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Purpose of the report

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This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their progress after completing the first 6 months of their grants. The time period covered in this form will be the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). This form includes four sections, addressing global metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Summary

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This report covers the first six months of the financial year 2016 - 17, and demonstrates the depth and breadth of programme activity delivered by Wikimedia UK and the progress made towards our quantitative targets, including global metrics. The report is presented in the context of the charity's new strategic framework and business plan for 2016 - 19, with an explanation of how this maps across from our previous strategy and the programmes articulated within our APG proposal.

The first half of the year has been very promising in terms of the positive impact of the organisational restructure that took place in 2015, demonstrated by continued growth in terms of reach and impact. Our quantitive indicators are provided in detail in the body of the report, but key highlights include:

  • The number of newly registered editors (global metric 2) is 594 at the halfway point of the year, compared to a total of 438 for last year
  • The number of individuals involved (global metric 3) so far this year is 1733, compared to last year’s total figure of 1856 and a target of 500
  • Our annual target for images added (global metric 4b) has already been exceeded, with 37,825 images uploaded compared to last year's result of 20,797
  • Our half year total of 44,282 articles improved or created (global metric 5) is significantly beyond our target of 10,000 and last year’s result of 13,072
  • With bytes added of 55 million we have already achieved significantly above our target of 6 million
  • We have engaged 66 lead volunteers in our work so far this year and have made excellent progress against our target for volunteer hours

Some of the narrative highlights from the report include:

  • Our focus on diverse and underrepresented content as the strategic driver for much of our partnerships activity this year
  • Our participation in Art + Feminism, through which we held partnership events at nine high profile arts institutions around the country
  • The appointment of a Wikimedian in Residence at the Wellcome Library in May
  • The development of our work with Wikidata, and the potential for this in terms of cultural partnerships
  • Our partnership with Llen Natur, the official body which gives Welsh names to species, releasing substantial amounts of content online
  • A wide-ranging and highly successful partnership with National Library of Wales
  • Funding from Oxford University's Innovation Fund to support a second phase of our Wikimedian in Residence at Bodleian Libraries
  • The delivery of Wikipedia in the Classroom with a number of higher education partners
  • Our nascent work in education and learning across other sectors
  • Our growing public profile, with a high number of speaking engagements delivered by our staff and volunteers

Looking forward, some of the upcoming activities in the second half of the year include a Gaelic Wikimedian in Residence, supported through the Gaelic Language Act Implementation Fund and in partnership with the National Library of Scotland, and the development of a multi-partner collaboration project with the National Heritage Science Forum. These are likely to be explored in more detail in our upcoming APG proposal for 2017 - 18.


Background

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At the point that Wikimedia UK’s APG proposal was created, during the summer and early autumn of 2015, the charity was two years into a five year strategy for 2014 - 2019, and the proposal was closely aligned with that strategy. However since the five year strategy was created there has been a substantial restructure, a high turnover of trustees and the appointment of a new Chief Executive, Lucy Crompton-Reid, who joined the organisation in October 2015 shortly after the submission of our 2016 bid. In December, Lucy facilitated a board away day to review and update the five year strategy, followed in early 2016 by a staff planning day and community consultation on the draft new strategic framework for 2016 - 19. As a result of this strategic development and planning, the charity now has:

A clear, concise strategic framework which articulates our vision, mission, values, outcomes, strategic goals and objectives; ensuring that the board, staff team, volunteers, funders, partners and other stakeholders have a clear sense of our direction of travel as a charity, and a shared understanding of what we are hoping to change. A three year business plan which puts the strategy in context, articulating the external drivers, priorities and programmes for the three year period and internal resources including staffing and funding. A delivery plan which details our planned activities in 2016/17, mapping these against our new strategic goals.

In developing and delivering our programme activities in 2016 the staff team and our wider community have been focused on the new strategy, moving away from the five strategic goals articulated in our former strategy and used as the basis of our APG proposal. Whilst the new strategy does change the way in which we frame our programme delivery - thus making this report slightly harder to read and understand in relation to our initial bid - it has also brought tangible benefits to the charity, providing a new focus and richness to our partnership work, volunteer engagement and other activities, and helping to address some of the FDC’s concerns about the Chapter.

During the FDC staff visit in June 2016, we discussed these changes and explained how our new goals can be mapped against our previous strategy, which we have also tried to illustrate in this report. Of course, the two strategies don’t map perfectly as there are some areas which have been prioritised (addressing inequality and bias, diversifying content and contributors and developing our education activities, for example), while others are no longer strategic goals and programmes (such as governance issues and technological innovation). The illustration below shows how the goals within our proposal (left) can be mapped against this progress report (right).

Global metrics overview - all programs

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Below are our results for all programmes counted together. Within each programme section further down, we are again reporting on global metrics, separated out for each of the three programmes.

Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved 145 Coming from across the programme activities, assistance with Wikidata work, delivering training at events, working on uploads. Both new editors that kept active, but crucially also the existing community involved in our activities. Also people getting skilled up in our volunteer training programme.

Students from Wikipedia in Classroom who keep editing during their courses, plus several community members who help run them. Several people involved in pilots for other areas in education.

2. # of new editors 594 Mostly from editing workshops - trained and aware of Wikimedia.

New course participants

3. # of individuals involved 1,733 Editors as above, plus participants in grants, contests, lead volunteers organising activities.

People present and participating at our awareness raising/advocacy talks (mostly offline, but we included the ODI lecture listens)

Overlapping sum of the above (a lot of new editors kept editing)

4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages 2,016 Reuse of the focused sets.
4a. # images/media added to Commons 37,825 Several handpicked, diversity-focused uploads, plus a large donation from a volunteer
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects 44,282 For Wikipedia (mostly en and cy) it’s editathons, editing workshops, contests (Awaken the Dragon and Core Contest). A large proportion comes from edits on Wikidata items.

Via the Wikipedia in Classroom

6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects 55,638,312 Articles as above, plus Wikidata work (details in the programme description).

Via the Wikipedia in Classroom


Global metrics for programme 1

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Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved 81 Coming from across the programme activities, assistance with Wikidata work, delivering training at events, working on uploads. Both new editors that kept active, but crucially also the existing community involved in our activities. Also people getting skilled up in our volunteer training programme.
2. # of new editors 279 Mostly from editing workshops - trained and aware of Wikimedia
3. # of individuals involved 582 Editors as above, plus participants in grants, contests, lead volunteers organising activities.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages 2,016 Reuse of the focused sets.
4a. # images/media added to Commons 37,825 Several handpicked, diversity-focused uploads, plus a large donation from a volunteer
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects 43,976 For Wikipedia (mostly en and cy) it’s editathons, editing workshops, contests (Awaken the Dragon and Core Contest). A large proportion comes from edits on Wikidata items.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects 52,837,547 Articles as above, plus Wikidata work (details in the programme description).


