Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Czech Republic/2016

Grant stage: grant in progress

Grantee: Wikimedia Czech Republic

Amount granted: 40,785 € Euro (46,382 US dollars)

Funding period: January 1, 2016 to December 31, 2016

Final report due: 30 January 2017

Application

Background

These two requests are required of first-time applicants. In future years, you can use reports to substitute for these requirements.

1. Link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements in the past year.

   WMF Blog: Senior citizens learn to edit Wikipedia in the Czech Republic

   Many more stories in Czech on our blog

2. Link to one learning story you have created or contributed to, that demonstrates how your organization documents and applies learning.

   Learning patterns/Training senior citizens

Link to these documents only if you have them.

1. Link to your organization's staffing plan. Wikimedia Czech Republic 2016 Staffing plan
2. Link to your annual plan. The annual plan is being prepared by the WMCZ board but will only be formally approved in the beginning of 2016 by the General assembly.
3. Link to your strategic plan. Currently, there is no strategic plan available in a public form but there was a Strategic meeting in June 2015 in the office where the long-term strategy was discussed by members of the chapter. We are working on a publicly available strategic plan at the moment.

Please add your global metrics to this sheet. Contact APG staff if you need access. {{{metricsapp}}}

Programs

Media acquisition support

Measurable objectives for each project are underlined for the convenience of committee members. The overall metrics for both programs are provided separately in the google forms, as required.

The overall objective of the "media acquisition program" is to support the Czech Wiki-community of photographers in improving the photographic coverage of Czech points of interest. Eventually we expect that all important points of interest will have a picture on Wikimedia Commons. Over the years, the community has become strong and very efficient, thanks to the Mediagrant program that provides travel support and equipment for photographers who upload to Wikimedia Commons. This successful volunteer-run program is supported by two types of workshops, competitions and will be reinforced with a map of yet undocumented points of interest.

15000 media will be uploaded to Commons and 3200 media will be added to Wikimedia articles as a result of the activities in the media acquisition program.

Czech villages photography progress in 2016

Photodocumentation program

• This is a successful photodocumentation program of notable objects in the Czech Republic (towns/villages/settlements, nature reserves and other protected areas, bodies of water or any other encyclopedically interesting objects). It originates from the successful 'Mediagrant' program - which produced more than 60,000 of pictures over years - and maintains its general rules.
• In a nutshell, every photographer in the Czech Republic can join and take pictures of the above mentioned sights. WMCZ is reimbursing for the travel expenses. The goal is to gradually document all notable objects and use them to illustrate articles on Czech Wikipedia. For 2016, we expect 1,200 new points of interest to be documented by 14,000 uploaded pictures (3,000 of them used on Czech and other Wikipedias).

Example of good practice: WMF Blog: Czech Mediagrant: go take pictures, upload them and we cover your costs

3rd WikiTown and 11th Photoworkshop

• WikiTown [WikiMěsto] is an annual weekend event aiming at photodocumentation and improvement of articles in a chosen city which had been poorly documented before. It serves to improve information about places which are further from the "beaten path" and most Mediagrant photographers would not pay a visit there. The goal of the event is to maximize our efforts and produce as much encyclopedic and photographic information as possible during one week-end. At least 500 pictures will be uploaded, 100 of them used in Wikipedia projects.
• PhotoWorkshop is a similar weekend-long traditional event with similar goals but also aiming at fostering the photographing community of Czech Wikimedians and improving their skills at practical hands-on courses or theoretical lectures on photography. At least 500 pictures will be uploaded, 100 of them used in Wikipedia projects.

Examples of good practice: WMCZ blog: Blog post about the 2015 WikiTown, WMCZ Blog: Blog post about the 2015 photoworkshop

Photographic competitions

• Two smaller competitions aiming at further improving picture quality of our photodocumentators. We expect at least 8 people to participate in each of these contests.
• The first - "Well documented village" - will be a competition and a campaign aiming at points of interest that photographers should document in each village. Learning to document everything important (national heritage sites, memorable trees, but also rivers etc.) is crucial for improving the efficiency of the photodocumentation program (so that photographers do not have to revisit the same villages). Each contestant will document a village of his/her choice with an estimated number of 50 pictures.
• The second - currently bearing no name - will concentrate on improving articles which relate to the pictures taken by photographers participating on the photodocumentation program. We want to stress the need for good quality articles to accompany the pictures taken by the volunteers and foster the Wikipedia-Wikimedia Commons collaboration. Each contestant will substantially improve at least 1 article of his/her choice.

Example of good practice: WMCZ blog: Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 report summarizing the course of the contest

Map of points of interest

• To simplify the planning of travels for our photographers, we will collect geodata (geocoordinates) of as many potentially interesting points of interest (POIs) in the Czech Republic as possible. These will include data already stored on Wikipedia and Wikidata but also other coordinates acquired from various sources thanks to our institutional collaborations. Those acquired from other sources will also be incorporated into Wikidata to enrich the Wikimedia content.
• The data will be cleaned and assembled onto a map of the Czech Republic, enabling everyone to find the POIs in their neighborhood. The map will discriminate between POIs which already have a picture on Czech Wikipedia and those which do not.
• We plan to turn this map into a mobile app, either in collaboration with the developers inside the Wikimedia community or during a hackathon event which is regularly organized by one of Czech IT companies. We expect to reach at least 50 app downloads during the 2nd half of 2016 and we will promote the app in Android communities in at least 3 promotional articles.
• We envision a "phase II" of this project during which we will invite other European chapters to help us provide their geodata and turn the app into a Europe-wide or even worldwide tool. When the Commons uploader app is made available again, we would like to connect these two apps.

