Wikimedians of United Arab Emirates User Group/2022/Activity Reports

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Introduction

The Wikimedians of United Arab Emirates User Group is part of Wikimedia Foundation, a not-for-profit organization that runs and oversees Wikimedia projects. A small group of active Wikimedia contributors who are committed to expanding the presence and quality of Arab material online founded the User Group in 2019. The User Group is an officially recognized User Group by the affiliation committee of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Emirates Literature Foundation, which is an independent, not-for-profit organization is acting as the Fiscal manager of the User Group.

Objectives

Over the next three years, the Wikimedians of the United Arab Emirates User Group wants to accomplish the following three goals:

• Enriching the content gap in the Arabic Language
• Building sustainable networks of content creators and researchers in UAE and encouraging their participation.
• Increasing awareness of the importance of freely accessible and reliable data in Arabic.

Programs

In order to achieve the above-mentioned objectives, the User Group has developed 5 main programs:

1. Education and Digital Literacy

• This program is focused on reaching out to universities and introduce them our User Group, Wikimedia Foundation’s movement and various projects in aim to increase and improve the Arabic content on Wikimedia projects generally and Wikipedia mostly. Also, we aimed to collaborate with different GLAM institutions to enrich our database which will help us with the implementation of our actions.
• Within the framework of this program, the Wikimedians of UAE UG organized 7 training sessions to different universities and institutions in three different emirates: Dubai, Sharjah, and Abu Dhabi. And we have signed one official MoU with United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), and we have several meetings with Zayed University to sign an MoU in 2023 and integrate Wikipedia in their curriculum. We as well collaborated with Mohammed Bin Rashid Library (MBRL) who later became one of our sponsors of organizing WikiArabia Conference 2022.
• In addition, having an army of skilled volunteers who can contribute to various events, competitions, and projects in one of the best ways to improve the content of the Wikimedia Project. Considering that we are still a new User Group, we determined the best strategy is to collaborate as much as possible with various universities to involve students in our movement.

Program’s Objectives:

• Training university students the basic tools of contributing on Wikipedia.
• Encouraging students to use Wikimedia projects as tool in their studies.
• Educating professors and teachers about the value of Wikimedia projects, particularly Wikipedia, and incorporating Wikipedia editing into course requirements.

Program’s Timeline:

• 27 January 2022: Effat University Students – Virtual
• 6 February 2022: Emirates Airline Festival of Literature – Physical
• 12 February 2022: Emirates Airline Festival of Literature – Physical
• 23 February 2022: University of Sharjah – Virtual
• 22 March 2022: American University of Dubai – Physical
• 6 September 2022: Zayed University – Physical
• 14 September 2022:
• Training the Librarians on Wikidata (English Session) – Physical
• Training the Librarians on Wikidata (Arabic Session) – Physical
• Training the Librarians on Wikidata (Arabic Session) – Physical
• 12 September 2022: Jeddah University – Session No. 1 – Virtual
• 14 September 2022: Jeddah University – Session No. 2 – Virtual

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Program’s Outcome:

• No. of Training Sessions: 11 Training sessions
• No. of Trainees: 104 trainees
• No. of Created Articles: 151 articles

2. Community Outreach

• In order to introduce Wikimedia projects and its movement to the UAE community, physical events continue to be the most successful strategy. It is important to remember that the community needs to be aware of our actions, especially since we are a new User Group. We believe the best method to draw in new and seasoned contributors to the movement and create the foundation for the UAE Wikimedians Community’s long-term growth is by holding events and contests. We also believe it is crucial that the User Group’s core team attends local conferences and summits that support the same goals as the Wikimedia Foundation; therefore, some team members attended events such as the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature and the Arabic Language Summit to network.
• We make certain that the importance of the culture of volunteering is emphasized in our various social events; we aim to encourage a culture of volunteering in the UAE, and the User Group has been working hard this year to develop this volunteering situation in the UAE Wikimedia community.
• To accomplish this goal, we have organized 4 edit-a-thons, 2 competitions, and WikiArabia Conference.

Activities’ Objectives:

• Engage the UAE community in the Wikimedia movement
• Organize local competitions and events to introduce new commers to our User Group and Wikimedia projects.
• Create a community of sustainable editors in the UAE.
• Organize the 6th WikiArabia Conference in Dubai to get involved more in the Wikimedia movement and introduce the Arabic Wikimedia Community about our User Group.