Global metrics for programme 2

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Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved 0
2. # of new editors 0
3. # of individuals involved 826 People present and participating at our awareness raising/advocacy talks (mostly offline, but we included the ODI lecture listens)
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages 0 (This programme does not directly contribute content, but rather creates conditions for that to be possible)
4a. # images/media added to Commons 0
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects 0
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects 0


Global metrics for programme 3

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Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. # of active editors involved 64 Students from Wikipedia in Classroom who keep editing during their courses, plus several community members who help run them. Several people involved in pilots for other areas in education.
2. # of new editors 315 New course participants
3. # of individuals involved 325 Overlapping sum of the above (a lot of new editors kept editing)
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages 0
4a. # images/media added to Commons 0 (the courses haven’t produced any media content)
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects 306 Via the Wikipedia in Classroom
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects 2,800,765 Via the Wikipedia in Classroom


Telling your program stories - all programs

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Here are general comments on our metrics results in the first half of the year, referencing some of the FDC staff and volunteer feedback on our APG bid:

  • The APG targets mentioned throughout this report are for all programmes taken together, not for specific programme areas
  • When we set targets for 2016 - 17 we obviously didn’t have the year end results from 2015 - 16, which is why the the previous year’s complete figures are also included for comparison.
  • It’s been useful to compare our performance against last year’s results, giving us a good indicator of whether we are performing as expected/planned and how we are improving our reach and impact as a Chapter
  • The results are showing considerable impact in creating knowledge, reaching out to new people, and engaging volunteers in our activities. We are particularly pleased with Bytes added and the size of our total audience
  • We are still referencing the logic models from our APG bid as despite the changes to our overall strategy they are continue to provide an effective frame for our activities, and show continuity in terms of the logic behind our programmes.
  • Further metrics relevant to each programme are identified within the narrative below.
Achieved Target has been achieved or exceeded
On track On track to achieve the target
Opportunity for improvement Some progress has been made towards achieving the target, but the target is not on track
Attention required Little or no progress has been made towards achieving the target

Programme 1: Diverse content and contributors

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Metrics

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For clarity of reference between our progress report and the APG bid, here is a mapping of our metrics with an explanation of any modifications. Note however that the actual targets were kept the same, since the activities delivered haven’t radically changed since the proposal was submitted.

APG plan metric 2016-17 delivery plan metric Modifications 2014-15 achieved 2015-16 achieved APG 2016-17 target (for all programmes) 2016-17 half year achieved
Number of active editors involved 2. Number of active editors involved GM1 - N/A 708 200 81
Number of newly registered users 3. Number of newly registered editors GM2 - N/A 438 300 279
Number of individuals involved 4. Number of individuals involved GM3 - 765 1,856 500 582
Number of leading volunteers 5. Number of leading volunteers - 987 (Wikimania) 70 260 32
Proportion of leading activity units attributable to women 6. Percentage of above who are women Kept target the same, just changed units to actual volunteers. Aim at the same diversity rate. 38% 40% 33% 32%
Number of activity units 7. Estimated number of volunteer hours Move to ‘hours’ rather than ‘activity units’. Much more accessible. To set the target we assumed 2hrs average per activity unit. N/A N/A 4,600 3,758
Proportion of activity units attributable to women 8. Percentage of above by women Kept target the same, just changed units to hours. Aim at the same diversity rate. N/A 30% 38% 19%
Number of uploads 12. Images/media added to Commons GM4b No changes for this or the ones below, just rewording 168,283 incl 150,000 mass upload 20,797 20,000+mass uploads 13,825+24,000 mass upload (37,825)
absolute # of images used (to be calculated from the captured image numbers) 13.Images/media added to WM pages GM4a - 6,058 2,217 2,000 2,016
Percentage of WMUK-related files (e.g. images) in mainspace use on a Wikimedia project (excluding Commons) 14. % uploaded media used in article pages - 3.6% 11% 10% 6%
Number of files (e.g. images) that have featured status on a Wikimedia project (including Commons) 15. Files with featured status - 63 57 80 58
articles created and improved 16. Articles added and/or improved - N/A 13,072 10,000 43,976
Number of new articles started on a Wikimedia site (eg any of the encyclopedias, incl Wicipedia) 17. Articles added - 835 6,712 1,000 5,238
TEXT - Sum of contribution edit size 18. Bytes added and/or deleted GM6 - 16,459,774 68,430,511 6 million 52,837,547

Discontinued metrics from APG plan:

Number of leading activity units Discontinued for simplicity. Lead contributions included in the volunteer hours sum.

Within this report, for easier mapping with our APG proposal, we have broken down the narrative of this programme into the two main aspects, content (following from the previous programme G1) and contributors (previous programme G2a).

Programme 1: Diverse content section

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APG strategic goal Strategic Framework 2016-19

Strategic goals/Programme strands

Programme activities
G1 Develop open knowledge Programme 1: Diverse content and contributors

Programme 3: Education and learning

This encompasses our planned activities for G1 but is better defined, with a particular focus on diverse content (programme 1), and education and learning (programme 3). Activities are mainly driven by partnerships with external institutions.

Background and overview of progress

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“The greatest threat to national heritage is disinterest and lack of knowledge. The best way to protect it is knowledge and information that’s free and easy to access” Wikimania 2016

“The Welsh language is a source of great pride for the people of Wales. I believe that everyone who wants to access services in the Welsh language should be able to do so”  The Welsh Government's Minister for Heritage

Organisational partnerships are central to programme delivery at Wikimedia UK and a key strength of the Chapter, as previously identified by the FDC. During 2016 we have capitalised on our strong background in this area and our substantial network within the cultural and education sectors and beyond; building on and leveraging existing relationships, delivering events and projects with new partners, and developing plans for scaling up our partnership work over the next three years.

In line with our new strategy, our work with partners this year has had a strong focus on diversity, with projects addressing inequality and bias on Wikipedia and the other projects including gender, minority languages, the cultural heritage of minority groups in the UK and other specific content gaps. We have a number of priorities in relation to underrepresentation, reflecting both global and local issues. We are committed to addressing the gender gap in terms of both content and editors - clearly a global issue for the whole movement - whilst a significant local issue for the UK is the language and cultural heritage of Wales, which is underrepresented on Wikimedia. We have a dedicated member of staff in Wales to develop and deliver this important work. At a more granular level, a needs analysis of every project we run includes an assessment of the possible content gaps it could address, often undertaken by our Wikimedians in residence or our internal leads within partner institutions.