Example of good practice: A simple map of villages which do not have a picture on Czech Wikipedia, developed by our member Blahma

Equipment

• We plan to renew our photographic equipment (which we lend to our volunteers) with a camera objective. It will be primarily purchased for our growing community in the city of Brno, which is too far from Prague to enable efficient borrowing of photographic equipment (there already is a camera to be stored in Brno from January 2016 on).
• A small sum is reserved for the maintenance of our photographic equipment. At least 9 people will make use of our photographic equipment in 2016.

Example of good practice: Page where photographic equipment is offered to the community

Education and institutional collaboration

Measurable objectives for each project are underlined for the convenience of committee members. The overall metrics for both programs are provided separately in the google forms, as required.

Institutional collaboration is an important step that Wikipedia must take to improve its quality and reliability. We have successfully developed collaborations with Czech universities and other cultural institutions such as libraries and are using the benefits of these cooperations to organize courses for students, senior citizens or certain key professions (librarians, university teachers, translators, etc.) or raise new media content from their archives. The ultimate goal is, of course, the improvement of encyclopedic content on Czech Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects.

1050 articles will be created or improved as a result of the activities in the education program, which will involve 640 new editors.

Students Write Wikipedia program

• A university education program created in 2011, aiming at students and their teachers, who develop courses during which students write Wikipedia articles. As of 15 October 2015, there were 74 documented courses from 17 different institutions with 1240 students in them, majority of them were university students (full data here).
• Project is led by the education manager, who meets teachers and potential volunteers from the Wikimedia community and helps with administration and tech support. Individual courses have their volunteering coordinators assigned via education extension. So-called coordinators (usually Wikipedians and Wikimedians) give lectures and provide online help.
• The stress is on production of articles and increasing the awareness of Wikipedia among the university students and in the academia. We expect at least 100 articles to be started and 2,000,000 bytes added.More criteria are included in the staffing plan.
• Courses for public Wikimedian speakers and a campaign looking for new public speakers among Wikipedians will ensure the sustainable development.

Example of good practice: WMF blog: Starting an education program for small chapters 1.0

Senior Citizens Write Wikipedia program

• A new education program created in 2014, aiming at senior citizens, which are given regular weekly lectures. Gradually, they become regular editors and write Wikipedia articles. The stress is thus on recruiting new Wikipedians rather than just short-time production of content. More than 100 senior citizens already participated; 20 have become regular Wikipedians who continue to edit; further 15 people have shown will to edit although currently (during the summer holiday) do not edit. 111 new articles were written and 368 pictures were uploaded.
• Administration is led by the education manager, individual weekly courses have their paid coordinators; coordinators give lectures and provide online help. We plan to tone down the number of courses in Prague to make the program more efficient while opening new courses outside of the capital. This goal which was not fulfilled in 2015 because of changes in the leadership of the program. Because the program was featured by Czech media, we have documented interest in organizing Wikipedia courses for senior citizens from at least 8 Czech cities (libraries or city councils).
• Courses for public speakers and a campaign looking for new public speakers among Wikipedians will foster its sustainable development.
• In 2016, we expect 150 articles to be written by at least 100 participants. More criteria are included in the staffing plan.

Example of good practice: WMF blog: Senior citizens learn to edit Wikipedia in the Czech Republic

Masaryk University Wikipedians team

• An ongoing WikiProject Masaryk University has been established in 2013 in an effort to improve collaboration between this largest university in Brno (the 2nd largest city in the country) and Wikipedia. In 2015, a position of a "Wikipedian in residence" was funded by the university, leading to new articles written about important alumni of the university, a public lecture for teachers on the usage of Wikipedia in class, creation of a legal framework for the release of employee works under a free license, and implementation of a citation tool that enables automatic export of theses into the Wikipedia citation format.
• The program will be coordinated by our "Wikipedian in Brno", Marek Blahuš, and expand to other institutions in Brno besides the Masaryk University. The goals, included in our staffing plan, include uploads of hundreds of pictures to Wikimedia Commons from institutional archives, workshops for professionals from various institutions, assistance with the Students Write Wikipedia program in Brno, workshops for the public and edit-a-thons ('Wikipedia club') at the academic grounds.

Example of good practice: WMCZ blog post about the Wikipedian in Residence at Masaryk University

Cultural partnerships [GLAM]

• Courses will be organized for the employees of our partner or befriended organizations - such as the National Heritage Institute, Municipal Library of Prague, National Library or the Museum of Silesia. Selected events can be organized in the open air when needed, thanks to a large tent we purchased in 2015. These events bring qualitative benefits - rather than massive numbers of new articles - and are important for future collaborations.
• We will organize a writing contest in collaboration with one of these institutions or similar, aimed at improving Wikipedia articles on a given topic (similar to CEE spring in 2015). At least 300 articles will be written by at least 30 Wikipedians.
• A public plan and a road map will be developed for the engagement of external experts (eg. librarians) into improving Wikipedia and providing reliable sources for writing articles, thus gradually engaging them into Wikipedia (possibly involving some new tool or app).

