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Grants:APG/Proposals/2018-2019 round 1/Wikimedia Israel/Progress report form

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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 grant 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.

Metrics and results overview - all programs

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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 Grant Metrics. We understand not all Grant or grantee-defined Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

  1. Next to each required metric, list the outcome/results achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
  2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
  3. 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 Grant Metrics.

Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. number of total participants
2. number of newly registered users
3. number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects
4. please report here on your grantee defined metric(s)
5. please report here on your grantee defined metric(s)


Telling your program stories - all programs

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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.


Community

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Metric Yearly goal Progress (H1) Projected (end of year) Comments

Participants (Hebrew community activities)

60 participants at yearly community events
  • 60 Community event
  • 15 Art+Feminism workshop
  • 41 Senior citizens workshops
  • 40 Wiki-women

Total = 156

Participants (Arabic community activities) 10 editors in an editing course
  • 7 editors in the local Wiki-Arabic group
  • 21 participants at 1lib1ref workshops
  • 6 participants at Art+Feminism workshop

Total = 34

Content pages (Hebrew Wikipedia) 5,225 2636 articles (682 new and improved, 1282 references, 626 gnome-edits, 23 Commons uploads)
Content pages (Arabic Wikipedia) 20 article improvements 50 articles (12 new, 18 significantly improved, 20 1lib1ref references)

Hebrew Wikipedia editors meetup
Our local editor community meets twice a year to socialize and to catch up. In early 2019, WMIL organized a meetup where 60 Wikipedians celebrated Wikipedia anniversary with their families and kids. The participants chose their preferred meetup activity following a vote, they watched “Mary Poppins Returns” at a movie theatre in Jerusalem.


WikiWomen
During H1, the chapter organized two WikiWomen meetings. The number of participants at both meetings was low, thus for H2 we decided to conduct brainstorming meetings to rethink our activities in minimizing the gender gap on Wikipedia.


Art + Feminism

Art + Feminism met up with collaboration with Artport: art center.


As a part of the Art+Feminism global movement, WMIL organized two events to celebrate female artists on International Womens’ day on March 8th. Two parallel edit-a-thons took place in different cities and art venues in two languages: (a) Artport, an art gallery and forum in Tel Aviv, where 15 attendees edited and improved and wrote 22 articles on Hebrew Wikipedia and on Wikidata, and (b). Umm al-Fahem Art Gallery in Umm al-Fahem where the 6 attendees, most of them artists, wrote and improved 7 articles on Arabic Wikipedia.


Local Wiki-Arabic Group
In collaboration with the Association of School Librarians, an editing course for librarians took place in February 2019. The group was hosted by St. Joseph Seminary High School in Nazareth. The 7 participants in the course are veteran librarians, through the course they acquired editing skills, they were introduced to the Arabic Wikipedia community. They 7 librarians wrote and improved 15 articles (6 new articles, 137 edits) on books, children books, villages, and biography articles.

The fantastic ten: Our first Haifa senior citizens course participates added together 740 articles to Hebrew Wikipedia.

Senior Citizens Courses
During the first half of 2019, our community activities were focused on the developing and promising direction of training new editors through senior citizen editing courses. We focused on the following activities:

  • Continuous activities for senior citizens - during this time two courses were completed; there were also two follow-up gatherings for editors who completed previous courses, and we continued to support remotely the editing activities of our course graduates.
  • Doubling the number of participants in a course: we recently opened a course with 17 participants - almost double the number of previous courses. To achieve this we made some changes to certain courses characteristics and added the number of supporting volunteers/ We are examining the effectiveness of working with larger groups.
  • Recruitment and training of an additional trainer for the courses - this will allow us to hold courses both close to the center of Israel and in the North of the country.

At this point in time, the senior citizens activity is expanding:

  • The number of edits of participants and graduates of our courses continues to be exceptional. During these 6 months, this group creates and edited 1,264 articles and files - a significant portion of our chapter’s output. Their edits continue to be of exceptionally high-quality, in their impact and diversity (see also Impact Report 2018).
  • High retention of course graduates and their integration in the Wikpedian community (See below).
  • The recruitment and selection process of course candidates has been streamlined and fine-tuned.
  • The course instructional materials are diverse and comprehensive.
  • We have accumulated knowledge on the tracking, training and interventions required to give the course participants and positive and empowering experience.
  • We are expecting to expand our range of influence both geographically and qualitatively, by the recruitment of an additional trainer and increasing the number of participants in each course.

