Grants:APG/Proposals/2013-2014 round1/Wikimedia UK/Impact report form
Purpose of the report
[edit]FDC funds are allocated to improve the alignment between the Wikimedia movement's strategy and spending; support greater impact and progress towards achieving shared goals; and enable all parts of the movement to learn how to achieve shared goals better and faster.
Funding should lead to increased access to and quality of content on Wikimedia project sites – the two ultimate goals of the Wikimedia movement strategic priorities, individually and as a whole. Funded activities must be consistent with the WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, must be reported to WMF, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement. The WMF mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
Each entity that receives FDC funding will need to complete this report, which seeks to determine how the funding received by the entity is leading towards these goals. The information you provide will help us to:
- Identify lessons learned, in terms of both what the entity learned that could benefit the broader movement, and how the entity used movement-wide best practices to accomplish its stated objectives.
- Assess the performance of the entity over the course of the funded period against the stated objectives in the entity's annual plan.
- Ensure accountability over how the money was spent. The FDC distributes "general funds", for both ongoing and programmatic expenses; these funds can be spent as the entity best sees fit to accomplish its stated goals. Therefore, although line-item expenses are not expected to be exactly as outlined in the entity's proposal, the FDC wants to ensure that money was spent in a way that led to movement goals.
For more information, please review FDC portal/Reporting requirements or reference your entity's grant agreement.
Basic entity information
[edit]Table 1
Entity information | Legal name of entity | Wikimedia UK |
Entity's fiscal year (mm/dd–mm/dd) | 02/01-01/31 | |
12 month timeframe of funds awarded (mm/dd/yy-mm/dd/yy) | 02/01-01/31 | |
Contact information (primary) | Primary contact name | D'Arcy Myers |
Primary contact position in entity | Interim Chief Executive | |
Primary contact username | ||
Primary contact email | darcy.myers@wikimedia.org.uk | |
Contact information (secondary) | Secondary contact name | Richard Symonds |
Secondary contact position in entity | Office & Development Manager | |
Secondary contact username | Richard Symonds (WMUK) | |
Secondary contact email | richard.symonds@wikimedia.org.uk |
Overview of the past year
[edit]The purpose of this section is to provide a brief overview of this report. Please use no more than 2–3 paragraphs to address the questions outlined below. You will have an opportunity to address these questions in detail elsewhere in this report. Also, we encourage you to share photographs, videos, and sound files in this report to make it more interactive, and include links to reports, blog posts, plans, etc as these will add context for the readers.
- HIGHLIGHTS: What were 2–3 important highlights of the past year? (These may include successes, challenges, lessons learned. Please note which you are describing)
- Success - cancer graphs image release from partnership with Cancer Research UK - see the story of success for details [1].
- Lessons learned through challenges - chapter support for Wikimania; running the Living Paths project (see the story of a challenge [2]).
- SWOT: Reflecting on the context outlined for your entity in the FDC proposal, what were some of the contextual elements that either enabled or inhibited the plan? Feel free to include factors unanticipated in the proposal.
- Looking back at our context narrative in the proposal form ([3]), we are pleased to say that our assessment matched closely the experiences of 2014-15.
- Strengths identified in 2014-15, with current comments:
- Governance review - yes our Governance brings strength to the chapter, as per G2b summary below
- Strong staff team - our team continued to grow expertise and knowledge in their respective areas
- Proven records of programme delivery and innovation - track record of the Wikimedian in Residence programme paid off in 2014-15, with us being able to approach further high profile partners for collaboration opportunities
- Reputation for delivery - as above, and with our implemented metrics structure and WIR reporting we were able to document the achievements
- Strong leadership from CEO and Board. The strategic leadership from the board, bringing in our metrics system, was indeed a great asset in 2014-15. We did not, however, anticipate the leadership change that we went through in Q4 and continue into Q1 of 2015-16. The associated risk that we have identified, the risk that the success “depends on a small number of individuals and their continued commitment”, holds true, as we saw with some staff transitions (mentioned in the general ‘challenges’ section in this report).
- Strengths identified in 2014-15, with current comments:
- Opportunities identified in 2014-15, with comments:
- Growing community - it holds true that we had the opportunity to increase our volunteer community, especially through Wikimania engagement. We were able to build new contacts and links with new volunteers, but, we still need to work on the capacity to support these new contacts, and make sure they are given opportunities to engage with the work of the chapter
- Better links with outside institutions - we believe we capitalised on this opportunity, as our narrative in G1.3 shows.
- Wikimania - supporting the delivery of Wikimania, we think, helped strengthen the reputation of our organisation, which matches our expectation. It also, however, posed a threat on our capacity, and burnout of the volunteer community and staff team.
- Gift Aid - we were able to benefit from this opportunity in 2014-15, increasing the value of UK donations.
- Opportunities identified in 2014-15, with comments:
- Risks identified in 2014-15, with comments:
- Governance challenges - we identified this as a risk, but with reflection feel that governance is our strength and allows the charity to develop. This has been bolstered by a governance audit in 2014-15, the results of which were published in Q4.
- Staff turnover - as mentioned above and in the ‘challenges’, we were affected by the staff turnover, and, particularly, being single point sensitive in some areas of work. Perhaps this is unavoidable to an extent with a small organisation, but we hope that more robust handover processes will be in place in the future.
- Community atrophy - we were able to continue engaging with the volunteering community, although were not fully successful in bringing new people in. We hope to be addressing this going forward.
- Risks identified in 2014-15, with comments:
- In October 2014, we ran a staff day where we worked through an in-depth analysis of of the charity, in the context of 2015-19 perspective. We took both a STEEPLED and a SWOT approach. We are summarising the results below, stressing again this is a five year, rather than one year, perspective. For the SWOT, we took each of our strategic goals and analysed them separately, as each bring their own context, opportunities, etc. This presented a broader view on the context in which our chapter functions, and many of the factors were not mentioned in our FDC proposal - the assessment of opportunities and threats is much deeper. See below for details.
- As identified originally, one of the main factors that enabled our programme were strong partnerships, and track record of success (e.g. in WIR) to drive new connections. We were affected by the funding cuts in the cultural sector, which meant there was less financial support for our potential projects, and also, more strongly, resistance to releasing content - the organisations had a greater pressure put on them to monetise their images, and were more resistant to our arguments. The fact that we don’t have a fixed workflow for digitisation support is a factor that inhibits some potential image uploads.
- As much as we identified ‘staff turnover’ as a risk in the original plan, the effects of this element were unanticipated.
- G1 Develop open knowledge
Strengths Weaknesses Expertise amongst staff and volunteer base
Wikimedia ‘Brand’ and associated platform
Being able to bring together technological solutions and cultural sourcesNumber of uploads had been relatively low
Little demonstrable contribution to the open sector beyond Wikimedia projects
We have not fully worked out how to support digitisation projects
Capacity to pursue contingent opportunities is lowOpportunities Threats Partnerships with high level partners
Strong GLAM sector in the UK and wealth of organisations to work with
World leading HE sector
Successive UK governments indicate interest in embedding IT into school curriculum
The UK has other minority languagesCuts to funding in the cultural sector - no money for digitisation, WIRs or project funding
Other open knowledge organisations have a more impressive partnership support offer
- G2 As a volunteer-led organisation, ensuring effective use of the resources available to us:
- G2.1 Develop, involve and engage WMUK volunteers
- G2.2 Use effective and high quality governance and resource management processes
Strengths Weaknesses Existing volunteer base
Public knowledge of the movement and projects
Wikimedian in Residence Programme track record
Culture of volunteering in the UK
WMUK office is volunteer focused, space and equipment availableLow diversity of the current community
CiviCRM not optimised for our needs
Low involvement level of the readersOpportunities Threats 45 million digitally literate people in the UK
As of 2013 70% of people in the Uk own a smartphone (aged 16 - 64)
Many organisations want to work with usRival ways of volunteering in other organisations
- G3 Reduce barriers to accessing open knowledge
Strengths Weaknesses Status as a charity helps in advocacy
Enthusiastic volunteers keen to act as advocates
We have offline readers ready in the form of Kiwix
Working with the European chapters on advocacyComplex UI and community norms puts people off editing
Cost and effort inherent in digitisation - also, a slow processOpportunities Threats Changes to legislation - many potential partners we could work with on this
Models for gamifying contributions
Greater awareness of the power of ‘big data’
Digital literacy increasingly commonInstitutions less open because more pressure to be commercially focused
Ingrained opinions - educators are often biased against WP
Journals use paywalls and it's difficult to change an economic model
- G4 Encourage and support technological innovation
Strengths Weaknesses Access to tech-literate volunteer base
Highly fundable in terms of linked impactsExpensive to resource
Lacking strategic planningOpportunities Threats Use of apps could improve micro editing behaviours
Office is based in ‘silicon roundabout’ - make use of neighbouring organisational interest and expertise
The rest of the GLAM sector are tech-poorOther technologies bypass or supersede our projects
- G5 Develop, support, and engage with other Wikimedia and open knowledge communities
Strengths Weaknesses Strong cooperation with other Chapters
Open Coalition work
English as the primary language and dominance of en.wp makes links to other chapters easierToo broad a remit
Tension between Wikipedia focus v a broad focusOpportunities Threats Working in coordination with other chapters to influence release of content from other cultures
UK focus of many communities
Local networks
Developing proto-chapters and improving access to WP via partnerships with chapters in the developing world.Too many organisations already in this area
Don’t have our own language - e.g. there are other native English language chapters
Our offer is too broad
- WIKI-FOCUS: What Wikimedia projects was your entity focused on (e.g., Wiki Commons, French Wiktionary) this year?
- en.wp: The majority of the 70 editing events run in 2014–15 by Wikimedia UK were focussed on the content of the English-language Wikipedia (with some notable exceptions such as the translatathon). 835 new articles were created. The Core Content and Stub contests were supported by the charity. Seven project grants active in the year relating to the English Wikipedia.
In the staff assessment of our original 2014-15 programme proposal, we were evaluated as "Potential impact on English language projects is high, with an active editing community, but the proposal is relatively unfocused and may not lead to significant impact on global targets." Looking back, we believe that we brought in valuable impact on English Wikipedia - one project to highlight is the Cancer Research UK residency, and the image uploads which were a part of the project. See our 'story of a success' in the section towards the end, but here we would like to highlight that the uploaded 400+ images, mostly used on English Wikipedia articles, are being seen by about 1.5 million people every month.
- cy.wp: The Living Paths! project resulted in 8,218 new articles on the Welsh Wicipedia created between 1 February 2014 and 31 January 2-15, representing 80% of the growth in that period. 180 people were trained in editing as part of the project, and coverage of Welsh topics improved on other Wikipedias.
- Commons: In excess of 160,000 images were uploaded to Commons over the course of the year. Four project grants active in the year relating to Commons. Partnerships with GLAMs accounted for the majority of this figure, while project grants and Wiki Loves Monuments led to an increase in Featured Pictures, Quality Images, and Valued images.
- Wikidata: Wikimedia UK ran two Wikidata workshops, supplemented with meetups for Wikidata contributors. Tens of thousands of items were added to Wikidata based on databases of the UK's heritage bodies to facilitate Wiki Loves Monuments.
- en.wp: The majority of the 70 editing events run in 2014–15 by Wikimedia UK were focussed on the content of the English-language Wikipedia (with some notable exceptions such as the translatathon). 835 new articles were created. The Core Content and Stub contests were supported by the charity. Seven project grants active in the year relating to the English Wikipedia.
- GROWTH: How did your entity grow over the past year (e.g., Number of active editors reached/involved/added, number of articles created, number of events held, number of participants reached through workshops)? And what were the long term affects of this growth (e.g. relationships with new editors, more returned editors, higher quality articles, etc)?
- 69 editing and training events held
- Global Metrics: 168,283 files uploaded with a Creative Commons licence
- Global Metrics: 16,459,774 bytes of information added to the article space
- Global Metrics: 835 new articles on English Wikipedia and 8,218 new articles on Welsh Wikipedia. Total improved articles not tracked, but Stub Contest of en.wp that we supported resulted in 362 stub articles being expanded
- Global Metrics: 228 new accounts[1]
- Featured Pictures increased by 63
- Quality Images increased by 380
- Valued Images increased by 69
- Global Metrics: 1,054 attendees at editing and training events. To total this to 'number of individuals involved', as it goes beyond events attended, we could look at our total activity units for the year, which was 2,539. Wikimania attendees are not counted here (only volunteers who supported us).
- Contests supported: Core Contest, Stub Contest, Wiki Loves Monuments UK 2014
- 14 project grants active in the year, facilitating:
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People learning how to edit at the Royal Society of Chemisty.
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Materials ready to be used to write Wikipedia articles at the Live Art and Feminism editathon in April.
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In November we got to host a Science Museum Late attended by thousands of people.
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The Barbican was the scene of Wikimania 2014.
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November's volunteer strategy day was held in Birmingham.
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People at an editathon about feminist film.
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Can you guess what it is? It's a Google Maps bike at the Science Museum.
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A tuning coil!
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Wikimedia UK has had a year-long project with Bovington Tank Museum, helping volunteers photograph the collection of tanks for Wikipedia.