Examples of good practice: WMCZ blog post about the memorandum of collaboration with the National Heritage Institute and a workshop for librarians in the National Library, WMCZ blog post about the CEE Spring in the Czech Republic.

Staff

Education manager

1. Please link to a detailed job description, which shows how this staff person will help your organization achieve its goals.

   Staffing plan: Employee 1: Education manager (Jan 2016 - Dec 2016)

2. How long is this staff person or contractor's planned engagement with your organization, and how many hours will they work over the course of this grant?

   20 hours per week × 52 weeks = 1040 hours over the course of 12 months, ongoing from year to year after evaluation

3. Use a percentage of that person's total hours to show how they will spend their time on different programs and activities.

   Please see employee 1's staff time subsection.

Wikipedian in Brno

1. Please link to a detailed job description, which shows how this staff person will help your organization achieve its goals.

   Staffing plan: Employee 2: Wikipedian in Brno (Jan 2016 - Dec 2016)

2. How long is this staff person or contractor's planned engagement with your organization, and how many hours will they work over the course of this grant?

   12 hours per week × 52 weeks = 624 hours over the course of 12 months, ongoing from year to year after evaluation

3. Use a percentage of that person's total hours to show how they will spend their time on different programs and activities.

   Please see employee 2's staff time subsection.

Budget and resource plan

Link to a detailed budget (that also includes a plan for raising the resources you need). → Budget plan

Midpoint report

This is a brief report on the grantee's progress during the midpoint reporting period: 1 January - 30 June 2016.

Program story

Please link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements during the reporting period.

Here is the text you may use to add a story or link!

Interview with one of the participants of the senior citizen program - about the motivations that lead him to contribute to Czech Wikipedia
Building a local community in the Czech Republic - essay written by our Wikipedian in residence in Brno

Progress

Please add text or a link to a page with details on your program progress. This should including reporting against each of the SMART objectives from your proposal.

Media acquisition support

15000 media will be uploaded to Commons and 3200 media will be added to Wikimedia articles as a result of the activities in the media acquisition program:

• For 2016, we expect 1,200 new points of interest to be documented by 14,000 uploaded pictures (3,000 of them used on Czech and other Wikipedias).

A total of 282 points of interest (mostly Czech villages or protected areas) were documented by our volunteer photographers participating in the 'Mediagrant' program which offers reimbursement of travel expenses. 2966 pictures of these objects were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. 16.3 % of these files are used on Wikimedia projects. The slow start of the project was caused by a transitional phase between the PEG-funded Mediagrant II project and the current program fully integrated into APG (priorities were on starting various educational activities in the early months of 2016 and the media acquisition program was only properly started at the end of March). We expect a part (about 1/4 of the allocated funds) to be left unspent at the end of the year. Examples of interesting places documented by our volunteers include national monument Lichnice - Kaňkovy hory or the village of Zárybničná Lhota in Southern Bohemia (and a few hundreds more).

WikiTown 2016 took place in the Western Bohemian town of Mariánské Lázně

• 3rd WikiTown: At least 500 pictures will be uploaded, 100 of them used in Wikipedia projects.

The WikiTown (see full report here) took place in the city of Mariánské Lázně (Marienbad) in Western Bohemia during the first week-end of June. The event was similar in concept to former WikiTowns (see full list here) but featured much more outreach efforts than usual. Our education team organized a lecture for local inhabitants, especially seniors, and a second talk was given to the pupils of the local elementary school. During the latter event, we pioneered the international #WikiTeachIn campaign which aims to promote teaching of digital literacy on the example of Wikipedia. As for the photographic and encyclopedic documentation: 202,000 bytes of high-quality encyclopedic content were added to Czech Wikipedia, 63 pages of old museum books were digitized and - quite amazingly - 39 villages and 3 other objects were photodocumented by our volunteers who (as of the end of June 2016) uploaded 885 pictures to Wikimedia Commons. Of these, 168 distinct files are already in use (17%) and the total file usage over Wikimedia projects is 466. A total number of 18 people took part in the organization and participation (not all were accommodated in the hotel, some arrived for a single day or volunteered on-line).

• PhotoWorkshop: At least 500 pictures will be uploaded, 100 of them used in Wikipedia projects.

The annual photo-workshop will be organized in autumn 2016. The venue has not been announced yet.

• 2 photographic competitions. We expect at least 8 people to participate in each of these contests. "Well documented village". Each contestant will document a village of his/her choice with an estimated number of 50 pictures. The second contest. Each contestant will substantially improve at least 1 article of his/her choice.

The first of these two competitions has just kicked off, named "Foť & Piš" ("Take pictures and write) because it combines photographic documentation with article writing.

• Map of points of interest. We expect to reach at least 50 app downloads during the 2nd half of 2016 and we will promote the app in Android communities in at least 3 promotional articles.