Achievements:

  • The average grade for the course given in anonymous feedback questionnaires at the end of the course was 5.5 out of 6.
  • 83% of graduates continued to edit 3 months after their courses ended. About 50% continue to edit frequently even after this period, and in essence became regular Wikipedians.
  • 14 graduates came to the annual Hebrew Wikipedia community event organized by WMIL.
  • Graduates integration as chapter volunteers - six our graduates have begun to volunteer and various Chapter activities.
  • Inter-institutional collaborations - all courses in the second half of 2019 will be hosted in academic libraries, and the marketing of the courses will also include communities related to these libraries.

Challenges:

  • Little activity from some course participants: while 83% of the participants edited intensively during the course, 17% of the participants showed little involvement and did not meet the goals that were set. Subsequently the candidate selection process has been revised to improve this point.
  • Remote support to assist graduates with their editing activities puts a load on the team which leads to delays in required assistance. Our attempt to answer this challenge by matching experienced editors with course graduates was not effective: We didn’t always manage to find a Wikipedian that had the time and/or motivation for the task. In addition, course graduates were hesitant about contacting and asking for assistance from someone they haven’t met. We are currently considering this question by reassessing our team’s availability as well as the support provided by the Hebrew Wikipedia community.
  • Follow-up gatherings and enrichment meetups for course graduates: when we look at the low percentage of graduates that participate in these activities and their didactic and social benefits, we are having doubts whether these meetups are valuable. We are checking other channels with which to keep in touch with our graduates and continue to support their development.
A Wikidata session for graduates, May 2019. In an attempt to expand the circle of participants, we allowed graduates to participate physically or online.

Insights:

  • In the past we conducted telephone interviews during the process of selection of course candidates. However, these interviews required time and effort investment which was not commensurate with their benefit. Currently we use instead written communication with the candidates.
  • Peer-learning increases the participants’ motivation and interest in the course. Subsequently the course design was adapted to include more peer-learning during the course meetings.
  • Learning to use source code and write in talk pages allows higher-quality edits by participants and reduces their dependency on the support of the training team. Therefore the course syllabus has more emphasis on these abilities.

In the upcoming months we plan to:

  • Open a course which will be given by the trainer which was recently recruited. Then we will be able to offer course activities in two geographical areas: the center and the north of Israel.
  • Opening courses for specific audiences of senior citizens, namely, those in the academic faculty retirees’ organization, and in academic library retirees' organizations.
A pamphlet advertising the next Senior Citizens course to be held at Sourasky Central Library at Tel Aviv University.

Community Support Goals and Performance

Yearly goal Performance (H1) Comments
Training 70 senior citizens’; 20% retention after 3 months 41 senior citizens were training (26 new participants as well as continuing the training of 15 graduates. 83% retention after 3 months
Four Wiki-Women meet-ups Two meet-ups were held, but due to the low attendance we are rethinking the activity model for reducing the gender gap in Hebrew Wikipedia
Two meet-ups were held, but due to the low attendance we are rethinking the activity model for reducing the gender gap in Hebrew Wikipedia

Marketing of Senior Citizens Courses

There was quite a big “buzz” surrounding the program when we first published about the very first courses, due to the novelty of the activity. We had no trouble getting good candidates to apply to the program, just from Facebook advertisements. After a while however we had to rethink this strategy including:

  1. Changing Facebook advertising according to advertisement performance.
  2. Having the course graduates help with advertising the course to their friends.
  3. Checking the possibility of advertising through a senior citizens website.

Wikidata

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Metric Yearly goal) Progress (H1) Projected (end of year) Comments
Participants 230 360 Not including ~250 viewers of the online webinar
Content pages 2500 150 More data from the Israeli Museum Portal wil be uploaded in H2

In 2019 WMIL started a new program to promote Wikidata in Israel. The work plan includes:

  • Promoting awareness of Wikidata in Israel
  • Developing a tutorial tool for the Wikidata Query Service (SPARQL)
  • Adding content to wikidata

Until the last quarter of 2018, Wikidata activity in Israel was purely volunteer-led. Around the time of the GLAM-WIKI conference, WMIL started to initiate Wikidata activities, and in 2019 it was explicitly included in our work plan, with the aim of creating a community of local editors that will add content to and be active on Wikidata.

Our efforts are focused on, but not limited to, certain target audiences: (1) Those with a technological background – developers, programmers, people working in startup companies, and other professionals involved with big data or related areas; (2) GLAM professionals and in particular librarians, archivists and other information specialists and (3) the Wikipedia community.

In addition, we are trying to incorporate Wikidata into educational programs in academia and high-schools.

The development of a tutorial for the Wikidata Query Service is also intended to attract people to Wikidata, by showcasing this unique information service that allows querying the largest free database.

Goals Performance Remarks
Promoting awareness of Wikidata in Israel Introduction to Wikidata was given at I-FISH (biggest Information specialists forum in Israel), at the Open Media and Information Lab at the Open University of Israel, at the Israeli Internet Association, at Google Campus, and at the Business Intelligence Big Data conference.