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Ed Saperia at Wikimania 2014
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Andy Mabbett speaking at Wikimania
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Ed Saperia receiving the UK Wikimedian of the Year Award.
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The community village at Wikimania
Financial summary
[edit]The FDC requires information about how your entity received and spent money over the past year. The FDC distributes general funds, so your entity is not required to use funds exactly as outlined in the proposal. While line-item expenses will not be examined, the FDC and movement wants to understand why the entity spent money in the way it did. If variance in budgeted vs. actual is greater than 20%, please provide explanation in more detail. This helps the FDC understand the rationale behind any significant changes. Note that any changes from the Grant proposal, among other things, must be consistent with the WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, must be reported to WMF, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement. The WMF mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
If you'd prefer to share a budget created in Google or another tool and import it to wiki, you can do so in the tables below instead of using wiki tables. You can link to an external document, but we ask that you do include a table in this form. We are testing this approach in this form.
Revenues for this quarter
[edit]Provide exchange rate used:
- £1 = $1.5
Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.
- Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan Incoming Grants GBP 353000 88250 88250 88250 88250 353000 529500 360000 As agreed. Donations GBP 240000 63846 60433 57612 91774 273665 360000 410498 No variance. Membership Income GBP 0 799 275 25 290 1389 0 2084 Not budgeted for. Gift Aid Claims GBP 0 0 12001 0 0 12001 0 18002 Not budgeted for. Discounts Allowed GBP 0 (14) 0 (16) (30) 0 (45) Conference Income GBP 0 150 430 622 0 1202 0 1803 Not budgeted for. Bank Interest GBP 0 152 193 104 259 708 0 1062 Not budgeted for. Gifts in Kind GBP 0 0 0 0 68453 68453 0 102679 A decision on how best to record gifts in kind was not made until the end of the year, and after talks with our auditors, so these appear to all fall in Q4 - in reality they stretch from Q2 to Q4. They include donations from the National Library of Scotland, Y Coleg Cymraeg, Cancer Research UK, York Museums Trust, Museums and Galleries Scotland, the Bodliean Library the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Public Catalogue Foundation, the Institute of Directors and the Natural History Museum. Other Miscellaneous Income GBP 0 0 39250 0 37041 76291 0 114436 Wikimania costs invoiced to WMF of £65k are included as Other Miscellaneous Income, including £15k staff costs. There is also circa £9k that has been returned to us from a supplier after HMRC agreed that VAT is not chargeable on the amount.
* Provide estimates in US Dollars
Spending during this quarter
[edit]Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.
- (The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan Community GBP 345751 63339 135378 119878 72333 390928 518626 586392 113% No major variation. Promoting Free Knowledge GBP 234136 36850 34465 80820 163014 315149 351204 472723 134% The largest direct cost variance here is £22k for Wikimedians in Residence. A gift in kind of £11k is charged to this line making the underlying variance £11k. £10k of this is a grant to a partner organisation agreed in October 2013. This was to have been vired from other budget lines in 2013/14 but was not paid until September 2014. This is also the budget which the majority of Wikimania costs fell. Finally, see also the notes in "Total". External Relations GBP 87081 24667 14709 17320 58489 115185 130622 172777 132% See "Total". Fundraising GBP 47979 17966 17966 17966 17966 71865 71968 107797 149% See "Total". Fundraising is particularly affected by the under-forecast mentioned. Governance GBP 57488 15400 14692 18371 25079 73542 86232 110313 128% See "Total". Total GBP 740812 155604 213975 257804 399286 966669 1111218 1450003 130% Two major events have significantly affected the results for the year: Wikimania and the departure of Jon Davies as CEO. These events alone more than account for the deficit beyond budget. The departure of Jon Davies as CEO in December and the engagement of D’Arcy Myers as Interim CEO was, in accounting terms, an extraordinary event and not planned in any budget. In addition, the original staff budget (£320k) did not agree with the forecast of staff costs for the year. As we fully absorb costs (spreading overheads across budgets to accurately reflect our expenditure), the extra expenditure on the Chief Exec transition and the higher-than-forecasted staff cost have affected all budgets.
Finally, planning for and managing Wikimania so that it was as successful as it was occupied the staff and office resources for a significant part of the year. Four additional staff were employed and many of the direct costs were invoiced to Wikimedia UK. Approaching £50k of direct and staff time costs have been invoiced to the Wikimedia Foundation but this is not a complete recovery, and Wikimania remained a costly event for the local chapter even after WMF reimbursements.
* Provide estimates in US Dollars
Terminology
[edit]The text below is copied from wmuk:WMUK activities and volunteers. It defines terms used in the following report.
Extended content |
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The charity and its activities[edit]WMUK activity A WMUK activity is an activity or event that is arranged by, carried out, hosted or run in conjunction with WMUK, or which WMUK has significantly sponsored or paid for. To count as a WMUK activity, the charity or its volunteers, staff or trustees must have taken some leading role: merely attending is not enough. The charity does not claim as a WMUK activity external events or activities that fall outside the above definition, even if WMUK staff, trustees or volunteers attend or are involved in a non-leading capacity. That is the case regardless of whether the individuals attend or are involved on behalf of WMUK. Examples:
Tracking of volunteer activity[edit]Activity units Rather than tracking the raw number of activities that the charity and its volunteers get involved with, without regard for their size, we instead focus on a measure of personal engagement that we call an activity unit. An activity unit is defined as one person attending one event. So, a score of 5 units may represent one person attending five separate events, or five people attending one event. For this purpose, no distinction is made between people who lead or help to lead an event, and those who simply attend. If the event is a WMUK activity, then all attendees contribute one activity unit to the overall count. If the event is a non-WMUK activity, we count only the activity units contributed by volunteer attendees who are working with us in some way for that activity. Activity units at advocacy events are given a 0.1 weighting. As we are primarily interested in external volunteer engagement here, we exclude the activities of WMUK staff or trustees when they are acting in their professional capacities. However, the following are not in themselves reasons to exclude from our activity counts:
Examples:
Leading activity units A leading activity unit is defined as one person taking a leading role in one event. That may include running or helping to run the event, or being one of the lead organisers of an online activity. Leading activity units are recorded as a subset of activity units, so a person taking a leading role is counted as contributing both one activity unit and one leading activity unit. Examples:
WMUK volunteers A WMUK volunteer is a person who has, at least once during the preceding 12 month period:
Examples:
WMUK leading volunteers A WMUK leading volunteer is a person who has, at least once during the preceding 12 month period:
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Ref | Term | Definition | Notes | |
[1] | Positive edit size | Sum of edit sizes in characters where text content has been added overall to the mainspace of a Wikimedia wiki. | We are here measuring quantity not quality of educational text content. We ignore all edits where content has been deleted overall, on the basis that deletions cannot generally be equated with the negative addition of content by that editor. We are aware that such an approach is relatively broad-brush, and will actively seek improved tools/measures in this area. | |
[2] | Institution reputation rating | Our estimate of the external reputation of each GLAM, education organisation or learned society that we work with. | This information is solely to enable us to track our own charitable impact consistently, and we will not be publishing the values we use for individual organisations | |
[3] | WMUK volunteer | WMUK:WMUK activities and volunteers#WMUK volunteer | ||
[3a] | Leading volunteer | WMUK:WMUK activities and volunteers#WMUK leading volunteer | ||
[4] | Activity unit | WMUK:WMUK activities and volunteers#Activity unit | ||
[5] | Leading activity unit | WMUK:WMUK activities and volunteers#Leading activity unit | ||
[6] | Annual survey capability score | To be defined | Questions to be written | Proposed survey to be repeated annually by WMUK |
[7] | Leading volunteer drop out rate | The proportion of our leading volunteers volunteers that drop out (no longer remain actively engaged with us) annually | Determined for each volunteer one year after first activity, two years and so on. | |
[8] | Tracking/measuring systems | The manual and automated systems by which WMUK tracks outputs/outcomes in accordance with the strategic plan | ||
[9] | Transparency score | To be defined | Questions to be written | Proposed survey to be repeated annually by WMUK |
[10] | Transparency compliance | As measured by Govcom against published transparency commitments | Commitments to be defined | |
[11] | Scans of QRpedia codes | The number of times QRpedia codes are used to direct to a Wikipedia article | This a is a subset of (15) | |
[12] | Awareness score | To be defined | Questions to be written | Proposed survey to be repeated annually by WMUK |
[13] | Shared activity units | A count of the number of units contributed by volunteers (not necessarily WMUK volunteers) on shared activities (14) | With technology-based groups or organisations having similar goals to WMUK | |
[14] | Shared activities | Activities that WMUK jointly lead with some other group | Does not include activities run by other groups that WMUK volunteers or staff simply attend or engage with. Depending on context, the other group could be Wikimedia-related (eg a chapter) or could be external to the Wikimedia movement (eg OpenStreetMaps) | |
[15] | Uses of tools | The number of times in aggregate a WMUK tool is used. | ||
[16] | Eval measure | A best-judgement evaluation on a scale of 1 to 5 (5=best) | Used in lieu of a objective metric where such a metric is impossible or currently impracticable to obtain | |
[18] | WMUK activity | WMUK:WMUK activities and volunteers#WMUK activity |
Progress against past year's goals/objectives
[edit]The FDC needs to understand the impact of the initiatives your entity has implemented over the past year. Because the FDC distributes general funds, entities are not required to implement the exact initiatives proposed in the FDC proposal; the FDC expects each entity to spend money in the way it best sees fit to achieve its goals and those of the movement. However, please point out any significant changes from the original proposal, and the reasons for the changes. Note that any changes from the Grant proposal, among other things, must be consistent with the WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, must be reported to WMF, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement. The WMF mission is "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally."
Key
[edit]Outcome (from our Strategic Goals) | Outcome Measure |
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Green | Annual target expected to be met; or good outcomes |
Yellow | Some issues but annual target should still be achieved; or reasonable outcomes |
Pink | Annual target in danger of being missed; or outcomes require urgent attention |
Grey | KPI not yet being tracked, or is no longer considered useful |
Notes and definitions
[edit]For explanatory notes and definitions (reference numbers in second column) see wmuk:Strategy monitoring plan#Notes and Definitions.
General comment regarding the 2014-15 activity plan
[edit]Looking back at our proposed plan put to FDC at the end of 2013 (Grants:APG/Proposals/2013-2014 round1/Wikimedia UK/Proposal form), we are able to see how Wikimedia UK developed over the activity year. Our original programme had several weaknesses, such as a lack of clarity of what strategic priorities are addressed by particular programmes, or how we intend to track the quality of content. Our plan consisted of several fragmented initiatives; they all had targets associated with them, however, most were output oriented, and did not feed into one another. Most of these were operational tasks (e.g. present at three external educational conferences), that were then used to monitor staff delivery, but looking back at them and assessing these targets in the context of the impact report would not paint a picture of the charity's real achievements. Activities were grouped together, but these collections did not have joint goals driving them, and this lack of common objectives caused a lack of clarity.
Our approach changed dramatically with the introduction of the new strategic goals framework (described in programme 2b below). It allowed us to clarify strategic goals of various initiatives, and, importantly, introduced outcome oriented targets. Many initiatives across the organisation feed into the same targets, which made our activities more connected. It was then also possible, throughout the year's reporting, to show how our activities relate to their larger context. We have also started employing Wikimetrics and CiviCRM in our data analysis, which gave us basis for more robust reporting. It is hoped that this change allows us now to implement more robust evaluation of our achievements.
Report card for this quarter
[edit]- The number in squares brackets refer to the definitions above
G1 Develop open knowledge
[edit]Outcome (from our Strategic Goals) | Outcome Measure | 2014 target (to 31 Jan 2015) | Results Q1 2014 (Feb to April) | Results Q2 2014 (May to July) | Results Q3 2014 (August to October) | Results Q4 2014 (November to January) | Current notes |
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G1.1 The quantity of open knowledge continues to increase | Number of uploads | Report only | 37,643 images to Commons this quarter | 21,269 images to Commons this quarter | 84,956 images to Commons this quarter | 24,415 images to Commons this quarter Total in 2014-15: 168,283 |
The majority of uploads supported by Wikimedia UK in Q4 were part of collaboration with the Wellcome Library. Though there was a photography-related project grant proposed in Q4, it has not yet been approved and would in any case take place in June 2015. Not yet moved to Commons, but worth highlighting is the recent British Library collaboration. The British Library released a million images scanned from old books. This collection was first loaded onto Flickr so that crowdsourcing could take place. In particular Wikimedians and Open Street Map worked with the British Library to find maps and floor plans among the million. 29,304 images were tagged as maps or ground plans between Friday 31 October and Sunday 28th December 2014 (10% at an event on the 31st October). This is a very exciting development, and we will continue supporting it. More information here.
