Purpose of the report

This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their results to date. For progress reports, the time period for this report will the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). For impact reports, the time period for this report will be the full 12 months of this grant, including the period already reported on in the progress report (e.g. 1 January - 31 December 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.

Global metrics overview - all programs

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Global Metrics. We understand not all Global Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

Next to each required metric, list the outcome achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs success

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Overall

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved
2. # of new editors	1,812
3. # of individuals involved	4,311
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	12,738 / 638
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	1,773 + 8,864 Wikignoming
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects

Overview

Executive Summary

2017 was another successful year for Wikimedia Israel. Our efforts to expand our activities to new audiences bore fruit. We increased the diversity of groups that took part in our programs: young he-wp editors (13-17 years old), senior citizens, and the Wiki Women group.

Wikimedia Israel had positive results in our efforts to strengthen the program Students Edit Arabic Wikipedia. By the end of the year, we got far beyond the goal we set for ourselves - 50 new articles- and almost doubled it: 93. Moreover, the foundation which has been supporting the project will continue to support it until the end of 2019!
In general, fundraising went very well in 2017, we raised 3% more that we planned. Fundraising is a mutual effort of the board and the Executive Director.
Alongside the daily work, in September we celebrated the 10th anniversary of Wikimedia Israel with an award ceremony to honor organizations and individuals promoting open knowledge in Israel. Founders of the chapter, partners, volunteers and Wikipedians met for a festive gathering.
Developing training materials is a powerful tool to increase our impact and bring us closer to our vision of expanding open and free knowledge to all. In 2017 we created a tool to provide the basics of reliability. We believe that in the age of fake news it is one of Wikimedia Movement’s role to provide a compass to our readers. Another infrastructure tool that was developed this year was a lesson plan about copyright for high school students. It was used as an introduction to the “Valued Image” project and can be used in many other projects. We will translate and publish it in 2018.
Many of our diverse activities are possible because of the trusted and reciprocal relation between Wikimedia Israel and the he-wp community.

Part of the reliable sources comics created by WMIL and Racheli Rottner, in English, Arablic and Hebrew

Learning from missteps is a very important process (and a never ending one) and we are doing our best for it to be part of our routine learning. In 2017 Wikimedia Israel faced a number of challenges that can be rounded up in two clusters: working with very small communities and personnel challenges.

In 2015 Wikimedia Israel launched a very ambitious project : to strengthen the Hebrew Wiktionary and its community. For this aim we built a collaboration with The Hebrew Language Academy and engaged many of the (very few) active editors. In the last two years together we ran two courses for new editors, two editing competitions and a few community meetings. The efforts bore fruit - more edits, new articles and some of the users who participated in the courses kept editing three to four months after the course ended. But it created a lot of work for two or three volunteers and one WMIL’s staff member - to support this challenging project, and our efforts did not lead to expanding the editors community because it was “outside” efforts. To add to that, the technical infrastructure of the Hebrew Wiktionary is not very welcoming (e.g., the visual editor works at a very basic level and in fact can not be used) and held back some of the new users. Nevertheless, high quality content was created. Encouraged by the possibility to support small Wikimedia initiatives, in the middle of 2016, WMIL set itself another challenge - to run an editing course in Ladino. This time we were more cautious and our expectations were lower. The first step was to approach Ladino speaking communities in Israel and to interest them in editing Ladino Wikipedia. Unfortunately we didn’t find partners in our wish to expand the Ladino Wikipedia. These challenges fortify us. Looking for ways to support small Wikimedia initiatives is part of our role and WMIL will pursue new ways to do it.
In 2017 there were many personnel changes due to various reasons: maternity leave, termination of a position after four years, and two staff members received job offers and decided to take them. This turnover of human resources created a burden on the other staff members and volunteers. 2018 seems to be stabler than 2017 in this area.

Table 3

Shared metrics

Participants: The number of people who attend your events, programs or activities, either in person or virtually. This definition does not include people organizing activities, social media followers, donors, or others not participating directly.
Newly registered: The number of participants that create new accounts on a Wikimedia project. These include users who register up to two weeks before the start of the event.
Content pages: A content page is an article on Wikipedia, an item on Wikidata, a content page on Wikisource, an entry on Wiktionary, and a media file on Commons, etc. This metric captures the total number of content pages created or improved across all Wikimedia projects.

Grantee-defined metrics

Additional Metric A:
Additional Metric B:

Program	Participants	Newly registered	Content pages	Additional Metric A	Additional Metric B
Community support: Hebrew Wikipedia	615	205	WikiGnomings - 10K instances of wikignoming, 500 new or significantly improved articles, 50 images	50 continuous editors	300 unique participants in face-to-face activities
Total 2017	537	107	WikiGnomings - 8,619 ; New or improved articles - 619, new images - 12,345, Images in articles articles 415.	26 continuous editors	220 unique participants in face-to-face activities
Hebrew Wiktionary	123	20	400	7 continuous editors	7 editors to take leading positions
Total 2017	33	17	105	2 continuous editors	2 editors taking a leading positions
Developers' meetups	90	6
Total 2017	73	5
Ladino Wikipedia (lad-wp)	15	10	50	5 continuous editors	2 partners
Total 2017	1	0	0
Education: Hebrew-speaking high-schools	2,300	750	510 articles, 100 images	60% of the articles to be defined as "quality articles" according to this guide: Article Assessment for Student Assignments – For Teacher	2 umbrella organizations and 7 educational organizations maintain their collaboration with Wikimedia Israel
Total 2017	2,402	1,114	527 articles (384 new articles + 143 significant expansions), 393 images.	96.5% of students’ contributions successfully incorporated into the main namespace.	2 umbrella organizations + 15 educational organizations.
Education: Arabic-speaking high-schools	100	50	50 articles, 10 images	5 schools to join the program	3 schools continue to the next school year
Total 2017	274	142	93 new articles, 3 improved articles	12	3
Higher education	1100	650	650	50% of the articles to be defined as "quality articles" according to the article quality indicator	15 professors continue to the next academic year
Total 2017	965	422	310 new, 116 expanded, 245 Wikignomings		16
Training (volunteer Team of instructors + trainig tools)	16 face-to-face instructors	4 new volunteers to join the team of instuctors		Developing and updating at least 6 training tools	Grow the Wikimedia Israel volunteer team and provide them with support by: (1) support and personal guidance; (2) 6 training sessions for the team of volunteer instructors are held (of which at least 4 online and at least 1 face-to-face; 70% of volunteers attend at least one meeting)
Total 2017	26 face to face instructors	5 new volunteers joined the team of instuctors		4 new tools developed and 3 tools updated	1 face-to-face and 4 online training sessions took place. 68% of volunteers attended at least one meeting.
TOTAL FOR ALL PROGRAMS	Target 2017 - 4,366. Total 2017 - 4,311	Target 2017 - 1,695 Total 2017 - 1,812	Target 2017 - 12,320 Total 2017 - Articles - 10,637 (8,864 Wikignoming; 1,773 new and expanded articles) Images - 12,738 Total - 23,063

Community Support

Hebrew Wikipedia


Program	Participants	Newly registered	Content pages	New pictures	New pictures in articals	Continuous	No of unique participants
Community support: Hebrew Wikipedia	615	205	WikiGnomings - 10,000; New or improved articles 500	50		50	300
H1	216	44	WikiGnomings - 4,157; New or improved articles 239	6,340	258	11	140
Total 2017	537	107	WikiGnomings - 8619 ; New or improved articles 619	12,345	415	26	220

Goals and Objectives

Face-to-face gatherings:

Target	Progress (at end of Q2)	End of year (projected or actual)	Comments
300 participants in activities	140	220
Contact 70% of participants in activities, with 20% of them continuing		Achieved
Support to 20 new and long standing editors	12	Achieved	At least 26 new editors from the senior citizens and Wikiwomen courses
Support for Wiki-Women group		Achieved

Winter meetup and 16th anniverssary celebration
Summer meetup and picnic, July 2017
Wikimedia Israel's 10th Anniversary
Elef Milim tour to Nesher Ramla cement factory

In the course of 2017, we saw further expansion of the cooperation between Wikimedia Israel and the Hebrew-language Wikipedia community, which has been based on trust and mutual understanding, as well as personal relations between the chapter’s workers and volunteers and members of the he-wp community. The expansion was both in quantity (the number of community members who maintained contact with the chapter) and in quality (the scope and quality of the joint initiatives and the scope of products resulting from this cooperation). Strengthening and enhancing the relations between the chapter and community members has been a direction of utmost importance in recent years, and 2017 was no exception. Furthermore, this year marked a new level of cooperation and good relations. We are determined to further develop this relationship in the coming years.