Activities’ Timeline:

• 8 March 2022: International Women Day Edit-a-thon
• 16 April 2022: Ramadan Edit-a-thon
• 29 May 2022: Abu Dhabi International Book Fair Edit-a-thon
• 06 June 2022: World Environment Day Edit-a-thon
• 18 July 2022: Kateb Maktub Competition (English)
• 22 December 2022: Writing Competition (HARER) – Ongoing until 22 Jan 23.

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Activities’ Outcome:

• No. of Participants in Edit-a-thons: 40 new commers
• No. of Participants in the Competitions: 32 participants
• No. of Created/Edited Articles: 444 articles

3. Media Outreach

As the Fiscal Manager of the User Group, the Emirates Literature Foundation collaborated with a PR Agency. This year, we aimed to create regular press releases about out User Group’s activities and accomplishments. We had a press release about our activities almost every month, with the goal of informing the public about our movement. From January to December, we issued ten press releases:

1. International Women’s Day Edit-a-thon (Ar/En)
2. Ramadan Edit-a-thon (Ar/En)
3. Wiki Loves Earth Competition (Ar/En)
4. WikiArabia Announcement (Ar/En)
5. Kateb Maktub Competition (En)
6. Emirati Women’s Day Edit-a-thon (Ar)
7. An MoU signing with University of United Arab Emirates (UAEU) (Ar/En)
8. WikiArabia Program Reveal (Ar/En)
9. WikiArabia Opening (Ar/En)
10. WikiArabia Closing (Ar/En)

• List of all Press releases
• One of our objectives was to encourage journalism students to contribute to Wikinews and eventually become editors. As a result, we contacted one of the Journalism Professors at American University of Dubai; we met with him, and explained our User Group’s goals, activities, and training sessions. He was eager to teach students the fundamentals of contributing to Wikipedia because he uses it in the classroom, so we organized a Wikipedia training session with 17 students in attendance. Following the success of the previous training sessions, the professor expressed an interest in organizing another training session on Wikinews during the following semester (2023).

4. Research Program

As a new User Group, it is critical that we understand what we should focus on and identify current content gaps in Arabic Wikimedia projects. Our User Group focuses on different areas each year, with different goals and KPIs, and this is where research comes in handy. We need a database of the content we want to create because we are building a community of editors in the UAE. For this reason, Iyhab Barakat, a full-time researcher, and Duaa Khidir, a part-time researcher, have been hired. The primary responsibilities of the researchers as follows:

• Creating databases to help us reach out metrics and to use it with university students
• Planning training sessions and updating slide decks, as well as preparing practices and monitoring students’ work.
• Creating content for events such as edit-a-thons, competitions, and social networking gatherings.
• Conducting surveys and case studies to understand our community and its needs.
• Contacting various data partners to constantly gather relevant and up-to-date data.

Main Outcomes:

• With the assistance of our researchers, we were able to successfully run two competitions, one of which was the Kateb Maktub Competition.
• We currently have a database of 20,000 authors and book titles from 11 different publishing houses that assisted us in sending their database to us in order for us to filter and add more than 300 articles to Arabic Wikipedia. This data collaboration will help us establish strong relationships with publishers, allowing us to contact them again for future projects. The following publishers provided us the data:
  • Abjjad – 6572 data items
  • Al Dar Al Masriah – 841 data items
  • Arab Scientific Publishers – 2860 data items
  • Dar Al Ayam – 1014 data items
  • Dar Al Hadyek – 286 data items
  • Dar Al Saqi – 520 data items
  • Dar Molhimon - 350 data items
  • Dar WOW – 67 data items
  • Hachette Antoine – 113 data items
  • Kalimat Group – 295 data items
  • Neel Wa Furat – 20444 data items

4. UAE Identity Projects

As a UAE User Group, one of our goals is to focus on enriching content about the UAE and the region. Therefore, it was critical that we include some activities that would assist us in achieving this goal.