The charity is making excellent progress towards this strategic goal and are particularly pleased with our content contributions in the first half of the year. In uploads we delivered several very focused sets (see below), and also received a donation of 24,000 geography photos from a volunteer. This big donation will take time to be reused on Wikimedia projects, which is why our reuse percentage is currently lower than the annual target of 10%. Text (bytes, articles) was produced through events as usual, but also a highly successful writing competition - Awaken the Dragon - supported by a volunteer grant, plus dynamic Wikidata work (particularly in Wales). Core Contest also delivered strongly on metrics, with over a million bytes added, 1,459 Wikipedia articles improved and 146 created. The number of articles created or improved at this point is well beyond our expectation, mainly as we didn’t anticipated the impressive development of our Wikidata work, and we are anticipating that this upward trend is set to continue.

This programme is closely aligned to the Wikimedia movement strategy area of Knowledge - How can we increase the quality of knowledge on the Wikimedia projects, the diversity of formats, and the depth and breadth of coverage (especially underrepresented subjects)?

Highlights of programme activity

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  • Our involvement with the international Art+Feminism project was particularly successful and involved events at nine prestigious art institutions around the country including Tate, Dulwich Picture Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. We have since developed the relationship with the Tate, running events such as a Queer British Artists editathon. Participating in an international project such as Art & Feminism has given us opportunities that would have been harder to generate on our own, and acted as a useful way to build relationships with galleries. Our learning from this project has been recorded here: Art & Feminism learning pattern.
Edit-a-thon at the Tate Britain as part of ArtAndFeminism 2016
  • As part of our partnership with Disability Arts Online, we held a series of four editathons to address a lack of disability arts coverage on Wikipedia, engaging with and training disabled writers as new editors.
  • After several years of relationship building and planning, our Wikimedian in Residence project at the major UK institution the Wellcome Library started this year with the appointment of Dr Alice White, who has a background in science communication and education. With a strong focus on diversity, the resident is identifying where content gaps on Wikipedia can be addressed by drawing on Wellcome’s incomparable collections, resources and expertise, with current examples including the history of mental health asylums and women in medicine and science.
External video
1 in 6 biographies on English Wikipedia are of women. Jane Garvey explains how 1 in 6 biographies on Wikipedia are of women. Polly Russell, curator at the British Library, and Carolin Young from the Oxford Food Symposium have a project to encourage people to add new pages to Wikipedia to explain and document the role of women within the history of food.
  • The Oxford Food Symposium, in collaboration with British Library, have been meeting to improve content on Wikipedia and expand the biographies of notable women in the area of food history via the Women & Food project. The Symposium is an international group of academics who work in the fields of culinary history, and our events with them have given them the skills to contribute to Wikimedia. The members have promoted their work on the BBC and the New Statesman, and our second event with them in July was attended by 15 people from around the world.
  • We are increasingly incorporating work in Wikidata into our existing partnerships and are excited about the potential for Wikidata to enhance our work on underrepresented content in the UK. Capitalising on our community expertise, we have been able to deliver several Wikidata projects in 2016, all focused on existing content gaps, including Llen Natur, the official body which gives standardised Welsh names to species (see the case study below).
  • In a similar strand of work, we supported the creation of Wikidata items and Wikipedia pages based on over 5000 peer reviewed articles about prominent Welsh people in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography content (case study below).
  • The world’s first Wikidata Visiting Scholar was set up in partnership with the Wikipedia Library. Based at the National Library of Wales, he has so far created detailed Wikidata for 5,000 Welsh landscape images on Wikimedia Commons thanks to special access to NLW Metadata.
Coverage Wikidata visiting scholar and in his own words

Developing our community of editors and volunteers cuts across all of our programmes, and we are engaging with volunteers very effectively in the rapid development of Wikidata work. Nav Evans is regularly engaging with the chapter, and crucially has been supporting our work on the Natural History Museum (NHM) data portal. A volunteer developer also helped to upload 2,000 audio files for the NHM project. Magnus Manske worked with Robin Owain on the Wikidata Llen Natur project, writing code that allows for our content to be shared in new ways, and Robin trained two other volunteers to support him with Wikidata work. 5,000 Welsh books (those released with the help of the Welsh Books Council in 2014) were entered on Wikidata by the community, which can now feed into expanding articles on Wikipedia.

Llen Natur Case Study

Llen Natur Case Study

One of the images being added as a result of this project

Llên Natur is a society formed to study, publicise and conserve the fauna, geology and climate of Wales. They are the official body which gives standardised Welsh names to species and are funded by the Welsh Government. Together with Uned Technolegau Iaith (Language Technology Unit) at Bangor University they have produced a Dictionary of Species (the main page links to Wikipedia) in Welsh, Latin and English. By working with Wici Cymru (Wikimedia UK), the dictionary has now become an illustrated dictionary of species, with around 10,000 images automatically drawn from Wikimedia Commons to illustrate existing text.

This work was co-ordinated by our Wales Manager, and in fact started with Robin receiving Llên Natur’s databases of fauna and flora back in 2013! The work moved forward in recent months, with the coding for the website completed - led by Bangor University and supported by Magnus Manske and other Wikimedia volunteers. As an example of the technical work involved, a code was produced to harvest images via Wikidata's prefered image, so that the Dictionary was automatically getting the best content. By June 2016, 13,000 images taken from Commons appeared in the Dictionary of Species, accompanied by a CC-BY-SA logo on the online gallery.

A significant aspect of this project is that the contributions are flowing the other way too, with Wikimedia using the Dictionary to add official Welsh names of all living birds, and other species, onto Wikidata, and so growing our content. Wikispecies content was also translated into Welsh, and each species within the Dictionary of Species has a direct link to the corresponding article on Wicipedia Cymraeg, increasing our readership. Volunteer engagement has also been a prominent element of this work. The Wales Manager trained several people in Wikidata, for example one of the trainees added around 50 of the Wikidata Lists, with each list calling up an average of 40 images from Commons. This volunteer has therefore made an additional 2,000 entries from Commons via Wikidata and into Wicipedia Cymraeg articles. New contributors have been attracted as well, including ornithologists who have started to upload new images to fill the gaps.

The next step perhaps in 2017 is include birdsongs and possibly video footage into the Dictionary. This shows the external / 3rd party use of CC-BY-SA content.


Dictionary of Welsh Biography Case Study

Dictionary of Welsh Biography Case Study

The Dictionary of Welsh Biography consists of over 5000 peer reviewed articles about prominent Welsh people. In 2014, via our Wales Manager, work began to create basic Wikidata for each entry using Mix and Match. In 2015 the National Library of Wales (NLW) Wikimedian in Residence (WIR) ran workshops with volunteers to speed up this work, and all entries were successfully added to Wikidata. To supplement this content with NLW material, the WIR also uploaded the NLW portrait archive to add images to many of the Wikidata items.