We also live streamed an online webinar about Wikidata  - which by the end of June was watched by more than 250 viewers. A SPARQL workshop for Wikipedians took place in February at WMIL’s offices. At the National Library we gave a two-part workshop to the library staff. Wikipedians from our senior citizens courses participated in a Wikidata workshop.

Wikidata in education High-Schools: In February we held a pilot project with high-school students majoring in Cyber Informatics. The students came to a 3 hour workshop at WMIL’s offices. In March, the Wikidata coordinator gave an online introduction to the teachers of this matriculation track. We have been in touch with the national coordinator of Science and Technology at the Ministry of Education, who is interested in organizing a Wikidata training day for all the teachers of this track (scheduled for July 2019).

Academia: the Wikidata coordinator met with Prof. Noa Aharony, head of the department for Information Science at the Bar-Ilan University. Wikidata will be incorporated in at least two courses in the next academic year: Information literacy and in one programming/machine learning course.

See Impact report 2018 for a description of the Cyber Information matriculation track.
Developing a tutorial for Wikidata Query Service The general structure of the tutorial has been outlined and about 75% of the content has been written. We have a blueprint for the User Interface and are currently in touch with two website developers to decide whether to build the website on mediaWiki or Wordpress platform. In collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland and Wiki Education Foundation.  
Data collaborations and uploading In collaboration with the National Library we are working to synchronize their National Authority File with Wikidata. This needs to be done piecemeal as the file contains records of various kinds: author names, place names, publishers, and more. Dr. Ahava Cohen from the National Library has almost finished mapping the publishers information onto the Wikidata model and will soon be running a pilot to upload a part of the data. In collaboration with Dr. Sinai Rosinek from the Digital Humanities Department at the University of Haifa a similar process is done for the place names.

Another interesting source of data is the Israeli Museum Portal. We’ve scraped the metadata of 22K visual art items and a small pilot (100 items) has shown that this data relevant and useful.

Marketing of Wikidata

The Israeli public doesn't know Wikidata, so advertising Wikidata required explaining what the project is about and how it is related to Wikimedia. For this purpose we made a brochure and merchandise to attract the attention of target audiences. Because it was challenging to get the general public to attend our Wikidata introduction lectures, we tried another way - by hosting an online live Webinar. The live webinar was quite a success with more than 250 people who watch it.

Our local GLAM community was also introduced to the Wikidata project via a targeted email campaign, which explained the potential of Wikidata and its benefits to GLAM institutions. They were offered to register to an online webinar followed by a workshop. Unfortunately, there was very little interest in this event and it was therefore canceled.

Given that it is the first year that WMIL initiates Wikidata activities, we are pleased to discover that the project raised interest in various organizations, and our lectures and workshops have been rather successful in attracting participants.

We were also encouraged by the fact that the Wikidata webinar had been watched by more than 250 viewers, and are planning to put more online content regarding Wikidata. We realize that part of our target audience feel more comfortable with online activities and would not attend activities otherwise (i.e., participate in face-to-face activities). It remains, however, a challenge to motivate participants to continue editing and adding data. In addition, activities such as lectures, demonstrations and webinars often do not allow us to later track whether the participants (or viewers) tried or continued to edit on the platform. We need to find ways to structure these activities such that we will be able to follow-up on what participants do.

Hebrew Education Program

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Yearly goal Performance (H1) Comments
Enriching Wiktionary with idioms entries

We worked with 8 classrooms and one college students group, who organized Wikipedia activities in the classroom as part of their practical training in the teaching profession.

The project exceeded our estimation as it turned out to be more demanding than expected, and it takes a longer process to fulfill it. We realized that using web resources is not sufficient, thus we had to use book references. 3 classes joined the project as a result of the collaboration with Levinsky College of Education.

Enriching Hebrew Wikipedia with quality content by developing research and writing skills among students WMIL Hebrew edu coordinator worked with 33 classrooms. We achieved our goals successfully in all groups. Students acquired multiple skills: looking up references, organizing information, summarizing and combining information from different references. -
Growth and expansion in schools: Fostering connections with teachers and schools staff, and encouraging school activities Planned for semester 2 -
Online training course for teachers in collaboration with Center for Educational Technology and MoE 45 teachers participated in two courses, organized by Center for Educational Technology

During H1, the Hebrew Education program focused on the following:

Two students talk while writing articles at the WikGap event


  • Students Write Wiktionary: Creating more than 100 new entries in Hebrew Wiktionary about idioms and expressions originating from the Bible.
  • Students Write Wikipedia: Students wrote and improved more than 320 new articles in Hebrew Wikipedia
  • Gifted students programs: The collaboration with Tel Aviv Uni and the Science Oriented Youth program continues, a list of suggested articles was built focusing on female pioneers.
  • Recruiting new schools for the next school year (to begin in September 2019).