As in previous years, the chapter organized and produced the two traditional meetups of the he-wp community, namely the winter meetup (January 2017), attended by 80 community members, which focused on crossing the 200,000-article bar on the Hebrew-language Wikipedia, and the summer meetup (July 2017), attended by 45 community members.

Throughout the year, the chapter held several activities of various kinds, aimed at creating new articles on he-wp, expansion of existing articles, and uploading images to Wikipedia articles.

Two article-writing competitions were held, one for writing articles about pioneering women, which resulted in 55 new articles, and another for writing articles about the Six-Day War, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary, which resulted in 53 new articles. The Six-Day War article-writing competition also included two editing workshops at Beit Ariela Library in Tel Aviv and at the Yad Levi Eshkol center in Jerusalem.
An “article-improvement drive” was held for updating and regorganizing the categorization of he-wp articles, during which 2900 new categories were created.
The Wiki Loves Monument competition was held locally for the sixth time. It resulted in 5355 new quality images of heritage sites in Israel, which were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The competition included two editors’ meetups at the chapter’s office, one for incorporating new images in Wikipedia articles and the other for writing articles about heritage sites which had not been included in Wikipedia.

Winner of the WMIL Wiki Loves Monuments 2017: The hexagonal pool and Zavitan Stream in northern Israel
The hexagonal pool in northern Israel
The ancient Synagogue in the Bar'am National Park

This year, the chapter helped organizing the Wikipedia Asian Month initiative for the he-wp community, which resulted in 153 new articles in Hebrew.

The chapter continued to assist and coordinate the Elef Millim project, which offers guided tours throughout the country to Wikipedians based on he-wp’s requirements of new images, and with the aim to upload the images from the tours onto Wikimedia Commons. Throughout 2017, 8 such tours were organized, resulting in 1057 new images on Wikimedia Commons.

In May 2017 the Israel Broadcasting Authority – Israel's state broadcasting network which since 1948 – was disbanded and replaced by a new authority – Israeli Broadcasting Corporation. This resulted in thousands of dead links from Hebrew Wikipedia to the old IBA website, which was taken off the air. At the request of several Wikipedians, WMIL approached the IBC asking if they would be able to resolve this issue. Consequently, although not all dead links have been fixed, a very good connection was formed with the IBC. An employee at their digital department has been appointed as a contact person with the Wikipedia community and with WMIL, initially assisted by our community coordinator. The IBC’s representative edits regularly on Hebrew Wikipedia, and in just 4 months in 2017 created 2 new articles, expanded 15 articles and added content in dozens of Wikigonmings. The special connection also led to a guided tour in IBC’s studios as part of the Elef Milim project, which took place in January 2018.

In the course of 2017, in the framework of the topic-focused editing groups’ activities (Wiki-Women, developers’ meetups etc.), the chapter started forming a new activity group, namely, the group of young editors on the Hebrew-language Wikipedia. This group includes editors of 12-17 years of age. Three young editors’ meetups took place during 2017 (in August, October and December). A special project page was created on he-wp and a WhatsApp user group. Young editors often struggle to understand the community’s norms of behavior. A Wikipedia community is normally indifferent to age, which means that young age is not taken into account when dealing with deviations from the community’s rules and norms. This situation led to much confusion, arguments and unnecessary misunderstandings, which in turn resulted in some of the young editors being blocked. The group’s social gatherings with the community coordinator allowed the young editors to interconnect and exchange information and understanding regarding the norms of the he-wp community. This is a new promising direction of activity, which we would like to promote in various ways, while spreading to other new activity directions.

Wikipedia courses for retired senior citizens

In 2017, WMIL launched a Wikipedia-editing training program for retired senior citizens. Information regarding various aspects of the course (content, marketing, participant selection etc.) were reported in detail in the progress report.

Four courses took place, offered to groups of senior citizens - two in Tel Aviv, one in Jerusalem, and one in Beersheba. In total, there were 46 participants in these four courses. So far, 33 new articles were written, another 47 were expanded, and 62 images were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Fifteen of the participants continue to edit on Wikipedia. More notably, we had a significant success in engaging the senior citizens in community activities. The social and community aspects of Wikipedia were emphasized during the course, and indeed, about 30% of the participants regularly join the Elef Millim tours, the editors’ meetups and other similar activities - a very high retainment percentage that we have not seen in any other course or activity. Given the success and demand for this program we intend to continue and expand it in 2018.

Wiki-Women

The first half of 2017 was abundant with various activities of the Wiki-Women group, culminating in the online course. The second half, on the other hand, was much calmer, with only four monthly meetups and a festive end-of-year event. One of the biggest challenges for Wikimedia Israel is the low number of active group-leading volunteers. The Wiki-Women group is no exception to this challenge, as it has been led by one prominent female Wikipedian since its inception in 2013. We made several attempts to recruit more female activists to lead the group, organize meetups and support newcomers, but so far with little success. Despite the support offered by the chapter’s team, burnout and fatigue are inevitable challenges for any community leader, and the current Wiki-Women’s leader is no exception. Nevertheless, the Wiki-Women group wrote XX articles in 2017. The end-of-year event was attended by more than 50 women and men, most of whom are active group members.

Hebrew Wiktionary


Program	Participants	Newly registered	Content pages	Continuous	Leading positions
Hebrew Wiktionary	123	20	400	7	7
H1	33	17	105	2	2
Total 2017	33	17	105	2	2

Grantee-defined metrics

Continuous - A new editor that participated in one of Wikimedia Israel activities and continued editing for two months after being recontacted
Leading positions - editors who take upon themselves roles in content creation activities or in social activities

Goals and Objectives

Target	Progress (at end of Q2)	End of year (projected or actual)	Comments
3 content creation activities	1	1
Create or expand 400 articles	105	155
100 contributors	33	45
Recruit 5 editors	-		Project discontinued
Retain 50% of the participants	-		Project discontinued

The beginning of 2017 saw the conclusion of the Hebrew Wiktionary entry-writing competition, which took place for the second time. The competition resulted in 155 new Wiktionary entries. Our work plan stipulated another course for training of new Wiktionary editors in 2017, but this plan was abandoned, for several reasons:

Fatigue and disinterest on the part of the volunteers who led these training workshops before
Disappointment with the results on the part of our partners, particularly the Academy of the Hebrew Language, who expected much bigger increase in the number of entries on Wiktionary following the workshop
In the long run (over a year) only a handful of editors, from among those who took the course, continued to edit on the Hebrew Wiktionary

A consensus among long-standing editors, the Academy of the Hebrew Language, and Wikimedia Israel’s team thought that significant improvement in he-wiktionary required a wider approach, which would include changing the structure of entries, so that they conform with the new spelling rules set by the Academy recently (note that adopting the new spelling rules entails change in the very structure of the entries, rather than just altering the spelling of words). Currently, he-wiktionary has its own method of presenting dictionary entries, which is different from the norms of any other Hebrew dictionary. This makes recruitment of new lexicographers harder and reduces the appeal of he-wiktionary to people who look for a professional accessible dictionary.