To scale the work up and engage more people, the WIR ran a Wikidata Hackathon for NLW staff and staff of the Director of the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh & Celtic Studies. He also set up an ongoing volunteer project to create stub articles for entries without Wikipedia articles.

Following this work on behalf of the Library, the WIR was invited to sit on the Dictionary of Welsh biography committee at the NLW, who decided to develop a specification for a new Dictionary of Welsh Biography website. Thanks to the WIR, it was decided that any new website should include links to Wikipedia articles and the use of Wikidata to develop a new interface including timelines, and open licences will now be offered to future contributors to the Welsh Biography site. This will see the use of images from Wiki Commons on the website (via Wikidata), with Wikidata-powered features such as timelines including basic information about each individual from Wikidata. The Wikidata will also allow for the inclusion of new search options/filters, which is of benefit to the Dictionary.

Articles in the Dictionary of Welsh Biography will include links to the relevant Wikipedia articles, potentially increasing community involvement in the Welsh biography using Wikipedia as a platform. The articles are naturally very academic in their language and structure and the board feel that linking them with Wikipedia makes the content more accessible. This project also showcases an innovative interface for a Dictionary of Biography website which demonstrates the power of Wikidata as a tool for GLAMs, highlighting how Wikidata can join data from different collections together to create richer data.

There is lots to be done including NLW creating the new website, Wikimedia developing Wikidata items further, creating the timelines, and including links on the new website to Wikipedia articles – or inviting people to create a Wikipedia article if it doesn’t already exist. If the work does come to fruition, it will be a great case study for free content flowing in several directions, and enriching various collections along the way.

Programme 1: Diverse contributors section

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APG strategic goal Strategic Framework 2016-19 - programme strands Programme activities
G2 As a volunteer-led organisation, ensuring effective use of the resources available to us: G2a Develop, involve and engage WMUK volunteers Programme 1: Diverse content and contributors The contributors element of this new programme encompasses the activities initially planned under G2, but with a greater focus on diversity - in order to support the creation of diverse content - and on linking volunteer activities directly to our programmes in order to create greater online impact.

Background and overview of progress

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“Thanks for including Wikidata training as a part of the Annual conference - that is what convinced me to attend!” AGM 2016 attendee

As highlighted above, our work with volunteers and editors cuts across all of our activities as an organisation, however under this programme strand we have a particular emphasis on increasing and diversifying our community. We are keen to develop a ‘virtuous’ circle whereby diverse contributors support the diversification of content, and running projects that shine a light on diversity and equality encourage people from diverse communities to engage with Wikimedia and become contributors.

Editing events and online writing competitions have been the main routes to engaging both new and existing editors this year, and at the midway point for the year we have surpassed our overall target for newly registered editors in 2016-17. This is in large part thanks to the activities delivered by our Wikimedians in Residence, as well as events run by the programmes team and/or volunteers. As well as editor recruitment and retention, we engage with volunteers more widely by bringing their ideas and projects into our overall plans, delivering high quality training and providing opportunities to contribute to our programmes and to the Wikimedia projects, underpinned by regular and effective communications.

In terms of the diversity of our community, we currently only set targets for gender and these metrics are slightly under our target, partly owing to the challenges in recording this data. Whilst we are behind our target on lead volunteers, we do feel that 66 people creating activities that wouldn’t otherwise have happened is significant, together with 3,700 volunteer hours contributed in total (the equivalent of 528 working days).

This programme responds to the Wikimedia movement strategy area of Communities - How can we increase the retention and engagement of existing and new volunteer Wikimedia contributors? Wikimedia UK does this by developing the skills of contributors through training, building confidence, empowerment and connections through networking and other events, supporting volunteer-led initiatives through grant making and project development, and providing clear, local and relevant volunteering opportunities.

Highlights of programme activity

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A key element of our volunteer engagement during 2016 has been to develop our understanding more about volunteer motivation and interests in order to identify appropriate and compelling opportunities to contribute to our work. To gather this information we created a series of volunteer roles which explain some of the main way people can support our charitable work. Implementing this process is also an opportunity to re-engage with people who have previously stated they are interested in volunteering with us but had not necessarily given information about activities they would like to undertake. This means we can implement volunteer programmes that are matched to what people said they need and want. We would also have a database of volunteer ‘interests’ which we can call on when we have a specific programmatic need. This matches what FDC picked up on in our APG plan - we can match volunteer activities and interests to our overall plans.

  • In 2016 we have been developing our understanding about volunteer motivation and reconnecting with past volunteers, in order to identify appropriate and compelling opportunities to contribute to our work. We created a series of volunteer roles which explain some of the main ways in which people can support our charitable work, and have added responses to our volunteer database, enabling us to match volunteer activities and interests to our overall plans and to create effective volunteer engagement activities.
A trainer is a popular volunteer role
  • In a pilot scheme, we messaged people based in Scotland who have donated to Wikimedia UK, with the intention of informing our stakeholders about our work and offering them different ways of engaging with our activities. The overall response to this was good, with open and click-rates above the industry average.

    A learning pattern to document this piece of work is here Grants:Learning patterns/Keeping communities engaged.

External video
On Saturday 14th May, the independent fact checking organisation Full Fact hosted a Wikipedia editathon at Newspeak House in Shoreditch, East London. Well worth a watch to see our contacts from the partner organisation talking about the importance of the editathon and how we are similar in goals. It’s also great to see new editors talking passionately about the editing skills they are mastering.
  • Being aware of our programme needs, and what volunteers told us they wanted in our annual survey, we set up another iteration of the Train the Trainer course in July. It has been a year and a half since we run the last TtT course, and since then we have run a number of projects with people who were keenly interested in developing their own training skills, so this was a timely activity and was very well received.
  • In order to engage with our established trainers who had felt somewhat disconnected from the charity during last year’s restructure, we invited some inactive volunteers to lead on an EU referendum editathon in May in partnership with Full Fact. Two volunteer trainers who had not led events since 2014 were active at the event and have re-established links with the current programmes team.
  • Our partner institutions are also creating volunteering opportunities and helping us to develop the Wikimedia community in the UK. Three volunteers from the National Library of Wales are working on the Dictionary of the Welsh Biography project, creating stub articles using entries from DWB as a source. Several other opportunities are being set up: (1) Wikidata has been created for 550 19th century ships registered at Aberystwyth. A volunteer programme to add more data, including a collaboration with Ceredigion County Archives and Royal on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales is now being planned. (2) We’re discussing with Wales for Peace Project about training staff to edit and upload images to Wikipedia and taking part of their outreach programme in Caernarfon as part of the traveling poppies exhibition in Sept/Oct 2016.
Awaken the Dragon case study

Case study, Awaken the Dragon

User:Dr. Blofeld, a prolific Wikipedian in South Wales, has previously received a number of small volunteer grants from WMUK to support the production of content on topics including Hollywood and Frank Sinatra. Following on from this work, James and Wikimedia UK were keen to see if we could encourage other volunteers to produce Wikimedia content and James proposed a bigger volunteer project to add content about Wales to Wikipedia, called Awaken the Dragon. As a charity, we had previously delivered successful projects to improve Welsh content on Wikipedia, such as the Living Paths project that received funding from the Welsh government in 2013. We therefore saw the value of supporting such work.