All the Hebrew Education projects of 2018-19 were completed successfully. Final results were uploaded to Wikipedia and Wiktionary. The process in some classes was more challenging than estimated by the teacher or by the WMIL coordinator at the beginning. The challenges were mostly about finding and identifying information resources, and the task of draft writing and reviewing.

Achievements

All projects were completed successfully; all groups uploaded articles to Hebrew Wikipedia. 98% of the articles integrated in Hebrew Wikipedia. 3 articles were deleted following notability discussions.

For the first time, students wrote and improved articles on books: children books, youth books, and adults books. Following this achievement, we created an instructional template which assists teachers to instruct their students in writing about books.

Several schools have upgraded the project and organized exhibitions and / or a presentation showing their achievements in front of an audience in creative ways. Some teachers asked students to reflect on their work and the learning process, and present heir experience orally or in writing.


Challenges

The Hebrew education coordinator worked with few teachers who did not invest enough time leading the project, consequently, some projects lasted longer than planned. The lack of investment in the project affected the quality of the Wiktionary drafts, or the productivity of the group as the students wrote less articles that planned. The Wiktionary articles were edited later in order to be appropriate to Wiktionary.

Insights

Teachers with the the chocolate & merchandise box we sent them at the end of the year.


  • The Proverbs Wiktionary project turned out to be challenging for students. The project requires teachers’ knowledge in referring to the Bible and using tools and references which help understand the context of the original text.
  • Set higher goals for each group: if we are interested in uploading 12 articles, then the primary goal should be 15 articles. Not all groups achieve the result set ahead. By the end of the year, and for diverse reasons, the groups upload less articles than expected. It is an unavoidable in all groups, and should be considered in future planning.
  • For the upcoming school year, we are developing a set of instructional tools for leading teachers in the Students Write Wikipedia program:
  • How to conduct an opening session about the project?
  • How to teach about reliable sources?
  • Suggested article templates on various topics, in addition to thematic instructional guides (i.e. writing about books, or laws).
  • Updating existing guides: Writing biography articles, writing about historical or geographical sites.


Students Write Wikipedia marketing

This popular program Marketing strategy's goal is to have our partners working with us many years. The teachers have to work hard in this project, and this made us realize we need to make sure that the teachers will stay and teach this program for more than one year. For this purpose, we took the following steps:

  • Sending at the end of the year a chocolate & merchandise box to all of the program’s teachers along with a thank-you note.
  • Writing about the program in our social media and quarterly newsletter, mentioning a special student and her teacher, in another newsletter we had picture of two of the teachers receiving the box.
  • Sending an email about the importance of the program to the school principal.
  • Producing and printing a pamphlet to attract more schools to participate in this program.

Arabic Education Program

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Metric Yearly Goal Progress (H1) Projected (end of year) Comments
Number of Participants 300 262 Including students who attended opening lectures at the schools
Number of schools 20 12 7 new schools joined the program
Articles (New/Significantly improved) 250 243 (76/167 significantly improved)

During the first half of the year, the Arabic Education program continues to grow at WMIL, involving more schools and staff, providing them with tools to create quality content on Arabic Wikipedia, int addition to developing new programs.

Main Activities:

  • Students Write Wikipedia (Arabic)
  • Wikipedia Ambassadors
  • Nibras Competition
  • Recruiting more schools to the program and examining new collaborations
Goals Performance Remarks
Encouraging and training more students to write and improve articles on Arabic Wikipedia The program ran at 12 schools, involving 14 teachers.

Students wrote and improved 243 articles on Arabic Wikipedia. 114 students participated in the writing workshops and process.

  • High school students joined the program as one way to volunteer in a community project. Their contribution was measured hourly as social commitment units.
  • Teachers had the option to use the program for alternative assessment requirement. Three schools used that option.
Organizing “Wikipedia Ambassador” and building a national network of Arabic Wikipedia editors The program was launched in Dec 2018 with 20 participants from 3 schools. The meetings included lectures and discussions on free knowledge and the power of reliable information, and editing workshops. The students were trained to add images to articles. Adding 95 images to articles on Arabic Wikipedia. Due to schedule and logistic challenges, we terminated the program until the beginning of the new semester in September 2019.
Collaborations In May 2019, Nibras Wikipedia competition was launched in collaboration with the National Library of Israel. The results exceeded our expectations, 61 students from 5 schools registered to participate in the competition. 18 students fulfilled the tasks, writing and improving 56 articles.
Editing workshop at Rowwad al-Quds high school, Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem

Achievements
Students Write Wikipedia
During the last half of 2018, we worked on preserving our activity at schools where the Students Write Wikipedia program fulfilled its goals in the previous school year, as we also worked on recruiting and raising awareness on Wikipedia and free knowledge at new schools.