The chapter, in close cooperation with the two main active editors of he-wiktionary, started to examine the possibility of changing the way entries are written and displayed. We also involved an active programmer. We hope that we will be able to present a plan in the near future.

Community Support: New directions

Developers Meetups

Target	Progress (at end of Q2)	End of year (projected or actual)	Comments
9 developers’ meetups with 10 participants each	3	11 meetups, average 6 participants
Increase the number of developers			We did not succeed in significantly increasing the number of developers
6 new developers		2 new developers	2 developers started to regularly attend the meetups.
Hackathon with 40 developers			No hackathon due to the lack of increase in the number of developers

During 2017, we focused on the activity of our developers’ group, which works with the help and assistance of the chapter. There were 11 monthly developers’ meetups throughout the year (some in Tel Aviv and some in Jerusalem). The chapter’s team, together with the executive board, dedicated time and thought to the expansion of the developer group’s scope of activities, as well as the number of its members. For this end, the chapter sponsored this year two major events of the Israeli open source scene, namely the August Pinguin annual conference of the Israeli free-software community (held in Ramat Gan last September) and the first hackathon of the National Library of Israel (held in Jerusalem last November). We also encouraged the developers’ group to take part in these events. The group won the first prize in the “organized teams” track of the NLI hackathon for developing a tool that enables recognition of famous figures in images without further data, so that even without a good description of the image, spotting important people in it is possible. This tool will help Wikipedia editors locate images of great historical value within large poorly maintained repositories. In addition, the NLI hackathon resulted in the development of a tool for Wikisource, which allows chunking of manuscripts, which are not handled well by OCR applications. The tool split the manuscript into small pieces of several words or lines, and a chat-bot will enable the editors to type the text through Telegram or facebook and upload them to Wikisource as live texts.

An article in English about the NLI hackathon

A short film about the NLI hackathon

Another direction that we explored throughout the year was recruiting more developers from among Israeli users of the Media-Wiki platform, for example, workers of Israeli companies that use Media-Wiki. For this purpose, we conducted a preliminary survey to map the market and understand the potential and feasibility of this idea. The cost-effectiveness analysis convinced us to abandon it and pursue other directions, at least for the time being. As we approached the end of the year, and following consultations with other members and organizations of the Wikipedia and Wikimedia communities, we decided that the best approach, that would bring the optimal results for promoting the group of developers, was focusing on the Wikidata project. This approach is made of two directions: first, uploading various kinds of data, found in governmental and other databases, onto Wikidata for incorporation in Wikipedia articles; second, embedding data already found today in Wikidata in various Wikipedia articles in Hebrew and Ladino (Judeo-Spanish). We plan to hold a special training course for developers and other interested people, to teach about Wikidata and how relevant external databases can be embedded in it and later used in Wikipedia. We believe this direction would be very beneficial, and we plan to pursue it during 2018.

Ladino Wikipedia


Program	Participants	Newly registered	Content pages	Continuous	Partners
Ladino Wikipedia	15	10	50	5	2
H1	0	0	0	0	0
Total 2017	1	0	0	0	0

Grantee-defined metrics

Continuous - A new editor that participated in one of Wikimedia Israel’s activities and continued editing for two months after being recontacted
Partners - Organizations that are necessary for reaching out to new audiences

Goals and Objectives

Target	Last year (if applicable)	Progress (at end of Q2)	End of year (projected or actual)	Comments
Build a partnership with 1 or 2 organizations and run a course				See text
50 articles, by 10 editors, 20% of them continue to edit				See text

During 2017, as part of our ambition to expand the scope of our activities, we tried to promote the expansion of Wikipedia in Ladino, which currently suffers from a low number of editors. Ladino, a.k.a. Judeo-Spanish, is a Jewish Romance language spoken by descendants of Jews who trace their ancestry to the medieval Iberian Peninsula. In the first half of the 20th century most Ladino speakers lived in the Balkans (including Turkey) and today they are scattered around the world, including a significant community in Israel. For this end, we contacted a Wikipedian who is also a member of the community of Ladino speakers in Israel. Together we planned to hold a Wikipedia-editing training course for Israeli Ladino speakers. In our attempt to recruit participants, we contacted two bodies: the National Authority for Ladino Culture, an Israeli governmental body whose aim is to preserve and foster the Ladino heritage, and the Arkadaş Association, an Israeli NPO whose aim is to research, preserve, foster and promote the heritage of the Turkish Jewry and the Ladino language. We also checked independently with members of the he-wp community that also speak Ladino whether they could recommend other relevant bodies for cooperation and recruitment of interested speakers of the language. Despite these efforts, we reached no results in this direction. Our appeals to the National Authority remained unanswered and in a phone conversation with the executive manager of the Arkadaş Association, he said they had no interest in cooperating with us for recruiting Ladino speakers for the editing course. Other attempts to contact relevant organizations and individuals were also fruitless. Therefore, we had to abandon this direction for the time being.

Education

Programs in Hebrew (Middle & High schools)

Program	Participants	Newly registered	Content pages	Article Assessment	Continued cooperation
Education: High schools (Hebrew)	2300	750	510 articles 100 images	60% of the articles defined as "quality articles" according to this guide: Article Assessment for Student Assignments – For Teacher	2 umbrella organizations and 7 educational organizations
H1	2026	738	374 articles (304 new articles + 70 significant expansions), 170 WikiGnomings, 293 Files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 223 out of which (=~76%) incorporated into the mainspace in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.		Between the 2015-2016 academic year and the 2016-2017 academic year: 3 umbrella organizations + 3 additional educational organizations (out of 6 that were interested to continue - see note 1 Between the 2016-2017 academic year and the 2016-2017 academic year: 4 umbrella organizations + 9 additional educational organizations.
2017	2402	1114	527 articles (384 new articles + 143 significant expansions) by students and teachers 393 images	96.5% of students’ contributions successfully incorporated into the main namespace - see note 2	Two umbrella organizations + 15 educational organizations

Grantee-defined metrics

Article Assessment - 60% of the articles are defined as "quality articles" according to the Article Assessment for Student Assignments – For Teacher.
Two umbrella organisations and seven educational organizations will continue the collaboration with Wikimedia Israel in the articles writing program. More than 50% of the classes we work with, are operated under the two umbrella organisations.

Note 1: The reasons for the suspension of activity in three organizations that expressed an interest in continuing: health problems of a leading volunteer, internal constraints within these organizations and our dissatisfaction with the conduct of the educational staff.

Note 2: In consultation with WMF staff, the article assessment goal was dropped from our targets, as the procedure for assessing articles proved to be too time-and resource consuming. Adapted versions of the article quality indicator are, however, used sometimes in academic courses as a guideline to grade the student’s assignment.

Goals and Objectives

Target	Last year (if applicable)	Progress (at end of Q2)	End of year (projected or actual)
480 articles by students from 40 classes	Hebrew and Arabic: 264 articles were written and 108 articles were significantly expanded. The students were also engaged in Wikignoming in 340 articles.	374 articles (304 new articles + 70 significant expansions), 170 WikiGnomings	521 articles (378 new articles + 143 significant expansions), 170 WikiGnomings,
Recruit 20 additional teachers			35
50% of educational institutions continue to the next year	100% of the schools and educational organizations that were working with WMIL on 2015 have chosen to continue working with us on 2016. Among the classes we work with this year, two classes were participated in 2015 activity.	Between the 2015-2016 academic year and the 2016-2017 academic year: 3 umbrella organizations + 3 additional educational organizations (out of 6 that were interested to continue). Between the 2016-2017 academic year and the 2016-2017 academic year: 4 umbrella organizations + 9 additional educational organizations.	93% of participating educational institutions in 2016-17 wish to continue in 2017-18; eventually the collaborations is continued with 77% of them actually
200 teachers in online training		151 teachers from 7 knowledge fields	357 teachers from 7 knowledge fields
40 teachers in advanced training create 30 articles			10 teachers wrote 6 articles in the Ort project
100 images uploaded to Commons by students from 4 classes		293 Files uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, 223 out of which (=~76%) incorporated into the mainspace in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.	About 393 images uploaded to Commons by students from 5 classes

During 2017 we continued to expand the “Students Write Wikipedia” and “Valued Image” programs in schools, as well as the teachers’ training workshops for using Wikipedia in the classroom as an educational teaching tool. We completed successfully article writing projects and image uploading projects in 36 classes of 32 different schools, in which 1,040 students took part and created 386 significant products. We started different projects in 19 classes of 16 schools, some of which are still in the stages of research and writing, and are expected to conclude by June 2018. These projects take place in 52 classes of 44 different schools, with 1,450 students. Of these, 8 projects have already been concluded successfully, after producing 228 significant products. In addition, we held seven training courses for teacher in cooperation with the Ministry of Education and the Center for Educational Technology, which were attended by 206 teachers.

