Grants:APG/Proposals/2020-2021 round 1/Wikimedia CH/Impact report form

Purpose of the report

This form reports on Wikimedia CH's results for 2021 (1 January - 31 December). Wikimedia CH has recently become financially independent and does not rely on an Annual Plan Grant (APG) from the Wikimedia Foundation. Therefore, this report provides an overview of the year without strictly adhering to the APG format.

Metrics and results overview - all programs

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Participants	1'200
Newly registered users	300
Content pages created or improved	30'000
Content reused by other Wikimedia projects	10'000
People reached in Switzerland	1'500'000

Program impacts

Executive Summary

Despite the continuing pandemic and the challenges it presented, 2021 was a successful year for Wikimedia CH in terms of both impact and learning. We took lessons learned in 2020 and put them into practice for various activities while learning new lessons along the way. Many activities remained virtual, but the slow shift from remote to in-person events presented opportunities to test and adapt our ways of working. We will continue to leverage these learnings and our agility as an organization into 2022 and the next five-year strategic period.

Our impact

Our programmatic activities in 2021 centered around three main focal points: Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary, 50 years of women’s suffrage in Switzerland and our new five-year strategy.

Program GLAM was busy with events around women’s suffrage that attracted new GLAM partners and volunteers. It also developed and strengthened GLAM partnerships and continued its holistic program approach to ensure scalability and sustainability.

Program Community focused on 20th-anniversary celebrations and the inaugural in-person WikiSwiss Awards, as well as the first-ever bilingual workshop in collaboration with Program GLAM. These efforts attracted new volunteers while recognizing and engaging long-term Wikipedians.

Program Education continued building and supporting scalable, innovative models for free educational content, including improving the openedu.ch platform. The work around these projects will create the foundation for our future Innovation Lab.

Last, our Outreach efforts built on existing relationships and started new ones to advocate for free knowledge. This work included successful collaboration with Parldigi to further our progress on ensuring free access to images created for the Confederation on the Swiss Open Government Data Portal.

Our people

In terms of personnel, we welcomed a new Fundraising Manager, Stéphane Maffli. Stéphane maintains communication with our donors and collaborates in overseeing fundraising campaigns, including a successful end-of-year donation appeal by post and email.

Meanwhile, some members of the team took on new responsibilities. Marie-Louise Cognard began working at 80%, overseeing finance and business intelligence. She also took on a more active role in strategy development. Directly working with Marie-Louise is Marta Vidal our accountant, who first supported us as an external consultant and became a staff member in January 2021. She stepped up to 70% at the end of the year and has been very involved in our chapter’s internal workings. Additionally, we hired Ylva Liligren as our administration officer, who is now working at 70%.

Looking forward to 2022 and beyond, we plan to build capacity by growing organically to be able to continue delivering high quality and having an impact where our community expects us to.

Our organization

Organizationally, much of our behind-the-scenes work focused on developing and finalizing our new five-year strategy, which is in line with the Wikimedia Movement Strategy 2030. The final strategic plan will guide where to focus our resources and how to make the greatest impact over the next five years. It will also help us become a learning organization that continuously engages in four-step cycles of build, measure, test and learn. The strategic plan was developed over nearly two years with a select group of internal and external stakeholders. Experts in both strategy and mindfulness facilitated the process to ensure the result was a living document that serves as our North Star going forward.

We also spent 2021 ramping up and professionalizing our communication and fundraising efforts. This work included creating new communication and fundraising plans, improving our donor database, allowing donations through Twint and ensuring outreach tools are compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We also began developing messaging that articulates our value proposition and impact to ensure consistency and alignment when communicating about our work.

Our future

Looking forward to 2022, we will begin implementing the new five-year strategy while continuing to adapt our activities to the ever-changing business environment. We will also shape our organization to best fit our environment and multilingual needs. As the pandemic enters its third year, we aim to leverage our team’s flexible, virtual nature and expertise navigating the digital landscape to continue to build our reputation as a trustworthy partner in online knowledge.