In the school year 2018-2019, seven new schools joined the program where students wrote and uploaded articles to Arabic Wikipedia. In most cases, the motivation at schools which join the program comes along with the staff interest in granting their students the digital, research and lingual skills while using the opportunity to contribute to knowledge.

Students writing Wikipedia at Yamma high school, Zemer

During H1, we had the chance to work with one (out of two) Arabic-speaking agriculture schools in Israel. The group of 15 students at Yamma high school wrote and improved articles on herbal plants and environmental topics. Since a great amount of articles on plants on Arabic Wikipedia are short pages, we used the chance to create a larger list of herb topics where the students at al-Rowwad High School in East Jerusalem added information about herbal benefits and other missing information on 39 plants (i.g. description, growth conditions). Taking into account that not all students have access to public libraries or school libraries, the Arabic education coordinator at WMIL provided each student with one reference to be used for improving the articles on herbal plants.

For the 2nd year, a group of students joined the WikiGap 2019 held in Tel Aviv. The 6 students wrote four new biographies on women, and improved 3; and one of the participants joined remotely. We see that such occasional events and communal edit-a-thons that take place outside the school environment encourages the students to  and expose them to the larger context of Wikipedia as community.

Competition poster

Nibras Competition

“Nibras Wikipedia” is a students wiki competition co-organized with Jrayed.org, a digital archive of Arabic newspapers in Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine. The participants wrote articles related to Ottoman and Mandatory Palestine, including institutions (e.g. Alhambra Cinema (Jaffa)), biographies of educators, government bodies, authors, journalists, musicians (e.g. Wasif Jawhariyyeh), in addition to articles about Arabic periodicals that were published before 1948 (e.g. Al-Difa' newspaper), while they also enriched stub articles about towns and cities around the world. The competition was an exciting opportunity to introduce the students to digital collections. It was also a chance for the participants to develop both digital and history literacy skills as they were asked to do this using archival documents.

A group of 6 students (6th graders) from an al-Khawarizmi elementary school in Baqa al-Gharbiah participated in the competition. This is the youngest group that has ever participated in any of our projects.

Challenges

  • Sustaining teachers' commitment is essential for the implementation of project in schools. In this process, providing clarifications of specific tasks to leading teachers, setting shared goals, and asking each group to a plan should be submitted in a form to the program coordinator at WMIL.

As we expect the leading teachers to be active reviewers and instructors, some are merely interested in organizing the logistics of each activity rather than content.

  • Program dropouts remain a challenge we tackle every year, especially among 10th-12th graders who begin with their matriculation exams during the school year. Our basic plan is to recruit 15 students minimum for each class, as we predict that some students might drop out. In order to assure productivity and results, the program coordinator at WMIL used to contact each group and send them reminders via Whatsapp communication channels created by the teachers. In these channels, she sent them detailed instructions using text, images and video recording, and received questions and requests. Although it consumes work hours, private contact with the students is helpful for encouraging them and answering technical issues or question related to the content of their task which in most cases assures better results. We consider to limit the contact to a weekly Q/A hour.
  • Calendar matters: 2018-2019 was an inconvenient year in the schools schedule since Ramadan weeks occurred during school days. The co-occurring conditions of fasting, festivities, schools assignments and exams have a negative impact on the students performance. Setting activity dates for editing workshops was challenging both with the staff and the students.
  • Wikipedia Ambassadors: Although we decided to conduct the meetings at Haifa University because of its accessible location to the students, who travelled from different geographical areas, we found that holding a monthly meeting to be challenging. The age heterogeneity in the group increased the challenge as some participants dropped out because of matriculation exams.

Insights

  • Curating thematic lists of suggested entries. Thematic assignments help both the teachers and students in the process of group learning, while reaching a common goal. It also facilitates the editing instructions on Wikipedia when it comes to explaining the desired structure of each topic (i.g. stubs and towns, plants).
  • Creating instructional materials for using the translation tool, and editing translated articles. The trilingual education system at Arabic-speaking schools gives us the opportunity to engage learners and teachers from different realms with literacies and practices associated with translation, in addition to evaluating multiple sources of information. In 2019, more teachers are interested in translation assignments.
  • Organizing an annual competition. Based on the experience we had with the competition launched in May, we found that such initiatives attract both veteran and new schools, and they strengthen schools engagement in the Students Write Wikipedia program. A competition is another way to encourage students to contribute to Wikipedia independently.
  • One-day or short-term activities where the students write their draft in the presence of the teacher and the WMIL coordinator can be highly effective.
  • Gnome-edits (e.g. adding links, adding images from Commons) following the introductory lectures are a highly effective exercise which enables the students to  break the ice with Wikipedia editor and make their first steps.