The development of the map of points of interest is in its preparatory phase with most work done on Wikidata. More than 50,000 edits were made on Wikidata in an effort to improve quality of the data. Over summer, coordinates of all Czech villages, protected areas and monuments will be transferred to Wikidata. We hope to build up and engage our small Czech Wikidata community and have thus decided to organize the first Czech Wikidata meeting in September 2016. 15 people have already signed up for the meeting. The following stage will involve additional data contributions (eg. on hundreds of Czech abandoned village (Q350895)), data validation (eg. more exact geocoordinates for Czech municipalities) and building an Android app which reads these data, displays them on a Wikimedia Map and shows the user the nearby points of interest. It will also communicate with the Wikimedia Commons app which enables upload of pictures.

• Equipment. At least 9 people will make use of our photographic equipment in 2016.

Already 7 people borrowed the photographic equipment.

Education and institutional collaboration

1050 articles will be created or improved as a result of the activities in the education program, which will involve 640 new editors:

• Students Write Wikipedia. We expect at least 100 articles to be started and 2,000,000 bytes added. More criteria are included in the staffing plan.

Students of "Christianity" at Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University during a Wikipedia training

As of 23rd June 2016, 2,953,605 bytes were added to Czech Wikipedia by the students enrolled in the education program courses (this includes both winter term 2015/2016 and summer term 2015/2016), 78 Wikipedia articles were started from scratch. This is already a >30% increase in the year-to-year comparison of added bytes. Several strong courses with many student participants are the cause of this. Additionally, 668 pictures were uploaded by participants of two courses (Architecture and Environmentalism) which incorporated photodocumentation into the student projects. In total, >700 Czech students took part in our education program this school year. The underperformance in number of articles created (78 down from 100 expected) is caused by the fact that there are fewer and fewer uncovered topics in Czech Wikipedia and students have often chosen topics where at least a few sentences had already been written.

We work on several other education-related projects including collaboration on the international #WikiTeachIn initiative. Our team also has representatives in the Wikimedia Education Collaborative, we are members of the Czech Alliance for Open Learning and the working group of the Strategy for Digital Literacy. Most of the improvements in the education program this year, both in the student and senior programs, are a direct result of the project's professionalization, after the education manager was employed in January 2016.

Scanning workshop in the Elpida centre in Prague, 2016

• Senior Citizens Write Wikipedia. In 2016, we expect 150 articles to be written by at least 100 participants.

The senior program blossomed in 2016 while it expanded out of Prague into the cities of Brno, Liberec and Příbram. Full curriculum courses (about 6 lessons) were organized in each of the cities and attracted significant attention from the local senior communities. A total of 70 senior citizens in the Czech Republic took part in our courses in 2016. They learned how to contribute to Wikipedia, added 895,135 bytes to the main namespace of Czech Wikipedia while making 2258 edits, and created 134 new articles from scratch. This is not only a significant contribution to the content of Czech Wikipedia but the program also improves coverage of underrepresented topics, for instance electrostatics or important women in the Czech society. The program will continue in autumn (after the summer holiday). Advanced participants of the courses have been invited to newly-established Wikipedia clubs in Brno and Prague. Several participants regularly take part in them, enabling them to work on Wikipedia in a calm library environment but also socialize with other Wikipedians.

To train new trainers, we renewed the Mluvkové ("public speakers") campaign which recruits (and offers support to) Wikipedians who are not afraid to talk to people or media or give lectures. We organized one in-person meeting for the experienced Wikipedians who already lead courses, during which we simulated the talks and received peer feed-back and commentary from a professional public speaker. We also made effort to expand the community by organizing several lectures for various librarians or social workers. For example, one of them (in the social centre Elpida) attracted 18 people. A total of 77 librarians all over the Czech Republic were trained in contributing to Wikipedia during ~3-hour events or lectures, making 267 edits in the main namespace (963 in total). We have at least one specific example where a librarian trained in a similar event in 2015 started to organize his own Wikipedia courses in a regional library.

Wikipedia club in the city of Brno

• Masaryk University Wikipedians team. The goals, included in our staffing plan, include uploads of hundreds of pictures to Wikimedia Commons from institutional archives, workshops for professionals from various institutions, assistance with the Students Write Wikipedia program in Brno, workshops for the public and edit-a-thons ('Wikipedia club') at the academic grounds.

Extensive consultations with Masaryk University staff including lawyers resulted in the adoption of a directive that is implemented since June 2016 and prescribes "open by default" for all future works created by the university Press Office staff, i.e. the monthly magazine Muni (text and pictures), press releases, brochures and digital photos. The first Muni magazine issue to implement this was June 2016 (see last two lines on p. 2); ten CC BY-licensed press releases have been published until 30 June 2016. A workflow for regular uploading and reuse of these texts and images is currently being set up in cooperation with the university (which will financially stimulate the reuse), and a batch of tens or hundreds of existing essential digital photographs (notable people, places etc.) is to be released soon. First Wikipedia course for senior citizens in Brno was organized by the university's "third age" department in April. Collaboration with Moravian Library was launched in March and has resulted so far in three public lectures on Wikipedia/Wikimedia/Wikisource and a Wikipedia course for the public. During regular meetings, Wikipedians and librarians develop activities for Fall 2016, such as a Wikisource challenge for library patrons, technical cooperation regarding OCR and metadata, and organization of workshops. Contacts with a few other institutions have been established (public sector, library, church, NGO). Wikipedia Club at the Faculty of Arts library, presided by a motivated teacher, has convened 17 times since March and the event's format spread even into Prague; more promotion for the event among students is planned for the autumn term. Two new Students Write Wikipedia courses ran in the spring term. Six monthly meetups of the Brno Wikimedia community took place.

