Grants:PEG/TMorshed/Wikipedia 15 Celebration in Bangladesh/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY Pending has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:PEG/TMorshed/Wikipedia 15 Celebration in Bangladesh.

You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email grants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?: YES

Is your project completed?: YES

Activities

See also, Wikipedia’s 15th birthday inspires Bangla translators (from WMF blog)

Together with the global communities, Wikimedia Bangladesh also organized a series of programs to mark Wikipeda's 15th anniversary. As part of the anniversary celebration, couple of events were organized which came out successful and were appreciated by the local community. Good article contest, Good article edit-a-thon day and Wikipedia workshops for university students were notables events among them. Finally, a gala event was held on 15th January 2016 at Bishwo Shahitto Kendro in Dhaka to celebrate the birthday of Wikipedia.

The series programs ended on 15th January 2016 at Bishwo Shahitto Kendro in Dhaka through the celebration of Wikipedia’s birthday. Noted filmmaker Mostofa Sarwar Farooki was present at the program as a special guest.

The goal of this initiative was to mark the 15th birthday of Wikipedia in Bangladesh with a number of programs aiming to improve both quality and quantity of articles in Bangla Wikipedia as well as creating awareness and recruit new volunteers by organizing article contests and workshops.

Good Article contest

To celebrate this special day, a good article writing competition was organized on the Bangla Wikipedia by Wikimedia Bangladesh. Bangla Wikipedia has a total article count of over 43,000. Among these, only a handful of articles are rated as “good” articles (English equivalent). In an attempt to enhance the content quality in the Bangla Wikipedia, a competition was organized that aimed to increase the number of good articles. The competition lasted from 1 November 2015 to 10 January 2016. In this contest, Bangla Wikipedians fully translated about 600 good articles from English Wikipedia.

A total of 550 Bengali-speaking registered users from Bangladesh, India, Italy and South Korea participated in this two-month long competition; 130 of them were awarded a Wikipedia Badge, wristband, USB flash drive, and T-shirts by Wikimedia Bangladesh. A reviewing panel of 35 experienced and regular users evaluated the translated articles. Among all the participants of the competition, 86% were new to Wikipedia and contributed for the first time, 14% were frequent editors, and 12% were female. The events received press coverage from around the country, including newspapers like Prothom Alo and The Daily Star.

Workshops

Wikipedia Workshops were held in three different Universities of Bangladesh. On an average, about 50 students attended in each workshop. The main goal of the workshops was to create awareness about Wikimedia projects. Another goal was to introduce Wikipedia (especially Bangla Wikipedia) to the audience and show the attendees how to edit the articles and contribute photographs to Wikimedia Commons.

Images from Commons

Good article day

Good article edit-a-thon day was another event in this series of programs. Four edit-a-thons were organized in three different cities in the Dhaka, Sylhet and Chittagong divisions. Like the contest, the aim of the edit-a-thons was to increase the number of good articles on the Bangla Wikipedia. As a result of these edit-a-thons, the number of good articles are increased from 14 to 60.

Images from Commons

Wikipedia 15 celebration

Wikipedia 15, the 15th anniversary of Wikipedia was celebrated on 15th January 2016 at Bishwo Shahitto Kendro in Dhaka. The winner of the good article contest was awarded a bicycle in the program. Over 90 Wikipedians from around Bangladesh participated the program. They shared their experiences and aspirations regarding Wikipedia. Noted filmmaker Mostofa Sarwar Farooki was present at the program as a special guest.

Images of the event at Commons

Celebrating Wikipedia's 15 Birthday in Dhaka.
Discussion in Wikipedia's 15 birthday celebration.
Group photo of the Wikimedians
Wikimedians during Wikipedia's 15 birthday celebration
Story telling
Mostofa Sarwar Farooki
Good article contest winner
Wikipedia15 cake

News coverage

Lessons learned

What worked well?

The Good Article Contest came out as a substantial successful event and for the first of its kind in the Bangla community. It generated about 500 good articles in the Bangla WIkipedia, a major addition to the quality content of this Wikipedia. Apart from this, the contest created a new bunch of Wikipedians throughout the country. Some of the new Wikipedians went on to become regular contributors.

What didn't work?

We didn't include the financial need for sending out gifts for the goof article creators, who are located in different parts of the country. As a result, we had to manage the money from one of the WMBD members to cover the cost of parceling of gifts. We couldn't imagine the contest would be attended by such a great amount of people, so we were in shortage of resources.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

We would plan in a more realistic way considering the probable need of resources.