What’s next?

  • Growth and sustainability of both teachers’ involvement and contributions by the students.
  • Recruiting new schools to the program and preserving the activity at veteran schools. We are planning to expand our reach to include new schools in new villages and towns including Bedouin schools the southern parts of the country.
  • Planning and implementing the “Wikipedia Ambassadors” program efficiently for the upcoming school year 2019-2020, focusing on awareness and motivation in the school environment.
  • Implementing the new instructional website “Wiki Warsha” (to be launched soon) in our educational activities.

Higher Education

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Metric Yearly goal) Progress (H1) Projected (end of year) Comments
Participants 450 285
Number of courses 15 14
Articles (New/Expanded) 450 (300/150) 221 (180/41)
Wikidata articles 100 329

Our program in Higher Education institutions is focused on these activities:

  • Supporting lecturers who incorporate a Wikipedia assignment in their course
  • Advertising successful collaborations with lecturers as a way to market the program
  • Identifying relevant target audiences and introducing the program to them

In 2019 the marketing of the academic program changed from a “push” strategy to a “pull” strategy. The lecturers that participated in the program were all very committed and motivated and the resulting articles were, on average, better than in previous years. This is also the results of streamlining the workflow with lecturers - providing clearer instructions for the process, curating a list of articles to be written, defining the scope of the assignment, setting milestones and deadlines etc…

The collaborations with two lecturers that joined the program this year will be advertised through several channels. Dr. Daniela Shabar-Shapira from the Tel-Aviv University School of Social Work incorporated a Wikipedia assignment in the course  “Women and Gender in Social Work – a Feminist Perspective”. Dr. Gideon Ticotsky incorporated the assignment in two literature courses: “The Birth of Literature from the Spirit of War: Camus, Sartre, Saint-Exupéry and The Little Prince” given at the Hebrew University, and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Re-reading Lea Goldberg, Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch” given at the Tel-Aviv University.

We’ve identified young lecturers as a relevant target audience. With the assistance of WMIL’s marketing coordinator, we advertised the Wikipedia assignment program through the mailing lists of the Junior Academic Staff Associations at the Hebrew University and Ben-Gurion University. WMIL’s academic coordinator also gave a lecture and introduced the program at the Azrieli Fellows forum - a prestigious academic Ph.D. forum.

Goals Performance Remarks
Building a marketing campaign for the program

Marketing to lecturers at three academic institutions

Marketing material was prepared and distributed through two mailing lists of Junior Academic Staff Associations at two universities before the beginning of the Spring semester 2019 We will launch a similar campaign before the start of the academic year in November 2019
Advertising successful collaborations with lecturers Two new collaborations (one in Social Work the other in Literature) were identified as fitting for advertising the program.. These collaborations came to fruition during the first half of 2019 and will be advertised in in the coming weeks through several channels (blogs, mailing lists, WMIL website, social channels etc…).

Wikipedia assignments were introduced in 14 courses, taught by 10 lecturers – two of them newly joined. In the first 6 months, 221 articles were written or significantly expanded in these courses.

Recruitment of new lecturers remains a challenge. Most lecturers in the program participated in it in the past. We try to market the program to young lecturers as this group has more awareness of the massive impact of Wikipedia and have more to gain from participation: impact how their research field is perceived by the general public, include references to their own publications, and receive due credit in the form of “course templates” in the Talk pages of the articles on Wikipedia. We contacted 5 Junior Academic Staff Associations, but only two agreed to advertise the program through their mailing lists.

The insights we gained during this period:

  • Quality is more important than quantity: being selective of lecturers that participate in the program eventually leads to better results, and is more efficient, as our resources are not wasted on lecturers who are not committed enough.
  • Eliminating the burden of “push” marketing allowed WMIL’s academic coordinator to focus on supporting the participating lecturers in a more efficient and close manner.
  • Young academics realize the impact of Wikipedia and its relevance to students and to the general public. Marketing the academic program to them remains a challenge.

Given these insights, we plan to dedicate the coming period in-between semesters to advertise successful collaborations as a way to publicize the program. The academic coordinator is also in contact with several educational funds (such as the Azrieli Fund, ISEF foundation) to bring the program into the awareness of their scholars who are young academics.