Strategy at a glance

Our mission

Wikimedia CH’s mission is to:

Collect, curate and disseminate free knowledge.
Promote the work of contributors.
Help Swiss memory institutions share their knowledge, collections and curatorial resources digitally with a global community through a global platform – all this to make the (Swiss) cultural heritage and its diversity more accessible to the world.
Sensitize all education levels to sustainable use of digital information.
Advocate for free knowledge, also at the political level.

Our strategy

The Wikimedia Foundation officially recognizes Wikimedia CH as the Swiss chapter of the global Wikimedia Movement. We support and advance free knowledge, focusing on four impact directions.

Impact directions

Program GLAM – We collaborate with galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) throughout Switzerland to provide digital access to memory institutions’ collections and artifacts. We aim to share the country’s culture and history in a sustainable format and across all borders.
Program Education – We deliver and collaborate on education programs that advance learning for children and adults at every level. Our work supports lifelong learning as well as teachers and trainers at schools, universities and other higher education institutions.
Program Community – We help the Wikimedia CH community grow, supporting existing members and cultivating new Wikipedians. Among other activities, we train and mentor Wikipedia editors and support our community’s diverse and multicultural interests with targeted programming.
Partnership & Outreach – We believe in using our unique position in the field of information exchange to be an influencer on national and international issues concerning open access and open knowledge. We offer our viewpoints on copyright, technology and more.

Program GLAM

Overview

In 2021, Program GLAM partnered with GLAM institutions in and outside Switzerland, collaborated with fellow chapters and built digital competence and technologies to improve access to cultural heritage and diversity. This year’s GLAM program was packed with events celebrating 50 years of women’s suffrage in Switzerland. Existing and new collaborations coalesced around this theme. For example, we joined longtime partner Who writes his_tory? to lead an edit-a-thon concentrating on Swiss women filmmakers, described in detail in GLAM’s upcoming highlight section.

While we strengthened and developed partnerships around the women’s suffrage celebration, we also ensured a holistic Program GLAM and investigated ways to sustainably scale the program and build team capacity. One of many examples is Program GLAM’s work to share technological knowledge, which we achieved via two different approaches. First, we offered events that made tech-related knowledge more accessible, such as GLAM on Tour at the Enter Museum (a museum of technological artifacts and their manuals) and our various activities with the library of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Library). Second, we further advanced our own technologies and continued sharing them with the GLAM community, Wikipedia chapters and people around the world. They include the WMCH Map Service and GLAM Statistical Tool, allowing users to learn about GLAM resources throughout Switzerland and other countries and to easily discern how best to improve related knowledge shared on Wikipedia.

Highlight activity

50 Years Swiss Women’s Suffrage was a hallmark of Program GLAM in 2021. Multiple events contributed to a year-long celebration that inspired fantastic community engagement and helped develop new GLAM partnerships under a unifying theme. In fact, a new opportunity emerged as professionals from participating GLAM institutions asked us to repeat a similar event in their own organization. All event formats worked well – online, hybrid and in-person.

Of particular interest was a virtual edit-a-thon about Swiss women filmmakers that was part of the schedule for the Solothurn Film Festival. Led by representatives of Who writes his_tory? and Wikimedia CH, the workshop focused on Wikipedia articles about women in film and women’s suffrage in three languages (German, French and Italian). This edit-a-thon was our chapter’s first bilingual workshop, taking place in both French and German. (Italian was also an option. While there were no Italian-speaking participants, articles in Italian were created and edited during the event.)

In 2016, volunteer group Who writes his_tory? began a German-language initiative to increase and improve Wikipedia information about art and feminism. With this 2021 event, Programs GLAM and Community partnered to reach German- and French-speaking community members alike. Furthermore, the writing workshop was a fantastic way to integrate the Wikiverse into the film festival, continuing the Who writes his_tory? partnership with this decades-old heritage institution that celebrates Swiss film productions.