• We Participated in both the international contests Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments, with a total of 490 photos about UAE uploaded by participants.
• Some of our edit-a-thons, such as “Ramadan Edit-a-thon”, “Abu Dhabi International Book Fair edit-a-thon”, and “Emirati Women’s Day Edit-a-thon” featured Emirati themes.
• In October 2022, we met with Dubai Culture and Al Shindagha Museums to discuss a potential project to create QR codes for four museums in Dubai. Dubai Culture was interested in this project; however, it was postponed until 2023 since they requested that we update their website and all the details before we could begin implementing the project.

Learning Story

The User Group has greater learning experience than ever in just one year. We were able to obtain in-depth knowledge into what may work and what would not through the organization of events, the WikiArabia conference, training sessions and contests.

1. One of our learning stories is that establishing partnerships with universities is difficult and takes longer than expected. Instead of focusing on multiple universities, we believe that forming collaborations with two or three universities, training professors and their students, forming Wiki clubs, and organizing one-day competitions or events would be the most effective and manageable approach. We also believe that, of all the activities we organized, edit-a-thons were the most successful. We had newcomers from edit-a-thons, and we were able to meet some experienced editors who live in the UAE.
2. This was our first year organizing edit-a-thons, and our initial goal was to reach our metrics through edit-a-thons to create and edit articles. Therefore, we had already planned for lofty goals. However, after organizing multiple edit-a-thons, we realized that this approach will not work in the interim, especially since we are still establishing a community of editors in the UAE. The majority of our edit-a-thon participants were either newcomers or had limited knowledge of how to contribute to Wikimedia Projects. We worked on only one article to edit/develop in some of the edit-a-thons such as the Ramadan Edit-a-thon and the ADIBF edit-a-thon, and we noticed that it worked well because the participants were able to work together to write on different sections of the article and it was more encouraging for them.
3. We firmly believe the engaging the local community is essential to strengthening our User Group. We did our hardest to connect wit has many colleges, teachers, and students as we could in 2022, and it was incredibly beneficial. We added a pre-conference day specifically for youth “students” to introduce to them the our User Group, Wikimedia Foundation’s projects and its movement. We had more than 70 students from seven different Universities participate. Some universities attended in order to learn more about Wikipedia and to support their students’ volunteerism and skill development.

United Arab Emirates to host the first WikiArabia Conference in the Gulf region

Dubai, UAE, 5 July 2022: The Wikimedians of UAE user group has issued an open invitation to the public to attend the sixth edition of the WikiArabia conference, a calendar highlight for the Arabic Wikimedian community. Hosting it from 28-30 October, the 2022 WikiArabia conference will be the first-ever edition in the UAE and the Gulf region.

Organisers say that the conference will be an essential catalyst for bridging the gaps and increasing quality content on Arabic Wikipedia. The conference will serve as a platform for the Arabic Wikimedia community to communicate and share ideas, opinions, and experiences through a packed programme. It is expected that these conversations will eventually contribute to the growth of a sustainable society that uses Wikimedia projects as a vital asset in its strategies.

"The UAE is one of the leading nations in the field of data development, and hosting the WikiArabia conference, one of the annual highlights for the Arabic Wikimedia community, is an important step towards emphasizing the need to make quality online data free and accessible,” said Ahlam Bolooki, Director of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature and Leading Manager of the Wikimedians of UAE User Group. "Since 2021, the Wikimedians of the UAE user group has had the ambitious goal of increasing the number of Wikipedia pages about literature, and so far, we have successfully achieved a 500 per cent increase in that section. This, along with our noteworthy education and outreach programmes that have been recognised by the global Wikimedia community, makes our user group eligible for hosting the annual event with grants from the Wikimedia Foundation. After establishing our user group less than two years ago, we are extremely proud to be hosting the WikiArabia conference in the United Arab Emirates. We are eager to collaborate with other Arabic user groups and promote our work internationally.”

All Arabic user groups are welcome to apply for participation or to register their attendance here. The Scholarship and Programme committees will evaluate each application before deciding on the conference schedule. Applications and registrations must be submitted by 11 July 2022.

With the Emirates Literature Foundation as its partner and fiscal sponsor, the Wikimedians of the UAE User Group recently became a member of the Wikimedia community, making it the first user group in the Gulf.

