Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Presentation & Outreach/Report2013-1

Interim report accepted

This interim report for a Project and Event Grant 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/WM CZ.
You may still comment on this report on its discussion page.
Please visit Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Presentation & Outreach to comment on or read the final report.
You are welcome to Email grants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

This report covers development of Wikimedia CZ's "Presentation & Outreach" grant after the submission 2012 report, e.g. from July 2012 to the end of April 2013.

In this period, P&O grant spent 121968 CZK, and while continuing with already working projects such as Student Write Wikipedia, GLAM, representing Wikipedia on relevant exhibitions, also partially financed 2012's Wikipedia conference. Major news was Czech Republic's first Wiki Loves Monument participation, which was quite high with more than 17k contributed images, and negotiations for first major media donation in the Czech Republic: 3000 stereographic slides from Charles University's Faculty of Science Geographical Library. WMCZ has also partnered with an advertising agency, leading to creation of video and prints inviting people to contribute to articles about nature.

Projects

Students Write Wikipedia (Czech Ambassador Program)

Czech education program Studenti píší Wikipedii (Students Write Wikipedia) kicked another term in early spring of 2013 with 8 participating faculties and nine projects.

The projects are distributed across all major cities of the Czech Republic and also vary in their topic. From various fields of natural science to social studies, the programme now covers all major branches of human knowledge - with minimal expenses. The progress in the program was presented at the Education Leaders Workshop in Milano.

In report period, expenses for the programme totalled 4515 CZK (including 3175 CZK for propagation materials prints filed in other topic).

GLAM: Digitization of stereograms

The most visible GLAM effort is the upcoming digitization of pre-WW1 stereographic slide collection from Geographic Library of Charles University's Faculty of Science.

At the moment this includes negotiations of the final contract and technical preparations, done with help of other institutions (National Technical Museum Prague and Technical Museum in Brno).

So far the expenses were pretty minimal (900 CZK) and are covered in Mediagrant tickets 291 and 315. The proposed project for scanning of 3000 delicate slides has expected budget around 115000 CZK and will be submitted to grant committee later this quarter.

Other GLAM activities

We have also obtained other free materials from the Geographic Library, some digitized in on Commons, others made available to WikiProjekt Geographie at German Wikipedia.

There are ongoing talks with Masaryk University in Brno about possible cooperation, including "Students write Wikipedia" activities and release of images. Apart from that, we have been given photos from Moravian Gallery in Brno, and got promised pictures from Central Archives of Surveying and Land Register in Prague.

Promotion of Protected Areas Project

The campaign promoting Protected Areas project was a result of continuing in partnership with an advertising agency, that has previously worked with us on print designs for 10 years of Wikipedia. The campaing was based on the idea that the animals themselves are the best experts to write about nature, but actually cannot write anything meaningful, so Wikipedia is looking for the second-best people to contribute. The campaign featured a video with wild pigs editing Wikipedia, several prints and audio clips, and a landing page made to look like being written by a wild pig.

The video did not a become a viral hit with only several hundred views, other media saw more success – the prints were picked up by several magazines, and sparked thalk about longer-term partnerships. User:Chmee2 was also invited to talk on a national radio station about the Protected areas project, and audio clips were broadcasted by one more radio station.

Overall, the campaign helped to raise awareness about the project, although it's difficult to directly measure effects of prints. What we know is that the campaign's landing page has seen several thousands of accesses, peaking in September when there was a direct click-through using one of the images on Czech Wikipedia homepage.

In this campaign we have partially paid production costs, total expenses paid from P&O were 11581 CZK. Apart from further spreading of "you can actually edit this" message among the public, the major positive effect was that we got a set of high-quality free media that we can use on other occasions. This is useful to bear in mind when cooperating with various advertising firms – while they are quite familiar with the concept of pro bono work, releasing materials under a free license is usually new for them, and it's worth to negotiate that.

Major events

Autumn Book Fair Havlíčkův Brod

In October 2012, four WMCZ volunteers set up a booth at Autumn Book Fair in Havlíčkův Brod. The booth reportedly attracted more visitors than last year, who mostly knew Wikipedia, but were rarely aware that they could edit it. Free handouts (such as Protected Areas Memory Game and partner magazines) were able to pull in people, which could then be provided with information and leftlets. Our "Nature experts" video has shown as a very useful way to attract especially younger audience.