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

Provide the original project goal here.: The goal of this initiative is to mark the 15th birthday of Wikipedia in Bangladesh with a number of programs. The programs aims to increase reach of the activities that the Bangladeshi Wikimedians are involved with. The program titled 'Good Article Translation Contest' will help better the quality of articles.
Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 short paragraphs.: Very much, yes. For the 15th anniversary programs, we've considered the following as measures of success:

We considered a baseline of 200 articles and 300 participants during the Good Article contest. But after the event, Bangla Wikipedians fully translated about 600 good articles from English Wikipedia. A total of 550 Bengali-speaking registered users from Bangladesh, India, Italy and South Korea participated in this two-month long competition.
In the University workshop we tried to enhance number of active users (both readers and editors). We've reached around 150+ students plus motivated local users during the workshop.
We initially planned to organize 5 Good article edit-a-thon but due to the limitation of budget 4 edit-athons were held. We expected 26 good articles with 75 participants in the 5 edit-a-thons but after events 40 participants marked 46 good articles in 4 edit-a-thons.

Progress towards targets and goals

Project metrics

Project metrics	Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation

Global Metrics

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the Global Metrics. We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" where necessary.

Next to each required metric, list the actual outcome achieved through this project.
Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for an edit-a-thon which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	150	Users who reviewed the article in the contest, participated in the good article edit-a-thons and university workshops,
2. # of new editors	673	Users who participated in the contest, good article edit-a-thons, workshops and main conference
3. # of individuals involved	1000	involved in all activities
4a. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	N/A
4b. # of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (Optional)	N/A	There was no image related works. However, 547 images added as part of the program.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	643	In article contest, Bangla Wikipedians fully translated 592 good articles from English Wikipedia and improved and promoted 51 new good articles in the bengali wikipedia's good article list at the time of good article edit-a-thons.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects

Learning question: Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

Of course they did; like we said above what we really need in our country is awareness and the wide circulation of these events in various medias helped us to reach the people. Wikipedia good article contest motivated a huge number of new editors join Wikipedia and motivated regular editors to continue editing.

Impact

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic priorities?

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects?

We have organized 3 Wikipedia workshops in three different universities. The workshops targeted creating new Wikipedians and providing hands-on training to them. We organized good article Contest, that has received about 600 good articles on Bengali Wikipedia from 550 participants.

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

The Wikipedia Workshops, held in universities focused on providing hands-on training to the participants. Many of the participants were active Wikipedians. The training included ways to write better and good articles in Wikipedia and instructions for improving quality of articles. We also managed to add a huge number of good articles on Bengali Wikipedia through the contest and edit-a-thons.

Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

Workshops were held in different universities, where such kind of Wikipedia activities were held for the first time. Participants from accross the country joined us in wikipedia15 celebration.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

This section describes the grant's use of funds

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here? Answer "Yes" or "No".: Yes

Expenses

Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions and dates. Review the instructions here.: BDT 78.40 per US dollar (quoted from https://www.bb.org.bd/econdata/exchangerate.php July 27, 2016)

Sl.No	Item	Quantity	Rate (BDT)	Total (BDT)	Total (USD)	Notes
Wikipedia 15 merchandise (Subtotal : 112100 BDT) USD 1429.8
1	Wikipedia 15 Tshirts	170	290	49300		given to the Wikipedia's 15th birthday celebration participants and article contest winners.
2	Wikipedia 15 badge	100	45	4500		given to the article contest winners
3	Wikipedia wristband	100	51	5100		given to the article contest winners
4	Wikipedia pen	100	46	4600		given to the article contest winners
5	USB Flashdrive	60	810	48600		given to the article contest winners
Good article contest (Subtotal : BDT 29900 or USD 369.9)
1	postal cost	120		22400		(local =108 (quantity) * 100 (Unit price) = 10800; Italy = 1 * 4000 = 4000; Korea = 1 * 2700 = 2100, India = 5 * 1100 = 5500)
2	First prize	1	7500	7500		a bicycle were given to the highest number of good article (85) creator as a first prize.
University Workshops (3 university workshops have been held, 50 participants in each) (Subtotal : BDT 42050 or USD 536.4)
1	Banner	3	900	2700
1	Refreshment	190	165	31350
1	Transportation for volunteers	3 events	2666 (each)	8000
Good article day (edit-a-thon) (4 edit-a-thons were held; 10 participants per event.) (Subtotal : BDT 16000 or USD 204.9)
1	Food+Tea/coffee	40	350	14000
2	others			2000
Wikipedia's 15th birthday celebration (Subtotal : 64650 BDT or USD 824.6)
1	Wikipedia 15 cake	1	5500	5500		Wikipedia 15 cake.
2	Tea/coffee	100		5000
3	Venue	1	15000	15000
4	Banner, Festoon, posters and other decorative items	-	-	7716
5	Food	100	225	22507
5	others	-	-	8993
Total: BDT 264766 (USD 3377.12)

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): 171898.40 BDT

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if PEG is your only funding source): 171898.40 BDT

Total amount spent on this project: 264766 BDT

Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project: 171898.40 BDT

Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.: Yes, Total 92867.60 BDT was spent during the project besides the Project and Event grant funds and they were received as a loan from Ali Haider Khan. Explanation of additional cost has been stated in the talk page.

Requesting reimbursement of additional costs: 92867.60 BDT

Remaining funds

Are there any grant funds remaining?: Answer YES or NO.; NO