Products

Notes:

The school year 2017-18 started in the second half of 2017. Following the beginning of the school year, 14 additional classes joined the Hebrew-language article-writing program, and 5 classes joined the photography competition. The products of these additional classes will be available at the end of the first half of 2018, hence they will be reported in 2018.
Following consultation with the WMF staff, the article assessment goal was dropped from our targets, as the procedure for assessing articles proved to be too time- and resource-consuming. Rather than examining the quality of the articles based on “Article Assessment for Student Assignment - For Teacher”, we measure the percentage of new articles and article expansions that remain on Wikipedia out of the sum of new articles and expansions that were written in educational projects. Upon request of members of the editors’ community, we created an additional quantitative index to follow the expansions made by students. According to this index, an expansion is considered significant only if it involves a text addition of at least 33% of the original size of the article in bytes. Smaller expansions are not counted as products, and a project template is not placed in the talk page of the expanded article. In this way, we guarantee that the expansions made by students are significant and visible in the article namespace. When summing up the products of the writing projects, we count 378 articles and 143 significant expansions. Of them only 8 articles were deleted due to low notability or insufficient level of writing. 96.5% of the articles and expansions were accepted fully (with no “cleanup” templates or other issues that require further editing). This high percentage is the result of close monitoring of the students’ work by the teachers and effective oversight of the chapter’s team and volunteers throughout the whole process, and especially at the stages of work with the Wikipedia interface and publication of the articles.

Continuing and new cooperations

In the transition period between the school years 2016-17 and 2017-18, 93% of the schools that took part in our writing project expressed willingness to have it again, however, owing to various reasons (which we stated in details in the progress report), we were able to continue our cooperation only with 23 schools that make up 77% of the schools that took part in the project in the past. In addition, 21 new schools joined up, with 29 new teachers. In the “old” schools, 26 teachers continue to guide writing projects, of them 6 teachers do it for the third time. In nearly all of the “old” schools, new teachers joined the project along the experienced ones, who offer them help and support. Overall, 35 new teachers joined the project - 29 in “new” schools and 6 in “old” schools.

We value this model for expanding the circle of teachers who participate in the project and we already see its fruits. This model allows teamwork and in-house apprenticeship that help the new teachers considerably and minimize the day-to-day involvement of the chapter in the project. Also, a fertile interdisciplinary dialog often develops when teachers from different fields of knowledge cooperate in the same school. This dialog results in richer research process which improves the quality of the products. We identified such process during the second half of 2017 in several schools, but we will be able to assess its impact more clearly only at the end of the school year, i.e. in June 2018.

We can say that both goals, expanding the circle of participating teachers and preserving cooperations, were fully accomplished in 2017. We believe that combining these two goals appropriately is the key for successful development of the educational projects.

Teacher training

In 2017, three kinds of teacher training courses took place: teacher training in cooperation with the Center for Educational Technology (CET), teacher training in cooperation with the ORT school network, and Wikimedia Israel’s open teacher training to all teachers who guide article-writing projects. The overall number of teachers who took part in these training courses is 236.

Cooperation with CET This was another year in which we held targeted teacher training workshops, based on field of knowledge, in cooperation with the Center for Educational Technology (CET) and the Ministry of Education (MOE). We had 5 training workshops in the following fields: geography, Hebrew, science, history, and history for Jewish religious schools. All workshops follow the same outline, which was developed by Wikimedia Israel and its partners in the past, and are adjusted to the specific field of knowledge. The outline includes various aspects of work with Wikipedia in the classroom. Each field of knowledge has its own specific contents and examples. The training workshops started in October 2017 and are expected to end in February 2018. The main topic of these workshop is knowledge consumption and other educational uses of Wikipedia, along with general introduction with the different namespaces and options offered by Wikipedia. At the end of these five workshops, another workshop will start during the first half of 2018. This workshop will continue the previous ones and deepen the participants’ acquaintance with Wikipedia. The participants in this follow-up workshop will also experience the creation of new articles. The chapter’s team was available to the workshops’ instructors, provided tools and helped with technical issues and inquiries about the norms of conduct among the Wikipedia editors’ community. In three of these five workshops, a video meeting was held with a chapter’s volunteer who talked about the community aspect of Wikipedia and her/his personal experience as a long-standing editor. All three encounters were very successful and raised a lot of interest among the participating teachers.
Cooperation with ORT Our vast cooperation with the ORT network of schools included in 2017 a special training workshop for new teachers. The details and goals of this workshop were included in the progress report. Here, we would like to refer only to the final assignment of this workshop, which included the creation of a new article on Wikipedia, and continued into the second half of 2017. The ORT Israel project: Teachers write articles Ten teachers of the ORT network of schools, who conduct this year an article-writing project with their students, started to create a new Wikipedia article during a training workshop that took place in the summer of 2017. They managed to upload six excellent articles in October 2017. Some of the teachers worked as teams in their schools, while others worked independently. They registered on Wikipedia, chose topics that were relevant to their fields of interest and expertise, and experienced a full process of research and writing. At the end of this process, and later, during the work with the students, the teachers pointed to this personal article-writing experience as a major influence on the guidance and support they offered to their students. They felt more confident and familiar with the special requirements of research process before publishing an article on Wikipedia. They better understood the open and collaborative dimension of Wikipedia-editing and the challenges that their students had to face. They managed to be more independent in leading the project, and needed Wikimedia Israel’s involvement less. Following this successful experience with the teachers of ORT, we encourage other teachers who lead article-writing projects to experience themselves the creation of articles and editing on Wikipedia.
Wikimedia Israel’s open training course In the summer of 2017, we held a special training workshop open to all teachers who participate in our educational projects. The details of this workshop were also included in the progress report. It is important to point out the difference between the workshops held in cooperation with CET or ORT and those held independently by the chapter. The teachers receive credit points for the training workshops held in cooperation with CET or ORT. These credit points affect their salary and may result in a payment bonus. Wikimedia Israel cannot offer such credit points for the workshop it holds independently, so participation is dependant only on the teachers’ interest in acquiring the tools and knowledge. For this reason, we are very pleased with the number of participants and regard it as a success, even though it is smaller (both absolutely and proportionately) than the other training workshops.

The “Students Write Wiktionary” project

As part of our effort to expand the activity of the Hebrew-language Wiktionary and enrich its article namespace, we endeavored in the second half of 2017 to develop the “Students Write Wiktionary” program. We devised an outline for this project, which includes instructional tools and a list of Hebrew proverbs from Jewish resources to serve as topics for writing dictionary entries by the students. We recruited teachers from three schools and volunteers from the he-wiktionary community. The first cycle of this program is about to start during the first half of 2018.

We believe that this project has high potential of success and hope to further expand it in the future by engaging more schools. Beside the impact it may have on the article namespace of he-wiktionary, it also has a unique educational value, as it exposes the students to linguistic and cultural assets of the Hebrew language.