Between 1 February 2014 and 31 January 2015 a total of 168,283 files were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons with the support of Wikimedia UK. A number of sources have contributed to the final number of uploads:
Mass uploads and photography competitions have proven to be a good source of images, while loaning equipment to members has also been effective. 90.8% of the files were uploaded through mass uploads. What we have learnt is that at the moment few volunteers have the skill and experience to use the mass upload tool, so in future it may be sensible to facilitate skill shares in order to have multiple volunteers working on upload projects - that is what we are hoping to do in 2015-16. We see it as a success that many of the uploads in 2014-15 came from an existing institutional partnership (e.g. around a WIR project), which shows that what helps in an upload is a dedicated coordinator, and that advocating for a content release as a part of a partnership can be a successful approach. For example in the case of Cancer Research UK WIR project, originally we were unsure if any images would be released at all, but thanks to the work of the resident it was made possible. We encourage other chapters to learn from this project - [5]. And in general, we feel the achievements in this area constitute a success, given a solid number of images produced in a variety of topical contexts. |
TEXT - Sum of positive edit size [1] | Report only | 4,791,175 bytes this quarter | 1,790,824 bytes this quarter | 5,802,530 bytes this quarter | 4,075,245 bytes this quarter Total in 2014-15: 16,459,774 |
The Q1 figure previously reported omitted a course run by the University of Portsmouth, hence an increase of 408,801 bytes for that quarter. Two university courses began in Q4 - the University of Portsmouth and University College London. As the courses end in Q1 2015–16, do avoid double counting we are including just edits made before the end of 31 January 2015. As such, these two courses contributed 81,302 bytes of information. Wikimedia UK supported 11 editing events in Q4. 80% of user names were recorded, so scaling up the figures produced through Wikimetrics to take this into account 209,601 bytes were added to the mainspace of Wikimedia projects. The Living Paths! project has contributed 3,784,342 bytes in Q4. One event worth highlighting is the translating editathon we supported in Q4. The event involved students at UCL identifying articles to work on from the English Women’s Health category. They checked whether the article existed in their target language Wikipedia, and whether it could helpfully be developed through translation. The blog post by the event organiser is a goldmine of tips for anyone wanting to run a similar event in the future: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/ele/2014/12/15/teaching-translation-through-editing-wikipedia/. We have strongly supported this initiative, and there are now signs that it will yield continuous engagement.
In 2014-15 Wikimedia UK was involved in adding 16.5 million bytes of information to Wikimedia projects. This is the equivalent of 2.7 million words of text, more than three times the entire length of the complete works of Shakespeare! Throughout the year, editing through the courses extension has contributed 2,037,776 bytes of information through six courses: the University of Portsmouth twice, University College London twice, Students 4 Best Evidence, and the University of Hull. To build capacity we implemented Campus Ambassador training - 3 sessions in 2014-15, and are planning to build on these in 2015-16. The current courses are recurring thanks to continuous engagement from partners. A report briefly summarising the various outcomes of 2014-15 volunteer project grants, many of which focus on content, can be found here. As a general reflection, Wikimedia UK’s project grants applications over its lifetime can mainly be spilt into general categories of
Looking back at how the grants performed in 2014-15, we can draw several reflections and lessons. Grants for reference materials tend to account for the least amount of money, but they also tend to take (sometimes much) longer than the applicant’s planed at first. Unlike for example photography, which has limited options for post-processing by the photographer once taken, articles can continuously be edited, improved, and re-nominated for featured content status until it satisfy the community’s expectation. This problem is additionally compounded by our experience that the editing process itself, even before nomination for review, tend to take longer than expected by even experience Wikipedia editors. We do ask our applicants about when they think they will finish the articles by, but we see that consistently the time needed is underestimated. We have been lucky on the other hand that our photography or video related grants have consistently generated high quality contribution. On the reporting side, our workflow is such that often the first time we get in touch with the successful applicant and ask for a report is after their stated projected completion date. While this is sensible for events or trip specific grants (there’s nothing to report until an event / trip has occurred), more regular and earlier reporting for articles related grants may ensure better compliance by grantee to their projected timeline. This would allow for regular check ups, and help along the way - provided we can find capacity to do so. We would encourage other chapters to do the same, if they aren't already. Grants for expenses for hosting of editathons suffer known issues related to one-off events where while new content are generated, and new editors trained, retention of these newly trained editors are limited or not monitored at all. | |
G1.2 The quality of open knowledge continues to improve | Percentage of WMUK-related files (e.g. images) in mainspace use on a Wikimedia project (excluding Commons) | 13% | 8.0% this quarter[4] | 4.0% this quarter | 2.0% this quarter | 1.0% this quarter Total in 2014-15: 3.6% |
2014-15 summary, including Q4 uploads as described in G1.1 Between 1 February 2014 and 31 January 2015, Wikimedia UK supported the upload of 168,283 files to Wikimedia Commons, and 2,891 books covers to the Welsh Wikipedia. Of the first group, 4,570 images were used in the mainspace of Wikimedia projects (excluding the likes of metawiki and outreach wiki) giving a usage rate of 2.7% throughout the year. As was mentioned in the Q1 report, exact figures for the book covers are unclear, but the latest report (April 2014) indicates 57.4% are used. Considered together, this means that 3.6% of the files supported by Wikimedia UK this year were in used on at least one Wikimedia project. Before progressing further it should be noted that the figures for Q1 and Q2 have increased since the initial reports, as might be expected. In the Q1 report the usage of Commons uploads stood at 2.6%, but has since increased to 4.2%; therefore increasing the overall usage of the quarter from 6.5% to 8.0%. Similarly Q2 when first reported was 3.1% but is now 4.0%. Statistics were not previously available for Q3, but it is safe to conclude that the current rate is higher than it was at the time of the Q3 report. We have supported uploads of varying scales and purposes - mass upload initiatives, photography competitions, media produced through equipment loans, and files supported by project grants. The images donated from institutions we worked with varied in scale: one donation - through a volunteer grant - produced 52,500 files (2.4% usage) while the WiR at the National Library of Scotland managed 1,100 (10.6%). It is worth mentioning here that the usage % was in steady increase throughout the residency, thanks to events incorporating the images uploaded, and internal curator training ([6]). Certainly a presence of Wikimedian in Residence who can curate uploaded content can have a greatly positive impact on the usage of content. Cancer Research UK project released 400+ diagrams of cancer-related illustrations in Q4. Already in November, the images were used 198 times in the English Wikipedia, and 8 times in 6 other language versions. Altogether 181 (43%) of the images released were being used, an exceptionally high figure after such a short time. The illustrations addressed a significant content gap on Wikipedia - neutral and informative images of cancer, extremely useful for e.g. newly diagnosed patients. Photos from grants, equipment loans and photo competitions accounted for 14,700 photos (14.4% usage) and presented a relatively high rate of use, despite being a high number of files. With big sets of images it takes longer to search for those most useful and add them to articles. Wiki Loves Monuments benefited from having an automated tool to help populate lists on Wikipedia with images, but as the lists themselves were not integral to the competition this limited the impact of the tool. What we see is that an identified need, a gap in content (as with WLM, Cancer Research UK), a dedicated coordinator and the right tools, it makes the images more used. Overall, our yearly target of 13% usage was set to be ambitious and was based on the performance in 2013–14, yet we have not reached it. Though equipment loans and photography competitions represented the vast majority of the total of 23,132 files for that year, mass uploads were not considered. Had the same pattern held true for 2014–15 and we exclude the mass uploads, the target was about correct. What this shows is that we need a greater appreciation of how images are used across Wikimedia projects. A figure in the region of 2–3% seems reasonable for mass uploads, while work undertaken on a smaller scale can be represented upwards of 10%. It is not impossible for large amounts of files to find use; of the 370385 files from Wiki Loves Monuments 2013, 13.4% are currently in use,[5] however this mobilised thousands of uploaders and automated tools highlighting possible images to use to get to that stage. Implementing something similar for mass uploads may not be feasible and making the best use of mass uploads remains a sticking point. At the same time, the 2014 competition found 7.9% of its files used.[6] While Wikimedia UK does not yet have a solution, there is encouraging progress in the wider movement with current discussions about a Commons2Wiki week in the Netherlands. Such a model may prove useful to the UK. |
Number of files (e.g. images) that have featured status on a Wikimedia project (including Commons) | 20 | 2 in year to date | 8 in year to date | 32 in year to date | 63 in year to date |
The 5 targets below highlight particularly how we Improved the Quality of Wikimedia projects.
There were two main sources of Featured pictures: the photographing UK cathedrals project grant and Wiki Loves Monuments. 28 images from the project grant were Featured on Commons, with a further 20 Featured on various language Wikipedias but not Commons itself. Ten photos from WLM 2014 were granted Featured status on Commons while another two were Featured on various language Wikipedias but not Commons itself.[7] In addition, three images from Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 were given Featured status in 2014–15.[8] What we see here is that a volunteer project grant can render value images, as it often works on a local content gap that the volunteer identified and is able to address it with resources available in the UK. | |
Number of files having quality image status on Commons | 70 | 53 in year to date | 61 in year to date | 328 in year to date | 380 in year to date |
2014-15 summary As with Valued images, Wiki Loves Monuments has been Wikimedia UK's most successful method of supporting Quality images. Of the 380 images which gained Quality status between 1 February 2014 and 31 January 2015, 318 (83.68%) derived from WLM 2014 and 28 (7.37%) derived from WLM 2013. The other large contributor to the number of Quality images was WIKI loves parliaments which supported 33 Quality images. That we exceeded our target by more than 400% was surprising. It was due to an unprecedented number of UK based images promoted from WLM, especially unexpected as the number of files uploaded to the competition declined from the previous year. For comparison, the 318 QIs represents 4.37% of the uploads from the UK, compared to 72 (0.61%) from 2013. For context, as of 4 February 2015 Commons has more than 88,800 Valued images, representing 0.36% of the 24,595,851 files on Commons. This shows just how successful WLM can be. Even in terms of total uploads throughout the year, 0.47% of the images are QI representing a higher rate than Commons in general; this does not take into account the fact that only files created by Commons user are eligible for QI status, meaning that mass uploads are generally excluded. While WLM has been very successful in producing Quality images, we should encourage volunteers to put their content forward for QI status. This would help diversify the sources of Quality images and mean metrics are not overly reliant on the success of a particular project such as WLM. A similar issue is discussed below in relation to Valued images. As of 6 March 2015, there are 5,068 images within the category tree for Quality images of the United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK's contribution from the year represents 7.5% of this number. | |
Number of files having valued image status on Commons | 50 | 46 in year to date | 51 in year to date | 56 in year to date | 69 in year to date | The 13 Valued images in Q4 were all from Wiki Loves Monuments.
2014-15 summary WLM has been by far the most successful method of producing Valued images. Of the 80 supported by the chapter to date, all but two have been uploaded as part of the photography competitions. 52 were from Wiki Loves Monuments 2013, which means we can expect entries from the 2014 competition to contribute to the 2015–16 targets. As of 4 February 2015 there are 256 files in Category:Valued images of the United Kingdom. The increase of 69 Valued images in 2014–15 as a result of WLM represents 27.0% of that total. While the target for the year was exceeded, it could likely have been much higher. Two grants related to produced media were approved last year: photographing UK cathedrals and public art in the City of Westminster. The former had the stated aim of producing "high quality interior photos of cathedrals", while the latter sought to photograph public works of art not already covered. Though many of the photographs have become Featured Pictures, and covering works of art not otherwise represented falls within the Valued image criteria, it was not discussed in the case of either project. A lesson for the future is that it may be preferable to ask photographers to consider nominating their photographs for Valued image status. | |
Number of new articles started on a Wikimedia site (eg any of the encyclopedias), excluding Welsh Wicipedia | 200 | 341 in year to date | 437 in year to date | 682 in year to date | 835 in year to date | Editing events during Q4 resulted in the creation of 41 new articles. The university courses resulted in the creation of one article, but the focus of the work has been on improving existing articles. Included in this quarter are 111 new articles from the Elections in Europe grant. Though granted in 2011, the sources continue to be used in the creation of new content for Wikipedia several years on. While the articles were created throughout the year rather than in Q4 alone, there is no effective way of automatically aggregating the totals so we opted to measure the impact at the end of the year.
Throughout the year a number of factors have contributed to the figure of 835 new articles. Project grants, such as the Elections in Europe grant, have contributed more than 100 articles. University courses have contributed 160 new articles; this is primarily down to one particular course as most tend to focus on improving existing articles. Editing events run directly by Wikimedia UK have accounted for over 200 new articles. While Living Paths! focussed primarily on Wales, it also added 300 new articles to the English Wikipedia in 2014-15. The yearly target of 200 was a rough estimate of how many articles we may be producing, and indeed, for our editing events alone, we reached about 200 articles. Our activities were much more focused on improving existing articles, however, it's an useful indication to see how our activities Improve Content successfully. | |
TEXT - Number of new articles started on Welsh Wicipedia inspired by WMUK | 10,000 over the course of the project | 2,182 in year to date (3,353 overall) | 3,250 in year to date (4,428 overall) | 6,293 in year to date (8,224 overall) | 8,218 in year to date (10,110 overall - the project's timelines extended slightly over our 2014-15 activity year) | The queries to arrive at this number (avoiding double counting) are here: 1, 2, 3
A report summarising the achievements of the Living Paths project can be found here. Also have a look at the Story of a Challenge in this report, to learn about the background and challenges we went through during the project. In January 2014 there were 53,000 articles on the Welsh Wicipedia; by January 2015 this had increased to 63,000. The Living Paths project accounts for roughly 80% of the growth on the Welsh Wicipedia in this period. The increase of 10,000 articles represents 16% of all the articles on the Welsh Wicipedia; roughly 1 in every 6. | |
G1.3 We are perceived as the go-to organisation by UK GLAM, educational, and other organisations who need support or advice for the development of open knowledge. | Sum of reputation ratings [2] of organisations that we are working in partnership with, or were working with no more than than two years ago | 693 (5% increase) | 497 | 706 | 1008 | 1133 | Please note: the scores for Q3 were over-estimated. Richard Nevell, who usually prepares this figure, was unavailable at the time of the report. While documentation has been prepared to help in the eventuality that staff are unavailable when reports are being drafted to ensure that the charity is not single-point sensitive and ensures understanding is shared, the documentation had not been adequately prepared in this area ahead of the Q3 report. That said, we have still far exceeded our initial target for the year. This involves work with 30 education institutions, 45 GLAMs, 12 learned institutions, and 48 other organisations.