Key program activities

Offered GLAM on Tour at the Enter Museum, allowing participants to interact with thousands of technological artifacts. Technical manuals and reference books helped to improve Wikipedia articles.
Readied the GLAM Statistical Tool for a global rollout as it continues to garner great feedback from other chapters.
Improved the WMCH Map Service software so that international cards can load faster, making the application more user-friendly for chapters and GLAM institutions outside Switzerland. Also, formulated new requirements for the WMCH Map Service, to be implemented in early 2022.
Following the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, set up a project page to share the International Council of Museums (ICOM) appeal to preserve the country’s art and cultural treasures on Wikipedia and other Wiki platforms. We have worked closely with ICOM on past International Museum Day events and did the same this year.
With the German and Austrian chapters, joined #1Lib1Ref for the first time and created project pages in German and French, issuing a call to add reliable evidence to Wikipedia articles where it is missing.
Produced various activities with the ETH Library – e.g. GLAMHack 2021 and WikiProject ETH Portraits. Uploaded library content onto Wikimedia projects (including a complete gallery of women elected to the national parliament in 1971) and organized workshops.
Led activities for International Museum Day 2021 in collaboration with border chapters, including a Wikidata Contest, a social media campaign and an article with ICOM.
Supported International Archives Week 2021, focusing on the theme “Empowering Archives.”
Contributed to the Memoriav OpenGLAM Online Symposium with an opening speech, a Wikiverse presentation and a Wikimedia Commons workshop in French with simultaneous translation in German.
Collaborated to ensure that the world-famous fossil collection of Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle Neuchâtel is now available on Wikimedia Commons and its attached scientific data is searchable on Wikidata.
Developed and financed Wikidata introduction courses for GLAM in German and English in cooperation with the OpenGLAM CH working group.
Facilitated a successful event with the political think tank Foraus to create and edit Wikipedia articles about women in foreign politics.

Program impact

Key accomplishments

We created a thematic focus that tied back to the mission: 50 years of women’s suffrage in Switzerland. It gave many of the year’s activities cohesion and focus, which helped us reach new GLAMs and volunteers with a subject that interested them.
Part of the women’s suffrage events included a collaboration with Program Community to lead the first bilingual (French/German) workshop, ensuring that a larger part of the Wikipedia community could join the event.
We also developed new partnerships, including a partnership with the Swiss Jesuits, who have a first-class library in Zurich and a large archive on the order’s activities in Switzerland. They showed great interest in strengthening their partnership with Wikimedia CH. The first Wikipedia workshop took place in 2021, with a continuation planned for 2022.
Our GLAM Statistical Tool continued to receive great feedback from other chapters. This feedback helps us ready the tool for a global rollout.

Lessons learned

Build engagement and interest with a thematic focus. The 2021 topic of women’s suffrage piqued our GLAM community’s interest and provided an excellent opportunity to develop new GLAM partnerships and collaborate on a common goal.
Engage co-organizers, such as the Wikipedia community and GLAM institutions, to marshal needed resources and extend the impact of thematic programming. We did so for the women’s suffrage celebration, and our approach worked well and strengthened relations and collaboration among all parties involved.
Define clear roles and responsibilities for activities with other chapters to achieve better, more organized, more efficient collaborations.

Looking ahead

As Program GLAM turns its focus to 2022, we will introduce a new theme to leverage this year’s lessons. The Year of Sound celebrates the 100th year of radio in Switzerland and focuses on music, soundwaves, and other audio heritage. Just as with our women’s suffrage celebration, we intend to engage co-organizers and build a cohesive set of events around the new theme. We’ve already issued a call to Wikimedians, GLAMs and partners to participate, edit related Wiki content and/or plan events. Also, a workshop at the Swiss Postal Services, Telegraphy and Telephony (PTT) archives is already planned, as is a conference at the Enter Museum.

Of course, we will continue serving the interests across the spectrum of GLAM topics beyond the Year of Sound. Our longtime practice has been to scale programming that has proven successful in the past. The structure of GLAM on Tour events — whereby Wikipedians are invited to an exclusive, multi-day excursion at a select GLAM institution — is one that our community has always favored. As such, we are planning four GLAM on Tour events for 2022, including one confirmed with the Zurich Central Library.

Along with programmatic planning, Program GLAM will focus on improving and scaling operations in 2022. We will explore how to build the team’s capacity to manage our expanding program. Also, we will help integrate Wikimedia tools and workflows into Swiss GLAM institutions.