Awaken the Dragon used an editathon competition model to incentivise Wikipedians to create and improve articles on chosen Welsh subjects, with book vouchers as prizes for the winning contributions. Offering weekly and overall prizes helped to increase interest in the project and drive the production of content, with excellent results. As James says, “In little more than a month we saw 1065 new and improved articles, 150 core article improvements, 61 Good Articles, and 4 Featured Articles and Lists.” James initially experimented with different scoring systems to try to encourage people to tackle certain subject areas that received less attention, but found that this confused editors too much and that a simplified scoring system worked best.

One of the main successes of Awaken the Dragon has been to get people to add to existing articles and make them better, rather than just creating new articles. “Most previous contests tended to encourage people to create new stubs. It is vitally important that we overcome the natural tendency for editors to just create new stubs and ignore the mess”, says James. The format of the project could be easily replicated to encourage volunteers to create content in other areas where more work is needed, and this is already beginning to happen in relation to articles about other UK regions like the West Country.

On top of this, the competition inspired another volunteer to run his own project about the Senghenydd Colliery Disaster. This was an editing project focused on expanding content on this important event in Welsh history. Featured Article status was achieved by the article on the event, after an impressive 43,396 bytes of content were changed.

Comparing to our APG plan, we have delivered over and above our proposal in terms of both content and partnerships. Our intention was that the Project Coordinators will support this area of work, and that has been true, with more support given to key partnerships enabling us to deliver deeper and more complex projects. For example with National Library of Wales, we don’t just have a Wikimedian in Residence - we also present jointly at external conferences, run events, deliver a volunteer training and engagement programme, and organise content releases. We have also linked a volunteer project grant to this institution too - this has been a wide, all round partnership collaboration. The work in Wales has been extremely impressive, partly thanks to the possibilities Wikidata offers to smaller language Wikipedias. We were also fortunate that a couple of relationships that we have been working on for years (e.g. Llen Natur) came to fruition in this period.

Volunteer engagement has been very positive in relation to the APG plan. Not only did we support volunteers in numerous project grants, but also worked beyond the plan to improve communications and engagement with volunteers - e.g. through the creation of volunteer roles.

For the remainder of the year, we will continue to focus on diversity, working with partners to improve both the quantity and quality of coverage of underrepresented subjects. There are new projects in the pipeline around the Scot Gaelic language, and new links being made with the Irish Government. We are also looking at content format diversity and are exploring projects which involve sound files. We will keep working on volunteer engagement; towards the end of the year we will be conducting the volunteer survey again to gain insight into our progress in this area from the community perspective.}}

Programme 2: Promoting open knowledge

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Metrics

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APG strategic goal Strategic Framework 2016-19 - programme strands Programme activities
G3 Reduce barriers to accessing open knowledge Programme 2: Promoting open knowledge Advocacy at UK and EU level, acting as a voice for open knowledge, external presence.
APG plan metric 2016-17 delivery plan metric Modifications 2014-15 achieved 2015-16 achieved APG target (for all programmes) 2016-17 half year achieved
n/a - new metric 1. Total audience and reach New metric to see our whole audience. Essentially ‘social media followers’ + ‘individuals involved’ N/A N/A N/A 29,772
Number of individuals involved 4. Number of individuals involved
765 1,856 500 826
Number of leading volunteers 5. Number of leading volunteers - 70 260 987 (Wikimania) 28
Number of activity units 7. Estimated number of volunteer hours Move to ‘hours’ rather than ‘activity units’. Much more accessible. To set the target we assumed 2hrs average per activity unit. N/A N/A 4,600 2,078
n/a - new metric 19. Number of social media followers A subset of ‘total audience’, to separate our digital reach N/A N/A N/A 28,039
Involvement in EU and UK advocacy activities; 21. Responses to consultations Same metric, phrased more accurately 2 4 3 1
Involvement in advocating legislative change within UK organisations 22. Evidence taken into consideration Same metric, phrased more accurately 5 3 3 2

Metrics which were removed from this programme:

# of initiatives that increase access to Wikimedia projects Programme phased out - not articulated well enough, strategic goal reworked
change in public attitudes Metric phased out in favour of a more general ‘total reach’ one below

Background and overview of progress

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“I remember when Wikipedia was first heard of in public libraries. It was dismissed as something irrelevant or misleading: after all, anyone could add anything to it so how trustworthy, or useful, could it be? I even occasionally hear librarians today questioning its usefulness.” Public Libraries News, introduction to a piece about collaboration with WMUK

Through our advocacy work - talks and presentations - we reached a significant amount of people, as reflected in the ‘individuals involved’. Then there is an order of magnitude increase when we look at how many people we are reaching through social media, our blog and website, and other digital engagement channels. This programme area is also very effective in engaging our lead volunteers, so organise and deliver presentations on our behalf, reaching tens of people at a time.

Our work is changing the organisations that we work with, and the sectors within which they operate. We can use case studies of our work to reach general public, and also to influence policy. It’s very valuable to be able to affect individual organisations, but we also need to be changing the ‘preconditions’, like grantmaking rules. Through selling the benefits of open knowledge, we are changing organisations, sectors, etc, which further down the line may lead to action such as content releases. message of our work is spreading, and we note activities and changes that arise without our initial involvement - e.g. we are being invited to speak at conferences, institutions contact us because they have found out about our past achievements, etc. We were recently contacted by the Irish government to help them with a consultation of growing a minority language.

This programme addresses the movement strategic priority of Reach - How can we reach more people around the world, so that they can share in knowledge? Our approach is, we need to change the underlying rules which are keeping the content closed, and that could be done through advocacy on various levels.