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Pre-Conference group photo

Conference group photo

⟹ On Commons

Harir Competition

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For the first time, the Wikimedians of UAE User Group organized an open competition entitled "Harir", in pursuit of one of its goals for 2020, which is to organize competitions on regular basis to increase Arabic content on the encyclopedia.

The competition started from December 22 to January 22, 2023, and focused on several topics including tourist destinations, historical and archaeological sites, Arab artists, Arabic books, tales and fictional folk characters. Participants were free to choose the articles they wish to write about from a selection of topics.

Awards

• The prizes for the top three winners were divided as follows:
  1. First Place: $500
  2. Second Place: $400
  3. Third Place: $300
• Special nominations were also added as follows:
  1. Special nomination for "new users": $200
  2. Special nomination for "Emirati Content": $200
  3. Special nomination for "Female Presence in Articles": $200

Competition Terms

The organizing team of the competition has set conditions related to participation and articles, in order to facilitate the process of participation, evaluation and collection of points, and in a way that provides fair results for all participants.

Participation Terms:

• Participants are required to create a Wikipedia account and use that account only to create articles.
• Entries are for individuals only, no participation is accepted by joint institutions, entities, or accounts.
• If a participant wishes to participate in the competition, they must include their username on the lists of participants and add the article name and link after 24 hours of the creation to avoid repetition and keep track of participants’ activity.
• Be sure to respect other participants of the community and not publish any article that is booked on the list of articles.
• Participants must use the Hashtag #WUC once the article is published.
• The arbitration committee has the right to remove any user that does not apply the required conditions or ignores warnings and instructions sent to them on their Wikipedia account.
• Participants can place a template "User participating in a free contest" template on their user page.
• Any participant who tampers with or violates the terms of the competition will be disqualified.

Articles Terms:

• Participants are free to choose their articles as long as it is the competition’s scope of themes and meets Wikipedia articles criteria (notability)
• The minimum acceptable article size is 4 KB for Arab artists, tourist destinations, historical and archaeological sites.
• The minimum acceptable article size is 2 KB for Arabic books, Folklore and fictional tales.
• Created articles must be written in an appropriate structure, well-written and clear, well translated, and understandable, does not contain long and redundant sentences, and encyclopedic.
• Created articles must be well documented and includes verifiable sources. The article should contain an infobox, categories, and images (if found), which is in accordance with Wiki formatting.
• Any contributions done before or after the date of the competition will not be accepted by the Judges.
• Participants must use the Hashtag #WUC in the Article edit summary before the article is published.

Competition Objectives

• Create articles in Arabic and allow participants to choose articles within the specified topics.
• Promote free knowledge and enrich Arabic content on various Wikimedia projects.
• Increase the Group's activities and contributers through the organization of competitions, workshops and training programs.

Competition’s Outcomes

• 57 participants from different Arab countries contributed in the competition, with age groups ranging from: 50% for the age group between 26 and 35 years, 27.50% for the age group between 18 and 25 years, and 12.50% for the age group between 36 and 50 years.
• 87% of participants had previously contributed to Wikipedia, and the remaining percentage joined Wikipedia during the competition.
• The evaluation period for the participants lasted for more than a month, and the results showed the publication of 935 articles, including 59 articles related to Emirati content, and 135 articles related to females in various fields.

Lessons learned

After the end of the competition, a questionnaire was shared with the participants in the competition to know their reactions to the competition, and when asked about their feedback in general, 50% of the votes identified the competition as very good, and more than 18% considered it excellent.

According to the participants, the competition was clear in terms of the rules and how to publish translated articles, one participant stated that the competition helped them develop themselves. Participants thought that the method used in the competition by giving participants the freedom to choose articles was good as it gave room for freedom of choice and creativity.

On the other hand, some participants considered the duration of the competition is somewhat short, and the orientation videos of how to participate in the competition were posted later in the competition.

Some participants also thought that enlisting their name in the participants’ list was difficult. while others saw that the evaluation system needs to be improved. Also, having a sufficient period of time to promote any competition before its launch, and not limiting the competition to creating new articles from scratch, as there are many important articles that needs to be developed.

One of the judges' opinions about the competition was that it was good, as it defines the topics in general, and leaves users free to write articles within these topics, but the participation terms were misunderstood by some users.