• Cultural partnerships [GLAM]. We will organize a writing contest in collaboration with one of these institutions or similar, aimed at improving Wikipedia articles on a given topic (similar to CEE spring in 2015). At least 300 articles will be written by at least 30 Wikipedians. A public plan and a road map will be developed for the engagement of external experts (eg. librarians) into improving Wikipedia and providing reliable sources for writing articles, thus gradually engaging them into Wikipedia (possibly involving some new tool or app).

Te writing contest has taken form of the classical CEE Spring contest and brought two special categories organized in collaboration with our partners (Polish towns, Czechoslovak Resistance Movement during the WWI) besides the main category revolving around the CEE region. Results and statistics are to be announced in mid July.

Signing the collaboration agreement with Martin Svoboda, director of the National Technical Library

We also made first steps to start collaborations with what we call "external experts" - people willing to contribute knowledge to Wikipedia but unable or not willing to become a proper part of the community. One way to establish bonds between such experts and us is by creating a reference desk. Our new project "Ptejte se knihovny" (Ask the library) collaborates with a preexisting portal run by the National Library of the Czech Republic and offers customized answers to Czech Wikipedians. Besides that we also signed a memorandum of collaboration with the National Technical Library of the Czech Republic (blog post here) and have already taken part in a Museum Night in the library's building. Authority data donation was also offered by the library and we are currently reviewing its usefulness for Wikidata.

Spending

Please report your organization's total spending during the reporting period, or link to a financial document showing your total spending. 9,315.49 EUR

Here is where your spending notes/explanations are.

As of 30th June 2016

Final report

This is the final report for your grant, describing your outcomes from the period 1 January 2016 to 31 December 2016.

Program story

Please link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements during the reporting period.

BLOG POST ON DATA DONATION FROM THE CZECH ENVIRONMENTAL AGENCY: Blog post describing data donation achieved in collaboration with a governmental agency, with interesting visualisations based on the data. We now use it to lure other data donators

Learning story

Please link to one learning story that shows how your organization documents lessons learned and adapts its programs accordingly.

HOW TO TEACH WIKIPEDIA TO SENIORS: Lesson plan for those who want to teach Wikipedia to elderly (link to Lesson 1, other 5 lessons under construction)

Results

Please add text or a link to a page with details on your program results. You should report on each of the objectives you included in your Simple APG application.

Please visit this worksheet to view global metrics targets and progress.

Media acquisition support

The Media acquisition support program is run almost exclusively by volunteers yet provides massive media content for Wikimedia Commons. The projects included in this program also feature improvements to Wikipedia articles and Wikidata. The essence of the program – a highly successful reimbursement project for volunteer photographers – has remained mostly unchanged from last years. This key project has been supplemented by some new initiatives.

15000 media will be uploaded to Commons and 3200 media will be added to Wikimedia articles as a result of the activities in the media acquisition program:

• For 2016, we expect 1,200 new points of interest to be documented by 14,000 uploaded pictures (3,000 of them used on Czech and other Wikipedias).

⮚ A total of 1020 points of interest (mostly Czech villages or protected areas) were documented by our volunteer photographers participating in the "Mediagrant" program which offers reimbursement of travel expenses. 17,099 pictures of these objects were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. 20.5 % of these files are used in Wikimedia projects. Although the project kicked off very late this year (due to a transition between the PEG-funded Mediagrant II project and the current APG-integrated one), we were able to catch up almost completely and meet most of our targets (number of pictures uploaded and used). From those, the Czech-Polish Wikiexpedition (whose Czech part was funded from Mediagrant) provided for more than 1,800 pictures from the remote Bruntál region with 27% usage in Wikimedia projects. Examples of places documented by our volunteers include the national monument Lichnice - Kaňkovy hory or the village of Zárybničná Lhota in Southern Bohemia (and more than a thousand others). The high picture usage is evidence that the pictures are valuable and needed in Wikimedia projects.

⮚ We also fostered better categorization of Czech pictures on Wikimedia Commons. We did this by creating a list of uncategorized images with a Czech description based on an idea in a recently created learning pattern. There were 4,600 uncategorized images with Czech description in April 2016 but only 450 left in July and we are able to keep this number very low even now (with new images constantly being uploaded at a quick pace). We estimate over 8,000 edits have been made by the volunteer community involved in this initiative. Such small low-cost projects show the potential of technical tools which simplify certain types of editor activities.

WikiTown 2016 took place in the Western Bohemian town of Mariánské Lázně

• 3rd WikiTown: At least 500 pictures will be uploaded, 100 of them used in Wikipedia projects.

