Grants:PEG/WM UA/Wiki Loves Monuments 2015/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/WM UA/Wiki Loves Monuments 2015.

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 and lessons learned

Activities

We organised Wiki Loves Monuments 2015 photo contest in Ukraine and a Cultural Heritage thematic week on Ukrainian Wikipedia. This year we have collected more than 41 thousand images through the contest and once again took the 1st place in international WLM contest in number of pics uploaded.

Our main activities for this project were the following:

Dealing with the Crimea question. Before the competition kicked off, the Crimea question arose as far as Crimea appeared to participate in both Ukrainian and Russian contest editions. So far, some voices spoke for boycotting Wiki Loves Monuments. That put the project under the risk. Nevertheless, we've handled out a poll for the community and the majority luckily supported the contest to be still held this year in Ukraine.
Preparation for the contest. As we have always stressed, an important and complicated part of the project in Ukraine is collecting object lists from state bodies and preparation them for the contest. This year we've added around 4 thousand new objects to our lists. Then we worked on announcing the contest through media, social media and partners.
The contest period. During the contest we were constantly updating the project blog and social media networks, maintaining contact with participants and answering their questions.
Selecting winners. After contest finished, members of the organizational committee traditionally looked through 41k of pictures and removed obviously low quality and ineligible pics to the Round Zero category. Then the jury of photographers, culturologists and Wikimedians got to work and selected winners of each nomination.
Award ceremony was held on November, 21 at Kiev Pechersk Lavra Historical and Cultural Preserve, a cultural heritage monument of national importance. It gathered around 50 participants, winners and their close ones, jury members and media representatives. The award ceremony got media coverage at Ukrainian media including Internet editions, TV and radio channels.
Reflections and feedback. For the first time this year, the award ceremony was followed by a discussion about the contest with the winners and jury members. Some of the participants and jury members have already been engaged in Wiki Loves Monuments or Wiki Loves Earth contests earlier and had enough experience now to share with us to improve the project together. In particular, the participants of discussion stressed that they appreciated special nominations on a national level in Ukraine held in previous years (2013 and 2014) and suggested to try some next year. Some of the winners and jury members even showed commitment to participate in organizing them next time.
The Cultural Heritage Wikipedia Week initiated by administration of the museum of Kiev Pechersk Lavra Historical and Cultural Preserve was held on December 1-31. The participants wrote over a hundred articles about Ukrainian cultural heritage monuments and objects of UNESCO World Cultural Heritage list.
Publishing. We published pocket calendars for 2016 with the winning picture. Sets of postcards were also planned but it was decided to replace them with a journal: we cooperated with The Monuments of Ukraine journal and the whole February issue of it (96 pages) is about Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine.

Lessons learned

What worked well?

The best positive lesson learned was a feedback session in a form of discussion with contest participants and jury members after the award ceremony. It was quite easy to organize, helped to clarify some things under the project, to gather new ideas and even to engage new volunteers to work on organizing the project next year. Listening to the feedback of people engaged and discussing it helps to see goals and opportunities and to engage them more into work.
We managed to retain those users who traditionally contribute the most. Most of our positive result we owe to them, even through all the difficult situation with the Crimea. This shows once again the importance of community shaping and loyal contributors.
We reached the goal of images uploaded and still held the 1st place internationally in number of files uploaded at this contest.
In quantity nomination, monuments that were not pictured before the contest were counted double. This helped us improve coverage both by getting photos of little-known monuments in big cities and of monuments in small towns and villages.
Well-configured UploadWizard automatically generated descriptions and categories for all images, avoiding the problem of sorting the entire category after the contest.
We engaged as a partner a museum which is important from GLAM program prospective.

What didn't work?

Including the Crimea into Russian lists (though quite predictable according to political events) was a shock for the Ukrainian wikicommunity and significantly harmed objectives and results of the project.
The ongoing war with Russia still monopolizes information and people attention, and cultural projects feel hard to survive in the meanwhile.
Once again, lack of freedom of panorama resulted in many images deleted from Wikimedia Commons upsetting contest participants.
Our traditional website wlm.org.ua was cybersquatted when we were transferring ownership from one of our volunteers to Wikimedia Ukraine and is now owned by some Russian company. We tried to buy it back but they requested an unreasonable amount of money (several hundred dollars), so we had to move to a much longer domain, http://wikilovesmonuments.org.ua/ , and we lost all our promotion for our previous website.

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

We should have been prepared how to deal with political problems like the one we came across while working on free knowledge sharing. Though there are no simple decisions.

Learning patterns

We will improve Grants:Evaluation/Program Toolkits/Photo Contests and Events based on our learnings from this project and from Wiki Loves Earth 2015.

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

Provide the original project goal here.: Our goal is to organise the Ukrainian edition of the Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest. After three successful editions in 2012, 2013 and 2014 we want to continue this contest by organising a new edition. During this year we have expanded our lists by adding new monuments and we hope to attract for this new edition more contributors from regions that were underrepresented in previous years.

Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 short paragraphs.: We mostly achieved the goal: we organised the photo contests, we expended our monument lists but we attracted less contributors than expected. We successfully achieved the goal in terms of number of photos: with 41 thousand images uploaded we exceeded the planned metric in 6 thousand. At the same time, we failed to achieve several other objectives. The main reason for that was connected with the Crimean issue within the project. The Crimea had been included into Russian contest list and part of the community called for boycotting Wiki Loves Monuments. The situation was accepted even worse after WMF refused to participate in solving the problem between two countries. It had a very negative impact by both demotivating a part of our community and by attracting negative media attention. The team had to handle out a poll and ask the community to see if the project get any support. Finally, the contest was launched but didn't gain that good support as in the previous year.