Highlights of programme activity

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Public presence, advocating for open knowledge:

  • Presentation by the CEO on gender gap at the high profile WOW (Women of the World) Festival at Southbank Centre; a lecture at the Open Data Institute, and a podcast. These events launched the ODI’s ‘Women in Data’ series; they had a significant reach and we have been contacted for further speaking engagements as as result.
External video
Video from Lucy’s presentation at The Open Data Institute “Editing out the gender gap”
External video
Women in data podcast
  • Our Wales Manager was invited as Guest Speaker at the Celtic Language Technology conference in Paris. This event encourages collaboration between researchers working on language technologies and resources for all Celtic languages.  The organisers were aware of our work on Welsh Wikipedia and keen for attendees to learn from our experiences of growing Welsh language content.
  • We received media coverage through our high profile WIR work. For example, the National Library of Wales residency was covered on BBC Radio Cymru about sharing Welsh history with the world through Wikipedia. The HuffPost article about Art + Feminism with details a number of events organised by Wikimedia UK. The Wellcome Library resident was interviewed by The Lancet Psychiatry, with the residency was featured in an article in 'The Lancet and on a Lancet Psychiatry Audio Feature. This potentially reached almost 50,000 users and the article was also sent to Wellcome Trust staff, publicising the project internally as well as externally. Our social media presence was also strong during this quarter, as reflected in the high ‘total audience and reach’ metric. Other significant gender gap mentions include The Daily Meal and The Herald.

We also worked at a sector-wide level, raising awareness and understanding of open knowledge via conferences and professional networks, and leveraging the reputation and case studies we have built through our work with individual organisations. Talks are delivered by staff and volunteers.

  • MGS WIR was very active across the Museum and Galleries sector in Scotland, promoting openness and change (e.g.  Digital Cultural Heritage Research Network promoting the value of the skills/infrastructure/attitude model for success in digital and open knowledge projects in cultural organisation;  Scottish Libraries and Information Council Digital Champions). Following those, more organisations were interested in working with us on open knowledge.
MGS project reached its 12 month mark in Q1. It ended in May, and we released the final report in Q2 to share what was learnt during the project.

A key learning from the project is summarised by the resident’s line manager: "Our Wikimedian in Residence project at Museums Galleries Scotland demonstrated to us the importance of ensuring that partners and beneficiaries of our work are ready for open knowledge. It emerged through the residency that many small museums and galleries in Scotland actually needed more introductory digital skills training, of which open knowledge and Wikimedia would be a later step.

Presentation at the OER16 conference:Opening Scotland: Museums Galleries Scotland’s Wikimedian in Residence & the diversification of engagement [April]
Presentation at the OER16 conference:Opening Scotland: Museums Galleries Scotland’s Wikimedian in Residence & the diversification of engagement [April]
  • The Wellcome Library WIR represented us at two national conferences: the Biennial Society for the Social History of Medicine Conference and Science in Public. Dr Alice White engaged with delegates who expressed interest in participating in training, expert evaluation of pages and attending editathons.
  • Our resident at NLW presented at the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) conference in Swansea
  • We are exploring a collaboration with the National Heritage Science Forum Board. Via the group, we are looking at a potential multi-partner collaboration, and also using it as an advocacy opportunity within the cultural heritage sector.
  • Continued work with Cancer Research UK, where we engage with highly specialised researcher audience, has led to other, similar research organisations approaching us such as the British Heart Foundation and the British Medical Association.
  • Our representation at the Open Educational Resources (OER) conference earlier this year continued to make a mark on the education sector into Q2. The conference was led by the University of Edinburgh with which we work. Wikimedia and OER communities share a common goal to increase the quantity and quality of open knowledge - so next year’s OER17 Conference, which focuses on the Politics of Open, will be co-chaired by Josie Fraser - our trustee.
  • Having met Statens Museum for Kunst (SMK), and learned about the examples of re-use and the creation of new content on a CC-0 license, we have been discussing this model with Tate, who use a NC licence. SMK have agreed to support any discussions with the Tate about changing their policies, or perhaps trying a pilot of some relicensing. Our hope is that in presenting another prestigious art institution’s successes and enthusiasm for open licensing, that we can provide the strongest case possible for the Tate considering more open policies.
  • Last but not least, we are involved in producing a UK focused book on open access (led by our partner National Library of Scotland). This practical and explanatory handbook will discuss the issues surrounding the use of open licences for content, data and metadata in libraries and other cultural heritage organisations. Focusing on case studies and practical solutions, it will form a strong voice for open in the sector, so our work on it is significant.

Transforming institutions

Our partner institutions continue to move towards openness as a direct result of our work with them, we are contributing to the development of sustainable change in organisational policy and practice.

  • Several institutions within the Museums Galleries Scotland  network were given advice on developing a digital licensing policy (e.g. Groam House museum).
  • In Q1 we concluded the year-long transformational residency with the Bodleian Libraries - case study below.
  • Natural Resources Wales agreed to change the license of their videos to Open License CC-BY-SA. So far 44 videos have been uploaded by the community.
  • Working with the National Library of Wales systems team and Wikidata volunteers, the WIR has been encouraging the library to dedicate more resources to uploading content onto Wikidata, and has developed new guidance for other institutions that wish to share data. NLW has also embedded upload to Wikipedia into the process of choosing and processing collections for digitisation.
NLW Wikidata scholar hard at work
  • At Wellcome Library, plans have been initiated to change workflows to incorporate Wikimedia:  (1) linking researchers’ Open Access work to Wikipedia. (2) training The Library Blog team to edit.  (3) Adding “Cite on Wikipedia” button to the Wellcome websites.
External video
Alice explains the plans for the residency, and introduces Wellcome
  • Discussions facilitated by WMUK’s Wikimedian in Residence at the Natural History Museum in 2013-14 have seen the NHM progress towards releasing their content under an open licence. Building on this opportunity, representatives from WMUK participated in discussions about how to store museum data, and a volunteer is currently involved in the process of uploading two sets of media files. This latter task has  involved mapping the museum-standard informatics format (Darwin Core) into XML which can be used by the GLAM-Wiki toolset. Once established, this can be re-used for other upload projects from the NHM.
Bodleian Libraries case study

Bodleian Libraries Case Study - diverse content and changing academics’ attitudes

External video
Martin Poulter’s presentation at 2016 AGM: sharing his reflections on Wikimedia and research projects

The Bodleian Libraries, a group of Oxford University research libraries employing 700 staff and with a collection of 12 million books, began hosting editathons in 2012 and in 2014 applied to host a Wikimedian in Residence. Dr Martin Poulter became the WiR from April 2015 to March 2016.

The partnership with the Bodleian exemplifies Wikimedia UK’s commitment to diversity. The library collections hold millions of documents from historical civilisations from around the world, and making these documents available on open licenses can help to deepen access for millions of people around the world into the history of their own cultures. For example, an 18th century painting of a traditional Japanese folk tale held by the Bodleian is now being used to illustrate the Japanese Wikipedia article on the topic.

Nine public editathons were held during the residency including four on Women in Science and there were six training sessions for academics. The training for librarians was particularly positive, with one attendee remarking that the training should be standard for all librarians. Workshops were also attended by educators from City University, Public Health England and Loughborough University, who expressed interest in future Wikipedia training for their colleagues.