In Q4, we have posted our GLAM booklet to the 100 most visited cultural institutions in the UK. GLAMs we have worked with in the past year were included in the mailing to keep them up to date with our activities. The booklet was produced in Q2-3, and rather than just use the material on an ad hoc basis, we worked on a structured plan for disseminating the material that we worked hard on producing. Several responses have already been received, notably from the People's Collection Wales, which we hope to work with in 2015-16. In Education, we delivered the EduWiki 2014 conference in Edinburgh, the feedback we captured is here. 24 Institutions were represented; since the event 2 have run projects and 2 other are preparing one, 61 people attended, representing 11 countries. In Q4, we had 6 active Wikimedian in Residence projects: National Library of Scotland, York Museums Trust, Cancer Research UK, Royal Society of Chemistry, National Library of Wales. Museum Galleries Scotland.
Working in partnerships was very successful in 2014-15, and we see it as making very good progress both in terms of institutions reached, and the work that was produced through this. We were able to base on existing case studies of previous work to bring in further projects. Building on our partnerships, for example, we developed the MGS project out of National Library of Scotland, and National Library of Wales project was possible thanks to the successful Y Coleg Cymraeg project. The first phase of the York Museums Trust project was received very favourably, and was subsequently developed into a region-wide outreach initiative, Museum Development Yorkshire project. Additionally, the Cancer Research UK WIR project would not have happened if we haven't delivered an event back in 2011 ([7]). In 2014-15, we were able to secure at least £63,000 in funding from the host organisations for the Residents' salaries. To highlight GLAM partnerships, and bring more organisations in, we produced and distributed the GLAM booklet, which any Wikimedia organisations are welcome to reuse. We met our partnership target and in fact far exceeded it. This is thanks in part to how many high profile institutions are based in the UK, and that we have access to here locally. What this score shows as well, however, is that we are in contact with great many institutions, and the engagements may not be sufficiently in depth, as we are spreading ourselves quite thinly (even bearing in mind that many of these contacts are maintained by volunteers or WIRs, rather than staff). A learning for us, and something that we will be taking into 2015-16, is to consider whether fewer, but more in-depth partnerships will give us more outcomes. As the movement in general goes into developing more work in partnerships, this is an important lesson to raise. |
Awareness score in annual national survey of public opinion [12] | n/a | Not collected | Not collected | Not collected | Not collected | We did not deliver the survey in Q4 - please see G3.2 for the narrative (the target repeats there). |
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The winner of Wiki Loves Monuments UK (6th place internationally): St Michael's Mount
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An 18th-century engraving of Caerlaverock Castle in Scotland, uploaded as part of the WMUK-National Library of Scotland partnership
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The choir of Chester Cathedral, photographed as part of one of WMUK's project grants
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Diagram from Cancer Research UK showing the T stages of bladder cancer.
G2a Develop, involve and engage WMUK volunteers
[edit]Outcome (from our Strategic Goals) | Outcome Measure | 2014 target (to 31 Jan 2015) | Results Q1 2014 (Feb to April) | Results Q2 2014 (May to July) | Results Q3 2014 (August to October) | Results Q4 2014 (November to January) | Current notes |
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G2a.1 We have a thriving community of WMUK volunteers. | Number of friends | 420 | 176 | 833 | 925 | 941 (registered in 2014-15) |
2014-15 summary In 2014–15 the charity established a system for 'friends of Wikimedia UK'. This gave people a way to support the charity without actively volunteering, or the legal requirements of membership. Friends receive a newsletter about the charity's activities. The first issue was circulated on 1 April 2014 and replaced the members' newsletter. Those subscribed to the previous newsletter were transferred to the new version, accounting for most of those people subscribed in Q1. The large spike of friends in Q2 was down to a call for volunteers for Wikimania, which invited people to become friends of Wikimedia UK to receive updates. This was by far the most effective method of attracting fiends of Wikimedia UK. The smaller increases in Q3 and Q4 were mostly from people visiting WMUK webpages; of the 87 people who visited the friends sign up page, 49 were from WMUK webpages with 34 direct entries (likely to be from emails). The newsletter (and therefore becoming a friend of Wikimedia UK) is promoted through follow up emails after events, however the impact has been minimal with bitly showing just six[9] people clicking through in a six-month period. The experience of Wikimania has taught us, however, that a wide promotion of the newsletter, showing its benefit to the recipients ('sign up to receive updates from us') can be successful, and if we decide to raise awareness of the newsletter further in 2015-16, it could be explored. At the moment, the WMUK website does not promote 'friends of Wikimedia UK' as much as it could do, though the newsletter is easy to find and sign up. What we saw is that the current route of people signing up as friends indicates that improving visibility on the website would be more effective than asking event attendees to sign up. |
Number of volunteers [3] | 250 | 187 | 360 | 719 | 765 (total to date) |
The number of volunteers stablised in Q4 - we have run new initiatives, described in the sections below, but haven't been as active in volunteer outreach as before. This partly could be down to the staff change that we experienced between Qs 3 and 4 - see the setbacks section for more.
Throughout the year, we run and supported a variety of activities where volunteers were involved and recruited. Editing events were a mixture of chapter and volunteer lead initiatives. Wikimania Fringe have drawn in lots of people who are new to the charity, and Wikimania itself was a huge draw both for volunteer and lead volunteers, taking on valuable roles around the conference. The identified challenge of keeping this new group of enthusiastic volunteers remains something to look into, especially that many of the new people were not core to Wikimedia, and may not know how to communicate with us. | |
Number of leading volunteers [3a] | 140 (30% increase) | 54 | 104 | 271 | 305 (total to date) |
The trends in leading volunteers were similar to that of volunteers above.
This was the first year we captured the leading volunteers statistic, and it certainly gives us an interesting insight into our community (as much as numbers are heavily influenced by Wikimania Fringe and Wikimania itself). We are very pleased with the number of volunteers and leading volunteers that we interacted with, and feel we have exceeded our targets. By taking the first year where we tried to consistently record the volunteers we work with, we realised that in a sense our volunteer group is bigger than we thought. We can also see that the volunteers are a varied group, with their own interests and areas where they can help us. With such a big group of people though, it is hard to keep in touch with everyone and make sure that each person is informed of the possible volunteering opportunities. After Wikimania our volunteer community got much more diverse, with people having different levels of background knowledge about the chapter and Wikimedia, and providing them with ways to interact with us isn't any more the case of a uniform message to everyone. Yet adapting it to different groups takes much more time - a challenge we haven't quite solved yet, and we would be interested to discuss this with others. | |
Number of activity units [4] | 1200 (24% increase) | 663 in year to date | 1,470 in year to date | 2,204 in year to date | 2,539 in year to date | Q4 has typically been a quieter period for Wikimedia UK in terms of activities with the holiday period and end of the financial year. In 2013–14 we delivered ten editing events in Q4, which is comparable to this year's figure of eleven. These events were reasonably well attended with two events attended by 30 people or above, and only three with fewer than ten attendees. Leading volunteer activity units was a strong contributor this quarter, particular through organising events such as the Science Museum Late and helping with social media, and is discussed below.
One volunteering event is worth highlighting here. In Q4 we organised and delivered an innovative Volunteer Strategy day. The aim was to get our community talking specifically about ways we can develop the organisation by creating new approaches to project-based volunteering. The day consisted of a few presentations by volunteers and staff, but the bulk of time was spend on group brainstorm and discussions about the future of the charity, how the volunteers see themselves developing within WMUK (and what would they need from us), etc. We spent some time reflecting on the make up and diversity of our current community, and also saw how volunteers can work with the chapter to find funding for the projects that interest them - it was a very diverse day. The hope is that together, we will be able to channel the volunteer energy better, and make connections between our programme, fundraising, and volunteering work. This event set the scene for this, and we will be following up on it in 2015-16. The write up of the event is already available, and can be seen here. As this event's purpose was to set the scene for further discussions, we want to run another event in 2015-16 to take some of the reflections forward into actionable ideas.
Overall it was illuminating to spend the whole year tracking volunteer and lead volunteer activity units - something we haven't done systematically before. The total of 2,539 units (comparable to days of work) is an indicator of how much effort our on the ground, local volunteer community put into contributing to the goal of promoting and spreading open knowledge. We are very pleased we were able to support them, and look forward to continuing doing so in 2015-16. | |
Number of leading activity units [5] | 145 (5% increase) | 115 in year to date | 418 in year to date | 822 in year to date | 987 in year to date | A total of 11 editing and training events were held in Q4. 14 of the 41 available trained trainers have supported at least one event in Q4, 3 of which have supported at least two events. In total, 11 leading activity units and 9 activity units have been delivered by trained trainers. In contrast, 9 activity units were delivered by trainers that has not attended one of our train the trainers course.
Lead volunteers were involved in screening the submissions to Wiki Loves Monuments; organising and delivering the Science Museum Late; helping with social media; using source material donated by partner organisations; and liaising with organisations alongside Wikimedia UK staff. | |
Leading volunteer [3a] drop out rate [7] | <10% | No data yet | No data yet | No data yet | No data yet | The first time we will have data against this KPI will be in the Q1 report for 2015–16. The number of leading volunteers far exceeded expectations for the year, due largely to Wikimania. It will be a key challenge keeping these lead volunteers engaged over the long term. | |
G2a.2 WMUK volunteers are highly diverse. | Proportion of activity units [4] attributable to women | 20% | 35% in year to date | 41% in year to date | 55% in year to date | 38% in year to date |
Gender Gap internship, a project to support our diversity work, was run for 4 months in Q3-4 to explore ways of deeper engagement in the gender gap activities. It initiated community building that could support future activities, encouraging female volunteers to get involved.
We were active in the gender gap activities throughout the year. E.g., in Q1 we ran nine editing and training events aimed at improving the coverage of women on Wikipedia. We also got gradually better (although still have some way to go) in actually capturing the gender information for our volunteers and event attendees. This enabled us to see, for example, that we are attracting a good number of female volunteers to the chapter's activities, possibly because of a higher demographics of women in e.g. GLAM sector in general - hence the overall statistics are better than the female editor representation on Wikipedia. Also, we have attracted many lead female volunteers over Wikimania. For the focused Gender Gap project from Q3-4, the project lead created a case study report summarising the activity: [8]. The genesis of this project was that in 2013 our editathons have expanded and received extremely positive responses from the attendees and in general. They were organised with a strong support from the Medical Research Council, which enabled us to deliver events in partnerships with other organisations who hosted them and invited people from their networks to attend. Since then we have been contacted by various organisations interested in collaborating with us further. Thanks to the popularity of these activities we decided to give more capacity for organising these diversity events (logistics can take a lot of time and effort!), and perhaps even growing the group of people who are interested and keen to be involved in this programme. This lead to creating the gender gap project worker post, initially for 4 months so we can explore how giving more capacity to this area would benefit what the charity does. We were building up on past successful initiatives, and adding more resources to the activities. The project report gives interesting insight into how the project coordinator managed the project and how she worked to build a community of gender gap volunteers. Perhaps due to short time span though, and no solid plans (or capacity) for continuation once the project was finished, we are concerned that we may lose the momentum that the project built up. One of the strategies to counter that was to build up documentation and toolkits for future gender gap events that our partners could take and continue the events, however, the project lead was not able to produce these. |
Proportion of leading activity units [4] attributable to women | 15% in year to date | 19% in year to date | 25% in year to date | 30% in year to date | 28% in year to date | The organisation of the Science Museum Late resulted in a high proportion of leading activity units attributable to women, however the majority of the leading activity units from training were attributable to men.
2014-15 At the moment, our pool of trained trainers is predominantly male, which means that trainers at our events are more like to be men than women. This was particularly evident in Q1 when our trainers delivered a high volume of events, and most of these leading volunteers were men. The peak in Q3 represents the impact of Wikimania, in which we were closer to parity amongst our leading activity units. It should be noted that the proportion of leading activity units attributable to women is lower than the proportion of our leading volunteers who are women (38%). Some volunteers carry out multiple activities, meaning they contribute to this KPI multiple times. | |
Activity units [4] in activities to encourage other diversity or minority engagement[10] | 15 | 5 in year to date | 9 in year to date | 11 in year to date | 65 in year to date | In Q4 Wikimedia UK organised two events addressing this area: an editathon at the British Film Institute relating to black and Asian British film-making and a translatathon at University College London. The BFI editathon was attended by 18 people, while the translatathon was attended by 36. The translatathon was new territory for Wikimedia UK, and got post-graduate students to translate good quality articles on the topic of women's health into other languages. Both were well attended, and were two of our top three events in terms of bytes added to Wikipedia mainspace.