The narrow scope and the repeating structure of entries about proverbs offer a relatively simple process of research and writing, which suits many audiences. As this project proceeds, we will be able to offer it to some of the schools as a simpler shorter alternative to the Wikipedia article-writing project.

Follow-up meetings to encourage engagement and editing after the first article publication: Alpha, Idea and IASA

In a few article-writing projects, we held special meetings after the upload of the articles onto Wikipedia. In these meetings, the students learned about the ways to follow the articles they had written, the options to start a dialog with other editors and the option to continue editing activities on Wikipedia. The students were very interested and many of them continued their activities on Wikipedia, in one manner or another, after the end of the project. Many created a user page, made Wikignoming edits to the article they had written or to other articles, or became active on Wikidata. Some students even went on to expand other Wikipedia articles or to create more new articles. We intent to hold more meetings of this kind, for appropriate groups, to turn the article-writing project from a one-time process into a springboard for continuous activity on Wikipedia.

The “Valued Image” project

The “Valued Image” project is a first-of-its-kind educational project for taking free images and incorporating them in he-wp articles. The project took place for the first time in the period between December 2016 and February 2017. It was initiated by Wikimedia Israel with the participation of the photography classes of two schools. These two schools cooperated with Wikimedia Israel on other projects in the past. Students took quality images themselves, uploaded them onto Wikimedia Commons and incorporated them in he-wp articles for the benefit of all Hebrew Wikipedia users. Overall, 293 images were uploaded. The project was concluded with a public street exhibition, in which the winning photographs were displayed to the general public.

Considering its success, we decided to resume this project for another cycle at the end of 2017, namely October-December 2017. This time, six schools asked to participate, from all across the country, though only five schools actually uploaded images. This cycle resulted in 100 new photographs that were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, however, we thought the quality of these images was lower compared with the images of the initial cycle. Therefore, we still consider whether we should resume the project next year. We also consider the question of whether the images taken by the students are actually needed on he-wp.

Programs in Arabic (Middle & High schools)

Program	Participants	Newly registered	Content pages	No. of school who join the program	No. of schools continued to the next school year
Education: Middle & High schools (ِArabic)	100	50	50 articles, 10 images	5	3
H1	177	110	64 - new articles 3 - expanded articles	8
2017	274	142	93 new articles, 3 expanded	12	3

Goals and Objectives

Target	Progress (at end of Q2)	End of year (projected or actual)	Comments
Engage 3-5 online and 1-2 offline volunteers		1 offline, 2 online volunteers	Despite our effort to create working relations with wp-ar Wikipedians, so far we have not been successful. We hope that our new coordinator will manage to keep a continuous connections with figures in the community
5 schools join the program, with at least one class each	8	12
50 articles written by 80 students	64 - new articles 3 - expanded articles	93 new articles, 3 expanded
3 schools continue to the next year		3

Throughout 2017, Wikimedia Israel activities in Arabic-speaking schools proceeded in introducing and integrating students in the Arabic-language program of “Students Write Wikipedia”. The chapter worked with high schools and middle schools at the same time (8th graders - 10th graders). By the end of 2017, the program ran in 12 schools (private, governmental) and educational institutions (gifted education programs) including one training for school teachers. The participants wrote a total of 93 articles and improved 3 articles. The students wrote articles on various topics: geography, science, history, notability articles, literature, historical sites, politics, organizations. The entries included local choices (e.g., German Military Cemetery in Nazareth, Olfat Haidar (sportswoman) and global choices (e.g., Charlottenburg Palace, Climate of Egypt).

In the new school year, September 2017, the chapter reactivated its activities in 3 schools which dominantly participated in the project in the previous school year and were enthusiastic to continue in the program: the Salvatorian Sisters’ School (Al-Mokhalles) in Nazareth (north), Ibn Sina junior high in Baqa al-Gharbiah (center), and Al-Ukhowwa junior high Tayibeh (center). Some of the students in these schools already participated in the program in the previous circle and some are freshmen. The program was introduced to new students and to veterans all together. In some presentations, veteran students shared their experiences which was helpful. One of the goals in the ongoing school year is to train skilled students to become Wikipedia Ambassadors in their schools in the next year. To achieve this goal, the coordinator and the school staff approach students from two grades at least to ensure durability in the upcoming school year. Enthusiasm of both the leading teacher and the principal are of great value as it sustains motivation among the students. The program was introduced to staff and students in new 5 diverse schools in location/district and curriculum. Only one school, Rowwad al-Quds in Jerusalem, has chosen to work with classrooms (2, 9th grade) as a unified group where all the students write articles, while the approach at most schools is to train a selected group of students. They also prefer to work with small groups (10-20 students) as it is easier for the school staff to maintain the group and to ensure productivity and commitment throughout the year. The schools also promote the program as “an opportunity” to volunteer as part of the social involvement program, one of the obligations high school students must complete for their Bagrut diploma. Offering this option to the staff encourages them to integrate the program inside the school and to continue in the future. The training workshops in most schools are the responsibility of the coordinator at the moment. Only one teacher in one school (Gifted Education program, Baqa al-Gharbiah) expressed willingness to co-train the students. Most teachers prefer to assist the coordinator in the process of proofreading and checking the drafts and the articles after changes (content and structure). Once the program reaches more schools, this situation should change, thus the chapter consults education specialists and considers training seminars for the teachers. The chapter has learned that the roadmap used in Hebrew-speaking schools is not necessary compatible with the needs in Arabic-speaking schools.

By October 2017, the 2 groups activated in Nazareth and Arrabeh wrote and uploaded a total of 20 articles to ar-wp. The topics were selected by the coordinator; which is the case in most schools. The teacher in one school, Al-Ukhowwa junior high in Tayibe, prefers to train the students on translating articles from English to Arabic. The two coordinators who worked with the school offered 37 topics (villages and cities, geographical sites, organizations, notability) which are available in English and are not found in Arabic although they refer to content relevant to Arabic-speaking readers.

In summer 2017, the project coordinator trained a teacher at the Gifted Education program in Tamrah. The leading-teacher of the group lead a group of students who wrote 8 well-formed articles in Arabic on various topics [mention topics]. The teacher worked closely with the students thus the outcome was satisfactory.

During 2017, two training courses for teachers were organized in collaboration with ORT (a Israeli schools network) as part of the continuing education programs offered to teachers. The purpose of this course is to widen the range of reach of the Arabic-language program and to involve more teachers as agents who can assist introducing wikipedia inside the Arabic-speaking schools.

One of the major events in 2017 was Christophe Henner’s visit to al-Qasemi high school in Baqa al-Gharbiah in September. Henner met a group of students from 3 schools in the town who participated in the project (Ibn Sina junior high, al-Qasemi high school, Ibn al-Haytham junior high), leading teachers and principals, WMIL director Michal Lister, town’s mayor Morsi Abu-Mokh, and the Arabic-language coordinators. Such visits and contact highlights the universality of Wikipedia and the outreach of Wikimedia Foundation.

A major obstacle which complicated the progress of work was the hectic changes in the position of the Arabic Education coordinator at WMIL. As two coordinators retired during 2017, the position moved between three coordinators in a short time. In addition to training, the new coordinator (joined WMIL in November 2017) conducted visits to the schools where the program has started in September 2017.

In December 2017, we have started initial talks with Dr. Walid Abu Ahmad, who has shown great commitment and support to the Arabic program, about an activity for Arabic-speaking librarians, within the frame of the global campaign #1Lib1Ref. In collaboration with al-Qasemi Academy, the chapter is organizing a one-day seminar for librarians who works at different institutions: public libraries, school libraries, information science specialists and students, educators. The goals of this event are: 1) Introduce the possibilities of contributing to Wikipedia as a librarian, 2) Introduce Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation and the chapter’s activities, 3) Train librarians to add references to the ar-wp. We have developed tools dedicated for this event.