Examples of the products of academic collaborations (these are from the course “Digital content in Cultural Heritage Institutions: Wikipedia, Librarians and Libraries”, taught by Orly Simon at the David Yellin College of Education)

Training Curriculum Development and Training Team

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The training program focussed on these activities:

  • Renewing the training and education volunteers meetups: in previous years we had a tradition of having regular (mostly virtual) meetups to provide the training and education volunteers a network of support, learning and inspiration. in 2018, due to changes in WMIL’s staff and organizational structure, these events came to halt. In the first half of 2019 we renewed this tradition, and held two video conferences to which these volunteers were invited.
  • Recruitment of new volunteers: for some of our program we were lacking volunteers (see below). Subsequently, in the past few months we tried to recruit new volunteers from the experienced Wikipedia community, as well as graduates of the senior citizen courses. As a result, we have added 9 new volunteers, who are now in various stages of integrating in WMIL’s activity.
  • Improving the Wikipedia editing courseware: this improvement is an update that is required as a result of changes to the visual editor in Hebrew, as well as adapting it to our activity needs. As this courseware involved a big investment from our side and has proven to be an effective training tool, we want its use to be as wide as possible. Currently, the courseware improvement process is near its end, and we are extremely pleased with this development. Technical difficulties prevented the completion of this goal in 2018, as planned.
  • Developing a tutorial to teach queries on Wikidata: see the section about Wikidata.
  • Developing Wiki Warsha, an instructional website in Arabic designed to teach Arabic-language readers around the globe to edit and write articles for Arabic Wikipedia. The website consists of multimedia elements (video, text, images) and is divided into 13 wiki-editing chapters, in addition to FAQs section. The team developed and wrote the content of the website pages, wrote scripts for the videos, created illustrative screenshots suited to each page. The process includes quality assurance conducted by WMIL team.
  • Developing instructional guides for activities and for newcomers and updating previously-used guides.
Students watching Wiki Warsha’s “How to edit an article?” pilot video.

Most of WMIL’s programs involve training and this is a central area for the chapter. During the years we have accumulated training knowledge regarding Wikimedia and its projects, and have set certain principles that guide us in training different audiences. We also have a rich and growing collection of effective instructional materials, which is supported by our group of training and education volunteers, who provide assistance during many of our activities.

Changes in the structure of WMIL’s team, as well as the availability ofteam member, together with organizational insights and the expansion of our activity, led to the fact that unlike in the past, the training area is not exclusively in the hands of one team member. Rather, training is distributed among the different coordinators, with shared consult and learning processes (o.a., an advanced PowerPoint training given in February for the all WMIL staff).

This organization structure has many advantages, among which: the instructional materials are adapted by every coordinator to the languages and specific projects that she leads, and more minds are involved in the development and design process in a way that allows creativity, control and coordination. However, the development and improvement of instructional materials is demanding and may create a heavy load on the coordinators, who perform this process next to their ongoing work.

Another challenge in expanding our volunteer team. As time passes, there was a depletion of our team, due to personal and occupational changes, which led to a shortage in volunteers in some of the programs.

The programs in Arabic are unique in that they are not supported by a Wikipedian volunteers team. This is due to the small size of the Arabic Wikipedia community in Israel. The Arabic language coordinator deals with this challenge in various ways - most prominently, by developing a Arabic language courseware - a tool that will be able to reduce the dependence of new editors on getting answers from expert trainers.

Metric Yearly goal) Progress (H1) Comments
Instructional materials in Arabic
  1. Distributing and integrating Wiki Warsha in the education system in Arabic: Wiki Warsha will be integrated in 80% of the schools participating in Students Write Wikipedia (Arabic).
  2. Using the introduction presentation in Arabic by 30% of the staff in the schools.
  3. Using the presentation and instructional materials in Arabic (encyclopedic writing, reliable source comics) by 60% of participants in WMIL activities.
  1. During the first half of 2019, the chapter continued to develop the instructional website project in-house and in collaboration with a service provider, including content pages, videos, illustrative images, and web design. Pilot versions of the videos were used in 60% of the sessions.
  2. Opening session presentation was used in all activities.
  3. All guides were used, referred to, and distributed in school and community activities.
  1. No comments.
  2. Although we found that an opening session is crucial for each activity, we decided to add gnome-editing task for those sessions too.
  3. We created “Guide and tips: How to choose your Wikipedia article topic?” in Arabic.
Instructional materials in Hebrew
  1. Adding concrete examples and interactive questionnaires to the Encyclopedic Writing Guide.
  2. Creating lessons plans for about encyclopedic writing for the teachers in the Students Write Wikipedia (Hebrew).
  3. Creating instructional material with information about free content, copyrights and OTRS.
N/A These golas were planned for H2.
Training and education volunteer team
  1. six volunteer meetups, four online and at least one (physical) gathering. 70% of the team will participate in at least one of these Personal support of the volunteers.
  2. Personal support of the volunteers.
  3. Recruitming two new volunteers to the team. Each new volunteer participates in at least two activities as a training volunteers.
  1. Two online meetups with 50% attendance.
  2. Done.
  3. Nine new volunteers have been recruited, seven of which havae already participated in 1-2 activities.
  1. Given the changes and instability in the volunteer team it has proven to be quite difficult to reach higher attendance or even define the size of the team.
  2. The training coordinator performed personal calls to support and strengthen the connection with volunteers, had personal meetings with new volunteers, and sent gifts to volunteers that were heavily involved in WMIL’s activities during H1.
  3. Six of the new volunteers are graduates of the senior citizen courses and 3 are experience editors from the Hebrew Wikipedia community. Recruitment often included meeting with the WMIL staff for acquaintance and training.