Seven activity units were the result of talks on Wikipedia; the first in Q1 was the Talking Wikipedia in Ghana event, while in Q3 we had a speaker giving a talk on the topic of 'Open Knowledge and the Memorialisation of Slavery'. These were attended by 70 people altogether. Q4 was our most productive part of the year in this area. We ran two editathons – one supporting the Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia and another on black and Asian British film-making – and one translatathon. We remain in touch with UCL and the institutional contacts who organised the editathon. This was a particularly impactful event as it helped address the issue of diversity in multiple ways: ensuring information is available in a range of languages and improving articles in relation to women's health. As a result of the Q4 events were were able to far exceed our target for the year. | |
G2a.3 WMUK volunteers are skilled and capable. | Activity units [4] in training sessions and editathons (total count, including people being trained) | 575 (5% increase) | 297 in this quarter | 433 in this quarter | 137 in this quarter | 150 in this quarter (total in 2014-15: 1,017) | This takes into account data from ten editathons and training workshops; data is as yet unavailable from the eleventh.
Throughout the year, there have been 987 activity units in training sessions and editing sessions. This has been a major strand of our activity and attendees have contributed 2,050,000 bytes of information to article space. |
Leading activity units [5] in training sessions and editathons (ie trainers only) | 95 (6% increase) | 104 in year to date | 136 in year to date | 156 in year to date | 166 in year to date | Several of the events were delivered by our Gender Gap Officer, and on occasion staff help give training. These activities have been excluded from this figure, hence it is lower for this quarter than any other previously.
This year saw a number of innovations in our Training the Trainers Programme:
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Annual survey capability score [6] (self-identified) | To be decided | Not collected | Not collected | Not collected | Survey conducted, actions being prepared |
2014-15 summary We were building towards delivering the survey throughout the year, being mindful of not approaching the community with too many surveys and requests for comments. We then decided to combine this proposed learned skills survey with a questionnaire exploring what the volunteers are interested in looking into the future. Over Q4 we constructed and delivered a survey which was distributed via out CiviCRM, taking benefit of the volunteer database. The results are summarised within the Commons category here. The findings are also summarised in text here. We are pleased to say that our volunteer community feel we are helping them build skills, and that the training events that we provide are of good quality: File:WMUKS2014-likert.png. The data was summarised towards the end of 2014-15, so going forward we will be considering the next steps in 2015-16. We would like to put the results forward to the community for discussion, and seeing if this will help us decide on volunteer activities in 2015-16 programme, the direction that we would go towards. For example, one thing that came through is volunteer interest in photography events - if this fits into the overall programme, we would be aiming to build that into our activities. |
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Attendees at the Women in Science edit-a-thon at the Royal Society
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Wikimedia UK keeps in touch with the Friends Newsletter
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Volunteers touring the Barbican ahead of Wikimania
G2b Use effective and high quality governance and resource management processes
[edit]Outcome (from our Strategic Goals) | Outcome Measure | 2014 target (to 31 Jan 2015) | Results Q1 2014 (Feb to April) | Results Q2 2014 (May to July) | Results Q3 2014 (August to October) | Results Q4 2014 (November to January) | Current notes |
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G2b.1 We have effective and high quality governance and resource management processes, and are recognised for such within the Wikimedia movement and the UK charity sector. | Progress on targets in the Hudson and Chapman governance reviews | All targets that we agree with have been completed and independently reviewed. | See narrative | See narrative | See narrative | See narrative (overall 2014-15: achieved) |
In Q4 we released the final governance report. This document marks the conclusion of a process that began almost two years ago. In summary, it found: “The charity has very largely addressed the 50 recommendations found within the original review. WMUK has developed very quickly, and the charity has clearly put a lot of effort into ensuring that its governance now meets best practice expectations. It has a cohesive, skilled and experienced board in place. They have a clear understanding of the charity’s vision and mission. For the stage that Wikimedia is in its life cycle it compares well with similar UK charities. Its transparency about its procedures is a beacon of best practice, and its conflicts of interest procedures are robust and well-tested”. As the report notes, “Inevitably, a lot of the Board’s efforts have to-date been internally focussed; putting in place robust governance arrangements and agreeing the new strategy that was published in March this year. [...] There is a chance for WMUK’s Board to become more outward focussed in its time and efforts.” This point was discussed at the board meeting in December 2014, to mark our continuous improvement as a charity. We hope the review serves as a useful learning resource for other organisations, and that chapters continue to benefit from our resources (throughout 2014-15, we have shared our learning on governance, through e.g. governance workshop, repeated in the year). Also, towards the end of 2014-15, we took part in the "Organizational effectiveness survey". Four people linked closely with WMUK responded, and as much as that is a small sample, it gives us a basis of internal reflection on our performance. One strong theme that respondents agreed on was that Wikimedia UK’s strength lays in delivering projects with partner organisations, and helping these organisations achieve impact. At the same time, there was also agreement that we don’t have enough resources to deliver to full potential. We are planning to address this in the 2015-16 programme.
Throughout the year, the organisation was working on improving its governance, and progressing consistently through the recommendations of the review. It has strengthened the board and the organisation as a whole, and we are extremely proud of this achievement. We learnt that improving governance can be a very resource intensive process. It can make the organisation put undue focus on it, making it very internally focused. It's our strategic ambition to aim for more external opportunities focus in 2015-16, to balance out the focus. |
Progress towards PQASSO 2 | Complete all internal preparations for PQASSO 2 ready for external accreditation | See narrative | See narrative | See narrative | See narrative (overall in 2014-15 - not achieved, although progress in the background work had been made in Q2 and 3) | In Q4 our involvement with the PQASSO programme was put on hold due to focus on internal organisational changes. This external accreditation scheme is very time intensive in the preparatory stage, and the capacity was not available to take it forward.
Despite gaining some ground in initial preparations for the PQASSO process (e.g. staff training to build capacity, and internal scoping in Q3), we were not able to progress sufficiently. It remains to be decided whether we will be able to commit the resources to it in 2015-16. Experience shows that an organisation needs about a year of preparations before a formal accreditation application, and so this work area will need to be assessed. | |
Level of external recognition | Narrative + eval score [16] | Eval: 1.8 / 3 | Eval: 1.8 / 3 | Eval: 1.8 / 3 | Not collected (overall in 2014-15: on good course to achieve our ambition of suitable level of external recognition, although the plans needed for the goal put on hold) |
We linked this evaluation score to our PQASSO progress (which has 1-3 levels of accreditation). Since this process was put on hold in Q4, we are unable to comment on our achievements in the area.
Overall, we have been making promising progress throughout the year in this area. Basing on the internal audits and scoping exercises, it could be suggested that we are on good course to achieve Level 2 of the external PQASSO accreditation ([9]). As discussed above, the process was put on hold in Q4 though. It is certainly now clear to us that such initiatives need guaranteed commitment from the organisation to succeed. In a broader context, our success in becoming a member of the Fundraising Standards Board should still be noted ([10]). This achievement gives us a local, UK based recognition for our standards of work, and so we see it as a success. | |
G2b.2 We have a high level of openness and transparency, and are recognised for such within the Wikimedia movement and the UK charity sector. | Transparency score [9] as measured by annual survey | n/a | Not collected | Not collected | Not collected | Not collected (overall in 2014-15, initiative not successful) |
2014-15 summary We were not able to complete a transparency survey in 2014-15. A drive to involve volunteers in the initiative in Q2 was unsuccessful due to the key people being focused on Wikimania London, and for the remainder of the year we were not able to find capacity to deliver this activity. |
Transparency compliance [10] as determined by Govcom against published transparency commitments | Narrative | Eval: 2/5 this quarter | Eval: 4/5 this quarter | Eval: 3/5 this quarter | Eval: 4/5 this quarter (overall in 2014-15: 3.5/5 |
The following main factors were considered relevant to this quarter's score:
GovCom considered Q4's transparency score to be 4/5 2014-15 summary Our transparency ambition would be to aim for 'good' (4/5) or above level. The results for the year show a steady progress towards this aim, and as much as a yearly average falls short of this goal, we think progress can be shown and so are pleased with the final achievement. | |
G2b.3 We have high quality systems to measure our impact as an organisation. | Progress towards full implementation of automated and manual tracking/measuring systems [8] | Narrative + eval score [16] | Eval: 55-60% achieved | Eval: 60-65% achieved | Eval: 65-70% achieved | Eval: 65-70% achieved | While CiviCRM continues to be our main platform for managing events – used much in the same way as in previous quarters – the continued development of the courses extension has led to some experimentation. Both have distinct advantages and disadvantages. Using CiviCRM allows us to follow up directly with event attendees, and encourage them to get involved with the charity through mailings. However, there is no direct integration between Wikimetrics and CiviCRM meaning that user names need to be exported from the database and imported into Wikimetrics to run reports. The course extension on the other hand has a dashboard. CiviCRM also requires updating after events to ensure appropriate post-event email are issued, which means a higher administrative workload compared to the courses extension. Training staff to use CiviCRM has been an ongoing process, but a worthwhile one as it allows us to build a detailed database. We have learnt that using CiviCRM to log partnership interactions and volunteering as well as manage events has meant that we have been able to establish not only that the number of lead volunteers who support the charity is much higher than initially estimated. Similarly we worked with more cultural institutions than we had estimated at the start of the year. As was noted in the Q3 report, Catscan was temporarily unavailable as it underwent an overhaul, but has since come back online, meaning we are again available to track how images supported by Wikimedia UK are used.
Looking back over 2014-15, it can't be underestimated how much change has taken place in terms of our systems for measuring impact. A strategy plan was created early in the activity year. This set out our mission, but also showed the way in which we were aiming to achieve that in practice. Having this clear set of high level strategic goals has been very useful in terms of being able to assess what we do and whether it fits into our aims and objectives, and we were working to gradually implement it into various areas of our work. After Q1 reporting, we received feedback from the FDC and our board, commenting that it is not easy to track our progress. We adopted a clearer reporting format from Q2 onwards, which included a traffic light system as well, that our board found useful. We committed to monitoring our performance, and were able to synchronise internal systems with those needed for the FDC. We continue work on the metrics systems as described in the Q4 summary above - the general reflection is that we have put a lot of work into Stabilising our Infrastructure. |
G2b.4 We ensure a stable, sustainable and diverse funding stream. | Number of separate donors | 6000 (9% increase) | 5266 in this quarter | 5110 in this quarter | 5022 in this quarter | 4912 in this quarter |
2014-15 summary This reflects the fact that at the time of setting targets in 2013 an ambition was to focus on developing a broader base of individual donors through mailings and events. However, given the time and structure invested around Wikimania, coupled with the issues experienced getting our database support contract to work, this made broad-scale engagement through mailings less practical than developing narrative and approaches for major donors. Overall therefore the number of donors has decreased, but the average donation figure significantly increased. This may well be a revised metric included in future reporting for clarity. |
Funds received from sources other than WMF fundraiser or FDC | £295000 (7% increase) | £63,846 this quarter | £58,991 this quarter | £102,318.49 in this quarter | £155,846 in this quarter |
2014-15 summary The existing major source of external income has historically been from regular donations. This year showed successes with gifts in kind and major gifts in Q4 that saw us eventually exceed the financial target set. By tying a case to support to specific programmatic successes and matching this to individuals or organisations with a capacity to give larger amounts the Chapter has had more success than making broad-based appeals to individuals in its database. | |
Proportion of funds from sources other than WMF fundraiser or FDC | 47% | 56% in this quarter | 33% in this quarter | 54% in this quarter | 64% in this quarter |
2014-15 summary This ended up being larger than forecast, again because of major gifts and gifts in kind emerging as productive areas for the charity's fundraising across the year, and because of course the WMF grant is a fixed amount within year. It demonstrated the Charity's increasing desire and ability to leverage funding from within the UK sector through partnership work and through its increasingly strong reputation for delivering good programmatic outcomes with institutions. | |
Proportion of funds from direct debits | 45% | 28% in this quarter | 94% in this quarter | 28% in this quarter | 60% in this quarter |
2014-15 summary Direct debits continue to remain an important part of our non FDC grant income. The reduced proportion of 'all other income' represented by year end reflected the increase in major and gifts in kind that the chapter achieved. Targets in this area must be set more mindfully however, to avoid reducing Direct Debit income overall being helpful to achieving a target of proportion of funds. Again, it is suggested that targets for stewardship of regular income, gift aid (tax relief from the UK government) and major gifts and gifts in kind are separated out for more accurate and helpful reporting. |
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WMUK used Wikimania in August to host an international Training the Trainers session
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A volunteer strategy gathering was held in November
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The Live Art and Feminism was one of many edit-a-thons aimed at improving coverage of women on Wikipedia
G3 Reduce barriers to accessing open knowledge
[edit]Outcome (from our Strategic Goals) | Outcome Measure | 2014 target (to 31 Jan 2015) | Results Q1 2014 (Feb to April) | Results Q2 2014 (May to July) | Results Q3 2014 (August to October) | Results Q4 2014 (November to January) | Current notes |
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G3.1 Access to Wikimedia projects is increasingly available to all, irrespective of personal characteristics, background or situation. | Total number of scans of QRpedia codes [11] | 14000 monthly | 17503/month this quarter | 15446/month this quarter | 13281/month this quarter | 11392/month this quarter In 2014-15, average 15,373 visits per month |
This quarter, we continued to monitor the QRpedia usage. We have also undertaken another project that increases access to free knowledge - for Wikimedia editors in this case. The Wikimedian in Residence at the Royal Society of Chemistry negotiated the donation of 100 "RSC Gold" accounts, for use by project editors wishing to use RSC journal content, including full archives, and published databases, to expand articles on chemistry-related topics. Please visit en:Wikipedia:RSC Gold for details.