This mainstreaming of the idea of open knowledge should allow the residency to have sustainable benefits in the long run, and we expect many more images to be released in future, on top of the 8000 that were uploaded during the residency. Martin has intentionally focused on sustainability of the project, and worked closely with the Web and Digital Manager to enable the transfer of content from the library’s new Digital Bodleian platform to Wikimedia Commons. This has included successfully advocating for policy change, creating new technical tools for bulk uploads and sharing content, and staff training.

Furthermore, the residency has had important impacts beyond the libraries, resulting in the release of images to Commons from three university colleges and the training of staff from the university’s museums, the Oxford Internet Institute and a number of other institutions. It influenced the IP Policy of the recently formed Academic Services and University Collections, which includes the University's museums.

One of the key recommendations of the residency was that WiRs should be proactively looking for research projects which are being planned, as Wikimedia UK can help researchers demonstrate the public impact and engagement with research that helps secure funding.

At the end of the project, the interest in further activities at the Library was very strong; the institution was also able to reflect on the achievements so far. Both WMUK and the Bodleian Libraries didn’t want to lose that momentum. At the end of Q2 the funding was confirmed from the University of Oxford’s Innovation Fund. The residency will have a new focus on Wikidata and staff training in wiki skills. It was felt that Wikidata would be particularly useful for visualising information, which encouraged the funder.

The final report explaining what the project achieved, learning, and recommendations for stakeholders

Sharing and replicating within the movement

  • We ran the Train the Trainer course at the end of Q2. This was focused on UK volunteers, but we were also approached by two chapters - Netherlands and Czechia - who wanted to participate in the course in order to apply what they observed in their own countries. Having had experience of running this course for four years, we were happy to accommodate two people, and share as much of what we have learnt about training trainers as possible.
  • In 2015, in collaboration with the Wellcome Library, we ran the first ever Wikipedia Science Conference which has directly inspired a Brazilian iteration being delivered later this year: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/BR-ER/Events/Congresso_Cient%C3%ADfico_Brasileiro_da_Wikip%C3%A9dia
  • We took the opportunity at the Wikimedia Conference and Wikimania to talk to other chapters about our projects and solutions, sharing lessons in evaluation and highlighting specific projects such as the National Library of Wales residency which we knew people wanted to learn more about. NLW is a great case study in how to make Wikidata more accessible to GLAMs, and we’re sure lots of people benefitted from the insights we shared.
External video
Jason sharing lessons learnt from National Library of Wales
  • There was a lot we were able to learn and pick up from other chapters as well. Wikimania offered opportunity for Jason Evans, our wikimedian in residence at the National Library of Wales, to learn from Sweden’s activities. We also looked at what other organisations do with Wikisource, as we are setting up activities around that at Edinburgh University. Cochrane contact became an inspiration for Wellcome WIR, who is working on mental health, amongst other things. Making use of learning patterns we discovered this year, we send the ‘account creation limit’ learning pattern to all new volunteer trainers, to help them understand how they can get round the problem.

EU/ UK advocacy. In terms of public policy and legislation, the beginning of the year saw the first meeting of a newly convened volunteer Advocacy Group (including representatives from the Open Rights Group). We participated in the EU consultation on Freedom of Panorama and Ancillary Copyright by involving our partners and running a campaign focused on the benefits of increased freedom of panorama across Europe, and are currently exploring with the Advocacy Group our priorities over the next few years, our delivery plans for next year and our short term focus for the remainder of 2016-17. We are mindful of the possible impact of Brexit on this area of our work and are incorporating this into our risk register (reviewed at board level) and our longer term planning.

We will continue to develop our advocacy work over the remainder of the year, with specific projects including the open access book (mentioned earlier), and continuing work with residents on institutional change (such as the National Library of Wales internal business case for open).

Comparing to our APG plan, we delivered far beyond our expectations on general audience outreach work including speaking engagements, presentations and general communications. Policy changes within institutions, particularly through the wikimedian in residencies, has brought substantial success so far, with even newly appointed residents acting as change-makers and exploring how they can make their host institutions more open.

Programme 3: Education and learning

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Goal: To support the use of the Wikimedia projects as important tools for education and learning in the UK

APG strategic goal Strategic Framework 2016-19

Strategic goals/programme strands

Programme activities
G1 Develop open knowledge Programme 1: Diverse content and contributors

Programme 3: Education and learning

Programme 3 is fleshed out education aspect of the old G1, allowing us to focus better on this area of our work.

Metrics

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APG plan metric 2016-17 delivery plan metric Any changes 2014-15 achieved 2015-16 achieved APG 2016-17 target (for all programmes) 2016-17 half year achieved
Number of active editors involved 2. Number of active editors involved GM1 - N/A 708 200 64
Number of newly registered users 3. Number of newly registered editors GM2 - N/A 438 300 315
Number of individuals involved 4. Number of individuals involved GM3 - 765 1,856 500 325
Number of leading volunteers 5. Number of leading volunteers - 987 (Wikimania) 70 260 6
Number of activity units 7. Estimated number of volunteer hours Move to ‘hours’ rather than ‘activity units’. Much more accessible. To set the target we assumed 2hrs average per activity unit. N/A N/A 4,600 3,190
articles created and improved 16. Articles added and/or improved - N/A 13,072 10,000 306
Number of new articles started on a Wikimedia site (eg any of the encyclopedias, incl Wicipedia) 17. Articles added - 835 6,712 1,000 16
TEXT - Sum of contribution edit size 18. Bytes added and/or deleted GM6 - 16,459,774 68,430,511 6 million 2,800,765

Background and overview of progress

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“Wikipedia is the greatest single open education tool the world has seen” Jim Groom, keynote speaker at the Open Educational Resources Conference 2016

“This is probably the most exhausting course I teach... probably also the most rewarding one" Jenny Chamarette at the WMUK educators meeting

The educational potential of Wikimedia is clear, but Wikimedia UK believes the movement must engage more directly and effectively with the education community in order to increase its use and impact within the sector. We therefore have a new strategic goal and programme strand focused specifically on education and learning, with a number of new initiatives, pilot activities and developments taking place in the year to date, reported below.

Our work with the higher education sector delivered a solid contribution to our content metrics, creating text mostly for the English Wikipedia. What is more impressive still is the volunteer engagement generated through this work - mostly made up of students participating in Wikipedia in the Classroom - who contributed a third of our total volunteer hours for the six month period. Our metrics also indicate that many of the newly registered users continued editing in this reporting period, which is very positive.

We know from informal research and anecdotal evidence that teachers struggle to introduce Wikipedia into their setting, for a variety of reasons. many barriers. At the same time, the education sector is keen to identify innovative ways to equip students with the right skills for the modern, digital world. We are therefore perfectly positioned to engage with the education sector, if we can find the right approaches to doing so. We therefore see this programme strand as being quite experimental and developmental this year, and we are focused on engaging volunteers to support this work and building mutually beneficial relationships with key stakeholders and potential partners.