⮚ The WikiTown (see full report here) took place in the city of Mariánské Lázně (Marienbad) in Western Bohemia during the first week-end of June. The event was similar in concept to former WikiTowns (see full list here) but featured much more outreach efforts than usual. Our education team organized a lecture for local inhabitants, especially seniors, and a second talk was given to the pupils of the local elementary school. During the latter event, we pioneered the international #WikiTeachIn campaign which aims to promote teaching of digital literacy on the example of Wikipedia. As for the photographic and encyclopedic documentation: 202,000 bytes of high-quality encyclopedic content were added to Czech Wikipedia, 63 pages of old museum books were digitized and - quite amazingly - 39 villages and 3 other objects were photodocumented by our volunteers who (as of the end of June 2016) uploaded 885 pictures to Wikimedia Commons. Of these, 168 distinct files are already in use (17%) and the total file usage over Wikimedia projects is 466. A total number of 18 people took part in the organization and participation (not all were accommodated in the hotel, some arrived for a single day or volunteered on-line).

• PhotoWorkshop: At least 500 pictures will be uploaded, 100 of them used in Wikimedia projects.

  

  Photo editing and talks during the photo-workshop in Jihlava

⮚ The annual photo-workshop took place in the city of Jihlava and was attended by 8 photographers and 1 guest. 7 contributors uploaded 316 images in total (49 of them used in Wikimedia projects), which did not reach the original goal. This is because the organizers decided to concentrate on the educational and community role of the workshop. Two experienced Wikipedians-photographers gave talks about photography and about ways in which photographers can help Wikimedia projects. Additionally, the workshop included an article editing session during which older pictures were added to Wikipedia articles to increase their usage. About 180 images were thereby added to corresponding articles.

• 2 photographic competitions. We expect at least 8 people to participate in each of these contests. "Well documented village". Each contestant will document a village of his/her choice with an estimated number of 50 pictures. The second contest. Each contestant will substantially improve at least 1 article of his/her choice.

⮚ We organized a photographic competition "Foť & Piš" ("Take Pictures and Write") to combine photographic documentation with relevant article writing. A total of 6 Wikipedians took part, improving 22 pages and adding 92,000 bytes of valuable encyclopedic information. In terms of these results, the competition was an overall success, although complex rules and tight deadlines were cited by some Wikipedians as preventing wider participation in the competition. The second planned competition (Well documented village) has not been organized due to lack of free time of the volunteer organizer and because we want to decide on a more attractive competition format before we invest time in them.

• Map of points of interest. We expect to reach at least 50 app downloads during the 2nd half of 2016 and we will promote the app in Android communities in at least 3 promotional articles.

  

  Wikidata workshop in Pardubice

  

  Czech memorable trees, color coded by circumference of the trunk (see query here)

⮚ The basis for a good map like this was to have a rich dataset on Wikidata. More than 50,000 edits were made on Wikidata in 30,000 items in an effort to improve quality of the data. For this, we decided to build up, foster and engage our small Czech Wikidata community and organized the first Czech Wikidata workshop in September 2016 (see blog post here). 11 people took part in the workshop. Individual efforts (eg. in hundreds of Czech abandoned village (Q350895)) and other data validation) provided for additional outcomes. For example, the Czech Environmental Agency donated their data on memorable trees and so thousands of Czech memorable trees now have a Wikidata item. We used this database for a successful Facebook campaign during which our followers were asked to upload pictures of memorable trees in their neighborhood. The post was shared >55 times and reached >10,000 people and resulted in 56 pictures uploaded by 9 different users, most of them previously inactive or even newly registered. We thus verified our hypothesis that maps of unphotographed objects can give us practical results, such as new editors or new media content for Wikimedia projects. The resulting blog post, full of data visualizations, is also used to attract attention of other governmental agencies (for example the National Heritage Institute which promised full collaboration on that). We also met with staff from Linkedpipes.com and discussed how the data transfer from governmental databases to Wikidata could be automated in future.

⮚ The original plan - to develop a Wikimedia Commons app displaying nearby unphotographed points of interest - was altered. This is because an IEG grant submitted by an independent group suggested very similar outcomes (see outcome "Display nearby wiki articles lacking photos") and we did not want to reinvent the wheel. We contacted the developer team and started a collaboration, providing feedback to their improvements. Further collaboration with the developer team, mainly switching the data source to Wikidata and creating a map of unphotographed sights during a joint hackathon, is planned for 2017 in the 2017 APG proposal.

• Equipment. At least 9 people will make use of our photographic equipment in 2016.

⮚ 8 people borrowed the photographic equipment in 2016 and it was used to take and upload 1435 pictures to Wikimedia Commons. We purchased photographic lens for one of our cameras and one of the cameras is now routinely kept in Brno to serve to the lccal community of photographers.

Education and institutional collaboration

Education projects stood at the forefront of this year's developments in our chapter in 2016 and most innovations this year were in this program. The progress we made is due to improved strategic planning and professional project management, which would not be possible without our employee team. The two employees which handle Education and institutional collaboration were employed in January 2016 and continue to work with us into 2017.

1050 articles will be created or improved as a result of the activities in the education program, which will involve 640 new editors:

• Students Write Wikipedia. We expect at least 100 articles to be started and 2,000,000 bytes added. More criteria are included in the staffing plan.