We found out that our Wikimedia Commons leaflets could be more up-to-date – thay state that there are 4M files at Commons, while currently it more than 16M, and they are not particularly clear in explaining how to describe authorship information. Also, for non-English speaking people, English-only category structure in Commons is a problem.

Overall our participation was a success, we handed out 260 magazines and 450 (i.e. all available) memory games. The expenses were 7996 CZK.

Wiki Loves Monuments

Czech part of Wiki Loves Monuments, a major media-gathering and promotion effort, attracted 398 volunteer contributors, who brought in 17131 new pictures, putting the Czech Republic on seventh place among 36 participating countries. As a rough measure of quality, the average file size was 2.6 MB, which was a slightly lower than global average (3.1 MB). Other possible measure of success can be almost 30 per cent coverage of ca. 40000 listed monuments during the first year.

The competition took a lot of work of three very dedicated volunteers, but was deemed worth it, because of large number of received images, as well as raised awareness of contribution possibilities. The Prizes, provided by 5 sponsors, were handed out at the award ceremony that was part of 2012 Wikiconference.

One comment was that sorting out through thousands of entries in three people is quite a lot work, and would benefit from some sort of automation. Nevertheless, the organizers consider the competition a success and would like to repeat it in the coming year.

Total expenses were 79943 CZK, which included fees for conference hall where Wikiconference also took place and domains for the next year. However, most of the expenses were covered by sponsors, so the final toll on P&O grant was only 9088 CZK.

Wikiconference

2012 Wikiconference took place on 24th November in National Technical Library in Prague and featured 12 session, including talks about education partnerships, QR code partnership with Prague 10, and Wiki Loves Monuments award ceremony. The venue was paid, but turned out to be a better choice, since the infrastructure in the library was able to better accommodate more than 100 participants of the event, including the Ambassador of the Republic of the Philippines, who came to pick up the prize for one of WLM winners.

The conference was generally agreed to be successful, gauging by reaction of WMCZ members and also on Wikipedia. However, commentators noted minimal presentation of minor WMF projects, and schedule with limited time for discussion.

The expenses were 31756 CZK, including a poster session and a lease of the conference hall (which was filed under WLM in our tracker).

Book Fair Ostrava

This year's Book Fair in Ostrava was joined with two other fair (Travel and Weddings), which increaded attendance, but also meant that lower proportion of people were actually interested in what we offered. We've fully used our stock of memory games and older Wikimedium magazines. However, the interest was less than we hoped for, and ultimately not worth higher expenses for Ostrava Fair (18750 CZK, more than twice than what we spent for Havlíčkův Brod). Due to recommendation of participants (Limojoe and Packa) and unsatisfactory price-output ratio our attendance on this fair will most probably will not continue next year.

Others

User:Limojoe went to Ostrava and presented Wikipedia to students in two talks done at two braches of Ostrava City Library.
User:Limojoe also presented WMF projects in a talk of Brno's Masaryk university.
We have printed another batch of leaflets for Protected ares project and Students write Wikipedia.
Another issue of Wikimedium magazine came out, including articles about Wikiconference, Wiki Loves Monuments, and 10 years of Czech Wikipedia.
A third run of popular Protected areas memory game has been printed.
We have used an offer of free advertising space offered to non-profits, and printed and installed a 3.5×2 meter banner next to a major Prague street. We have used a "don't leave it to yourself" photo, previously made for us by a friendly advertising agency.

Finance

This part is common for both P&O and Mediagrant, as the two are funded from the same pool of money.