Higher Education

Program	Participants	Newly registered	Content pages	Article Assessment	No. of professors continued to the next academic year
Higher Education	1100	650	650	50% of the articles defined as "quality articles" according to the article quality indicator	15 professors continue to the next academic year
H1	730	296	208 new, 72 expanded, 111 Wikignome	*See NOTE below table
2017	965	422	310 new, 116 expanded, 245 Wikignomes	*See NOTE below table	16 professors continue to the next academic year

*Article Assessment - Article Assessment - 50% of the articles are defined as "quality articles" according to the article quality indicator.

NOTE: In consultation with WMF staff, the article assessment goal was dropped from our targets, as the procedure for assessing articles proved to be too time-and resource consuming. Adapted versions of the article quality indicator are, however, used sometimes in academic courses as a guideline to grade the student’s assignment.

Goals and Objectives

Target	Last year (if applicable)	Progress (at end of Q2)	End of year (projected or actual)	Comments
15 courses with Wikipedia assignments in one academic institution		13	13
15 lecturers endorse the program in their 2017-18 courses	11		15	WMIL-led
15 lecturers continue from previous year			16	Including volunteer-led courses

Products

Academic collaborations took place in 32 courses in 2017. These courses yielded 310 new articles,116 expansions of articles, 245 Wikignomings, and 422 new registered editors. Compared to the previous year there were more courses taking part in the Academia Project, but fewer contributions to Wikipedia, in terms of new or expanded articles. We review the reasons below.

WMIL-led collaborations

In 2017, the Wikicampus project, which began in 2016, came to fruition. This institutional collaboration with the IDC was only partially successful. While quite a few lecturers wanted to participate in the pilot for the project - 11 lecturers in 13 courses - the output of these collaborations was in some cases under par. In particular, the number of articles uploaded to Wikipedia was quite low compared to the number of articles written. In several cases, lecturers gave students their grades before the articles were uploaded to Wikipedia, leaving students without any incentive to perform the final stage of the assignment. Overall, out of 219 articles (new or expansions) that were supposed to be written in the Wikicampus project, only 75 were actually incorporated in Wikipedia.

As reviewed in our progress report, we identified several reasons for this, and applied changes to the project’s mode of work. The changes mainly involved ensuring the lecturer and/or teaching assistant are familiar with the assignment requirements and committed to carrying them out, and tighter control on the progress of the assignment.

These changes were only partially implemented in the second semester of the 2016-17 year, because the courses began before we could assess the outcome of the first semester’s pilot. Furthermore, for various reasons, only a couple of lecturers from the IDC collaboration continue in 2017-18. Among these reasons are: lecturers going on Sabbatical or no longer teaching a suitable course, concerns about finding enough topics for articles that fit with the course’s syllabus, and lecturers realizing that using a Wikipedia assignment is more demanding - both from them and the students - than they initially thought.

Nevertheless, we were able to recruit 15 lecturers from various academic institutions who include a Wikipedia assignment in their 2017-18 course using the revised model. Seven of these lecturers participated in collaborations in previous years. We had individual meetings with each lecturer and/or teaching assistant(s) to clarify the stages of the assignment. In the courses that started in October 2017, we helped the lecturers create a list of topics for articles to be written. The assignment in each course was tailor-fit, taking into consideration various factors, such as other course assignments, the topics to be written, and the scope of the assignment. In each course, milestones were set for the stages, including deadlines for submission of the outline, submission of the sources which will be used, first draft submission, and the final upload.

The products of these courses will be reported in the 2018 progress report.

Volunteer-led activity

Academic collaborations led by WMIL volunteers Shani Evenstein, Hana Yariv and Deror Linn continued in 2017, and are expanding in the academic year 2017-18. Shani Evenstein, who has been teaching the Wiki-Med course at Tel-Aviv University since 2013, will give this course to medical students at the NY/American Medical Program at the Tel-Aviv University, who will be editing English Wikipedia. Hana Yariv, who continues to lead various Wikipedia assignments in courses at the Department of Humanities at the University of Haifa will also be collaborating with teachers of archeology courses at Kinneret College and at the Tel Aviv University. Remarkably, two articles written during 2017 in courses led by Hana Yariv have been chosen as featured articles - quite an achievement for students making their first steps in Wikipedia!

Academic website

In 2017, we launched a website dedicated to the academic project, as part of the strategy to create a model for academic collaboration that will be less dependant on WMIL volunteer and staff resources. The site contains information about Wikipedia-related academic projects in Israel and around the world, as well as marketing materials, such as the advantages of using a Wikipedia assignment in academic courses. Crucially, the site contains all the tools developed by WMIL with which students can learn how to edit on Wikipedia, in terms of both form and content: the Editing courseware teaches the former, while the Encyclopedic Writing Guide teaches the latter. Furthermore, the website’s FAQ section given answers to common questions regarding a Wikipedia assignment. Students are also encouraged to contact us for support via the website.

Training Curriculum Development and Training Team

Target	End of year (projected or actual)	Comments
16 face-to-face instructors	26 instructors	Some volunteers did not join any activities yet
Develop and update 6 tools	4 new tools developed and 3 tools updated
6 training sessions for volunteer team (at least 1 face to face), 70% attendance	1 face-to-face and 4 online training sessions took place. 68% of volunteers attended at least one meeting.
Recruit 3-4 new members	5 new volunteers joined the team

In 2017, the involvement of the instructional team in Wikimedia initiatives grew deeper. Generally speaking, the long-standing volunteers had been gaining experience that allowed them to lead more activities successfully without the engagement of the chapter’s team. Overall, 26 volunteering guides were engaged in Wikimedia initiatives, of them 5 volunteers who had not been active in the past. 18 meetings of students with Wikipedians were held. In many cases, the Wikipedian continued to guide the students throughout the article-writing process remotely or in further meetings. In addition, 4 virtual meetings were held with groups of teachers during training courses.

As part of the training system for guides, 4 virtual meetings were held, which were attended by 18 guides, who make up 68% of all guides. In these meetings, guides were exposed to new instructional tools, discussed common challenges in group leading, and exchanged impressions about their activities.

In September, an appreciation meeting for volunteering guides was held. The meeting included a tour at the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. Amos Rabban, a teacher of history at the Lady Davis Amal School, guided the volunteers through an exhibition at the museum that served as an inspiration for his own Wikipedia article-writing project. After the tour, the volunteers were invited for a small lunch and informal conversations. This successful meeting was attended by 15 volunteers.

During 2017, we created four new instructional tools and updated many others in light of some minor changes in the Wikipedia interface.

The new tools are:

An instructional tool for expansion of articles based on drafts - the tool explains how to appropriately merge a prewritten article expansion with an existing article on Wikipedia.
An instructional tool for adding references to Wikipedia articles - this tool was developed at the end of 2017 ahead of the 1Lib1Ref campaign in January 2018. Its target audience is librarians with no previous Wikipedia-editing skills.
Comics about reliable sources
Lesson plan about copyrights.

Lesson plan about copyrights The most recent training tool – lesson plan about copyrights – was developed in response to a need that arose from activities in schools and in other initiatives, where it became apparent that the concepts of copyrights and free content require a more thorough explanation. The lesson plan starts with the story of the Monkey selfie copyright dispute, presenting the moral and legal discussions that evolved from it, through which the participants learn about the meaning of copyrights. Next, they make use of photos they took themselves to create something new - once with their own photo, and once with another participant’s photo. This experience sharpens the understanding of using free content, and the copyright questions regarding using another's creation. Following this activity, there is a short discussion on the concept of collaborative content and its implications on uploading images to Commons. Finally, the participants fill in a questionnaire that presents various situations where copyrights are in doubt. For this task, the participants use a document about copyrights and the knowledge they acquired during the lesson. So far, our experience shows that the lesson plan is successful tool for acquiring the relevant knowledge, and allows each participant to form an opinion about their stand regarding free license content. We see it as an important tool for raising awareness to the legal and social implications of content contribution on Commons.