For the year, visits to QRpedia average 15,373 visits per month meaning that we achieved our target. Data collection began part-way through December 2013 so it is unclear whether the changing number represents a cyclical pattern in visitors or whether there is an overall downward trend. Beyond producing QRpedia badges to promote the tool, Wikimedia has undertaken only maintenance tasks. The case remains though that through supporting QRpedia, we are providing access to free knowledge for people who may not have seen it otherwise. It is certainly useful to know that we are enabling readers to reach information through this tool, therefore Increasing Reach. But a more meaningful target may give us more insight into this work in 2015-16. |
Projects addressed at new readers [16] being enabled to access Wikimedia websites | 3 activities | 1 in year to date | 1 in year to date | 1 in year to date | 3 in year to date (numerical target met, although see narrative for assessment of successfulness) |
Two new initiatives took place this quarter:
Identifying projects which could have a significant impact in this area has been challenging. As much as we delivered the 3 intended projects in the year, two of these perhaps did not fulfil their potential. In the case of proposal to use offline Wikipedia in Young Offenders' Institutions, the blocker was in providing a version free of violent themes and we were not able to deliver on the project. It is hoped that, learning from this, it may in the future be possible to use Kiwix as an educational resource. Recording Wikipedia articles may be something we try again with a better article – and thanks is due to all the volunteers who not only gave their time to read the articles, but helped with the recording. | |
G3.2 There is increased awareness of the benefits of open knowledge. | Awareness score [12] in annual national survey of public opinion | n/a | Not collected | Not collected | Not collected | Not collected. Overall in 2014-15: survey not delivered, but other initiatives gave useful insight in the area |
We did not deliver the survey in Q4. At the same time, however, we used the Science Museum Late event to learn more about people's perceptions of Wikipedia. During the event, we used the opportunity of having access to a large audience, and surveyed them on their thoughts on Wikipedia. The results, together with a word cloud, are here. They give useful insights of how important Wikipedia is in people's lives.
In Q3, we reported that the Board looked at the possibility of delivering the survey, analysing the resources needed to do it on a professional and truly informative level. After analysing the possibilities, we realised that running a national poll would bring with it a considerable cost. It was felt that these resources are not in place in 2014-15, and so the survey delivery was parked. We may not be able to pick this project up in 2015-16, as spend needed constitutes a luxury we are not prepared to afford. Science Museum experience shows, however, that other events can be used to explore public opinions. What we have been keeping a small eye on is yougov.co.uk, a UK based polling organisation, which does sometimes ask people their views on Wikipedia. It is worth noting our other work in this area (hence the 'yellow' assessment of our progress, indicating partial success). To influence people's opinion of Wikimedia, we have been active in our presence at key sector conferences (e.g. 6 conferences in Education and 3 GLAM related). In total in 2014-15 Wikimedia UK was represented at 29 advocacy events, ranging from BETT UK 2015 to OKFestival 2015. This also includes the Science Museum Late, and overall we reached an audience of several thousand in our work of advocating for open knowledge. |
G3.3 Legislative and institutional changes favour the release of open knowledge. | Responses to EU and UK government policy consultations. | Narrative | See narrative | See narrative | See narrative | See narrative. Overall 2014-15: met our expectations |
In Q4 we worked on progress of the Speaker's Commission consultation - details below. 2014-15 summary Over the year, Wikimedia UK has submitted evidence to at least two key public consultations: UK Parliament's Speaker's Commission on Digital Democracy [11] and the House of Lords Select Committee on Digital Skills [12]. These were important pieces of work and have ensured that free and open knowledge has a place in these debates. Our evidence was used in the House of Lords paper, and we subsequently blogged about it [13]. Preparing the evidence was a substantial task, and we drew on the experience of other chapters to shape our response ([14]). We feel that we reached our ambitions in this area, as we were active in key national consultations relevant to Wikimedia in the UK. |
Involvement in EU and UK advocacy activities; Involvement in advocating legislative change within GLAM, Education, and other organisations | Narrative + eval score [16] | Eval: 4/5 | Eval: 5/5 | Eval 5/5 | Eval 5/5 Overall 2014-15: met our expectations |
In Q4 WMUK continued to contact MEPs and policy makers and began planning an event about UK digital democracy to take place in 15-16 Q2 (if funding available). Legislative improvement was achieved when changes to the use of orphan works were enacted at a national level due to a European Parliament decision. See https://blog.wikimedia.org.uk/2014/11/response-to-the-new-ipo-orphan-works-licensing-scheme/ for more details. This is one of the cornerstone areas of work set out by the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU that we are active in. Additionally, we had strong successes in policy change within the WIR programme.
2014-15 was a year of good progress for Wikimedia UK's advocacy which, in part, fits in to the overall advocacy of the European chapters. We think that we meet our aspirations in this area by being involved in consultations and in case of the WIR work, introducing tangible changes that will carry on delivering positive impact (e.g. opening up content and so Increasing Reach of the content). Following the collective signing by many European chapters of the statement of intent of the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU work began in earnest to pursue the aims of the group: EU harmonisation of Freedom of Panorama, the right to use orphan works and public domain licensing of publicly funded works. We played an active role in the Brussels policy meeting in March. We took a lead in MEP outreach by writing to all 73 UK members of the European Parliament and developed good relationships with key statutory bodies such as the Intellectual Property Office. This approach is now being replicated by other European chapters. In November, along with the Wikimedian in Brussels our head of external relations met with a Chair of the European Parliament's committee on civil liberties and with key political advisors to discuss copyright reform and the potential for a "digital bill of rights". As a general note, our advocacy work was undertaken using voluntary income rather than funds from the Wikimedia Foundation. However, we include it here because we believe it is of great value to the Wikimedia movement and to free and open knowledge generally. As for the WIR work in changing the policies of their host institutions, many residents were able to introduce very positive changes into their organisations. To show the breadth of their work, we would like to present a non-exhaustive list of highlights
One thing we learnt in this area is that often an internal policy change can be met with unexpected resistance, and introducing changes is difficult. At National Library of Scotland, after a very positive start and a pilot image release, the process was put on hold. After some members of staff at the NLS raised concerns regarding the release of content onto a CC-0 licence on a mass scale, uploads were stopped to allow for internal conversations regarding the releasing of digital content onto open licences. Internal events - workshops, seminars, and surveys - were organised to encourage discussion and reach a consensus. This process will continue onto 2015-16. |
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The Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU have been campaigning on Freedom of Panorama issues
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Wendy and Percy faced with the puzzle of changing EU law
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April's Big Fat Brussels Meeting, where discussed advocacy and the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU
G4 Encourage and support technological innovation
[edit]Outcome (from our Strategic Goals) | Outcome Measure | 2014 target (to 31 Jan 2015) | Results Q1 2014 (Feb to April) | Results Q2 2014 (May to July) | Results Q3 2014 (August to October) | Results Q4 2014 (November to January) | Current notes |
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G4.1 There are robust and efficient tools readily available to enable the creation, curation and dissemination of open knowledge. | Number and availability of the project tools we host or support | Narrative | See narrative | See narrative | See narrative | See narrative | Wikimedia UK hosts QRpedia and the Virtual Learning Environment. QRpedia remains available, and is in the same state it was at the start of the year. The Virtual Learning Environment remains in beta test, as efforts have been directed to the Wikisoba project.
The Technology Committee meets regularly, with volunteers discussing various projects and developers and staff available as possible to update and join discussions. Earlier in the year a scoping exercise was carried out which highlighted failures of project management which hindered development. Amongst the recommendations was that a contractor, tech liaison, or Chief Technical Officer should be recruited to address the lack of project management, which in part stops our development in the area. However, the cost implications meant that alternatives were sought. Out-sourcing was looked into, but again the cost was higher than hoped. Currently, the charity's tech projects still lack formal project management. To mitigate this, the developers have emphasised the importance of using Wikimedia UK's installation of Bugzilla as a project management tool, and to help prioritise tasks. Overall, we feel that we are in a static position with regards to this goal, which warrants the 'yellow' assessment. |
G4.2 There are robust and efficient tools readily available to allow WMUK - and related organisations - to support our own programmes and to enable us to effectively record impact measures. | Uses [15] of the internal or supporting tools we host or support | Narrative | See narrative | See narrative | See narrative | See narrative | As in Q1 and Q2, the main tools are CiviCRM, piwik, and the Virtual Learning Environment. We use CiviCRM as often as possible when organising events to make reporting easier. Further work on Civi CRM was undertaken, but a decision was made to cease the contract with the external support company as it was not delivering against spend or impact criteria. An alternative maintained system will be considered as a result.
Of the three tools, CiviCRM has been given most developer time this year. Piwik has been maintained throughout the year, but we haven't reached our ambitions to modify its interface to make finding statistics for particular pages (germane for GLAMs interested in QRcodes). Over the course of the year, the Virtual Learning Environment has encountered issues with project management, resource allocation, and the interface between Moodle and the wiki software. While it remains in beta testing an introductory video is available below. Volunteer effort has been invested in Wikisoba, effectively a Moodle lite, with key volunteers working on both the front- and back-end development. CiviCRM has undergone software upgrade in 2014–15, and the inclusion of the volunteer module has been useful for tracking the charity's interaction with volunteers. Automated emailing was set up in Q2, however further modifications which would allow Gift Aid processing through CiviCRM was not completed. Overall we feel we made progress comparing to 2013-14, with some tool development and progress on CiviCRM (our key database system). We would have liked CiviCRM to be more functional though, some of its set up is still not available to the standard needed for us - hence the 'in progress' assessment of this aim. In the context of our organisation and its development, we are ready for a sophisticated database system, and so our current software falls short of that. |
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Introduction to the virtual learning environment (http://moodle.wikimedia.org.uk/)
G5 Develop, support, and engage with other Wikimedia and open knowledge communities
[edit]Outcome (from our Strategic Goals) | Outcome Measure | 2014 target (to 31 Jan 2015) | Results Q1 2014 (Feb to April) | Results Q2 2014 (May to July) | Results Q3 2014 (August to October) | Results Q4 2014 (November to January) | Current notes |
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G5.1 A thriving set of other Wikimedia communities | Funding to support other chapters and Wikimedia groups | £10000 | £10,149 in year to date | £10,443 in year to date | £12,043 in year to date | £12,043 in year to date | No spending was undertaken for Q4 in this regard.
The majority of this spending was on running two governance workshops for Wikimedia chapter trustees. The first was held at the start of March 2014, and while the organisers were open to a follow up session if it was well-received plans had yet to be solidified. The February workshop was attended by trustees from international Wikimedia chapters, and the feedback from the event was that it was certainly useful and allowed the sharing of experience and ideas. As such, a second workshop was arranged for the run up to Wikimania. This allowed costs to be kept at a minimum as attendees would not be claiming travels costs from Wikimedia UK. |
Activities held for or jointly with other chapters and Wikimedia groups | 7 (including G5.2 and G5.3 events) | 4 in year to date | 6 in year to date | 15 in year to date | 17 in year to date |
Lead by John Cummings, we have also worked on an inter-chapter application for a project with UNESCO. Many chapters have signed up to help with the project, matching volunteers to local organisations and similar. If the project goes ahead in 2015-16, it will certainly be a basis of one of our key inter-chapter collaborations.
Basing on past experience, we have estimated running 7 focused events that aim at building chapters and groups in the international Wikimedia community - something we believe is a part of our missing as an organisation that learnt a lot and can share it. Not counting Wikimania activities in (which contributed at least 9 events) we would have been just on target with the number of activities and the number of people involved. During the year we provided various platforms for chapters to learn from each other (e.g. during Wikimania Fringe), and from us (e.g. governance workshops). This year is then judged as a success based on the level of contribution to the global movement that we provided. | |
Total shared activity units [13] in shared activities [14] with other chapters and Wikimedia groups | 150 (including G5.2 and G5.3 events) | 103 in year to date | 125 in year to date | 374 to date | 389 to date (total in 2014-15) | There were about 15 activity units put into the projects as described above. Over the course of 2014–15 Wikimania and the opportunity it gave the charity to share in activities with other chapters and Wikimedia groups was a key contributing factor to this area. | |
Number of UK based Wikimedia events other than WMUK events | Report only | 15 this quarter | 17 in this quarter | 14 in this quarter | 7 in this quarter (total 53 in 2014-15) | Meetups continue to make up the bulk of activity in this area.