Students of "Christianity" at Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University during a Wikipedia training

⮚ The university education program continued in its growth in school year 2015/2016. As of 30th September 2016, 3,103,409 bytes were added to Czech Wikipedia by the students enrolled in the education program courses (this includes both winter term 2015/2016 and summer term 2015/2016), 148 Wikipedia articles were started from scratch. This is already a >50% increase in the year-to-year comparison of added bytes. The growth trend is documented in the metrics timetable. Several strong courses with many student participants are the cause for the year-to-year increase. Additionally, 694 pictures were uploaded my students, mainly by participants of two courses (Architecture and Environmentalism). Of those, 588 (=84 %) were used in Wikimedia projects. In total, about 559 Czech students took part in our education program this school year (yet only 373 made it to the main namespace). 148 articles were newly written (up from 100 expected). Mostly though, students have chosen topics where at least a few sentences had already been written.

⮚ We also started work on several other education-related projects including collaboration on the international #EduWiki campaign. We somewhat adapted it for the Czech school system, named it "Teach with Wiki" (Uč (s) Wiki) and decided to aim for the development of critical thinking and digital literacy. We designed teaching resources for elementary school and high school students and tested them during the WikiTown event in Mariánské Lázně in June 2016. We had very good feedback from local teachers so we decided to continue in developing different school activities. We also recorded a video talk on how to teach students using and about Wikipedia. We will continue in this idea in 2017 and prepare a Ministry of Education-certified course for teachers.

⮚ Our team also has representatives in the Wikimedia Education Collaborative (where we provide mentorship to other program leaders and give feedback to the P&E Dashboard), we are members of the Czech Alliance for Open Learning and the working group of the Czech Strategy for Digital Literacy.

Scanning workshop in the Elpida centre in Prague, 2016

• Senior Citizens Write Wikipedia. In 2016, we expect 150 articles to be written by at least 100 participants.

⮚ The senior program blossomed in 2016 while it expanded out of Prague into the cities of Brno, Liberec, Olomouc, Vsetín, Ústí nad Labem, Ostrava and Karviná, and significantly overcame our expectations thanks to the good work of the WMCZ education team. Full curriculum courses (4-6 lessons) were organized in each of the cities and attracted significant attention from the local senior communities. 111 senior citizens were newly registered in 2016 but as many as 142 seniors were active in 2016 (some of them registered during the preceding years). The retention of users is greatly fostered by a new type of course - advanced courses for seniors who want to continue meeting and learn more. In total, we organized 19 courses in 2016 and the seniors involved added 1,971,065 bytes to the main namespace of Czech Wikipedia while making 3043 edits and creating 216 new articles. This is not only a significant contribution to the content of Czech Wikipedia but the program also improves coverage of underrepresented topics, such as electrostatics or important women in the Czech society.

⮚ Outreach to librarians is an important part of our work in senior citizen education programs. In order to keep the project sustainable, we organized several "How to teach seniors write Wikipedia" seminars for 50 librarians in total. The results of this long-term work with librarians are already here as 3 past participants of our courses organized their own courses for their readers under our supervision and are becoming independent. This is very helpful because we are training our own trainers of Wikipedia instead of supplying them "from our ranks". Changes that we made in librarian training are likely to further increase the number of librarians who organize their own regional Wikipedia courses. Some of the librarians are indeed fairly active editors already and the participants of courses added 1,136,740 bytes in 591 edited pages.

⮚ Advanced participants of the senior courses have been invited to newly-established Wikipedia clubs in two largest cities of the Czech Republic, Brno and Prague, where concentration of editors is the highest. Several senior participants regularly take part in them, enabling them to work on Wikipedia in a calm library environment but also socialize with other Wikipedians.

⮚ The Wikipedia Club in the Municipal Library of Prague attracted 55 different visitors (30 registered, 5 of them newly registered this year), added 772,927 bytes of encyclopedic content to Czech Wikipedia and uploaded >300 pictures. Some of the participants were seniors while others were experienced long-time Wikipedians, creating a diverse atmosphere where skills are exchanged between visitors who are at different levels of Wikipedia expertise. In 2017 we plan to invite more students participating in the Students Write Wikipedia project to "write their homework" at the Wikipedia Club – improving quality of their contributions.

⮚ To train new trainers, we upgraded the Mluvkové ("public speakers") campaign which recruits (and offers support to) Wikipedians who are not afraid to talk to people or media or give lectures. We organized one in-person meeting for the experienced Wikipedians who already lead courses, during which we simulated the talks and received peer feed-back as well as commentary from a professional public speaker. During autumn we organized three more seminar for our trainers (strategic meeting for the senior education program, training of public speaking, and Introductory workshop on teaching of adults and course design). Now we have 12 officially trained trainers in 7 Czech cities. At the end of 2016, we started to prepare teaching materials for the trainers of Seniors write Wikipedia courses (for each lesson). In 2017, we would like to complete them and distribute them both to current trainers and to potential trainers among librarians.