Free Knowledge Awareness

Goals and Objectives

Engage two/three additional photographers for the Photographing Public Figures project.
Photograph Israeli public figures and integrate their images into Wikipedia to raise the issue of free content and to enrich Wikipedia content. At least 200 images will be integrated into Wikipedia.
Produce an annual conference and an event marking the Wikimedia Israel ten-year anniversary with the participation of at least 75 people. Raise awareness to free content through these events.
Position Wikimedia Israel as a significant player in the campaign for the freedom of information in Israel. Participate in all parliamentary and public committees on the subject.

In the Public Figure Photography Project, WMIL volunteers look for articles about Israeli living public figures on he-wp and contact these persons in order to take their pictures. The images are then published under a free license on Wikimedia Commons and embedded in the relevant articles. Despite the fact that the leading volunteer in this project was less active than projected, 38 new images were uploaded onto Wikimedia Commons. Some of these images were sent by the public figure, other images were released by a license sent through the OTRS. In other cases, WMIL volunteers took the images themselves.

Here are a few examples from the project:

Novelist Abraham B. Yehoshua

Journalist and radio presenter Menachem Granit

Writer and translator Rimona Dinur

Journalist Eeleel Shahar

In September 2017, Wikimedia Israel happily marked its 10th anniversary in a festive gathering attended by WMF chair, Mr. Christophe Henner. In this event we offered for the first time Wikimedia awards for people and organizations who promote free knowledge in Israel. The awards were offered to four people and organizations who worked side by side with us, during our first ten years, to promote far-reaching projects and programs in the field of free content. They are the University of Haifa, the Israel Internet Association, former minister of education, Rabbi Shai Piron, and the former head of the Government Press Office, Mr. Oren Helman.

The University of Haifa received the award for introducing the Wikipedia Assignment program. Since 2011, the university has courses in which the students have to write a Wikipedia article as part of their academic assignments. Dr. Ory Amitay took the project to new heights when it was still in its infancy, and encouraged other lecturers to take part. Currently, 21 lecturers in the University of Haifa have the Wikipedia Assignment program as part of their 33 courses. The lecturers’ deep commitment to upload quality academic material to Wikipedia resulted in 400 new impressive articles, which demonstrate in the best manner the fruitfulness of cooperation between the university, as an academic institute dedicated to the preservation and expansion of academic knowledge, and Wikimedia, which works to distribute the sum of all human knowledge to the entire public.

The Israel Internet Association (ISOC-IL) is an NPO dedicated to promoting the use of the Internet for research and communication. In the past decade, ISOC-IL has been a close major partner of Wikimedia Israel. ISOC-IL supports Wikimedia Israel’s activity from its outset in 2007. The projects supported by ISOC-IL include the first Israeli Wikipedia Academy conference in 2009 and the PikiWiki project - an open collaborative repository of digital images related to the history and geography of Israel. The PikiWiki project led to the addition of nearly 40 thousand images to Wikimedia Commons. ISOC-IL also supported the “Wiki Loves Monuments” photography competition in Israel and was a partner in the organization of Wikimania 2011 in Haifa, an event that made Wikimedia Israel a significant and leading organization in the entire Wikimedia movement.

Former minister of education, Rabbi Shai Piron received the award for opening doors for Wikimedia Israel to activity in the high levels of the education system during his term as minister of education in 2014. He gave his blessing to the development of a teacher training program for promoting the educational use of Wikipedia, which happened with the help of Ms. Dalia Fenig, the deputy head of the Pedagogical Secretariat of the Ministry of Education, and in cooperation with the Center for Educational Technology. This was the first official cooperation between a ministry of education and a Wikimedia organization worldwide. Thanks to Rabbi Piron’s recognition of the importance of Wikipedia to the education system, this teacher training takes place for the fourth consecutive year. So far, more than 1200 teachers completed it with a lot of success.

More than 4000 students took part so far in the “Students Write Wikipedia” program, in which students create encyclopedic content and embed it in Wikipedia with the guidance of teachers trained by Wikimedia Israel. The program has been operated with much success for four years now, and it keeps expanding every year. Over the years, we see many more teachers and students who turned from consumers of Wikipedia contents to full participants in the creation of its contents, in Hebrew and in Arabic.

The cooperation with Rabbi Piron started in a meeting between him and the then chair of the Wikimedia Foundation, Mr. Jan-Bart de Vreede.

Oren Helman received the Wikimedia award for his effort to release contents from government ministries under a free license. On 6 December 2012, the Government of Israel passed a precedential resolution - it decided to support the Ministry of Justice’s bill about free public use of images displayed on governmental websites. The preceding legislation process had been led by Wikimedia Israel since 2010 with the help of MK Meir Shitrit and the support of the then minister Michael Eitan, ISOC-IL, CC-IL and attorney Jonathan Klinger.

Government ministries and other organizations tended to object this idea in Knesset hearings. A prominent exception was Oren Helman who was at the time the head of the Government Press Office. His support was not obvious at all, since the proposed legislation seemingly harmed the GPO more than any other body. The bill suggested that the GPO would not be able to charge money for the images it publish, as it used to. Nevertheless, Mr. Helman publicly expressed his support, and, with the continuous public and legislative effort, eventually convinced the government to pass the resolution, which allowed the release of governmental images under free non-commercial license. Although the current license is still incompatible with the requirements of Wikipedia, their release to the public is an important achievement and a major contribution to the realization of the Wikimedia vision.

A short film created to mark Wikimedia Israel’s 10th anniversary

In the beginning of 2017, ISOC-IL formed a coalition of organizations with the aim of coordinating positions and formulating a strategy for dealing with several legislative initiatives that wish to harm the freedom of the Internet. Wikimedia Israel takes part in this coalition together with other non-governmental organizations, representatives of academic institutes and prominent Israeli Internet activists. One of the proposed legislations suggests that a website be blocked in case it is suspected of serving a terror organization (including a non-declared terror organization). There would be no public transparency about this process. Two bills call for censorship of offensive material on the Internet, such as sexual intercourse of any kind, nudity, racist or nationalistic propaganda or gambling in games which include violence.

As part of this coalition, Wikimedia Israel works to minimize the scope of this legislation. There is public awareness activity on this issue planned for the World Day Against Cyber Censorship, on 12 March 2018.

Communication

Goals and Objectives

Wikimedia Israel's positioning as a leader in the Israeli education system through participation in conferences and major debates in this field in Israel.
Increasing the visibility of the organization’s activities through publicity in various channels during the year.
Maintaining contact with Wikimedia communities and volunteers by publishing a monthly newsletter, local and international blog posts, and other relevant publications in village pump.
Handling press relationship and press inquiries.

Objective 1: In 2017, Wikimedia Israel continued to take part in widespread educational projects and maintained its relations with its partners in the education system. The article-writing programs and the image uploading initiatives are recognized and encouraged by the Ministry of Education, and are included in the “basket of options” offered to teachers as assignments for alternative achievement assessment, or as a community service in the “personal commitment” program, or in programs of further education and general knowledge acquisition.

On the World Teachers’ Day, we published the stories of four leading teachers from among the participants of the “Students Write Wikipedia” program in Hebrew and in Arabic, as an appreciation for their activity.

During 2017, we started a new cooperation with the education department of Yad Vashem Museum, in order to offer significant assistance to schools who write articles about the Holocaust. The chapter’s Hebrew-language education coordinator attended a special symposium at the museum, dealing with innovative and alternative teaching methods of the Holocaust events. In this symposium, the coordinator presented the article-writing programs as a model of innovative teaching and reviewed various options of cooperation between the Yad Vashem educational team and Wikimedia Israel. The coordinator is in continuous contact with Yad Vashem ever since this visit, and the cooperation with them grows steadily.