Nevertheless, delaying the core decision on implementing the project almost ruined organizing process and announcement. The actual preparations for the contest started late. Furthermore, some volunteers got demotivated from working passionately on the project because of the issue and community calls to drop off the project. All these things badly impacted our performance compared to the project objectives.

Progress towards targets and goals

Project metrics

Project metrics	Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
400 users participating in the contest	237 users participating in the contest	We faced decrease in number of participants compared to the previous year. Our explanation on failure of this and other objectives you can find above.
200 newly registered users thanks to the contest	122 newly registered user thanks to the contest	We faced decrease in number of newbises as well, for the same reasons as above
35,000 images uploaded	41,656 images uploaded	We are glad to exceed our expectation, particular owing to a group of very active participants (13 users uploaded over 1,000 photos each)
5000 monuments illustrated (including monuments that previously had illustrations)	14142 monuments illustrated (incl. 3845 monuments that previously had no illustrations)	We performed much better than expected owing to a success of our new ranking system in the quality nomination that gives advantage to monuments that previously had no illustrations
5000 images used across Wikimedia projects	4030 images used across Wikimedia projects	We slightly missed the target, particularly because community was less active in integrating these images to articles.
200 Wikipedia/Wikivoyage articles to be created/improved	121 Wikipedia articles were created/improved	The model of thematic week (unlike article contest) was much more focused on existing users than on newbies.
8 cities and towns with Wiki Loves Monuments outreach events	Only 1 city with Wiki Loves Monuments outreach events (Kyiv)	Events were not held due to the lack of organizational time and demotivation of volunteers because of the Crimea issue (see above).

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	180	108 WLM contest participants 7 orgcom members & 15 volunteers engaged 43 contest participants of the Cultural Heritage Week in Wikipedia 7 jury members
2. # of new editors	122 in photo contest
3. # of individuals involved	326	237 WLM contest participants 7 orgcom members & 15 volunteers engaged 43 contest participants of the Cultural Heritage Week in Wikipedia 14 jury members 10 representatives of partners
4a. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	4030	Images from commons:Category:Images from Wiki Loves Monuments 2015 in Ukraine used on Wikimedia projects
4b. # of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons (Optional)	41,656	See the category
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	121	counting only 113 Wikipedia articles created and 8 articles improved within the Cultural Heritage Week in Wikipedia
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	999,707	Contributions during Cultural heritage thematic week

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

We can say that WLM this year motivated rather many photographers to contribute more to Wikimedia projects doing specific search through the regions of Ukraine to upload new photos of objects lacking images. Moreover, some Commons users who were earlier participants of the photo contest got interested and became Wikipedia editors as well. We know this thanks to the feedback session after the award ceremony and also from further personal communication with those people. Some of them were eager to attend our Wikipedia anniversary editathon later, where they learnt to create articles.

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?

Participants of the contest remain active users of Wikimedia Commons and also switch to editing and creating articles in Wikipedia as a result of the project. We also involved over 100 new contributors.

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

Our contest resulted in a number of high quality images, including the one that won the international contest and a number of FPs and QIs. The article contest produced high-quality content on Ukrainian Wikipedia, including many long and detailed articles as well as one GA.

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

Media coverage of WLM helps to increase Wikimedia projects reach (readership) in short terms and in long run, particularly among people interested in cultural heritage.

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.

Number	Category	Budgeted total	Actual total	Currency	Actual total (UAH)	Notes
1.1	Main Prizes	2,700.00	2,940.21	USD	65,283.16
1.2	Additional Prizes	600.00	213.34	USD	4,736.84
1.3	Special nominations prizes	150.00	47.41	USD	1,052.63
2.1	Jury's offline meeting (travel expenses and meals)	300.00	-	USD	-	There was no additional offline meeting of the jury
2.2	Hall rent	200.00	220.56	USD	4,897.15
2.3	Hall decorations	125.00	211.79	USD	4,702.49
2.4	Food & Beverages. Stand-up party	90.00	105.25	USD	2,336.84
2.5	Travel expenses (for participants and jury members)	500.00	202.53	USD	4,496.84
2.6	Transportation expenses	24.00	18.96	USD	421.05
3.1	Publishing sets of postcards and calendars	2,250.00	2,458.61	USD	54,590.00
3.2	Post expenses and telephone charges	125.00	120.43	USD	2,674.00
4.1	Wiki Loves Monuments thematic month: souvenirs for participants and presentation event	400.00	94.82	USD	2,105.26
4.2	Local outreach events	480.00	-	USD	-
5.1	Bank expenses	75.00	35.38	USD	785.50
Total		8,019.00	6,669.29	USD	148,081.76

Exchange Rate Calculation

No.	Date	Amount (UAH)	Exchange Rate (USD/UAH)	Amount sold (USD)
1	from WLM 2014	5,327.47	0.04626	246.46
2	from PR 2014	121,376.17	0.04626	5,615.11
3	19-nov-15	51,346.83	0.04202	2,157.43
Total	-	178,050.47	0.04504	8,019.00

Weighted exchange rate for the grant period: 0.04504

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): 8,169.00 USD

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): 8,019.00 USD (2,157.43 USD transferred)

Total amount spent on this project: 6,700.00

Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project: 6,669.29

Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.: Kyiv-Pechersk Historic and Cultural Reserve has provided books to award active participants of the thematic month.

Remaining funds

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of 1,349.71 USD were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:APG/Proposals/2015-2016 round1/Wikimedia Ukraine/Proposal form.

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

Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)

1,349.71 USD (29,968.71 UAH)

If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.

Please state here if you intend to return unused funds to WMF, submit a request for reallocation, or submit a new grant request, and then follow the instructions on your approved grant submission.

We would like to request reallocating these funds to our APG Proposal for 2015-2016