Of the 53 UK-based Wikimedia events other than WMUK events held in 2014-15, 44 of these were meetups. On top of this, there were editathons and OpenSym. Meetups give editors a chance to meet face-to-face, and the high number indicates a self-sustaining Wikimedia community in the UK. There are also indications of growth, with meetups in Scotland and Wales. The focus on meetups may not be an accurate reflection of activity in the UK. We rely on people adding events such as meetups to our events page on the WMUK wiki so that anyone interested can find out about them. This means that people who are highly involved in the Wikimedia movement report their meetups and events, while those who are newer and less experienced are less likely to do so. The result is that at least twice in the year we came across example of get togethers where people discuss editing and help each other out. These tend to be people who don't attend the meetups listed on meta-wiki. Discovery of these kind of events has proven problematic, and it remains unclear how Wikimedia UK can best support these groups without compromising their grassroots character. | |
G5.2 An increased diversity of Wikimedia contributors | Activities specifically directed to supporting the diversity of other chapters and Wikimedia groups | 1 | 1 in year to date | 1 in year to date | 4 in year to date | 4 in year to date | No further events were held specifically in this area in Q4.
One event took place in Q1, and three in Q3. The Q1 event Wikimedia UK supported was Talking Wikipedia in Ghana. Wikimania in particular gave the charity the opportunity to support other organisations in their work. The international Train the Trainers session around Wikimania gave other groups the skills to train new editors and a chance to share one of our more successful, documented and evaluated programs (so much so that even before this event we were receiving questions from other chapters regarding how we run the course). Our own editing events have been well attended by women. In addition, we facilitated meetups for Wikimedia groups such as the WikiArabia meetup, the African Wikimedians meetups, the Celtic Languages meetup and Smaller Languages meetup. Our international diversity support activities were delivered with other groups that have the expertise and connections in the respective areas. We feel that this is an effective approach for such work - the partnering groups are aware of their local contexts, and we can bring in the elements of the support that we know works. |
G5.3 Wikimedia communities are skilled and capable | Activities specifically directed to help train or to share knowledge with other chapters and Wikimedia groups | 1 | 1 in year to date | 1 in year to date | 3 in year to date | 3 in year to date |
We have not organised focused knowledge sharing events in Q4, however, we continued to share our experiences with other chapters via various channels. One interesting example is our work with promoting the usage of geonotices (as a way to invite existing and new editors to events through their watchlists). UK GLAM events have long been promoted this way. During the last year we have mentored Wikimedia Ireland to the point where they no longer need our support on this and they now file their own requests for geonotices. We have also shared this idea with the global GLAM-Wiki group - since and we have had watchlist notice requests to promote GLAM events in Mexico and Madrid as well as the places we are used to seeing such requests.
It is highlighted in many other areas in this report how we are sharing what we learn with other chapters and organisations, so it suffices to say here that we feel we have achieved to our ability in this area. We have shared the relevant learning throughout the movement by producing materials, organising events and simply being transparent in what we do. We participated in many movement events (e.g. Wikimedia conference), where we regularly spoke on what we are learning and how others can benefit. Hopefully our ideas Encouraged Innovation throughout Wikimedia movement. |
G5.4 Open knowledge communities with missions similar to our own are thriving. | Number of shared activities [14] hosted with groups or organisations having similar goals to WMUK | 5 | 0 in year to date | 5 in year to date | 7 in year to date | 10 in year to date (total in 2014-15) | wmuk:Open Coalition work continued to activate various open organisations in the field and deliver projects in collaboration with others. The three main projects worked on in Q4 were:
This work continues and will be the focus of 2015-16 activity in this area. 2014-15 A year summary report was created specifically for this document, and can be found here. |
Total shared activity units [13] in shared activities [14] hosted with groups or organisations having similar goals to WMUK | 40 | 0 in year to date | 96 in year to date | 164 in year to date | 183 in year to date (total in 2014-15) | There were 19 people in total involved in the activities mentioned above, representing 16 organisations (there would be repetitions from project to project).
We co-founded a project called the Open Coalition, and were the first to fund it. The Open Coalition is a cross-organisational project to increase collaboration, knowledge sharing and awareness of good practise in the open sector. Other partners include Mozilla, Creative Commons and Open Knowledge. |
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The Open Coalition, supported by Wikimedia UK, were represented at Wikimania 2014
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GLAMwiki in Yorkshire
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The community village at Wikimania
Lessons learned
[edit]Lessons from the past
[edit]A key objective of the funding is to enable the movement as a whole to understand how to achieve shared goals better and faster. An important way of doing this is to identify lessons learned and insights from entities who receive funds, and to share these lessons across the movement. Please answer the following questions in 1–2 paragraphs each.
- 1. What were your major accomplishments in the past year, and how did you help to achieve movement goals?
We are proud of the content production we were able to support in 2014-15, as highlighted in the summary of G1 below, and are pleased how on the whole it directly fed into the movement goal of Improving Quality. Here, however, we would like to highlight several specific successful initiatives:
- WIR policy changes - having a Resident embedded within an institution often enabled us to introduce in depth changes within that organisation. A summary of achievements is in G3.3 below. By changing the institutions to be more open, we make it possible for more people to access their resources, thus Increasing Reach.
- Usage of images - we run several initiatives where our images had an impressive usage rate on Wikimedia projects, thanks to running them in partnerships with other organisations, or basing on identified needs (see G1.2). This addressed Improving Quality by providing great images for Wikipedia.
- Volunteer strategy and survey - we engaged with our volunteer community to bring us closer to working with them on projects, and understanding what they get from volunteering with us. See G2a for more. We strongly engaged with the community, therefore Increasing Participation.
- 2. What were your major setbacks in the past year (e.g., programs that were not successful)?
Some programmes were not delivered as planned, because we adapted some elements of our programme to match the changing circumstances (e.g. we merged our AGM with a track at Wikimania, which meant we did not deliver a separate WikiConference and AGM). The two setbacks that are worth highlighting particularly though are:
- Gender Gap internship, a project to support our diversity work, was run for 4 months in Q3-4 to explore ways of deeper engagement in the gender gap activities. It initiated community building that could support future activities, encouraging female volunteers to get involved. Despite stretching it from the original 3 months to 4, we think it’s unlikely that a lasting change will be delivered through this project. Building a new community is a much longer process, especially when it is going against the existing status quo, and the concentrated approach we took did not bring in the desired effect. For the project’s case study report see here.
- We were not able to build a robust development (IT) programme that would match our aspirations in the area. Lack of required resources was a hindrance, but we were also impeded by lack of existing expertise that would help us scope out the required work and help in establishing what a successful programme in this area would be. See G4.1 for more.
- There were several surveys (e.g. public awareness or transparency) that we wrote into our programme, and we were not subsequently able to deliver them. We planned these initiatives as important evaluation tools, however, we were not able to provide capacity needed for delivering them. Scoping, preparing, and administering surveys, as we learnt, needs considerable time (and sometimes funding) resources, and need to be build in specific people’s work plans. If we take up the survey delivery in 2015-16, we should take this into consideration.
- Student societies’ support has been retracted - student turnover has been a reason for lack of sustained engagement. Further activity in this area is not advisable as the return on time and resources invested is very low.
- 3. What factors (organizational, environmental) enabled your success?
Our identified strengths (as per SWOT analysis the the initial sections of this report ([15]) played a strong role in enabling the achievements of 2014-15. Partnerships, volunteer base, programme track record and successful collaborations with other chapters all contributed. Externally, high profile organisations that wanted to work with us, and changes towards openness in the society (digital literacy, big data) helped us when promoting and starting projects.
- 4. What unanticipated challenges did you encounter and how did this affect what you were able to accomplish?
Wikimedia UK faced some challenges last year. Wikimania 2014 took more of the chapter’s resources than expected (financial and staff), but we were responding to the developing situation and were adding capacities where possible. A chapter is not normally run to have a capacity to support such a large event, and building up to it, and afterwards scaling down to normal operations, can be a challenge. This meant that we were able to deliver a smaller programme than otherwise, but thanks to the fact that we were aware of this possibility, we managed our existing partnership relations accordingly, making partner organisations aware of a phase of reduced capacity on our end. We believe it taught us more about managing our capacities.
Elsewhere, a health issue led to one of our employees being away for more than three months. This happened to coincide with a transition at executive director level within the charity. We have seen how much internal knowledge can be built up and held by a staff member, which can be intangible and hard to handover, especially over a short period of time. We think this is an interesting challenge for chapters, especially small ones, where a lot of the contacts, knowledge, information, can be held by one person and not recorded. In our case, this meant that some projects had to be put on hold, or restarted, as we were not able to pick up the leads needed for continuation. This for example meant that our volunteer skills survey was delayed by several months.
- 5. What are the 2–3 most important lessons that other entities can learn from your experience? Consider learning from both the programmatic and institutional (what you have learned about professionalizing your entity, if you have done so) points of view.
- Institutional: In 2014-15 we took further steps in professionalising Wikimedia UK - the most telling evidence of this is the completed governance review process. The document that was produced in the process ([16]) will, we hope, serve as a useful tool for other chapters to learn (which is why we run a series of governance workshops in 2014-15). There are many lessons that can be drawn from this process of progressing from a ‘youthful’ to ‘adult’ stage of organisational development. Worth mentioning is a lesson that monitoring board’s existing skills give the organisation a useful perspective of where it needs more expertise. We also learnt that the way the board interacts with the charity (ranging from support to criticism) is important and has a big influence on how the organisation develops. We are always happy to share what we learnt in more detail with interested parties.
- Programmatic: Another place where we condensed many learning points is the UK Wikimedian in Residence review. Bearing in mind the widespread nature of this programme across the chapters, we hope the document is of use to others. Its key findings ([17]) flag up ways in which the programme can be made stronger and more efficient - running a residency for at least 12 months, providing more support and facilitation between residents and host institutions, put more effort into sharing information between the residencies, build residency teams. The last element stresses how important it is for not only resident to be working on the project, but also his manager at the host institution, and 1-2 other people. This can make the project much stronger and successful. On an institutional level, we have learned that such effort to review a programme in depth takes a lot of time resource, and there needs to be commitment to take up on the findings, take the recommendations forward.
Our major accomplishments (question 1. of this section) should also count in what major lessons we experienced this year.
Lessons for the future
[edit]The Wikimedia movement grows as each entity in the movement reflects and adapts its approaches to changing needs and contexts. The questions below encourage you to apply your thinking in the sections above of "how well have we done" and "what have we learned" to the development and execution of future organisational and program strategies. The questions below can be informed both by your own entities' learnings, as well as the learnings of other movement entities (e.g., adding a new program that appears to have caused significant impact in several other countries or communities).
- 1. What organisational or program strategies would you continue?
- We are aiming to continue, and build on, our approach to deliver activities in collaboration with external organisations. As mentioned in G1.3, working in partnerships was very successful in 2014-15, and many of the outcomes delivered was possible through working with others, connecting to their content, expertise about it, and their communities. This will mean continuing to support the Wikimedian in Residence programme, but also focus more on partnership in any activities that we set up. We see other chapters going into this approach as well, and we will keep the conversations going there to learn as we move into this direction (e.g. WMNL or WMFR).
- We will continue to keep the standard of our governance, and build on our strategic goals system. The later proved instrumental in our ability to measure and evaluate programmes, and we are committed to continuing this approach to keep learning about our impact.
- 2. What might you change in organisational and program strategies in order to improve the effectiveness of your entity?
- Following from the insight of the Organisational Effectiveness Survey we took part in, we would like to put more resources in managing and building partnerships. One strong theme in the survey that respondents agreed on was that Wikimedia UK’s strength lays in delivering projects with partner organisations, but that we don’t have enough resources to deliver to full potential. Increasing this should give us more effectiveness.
- We would like to continue working on the recommendations of the [WIR] and [Train the Trainer] reviews.
- As we approach a more mature stage in the organisational development, we will be considering how our organically developed structure could be modelled for best efficiency. This will certainly be one of the focuses of 2015-16.
- 3. Please create at least one learning pattern from your entity's experiences this year and link to it here.
We created some learning patterns around photography, as we were strongly involved in WLM in 2014-15. The aim was to empower volunteers to take better photos. I hope they will be useful to others!
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_patterns/Photographing_your_local_buildings
- http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_patterns/Improving_your_building_photography
Stories of success and challenge
[edit]Of all the accomplishments highlighted through this report, please share two detailed stories: one story of a success and one story of a challenge that your entity experienced over the past year in a few paragraphs each. Provide any details that might be helpful to others in the movement on the context, strategy, and impact of this initiative. We suggest you write this as you would tell a story to a friend or colleague. Please refrain from using bullet points or making a list, and rather focus on telling us about your organization's experience.
Case study: success
[edit]400 informative quality images images, at least 7 million views (reaching and informing readers!), clearer, more neutral cancer information available to all. How did we get there?