The next steps:

  • Complete the update and improvement of the courseware in Hebrew.
  • Launching Wiki Warsha: The website will be used as the main instructional tool in our Arabic workshops in schools and in community activities.
  • Promoting Wiki Warsha for Arabic speakers worldwide.
  • The general structure of the Wikidata tutorial has been outlined and about 75% of the content has been written. We plan to have a Proof of Concept for the tutorial website during the 3rd quarter of 2019.
  • Complete the goals for the instructional materials in Hebrew (see table).
  • 3-4 meetups with the training and education volunteers.
  • Continue to support the new volunteers, to establish their integration in WMIL’s activities.

Fundraising

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Igul Letova (Round-Up)

Israeli donation project- IGOL LETOVA is a donations system: with every transaction a doner makes on his/her credit card, his bill will be rounded up to the nearest NIS, and the change goes to the charities of their choice (about 5.42 NIS monthly to a doner).
We began 2019 with 1101 monthly Roundup donors via Igol Letova project. We add new donor by taking a part in two conference, there we had a donation booth (in kind donation of the Production company) asking conference participants to become a Roundup donor to Wikimedia Israel. Another method was to raise awareness within our volunteers and partner base to join this project, adding links to donation in each email, giving out pamphlet, having one of the volunteers talking about id itch time and adding the link to all of the staff email signature, all this actions got us to 1079 Roundup donors, in this August we will have another fundraising campaign.

Small Donations

WMIL received Donations in low amounts from private donors throughout the years, all of them got a thank you email after their donation. We decide to approach people who made a donation in the last 12 month and ask them to make another donation, we wrote them a personal email, celebrating their first donation, this campaign was a big success, strengthening the bond with our donor base.

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
Revenues from private donations ILS 10,000 12,535 7,094 0 0 19,629 2,706 5,312
Sponsorships ILS 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Foundations ILS 400,000 10,471 26,926 0 0 37,397 108,240 10,120
Revenues from membership fees ILS 2,000 420 40 0 0 460 541 124
Wikimedia Foundation ILS 1,075,000 627,083 0 0 0 627,083 290,895 169,689
Revenues from collaborations ILS 30,000 0 20,000 0 0 20,000 8,118 5,412
Revenues from courses ILS 4,000 1,220 3,400 0 0 4,620 1,082 1,250
In-kind donations (will be summed and added only at the end of the year) ILS 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Round Up ILS 72,000 12,662 22,004 0 0 34,666 19,483 9,381
Revenues from companies ILS 15,000 0 1,500 0 0 1,500 4,059 406
Total revenues (should equal the sum of the rows): ILS 1,608,000 664,391 80,964 0 0 745,355 435,125 201,693

* 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
Community Support (Hebrew Wikipedia) ILS 198,970 43,511 24,278 0 0 67,789 53,841 18,344 34.07%
Developers Community Support ILS 12,600 128 1,332 0 0 1,460 3,410 395 11.59% 0
Collaborations for Contant Release ILS 41,000 11,970 213 0 0 12,183 11,095 3,297 29.71%
Education - Hebrew ILS 178,985 43,673 43,418 0 0 87,091 48,433 23,567 48.66%
Higher Education ILS 181,985 43,571 39,801 0 0 83,372 49,245 22,560 45.81%
Education - Arabic ILS 226,385 52,208 43,703 0 0 95,911 61,260 25,954 42.37%
Training ILS 108,985 16,744 7,817 0 0 24,561 29,491 6,646 22.54%
Free knowledge awareness ILS 125,000 14,812 19,921 0 0 34,733 33,825 9,399 27.79%
Global engagement ILS 34,000 3,016 13,640 0 0 16,656 9,200 4,507 48.99%
Communication and publicity ILS 168,000 48,558 41,068 0 0 89,626 45,461 24,253 53.35%
Management and Administration ILS 443,890 115,489 105,099 0 0 220,588 120,117 59,691 49.69%
Total Expense(should equal the sum of the rows): ILS 1,719,800 393,680 340,290 0 0 733,970 465,378 198,612 42.68%

* 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.

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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