15 mentions and media publications about Wikimedia and the activity of Wikimedia Israel during 2017.

During 2017, the chapter maintained continuous contact with Israeli members of Wikimedia project communities, especially with the he-wp community, which is the largest in Israel and with which we have direct bidirectional contact. Throughout the year we had an ongoing dialog between the chapter’s team and community members through phone conversations, emails, Wikipedia talk pages, personal meetings etc. in order to respond to the needs and requests raised by community members, and to assist the promotion of various initiatives, suggested by the chapter or by community members. The chapter’s community coordinator was careful to publish events and suggestions for activities that might interest community members on the he-wp Kikar Ha-Ir page (equivalent to “Village Pump (miscellaneous)” on en-wp).

Throughout the year, the chapter published 15 newsletters (once a month approximately), which were distributed by email to all chapter members and other interested people. These updates included a short summary of the chapter’s day-to-day activities, information about forthcoming activities and general updates about Wikimedia events and initiatives (like the strategic process of 2017).

With the help of a Wikipedian and a chapter volunteer, we made contact with Omer Benjakob, a researcher of culture and technology and reporter for Haaretz. This contact led to a talk entitled “Science on Wikipedia and Wikipedia as Science” given by Benjakob and one of his colleagues to the general public at the chapter’s office in July 2017. It also led to a series of articles on different Wikipedia-related stories published on Haaretz in both English and Hebrew, and meant to shed light on the action behind the scenes of Wikipedia, and attract more people to take part in it.

In November 2018, Wikimedia Israel will host the Wikimedia movement’s GLAM-WIKI conference. This will be the third time that Wikimedia Israel hosts an international conference of the movement (the previous ones were Wikimania 2011 and the hackathon of 2016). Wikimedia Israel is currently the only chapter to host three international conferences! The participants will include members of the GLAM-Wiki community, GLAM professional, Wikimedians, and leading figures from cultural institutions and from the GLAM community all over the world.

The conference will aim at increasing awareness among GLAM professionals of the importance of accessible cultural heritage, and inspiring and motivating participants to start up their own GLAM projects.

Beyond the honor of hosting another conference of our movement, we view this as also an important opportunity to connect the local GLAM community with the Wikimedia movement, and to promote programs of Israeli cultural institutes for the release of cultural assets.

Revenues received during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)

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
2016 Reserves	NIS	10,000	25,000				25,000	2,639	6,598
Foundations	NIS	365,000	93,490		125,250	114,165	332,905	96,334	87,864
Private donations	NIS	16,000	18,670	535	7,764	6,100	33,069	4223	8728
Sponsorships	NIS	25,000			4,420		4,420	6,598	1,167	This year sponsorships were not a priority
Wikimedia Foundation	NIS	860,000	501,667	363,613			865,280	226,980	228,373	Including budget for Salon Strategy Dinner
Membership fees	NIS	1,000	180	760		20	960	264	253
Collaborations	NIS	50,000						13,197		Collaborations in 2017 involved in-kind revenues rather than monetary
Courses	NIS	1,400		3,500		3,900	7,400	370	1,953
Revenues that are a result of court ruling	NIS			4,299	115,372		119,671		31,585
In-kind donations	NIS	‎-300,000					‎-844,640	‎-79,179	‎-222,926
TOTAL	NIS	1,328,400	639,007	372,707	252,806	124,185	1,388,705	350,605	366,521

* Provide estimates in US Dollars

Spending during this period (6 month for progress report, 12 months for impact report)

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
Community Support (Wikipedia) - Strengthening and cultivating the relations between the Chapter and the Wikimedia community	NIS	194,100	33,541	30,888	43,996	52,705	161,130	51,229	42,527	83%
Communities support (Wikimedia Initiatives)	NIS	30,000	5,846	1,447	423	2,469	10,185	7,918	2,688	34%	See respective section
Developing infrastructure to promote openly licensed materials	NIS	10,500	2,272	176		15,615	18,063	2,771	4,767	172%	Including WLM costs
Collaboration for free content	NIS	345,700	86,968	89,769	77,242	89,234	343,213	91,241	90,584	99%
Training	NIS	65,200	16,439	8,042	17,475	7,095	49,051	17,208	12,946	75%
Free knowledge awareness	NIS	92,000	20,410	12,460	53,939	9,000	95,809	24,282	25,287	104%
Global engagement	NIS	56,100	3,885	32,262	16,904	3,487	56,538	14,806	14,922	101%
Promoting activity in Arabic	NIS	155,348	37,945	23,405	45,359	36,789	143,498	41,001	37,873	92%	Budget increased due to manpower change and increase in travel costs component in salary
Communication and publicity	NIS	20,000	2,812	2,140	1,500	24,820	31,272	5,279	8,254	156%	Including costs for new WMIL internet site
Management and Administration	NIS	402,700	96,289	98,567	95,379	92,655	382,890	106,285	101,056	95%
TOTAL	NIS	1,371,648	306,407	299,156	352,217	333,869	1,291,649	362,019	340,905	94%	N/A

* Provide estimates in US Dollars

Compliance

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

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.

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

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

Michal Lester לסטר (talk) 10:46, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

Resources

Resources to plan for measurement

Global metrics are an important starting point for grantees when it comes to measuring programmatic impact (Learning Patterns and Tutorial) but don’t stop there.
Logic Models provide a framework for mapping your pathway to impact through the cause and effect chain from inputs to outputs to outcomes. Develop a logic model to map out your theory of change and determine the metrics and measures for your programs.
Importantly, both qualitative and quantitative measures are important so consider both as you determine measures for your evaluation and be sure to ask the right questions to be sure to capture your program stories.

Resources for storytelling

WMF storytelling series and toolkit (DRAFT)
Online workshop on Storytelling. By Frameworks institute
- The origin of storytelling
- Story frames, with a focus on news-worthiness.
Reading guide: Storytelling and Social change. By Working Narratives
- The uses of the story.
- Case studies.
Blog: 3 Tips on telling stories that move people to action. By Paul VanDeCarr (Working Narratives), on Philanthropy.com
Building bridges using narrative techniques. By Sparknow.net
- Differences between a report and a story
- Question guides and exercises.
Guide: Tools for Knowledge and Learning. By Overseas Development Institute (UK).
- Developing a strategy
- Collaboration mechanisms
- Knowledge sharing and learning
- Capturing and storing knowledge.

Telling your program stories - all programs

Please tell the story of each of your programs included in your proposal. This is your chance to tell your story by using any additional metrics (beyond global metrics) that are relevant to your context, beyond the global metrics above. You should be reporting against the targets you set at the beginning of the year throughout the year. We have provided a template here below for you to report against your targets, but you are welcome to include this information in another way. Also, if you decided not to do a program that was included in your proposal or added a program not in the proposal, please explain this change. More resources for storytelling are at the end of this form. Here are some ways to tell your story.

We encourage you to share your successes and failures and what you are learning. Please also share why are these successes, failures, or learnings are important in your context. Reference learning patterns or other documentation.
Make clear connections between your offline activities and online results, as applicable. For example, explain how your education program activities is leading to quality content on Wikipedia.
We encourage you to tell your story in different ways by using videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g.), compelling quotes, and by linking directly to work you produce. You may highlight outcomes, learning, or metrics this way.
We encourage you to continue using dashboards, progress bars, and scorecards that you have used to illustrate your progress in the past, and to report consistently over time.
You are welcome to use the table below to report on any metrics or measures relevant to your program. These may or may not include the global metrics you put in the overview section above. You can also share your progress in another way if you do not find a table like this useful.

Program	Participants	Newly registered	Content pages	Additional Metric A	Additional Metric B
Example	Example	Example	Example	Example	Example