This programme addresses the movement strategic priority of Reach - How can we reach more people around the world, so that they can share in knowledge? Through this programme, we are seeking to address the fact that people need to be able to understand and navigate open knowledge before they can truly share in it, which is why some of the projects we are planning will incorporate elements of digital and data literacy.

We have included our original G1 logic model for reference, as this included references to our education work, although our thinking in this area has since expanded.

Highlights of programme activity

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We delivered both established education projects, and worked on pilots to broaden the ways in which Wikimedia can be used in education and learning.

  • In Wales, where we have more flexibility to work with the education sector, we have been setting up several key initiatives. Although these are in development and haven’t been put in place yet, they offer inspiring insight into what could be possible if they get approved by the partner organisations. We have been working with the NLW education team to develop a Wikipedia based module for the Welsh Baccalaureate qualification which would provide students across Wales with a template for organising and running their own Wikipedia editathons as part of the qualification. This is coordinated with WJEC (the examining body for Wales) and is a highly strategic piece of work which could have a far reaching impact. The approach might also involve teacher training consortiums.
  • At NLW, the resident is having discussions with Wales for Peace team about running Wikipedia workshops for school children in North Wales as part of their WWI remembrance programme. This could give a good example of school children editing Wikipedia.
  • Of similar significance is our work in Scotland, with the resident based at the Edinburgh University working with the Postgraduate Certificate of Academic Practice (PgCAP course) to explore the possibility of embedding Wikipedia within course design. This would mean not only reaching students, but also giving wiki teaching skills to future educators.
  • We continued our work with higher education through ongoing Wikipedia in Classroom assignments, supporting university courses at Warwick, Queen’s College London, and Portsmouth. In July we organised a meeting for Wikipedia in Classroom course leaders based in the UK to discuss their experience and share best practice. While Wikimedia UK has hosted three EduWiki conferences in the past, this was the first time course leaders have been brought together with the explicit intention of sharing information about their activities and networking. It was also an opportunity to better understand what support the courses required from WMUK.

    From discussions, we created one learning pattern on an issue that was widely discussed on the day.

  • As the WikiEdu Foundation has a wealth of experience with classroom courses, WMUK asked WEF staff for advice on managing courses. This led to the adoption of the outreach dashboard (created by the Foundation) for one of the courses. The dashboard has been useful for tracking and managing courses and the advice from the WEF has been instrumental in its use - we’re glad that we are able to reuse it.
  • To further build our educators community, we wanted to activate volunteers interested in education to get their ideas on how we should move forward. In May, our trustee Josie organised a very successful Wikimedia UK education event in Leicester, attended by over 20 volunteers and educators and designed to take open education in relation to Wikimedia projects forward across the schools, further education, higher education and adult education sectors. Josie worked with our volunteer Fabian Tompsett to plan and organise the event, which was supported and hosted by the Learning and Work Institute. One of the outcomes of this meeting is likely to be a Wikimedia education summit, hosted by Middlesex University early next year, as well as pilot projects in schools and other settings.
  • We also made sure that our work is promoted widely within the sector. We were very strongly represented at OER16 in Edinburgh with presentations from our CEO and a trustee plus all current Wikimedians in Residence. Our resident at Museums Galleries Scotland also presented ‘Beyond the Encyclopedia: Wikipedia as a learning and teaching tool’ at the University of Glasgow’s Learning & Teaching Conference.
MGS presentations at the Digital Learning Network, Open Educational Resources 2016 (OER16) and Glasgow University’s Learning & Teaching Conference.

We haven’t mentioned education extensively in our APG plan beyond the classroom assignments, so we are pleased to demonstrate a broader range of activities in this report, reflecting our new strategy. In the second half of the year we will be developing this work further, including planning for OER 2017, the education summit mentioned above, and other activities.

In our proposal for an Annual Plan Grant in 2016 - 17, submitted in October 2015, we described our plans for encouraging and supporting technological innovation (Goal 4 of the 2014 - 19 strategy) and developing, supporting, and engaging with other Wikimedia and open knowledge communities (Goal 5). We also articulated our plans in terms of governance and resource management processes. However as described earlier in this report, whilst our APG proposal was aligned with our 2014 - 19 strategy our delivery during 2016 and subsequently this report has been focused on our new strategy for 2016 - 19, and we are therefore not reporting Goals 2b, 4 and 5. It may be worth noting the following:

  • Encouraging technical innovation is now an operational objective for the charity and we will continue to support volunteer work in developing technological solutions, but are not proactively developing work in this area at a strategic level
  • Engaging with the global Wikimedia movement and the open movement more broadly is still key for Wikimedia UK, however this cuts across all of our programmes rather than being a separate strand
  • As per past discussions and feedback, we will no longer report on our high standards of governance and our robust resource management processes as part of this report, which focuses on programmatic activity.

Revenues received during this six-month period

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Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

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
Grants GBP 138650 69235 69415 - - 138650 213507 213507
Donations GBP 106874 51627 50148 - - 101775 164575 156723 a reduction was anticipated but this is higher than expected
Gifts in Kind GBP 24000 12398 15170 - - 27568 36958 42452 negotiating success
Fundraising GBP 30000 8500 0 - - 8500 46197 13089 this is a new budget line that as spread evenly over the year.
Gift Aid claims GBP 5510 2973 3081 - - 6054 8485 9323
Membership income GBP 185 330 - - 515 0 793
Interest GBP 13 28 - - 41 0 63
Other income GBP 82 16 - - 98 0 150

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Spending during this six-month period

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Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

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
Diverse content and contributors GBP 58430 5796 18224 - - 24020 89976 36988 41.11%
Promoting open knowledge GBP 68815 11444 11584 - - 23028 105968 35461 33.46%
Education and learning GBP 10005 1355 2422 - - 3777 15407 5817 37.75%
Fundraising GBP 21094 4071 3593 - - 7664 32483 257832 36.33%
Staff costs GBP 342238 76794 90641 - - 167434 527012 257832 48.92%
Operations GBP 108998 20003 18881 - - 38885 167846 59878 35.67% Budget includes contingency
TOTAL GBP 609579 119463 145345 - - 264808 938691 407777 43.44% N/A

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Compliance

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Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?

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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.

  • There have been no changes from the proposal other than those described above - we made utmost effort to highlight any modifications, and explain the reasoning behind them. WE believe all of the modifications still fall within the grant agreement and were made to the benefit of our movement's mission.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

  • Yes

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

Signature

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Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

Resources

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Resources to plan for measurement

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Resources for storytelling

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