Payment totals for WMCZ consolidated grants, as of 2013-05-08
grant	topic	tts	unpaid	paid	overpaid	paid change since last report
Presentation and Outreach	Czech Ambassador Program	9	-	2167.00 CZK	-	1319 CZK
	GLAM	5	-	5802.00 CZK	-	380 CZK
	Conferences. Talks. Presentations	12	2984.71 CZK	31944.50 CZK	-	13984 CZK
	Presentation Equipment	7	-	49299.80 CZK	-	0
	Printed materials	14	-	96903.00 CZK	-	47603.20 CZK
	Exhibitions 2010-2011	8	-	65215.00 CZK	-	0
	Exhibitions 2012	4	-	30659.00 CZK	-	21740 CZK
	P&O misc	16	462.00 CZK	45455.08 CZK	578.00 CZK	43465 CZK
	P&O totals		3446.71 CZK	327445.38 CZK	578.00 CZK	121968.08 CZK
Mediagrant	Czech municipalities	90	2119.00 CZK	19295.08 CZK	-	10774.50 CZK
	Vernacular works	4	-	2000.00 CZK	-	0
	Protected natural areas	85	1032.00 CZK	15240.50 CZK	-	7154.50 CZK
	Scientific photography	4	232.00 CZK	270.00 CZK	-	150 CZK
	Important events	2	-	97.00 CZK	-	0
	Water bodies	0	-	-	-	0
	Jewish monuments	10	-	5162.50 CZK	-	1905.50 CZK
	Czech zoos	0	-	-	-	0
	One-time requests / misc	28	820.00 CZK	96443.75 CZK	-	7933.50 CZK
	MG totals		4203.00 CZK	138508.83 CZK	-	27918.50 CZK
Grand total			7649.71 CZK	465954.21 CZK	578.00 CZK	149886.58 CZK
Paid out in total				466532.21 CZK		136277.08 CZK

An up-to-date version of this table is available in WMCZ grant tracker.

Account balance

In 2010 we received 34260 EUR (868148.40 CZK) from WMF as funding for our consolidated grant programs.

As of 2013-05-08, WMCZ grant account balances are:

account	balance	~ in CZK	change since last report
common account CZK	691.66 CZK	691.66 CZK	-970.19 CZK
savings account CZK	460401.61 CZK	460401.61 CZK	358962.23 CZK
common account EUR	10 EUR	258.75 CZK	-4757.95 CZK
saving account EUR	14.11 EUR	365.09 CZK	-488595.17 CZK
total		461717.11 CZK	-134791.06 CZK

Conclusions

Lessons learned

Wiki Loves Monuments is a great thing, but sorting through the entries would benefit from automated processing. It was quite a lot of work for people involved, but at least some of them wants to do it again next year, which emphasizes how satisfying working on such project must be.
Viral videos are mostly a myth. It does not hurt to make a funny and interesting video, but it won't probably be a magic bullet.
Working with advertising agencies can bring great media, but there's still a lot of things you need to do yourself, to get out the message. Own promotion and partnership with magazines is what made current attempt more successful than previous "Don't keep it to yourself" visuals.
Memory game is quite popular (we've fully distributed the first two print runs, totaling 3000 copies), and seems to be an excellent way to get our materials to people.

Impact

Reach: It seems that Wikipedia is well known source of information in the Czech Republic, so there's not much to do in this regard – pretty much everyone who stopped by WMCZ exhibition booths has already known the encyclopedia. What people don't know as widely are Wikipedia's sister projects, so our materials also emphasize those – especially Commons, which is probably most useful for most people. Efforts like Wiki Loves Monuments also draw attention to it.

Quality: Even though P&O grant is not primarily about increasing quality of Wikimedia projects, some of its activities have the "side-effect" of bringing new quality content. This includes especially academic cooperation programmes (Students Write Wikipedia brings new articles from soon-to-be-qualified contributors, while GLAM acquires rare media), but also Wiki Loves Monuments where having photos of thousands of encyclopedia-worthy subject is an obvious improvement.

Credibility: P&O increases Wikipedia's credibility in various ways. Apart from the route of improving quality, which in turns makes the encyclopedia credible, its credibility is also increased by explaining how exactly editing and quality control processes work. This is part of many P&O programmes: by ambassadors working on Students Write Wikipedia, on exhibitions like Book Fair Havlíčkův Brod both through direct contact and distributed leaflets, and talks supported through P&O. Also, cooperation with academia via GLAM and SWW efforts further show that Wikipedia is to be taken seriously.

Participation

Since awareness of Wikipedia is already pretty high in the Czech Republic, increasing participation (i.e. helping people to edit and contribute media) is the main goal of the most of P&O efforts:

Student Write Wikipedia directly guides students into contributing to Wikipedia.
Promotion of Protected Areas effort shows people that their contribution to improvement in this specific area is welcome.
Inviting people to contribute is the main theme of our exhibition presentation and associated printed materials, as well as various talks.
Finally, Wiki Loves Monuments was a major activity that attracted many new contributors.