Towards the end of 2013 we set up a Wikimedian in Residence with Cancer Research UK, the world’s largest cancer research charity, funding over 4,000 research staff working on cancer. We successfully applied for an external grant from the Wellcome Trust, a large UK medical research charitable foundation, to fund the project, which is a success in itself. We started working with CRUK back in 2011, when we run training events for staff, but without continuous support the engagement with Wikipedia decreased. We then spent most of 2013 setting the WIR project up, working on the grant application and our plans.
At the start of the project, our high spirits of releasing tons of cancer related information were dampened. The organisation was worried of losing control of the images. Their painstakingly created content, just right and correct, could not be put into the wrong context, or edited out.
Instead, we focused on working with the existing medical editors on the English Wikipedia to improve our articles on cancer topics, in particular those on the four common cancers which are widely recognised as having the greatest “unmet need” because there has been little improvement in survival rates in recent decades. These are cancers of the lung, pancreas, brain and oesophagus. This linked to the CRUK new research strategy with an increased focus on these.
However, with much internal advocacy work by the resident, over three months after the project started, the CRUK Governance Panel confirmed that a batch of about 400 images can be released - patient-directed online cancer content managed by the CancerHelp team. A lot of roadblocks had to be solved, from model/patient confidentiality, uncertainty over copyright status, agreements with journals who have published research, to showing the previous CRUK brand identity, a fatal flaw as far as the Brand team were concerned!).
The relevant staff were able to see the benefits though. The idea of releasing the images is not just to allow use on Wikipedia, but anywhere else. One advantage of this is that it will save CancerHelp from having to respond to the many requests for permission to reuse they already get. But also, a massive change of thinking started happening at CRUK. Instead of worrying about their images being put out of context (and so keeping them copyrighted), they realised that by keeping them closed, they make it impossible for people to use the exact images, and forcing them to use something else.
Also, Wikipedia cancer articles tend to be mostly illustrated with alarming shots of tumours, or purple-stained pathology slides which convey little to non-professional readers. The new images are from the patient information pages on CRUK’s website and explain in simple terms basic aspects of the main cancers – where they arise, how they grow and spread. Some show surgical procedures that are hard to convey in prose.
The Wikipedia medical editors had been enthusiastic about the release. Within a month 176 were already used in Wikipedia articles, 14 twice, which is a phenomenally quick uptake. They are SVG format files, which means that where appropriate the text labels in the images can easily be translated for use in other languages. This indeed happened organically, e.g. in November 2014 images on pancreatic cancer had the text labels within the image translated into German, and they are now used in the German article. This is the first time that has been seen, the other non-English usage being of images either with no text, or keeping the English text.
The usage in articles should increase further over time, both on English and other Wikipedias, and other contexts beyond the Wikimedia projects (a contact at NHS England expressed interest when she heard of the release, as the NHS Choices site has very few such images). The BaGLAMa2 report shows page views of articles using these images in August, traditionally a low-traffic month, totalled 1.1 million. Subsequent months showed: September, 1.41 million, October 1.43 million, November 1.35 million (cumulative 6.61 million to November). These figures exclude views on mobile & other hand-held devices, which will represent about 30% of total traffic.
CRUK has been changed by the experience too - they are thinking about more openness - to be continued…
Case study: challenge
[edit]Living Paths, a programme we started in 2013-14 and continued throughout 2014-15, is a project that aimed to empower local communities with simple Wikipedia web-authoring skills in all coastal counties that border the Wales Coast Path. We wanted to develop Wikipedia articles on the Wales Coast Path. Before, communities in Wales were finding it difficult to share information about their locality such as historic buildings, circular paths, geographical features and other points of interest. The information is published in local history pamphlets but these are expensive to distribute therefore difficult to source. The project addressed this problem by teaching editing skills to local people.
We also aimed to support and encourage existing Wikipedians and inspire them to write in other languages.
With these inspiring goals in mind, supported by a local coordinator very committed to growing the Welsh language, we were further inspired by the government context we were working in.
The importance of the Welsh and English Wikipedia and the use of open content was recognised in 2011 by the Welsh Government, following direct consultation with Wikipedia Cymraeg. The Government's Welsh Language, Technology and Digital Media Action Plan published states: "Action Points: Develop the skills and confidence of Welsh speakers to create digital content by a) supporting the efforts of Wicipedia Cymraeg to train Welsh speakers and raise awareness with regard to adding Welsh language content to Wicipedia and b) exploring whether any Welsh Government investments in Welsh-medium technology could be licensed on a Creative Commons basis."
The idea for our project was recognised by the government! We banked on the strong commitment of the government to support the local language and nurture local speakers, and were able to show that Welsh Wikipedia is the biggest online language resource in Welsh - which convinced them to support it. The work that followed, our ambition to reach the aspirations, was riddled with challenges, many of which we didn't fully anticipate.
Robin Owain, the manager of the project, explains the beginning stages, excitement and challenges met ("four months of paperwork to get started") in this great video.
From the start, we had to adapt to the government way of working (they were providing some funding for the project) - the documentation was growing very quickly, together with procedures, very specific metrics, etc. And it can’t be forgotten that all of this had to happen in two languages, Welsh and English. This needed a lot of effort and time, which took away from the capacity to actually run the project.
Additionally, the main project coordinator was based in Wales, which meant the office’s support was reduced to remote help.
As it often happens, the good ‘open knowledge’ objective of the project was soon criticised for a vast potential for using Wikipedia as a marketing platform, rather than an information tool. This is because the local tourism board saw the project as a way of promoting the area, bringing more visitors in. As much as sharing objective information about the area could do it, they thought use the project in a marketing and PR way. This took careful explaining and managing the misunderstanding.
With these difficulties worked on, we pushed on with our work. We consolidated a partnership with Software Alliance Wales (SAW; based at Swansea University), who agreed to train their own trainers in wiki-skills. They then trained others in all parts of Wales. No commercial aspects were taught in any way other than instructing them how these location based articles could be used in their own websites, should they want to do that. It's possible that this was the first time for an independent body to teach wiki-skills in the UK.
We had some challenges in getting the courses full, however. Getting people's interest in attending editing workshops was much easier by direct face-to-face contact than any other means. Emails and leaflets providing information typically had to be followed up with telephone calls which usually became lengthy as queries about Wikipedia and the project had to be answered. As time progressed the frequently asked questions became clear. Generally, people wanted to know how giving up their free time to edit Wikipedia would benefit them or their area. Had time allowed, it would have been good to have been able to produce and direct people to a helpful video presenting the project and workshops in a way that addressed the most common queries. It would have included a presenter and/or voice over with screen grabs, possibly incorporating some animation.
With all these, we have managed to achieve what we set out to do, and actually much more - have a look at all the stats we gathered [18].
With so many institutions and people touched by the project, it’s no wonder that the work continues. There is now a WIR at the National Library, Software Alliance Wales continues to teach wiki-skills, and more! For example, a Pilot was started with the aim of using images from Commons (preferred Wikidata image) into every entry on their (Illustrated) Species Dictionary and type 'buwch' - to see 50 types of ladybirds.
Additional learning
[edit]- 1. What are some of the activities that are happening in your community that are not chapter-led? What are the most successful among these, and why?
This is actually one of the goals that we were monitoring in 2014-15 (G5.1 "Number of UK based Wikimedia events other than WMUK events").
Of the 53 UK-based Wikimedia events other than WMUK events held in 2014-15, 44 of these were meetups. On top of this, there were editathons and OpenSym. Meetups give editors a chance to meet face-to-face and the high number indicates a self-sustaining Wikimedia community in the UK. There are also indications of growth, with meetups in Scotland and Wales, as the communities build up. The focus on meetups may not be an accurate reflection of activity in the UK - we rely on people adding events such as meetups to our events page on the WMUK wiki so that anyone interested can find out about them. This means that people who are highly involved in the Wikimedia movement report their meetups and events, while those who are newer and less experienced are less likely to do so. The result is that at least twice in the year we came across example of people get togethers where people discuss editing and help each other out. These tend to be people who don't attend the meetups listed on meta-wiki. Discovery of these kind of events has proven problematic, and it remains unclear how Wikimedia UK can best support these groups without compromising their grassroots character. With the meet ups, we definitely see that a local 'coordinator' who pushes for them and acts as an anchor for others is one of the factors that enables their growth and success.
- 2. Provide any links to any media coverage, blog posts, more detailed reports, more detailed financial information that you haven't already, as well as at least one photograph or video that captures the impact your entity had this past year.
Learning materials produced
[edit]- A long term look on effects of the GLAM-Wiki 2013 conference was conducted in 2014, and our long term report was produced as a result [19]
- We run a Volunteer Strategy Day in Q4 of 2014, and created a report on the participants’ responses - [20]
- We developed a survey on volunteer skills, summarised here and here.
-
Main film (also on YouTube)
Review of the Wikimedian in Residence programme. In Q1 the chapter began the process of reviewing its WiR programme, it was finalised towards the end of Q2. It pulled together three strands of information – seeking input from the community, the WiRs themselves, and the institutions they worked with – to assess the impact of the programme, and look at in depth lessons to see how it could be run better by the chapter. A deep research including a SWOT analysis was carried out jointly with the residents, and some key findings and recommendations were produced which may be of interest to other chapters with WiR schemes. Since the review was circulated at the end of July, the chapter has been receiving expressions of interest to find out more from other chapters, the printed booklet has also been circulated to UK based institutions.
- Another important element of the sharing of WIR learning is that several residents have managed to finalise their end of project 'case study' documents, sharing the summary of what they've done, reflections on that, and recommendations for the future. The reports are Natural History Museum and Science Museum [21], Jisc Wikimedia Ambassador [22], York Museums Trust [23], National Library of Scotland [24]. These will serve as an useful record of the projects in the future, and will be promoted further within the relevant communities.
Wikimania press coverage
[edit]Wikimedia UK key stories
[edit]Wikipedia and Wikimedia related (key stories only)
[edit]Blog posts this activity year
[edit]Compliance
[edit]Is your organization compliant with the terms defined in the grant agreement?
[edit]- 1. As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.
- We have not deviated from our proposal beyond what is outlined in the grant report above. Where WMF funds were used, the deviations were consistent with the WMF's mission and complied with the grant agreement.
- 2. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
- Yes
- 3. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".
- Yes
Financial information
[edit]- 1. Report any Grant funds that are unexpended fifteen (15) months after the Effective Date of the Grant Agreement. These funds must be returned to WMF or otherwise transferred or deployed as directed by WMF.
- No funds are unexpended.
- 2. Any interest earned on the Grant funds by Grantee will be used by Grantee to support the Mission and Purposes as set out in this Grant Agreement. Please report any interest earned during the reporting period and cumulatively over the duration of the Grant and Grant Agreement.
- Reported above in the 'income' section. Any interest was used in a way which was both consistent with the WMF's mission and complied with the grant agreement.
Notes
[edit]- ↑ This is out of 514 user names gathered from editing events out of a total attendance figure of 1,022. Wikimetrics was then used to arrive at this figure. The true number is most likely closer to 450.
- ↑ Operation Flavius (April 2014) and Death on the Rock (September 2014)
- ↑ Althorp (June 2014), Waldorf Astoria New York (January 2015), and Waldorf–Astoria (New York, 1893) (January 2015)
- ↑ This includes files on Commons and those uploaded to the Welsh Wicipedia with WMUK support. Further details can be found in the Q1 report.
- ↑ https://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/glamorous.php?doit=1&category=Images+from+Wiki+Loves+Monuments+2013&use_globalusage=1&ns0=1&projects[wikipedia]=1&projects[wikimedia]=1&projects[wikisource]=1&projects[wikibooks]=1&projects[wikiquote]=1&projects[wiktionary]=1&projects[wikinews]=1&projects[wikivoyage]=1&projects[wikispecies]=1&projects[mediawiki]=1&projects[wikidata]=1&projects[wikiversity]=1
- ↑ https://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/glamorous.php?doit=1&category=Images+from+Wiki+Loves+Monuments+2014&use_globalusage=1&ns0=1&projects[wikipedia]=1&projects[wikimedia]=1&projects[wikisource]=1&projects[wikibooks]=1&projects[wikiquote]=1&projects[wiktionary]=1&projects[wikinews]=1&projects[wikivoyage]=1&projects[wikispecies]=1&projects[mediawiki]=1&projects[wikidata]=1&projects[wikiversity]=1
- ↑
- ↑
- The Cloisters of Gloucester Cathedral (27 March 2014)
- South facade of Lyme Park house, 2013 (16 April 2014)
- St Matthew's Church - Paisley - Stained Glass Window (21 April 2014)
- ↑ bitly link removed as it triggers a spam filter.
- ↑ ie: excluding events aimed at promoting gender diversity
Signature
[edit]Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.
- Richard Symonds (WMUK) (talk) 09:16, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
- Annual plan grant reports
- Annual plan grant reports for 2013-2014 Round 1
- Annual plan grant reports by Wikimedia UK
- Annual plan grant reports by Wikimedia UK for FDC 2013-2014 Round 1
- Annual plan grant impact report forms
- Annual plan grant impact report forms for 2013-2014 Round 1
- Annual plan grant impact report forms by Wikimedia UK
- Annual plan grants or proposals by Wikimedia UK for 2013-2014 Round 1