Wikipedia club in the city of Brno

• Masaryk University Wikipedians team. The goals, included in our staffing plan, include uploads of hundreds of pictures to Wikimedia Commons from institutional archives, workshops for professionals from various institutions, assistance with the Students Write Wikipedia program in Brno, workshops for the public and edit-a-thons ('Wikipedia club') at the academic grounds.

⮚ In 2016 we employed Marek Blahuš as a Wikipedian in Residence, or as we call it, "Wikipedian in Brno"; he is co-funded from the Masaryk University where we have a long-term partnership. Marek was in charge of most developments in the Brno project. Extensive consultations with Masaryk University staff including lawyers resulted in the adoption of a directive that is implemented since June 2016 and prescribes "open by default" for all future works created by the university Press Office staff, i.e. the monthly magazine Muni (text and pictures), press releases, brochures and digital photos. The first Muni magazine issue to implement this was June 2016 (see last two lines on p. 2); ten CC BY-licensed press releases have been published until 30 June 2016. A workflow for regular uploading and reuse of these texts and images is currently being set up in cooperation with the university (which will financially stimulate the reuse), and a batch of tens or hundreds of existing essential digital photographs (notable people, places etc.) is to be released in 2017 (postponed from December 2016 due to time issues with Wikiconference).

⮚ The project also provided support to local Students Write Wikipedia and Seniors Write Wikipedia courses. First Wikipedia course for senior citizens in Brno was organized by the university's "third age" department in April, others followed in autumn. Collaboration with Moravian Library was launched in March and has resulted so far in three public lectures on Wikipedia/Wikimedia/Wikisource and a Wikipedia course for the public. 2 new Students Write Wikipedia courses ran in the spring term and 4 new in the summer term, totaling 6 new courses which is a significant growth (Masaryk University is the most quickly growing university in the Czech Republic in terms of number of Students Write Wikipedia courses). One of the biggest achievements is an article on Christian sacral architecture written by a student at the Faculty of Arts. Our Wikipedian in Residence also consulted two Bachelor's theses at university - "Finding missing interwiki links in Czech Wikipedia" and "Parallel Corpus from Wikipedia". Wikipedia Club at the Faculty of Arts library, presided by a motivated teacher rather than us, has convened 24 times since March and the event's format spread even into Prague in May.

⮚ Marek also provided support for local community meetings (an English-language article on that is at: Building a local community in the Czech Republic). 12 monthly meetups of the Brno Wikimedia community were organized and attended by a large number of local community members. However, the largest achievement was the organization of a national Wikiconference 2016 in Brno (blog post here), attended by 112 people and featuring mostly talks in Czech but also two in English. The talks are available online at Slideslive. A pre-conference seminar in collaboration with the Moravian Library was offered to local community in Brno and attended by >10 people.

• Cultural partnerships [GLAM]. We will organize a writing contest in collaboration with one of these institutions or similar, aimed at improving Wikipedia articles on a given topic (similar to CEE spring in 2015). At least 300 articles will be written by at least 30 Wikipedians. A public plan and a road map will be developed for the engagement of external experts (eg. librarians) into improving Wikipedia and providing reliable sources for writing articles, thus gradually engaging them into Wikipedia (possibly involving some new tool or app).

  

  Signing the collaboration agreement with Martin Svoboda, director of the National Technical Library

⮚ The writing competition has taken form of the classical CEE Spring contest and brought two special categories organized in collaboration with our partners (Polish towns, Czechoslovak Resistance Movement during the WWI) besides the main category revolving around the CEE region. 36 volunteers participated (1 of them newly registered), 384 pages were improved in the competition and 2,680,893 bytes were added to the articles - overcoming our expectations. This is a massive contribution to Wikipedia and improves its content although such competitions rarely recruit new volunteers (who stand little chance against more experienced Wikipedians).

Edit-a-thon on women in science, 2016

⮚ We also made first steps to start collaborations with what we call "external experts" - people willing to contribute knowledge to Wikipedia but unable or not willing to become a proper part of the community. One way to establish bonds between such experts and us is by creating a reference desk. Our new project "Ptejte se knihovny" (Ask the library) collaborates with a preexisting portal run by the National Library of the Czech Republic and offers customized answers to Czech Wikipedians. However the service has not become particularly used among Wikipedians who presumably feel they have enough reference material for their work; only five articles have been improved using information acquired from the library service.

⮚ Besides that we also signed a memorandum of collaboration with the National Technical Library of the Czech Republic (blog post here) - the second major institution to partner with us after the National Heritage Institute (2015) – and have already taken part in a Museum Night organized by the library. Authority data donation to Wikidata was also offered but postponed until a suitable way to harness them is found.

⮚ Other significant collaborations include one with the National Contact Centre-Gender and Science which lead to a second edit-a-thon on women in science in a row (the first took place in 2015). The 2016 workshop concentrated on Czech woman scientists, attracted 10 people (6 of them newly registered, most of them women) who improved 12 pages, adding 54,080 bytes of valuable information on a poorly covered topic. This kind of workshops is considered very rewarding because the hosting institution takes care of the promotion and always attracts a lot of motivated participants – and we only provide support and training.

Spending

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Financial report

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857 846.33 CZK (31,783.87 €, approximately 36,145.63 USD)

Notes