Grants:PEG/Wikimedistas de Colombia/Wikivacaciones Colombia/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/Wikimedistas de Colombia/Wikivacaciones Colombia.

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

Wikivacaciones was a photographic and writing contest in which participants had to submit photos or write reviews of their vacations. Places, food, activities, people, and so on, a lot of different topics were allowed to participate.

The photographic category worked pretty much the same way as Wiki Loves Monuments Colombia: during the participation period (December and January) people uploaded photos through an Upload Wizard; after that (February), a team of jurors picked the best photos in a process that comprised several rounds. On the other hand, the writing competition worked in a similar way as traditional wikicontests and contests like La mujer que nunca conociste: during the participation period (December and January), participants wrote reviews of elements found during their vacations in the Spanish Wikivoyage; after that, each review was scored by a juror in two factors (writing quality and usefulness), and those scores were weighted with the review length to produce a score; the participants with the highest final scores won the contest.

Aditionally, a "Public Pick Prize" was given. Participants could nominate one of their photos in Wikimedistas de Colombia's Facebook Page, and the photo which had more likes at the end of the participation period won the prize. As a restriction, people needed to follow the page before voting; this allowed us to get new followers.

In the end, 175 people shared 4311 photos from 305 different places, and 6 people wrote 42 texts (including reviews, itineraries and full articles) in Wikivoyage.

For communication, we had the following resources:

A Contest website.
A real-time statistics page created by Racso.
Wikimedistas de Colombia's Facebook Page
Wikimedistas de Colombia's Twitter.

As extra activities, we made the following:

We made a Workshop at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, Bucaramanga, where participants were explained about the contest and how to participate. The workshop was streamed, too.
We categorized a lot of the contest images in Commons. Uncategorized images are one of the main issues that massive-photo-uploading contests have, and we solved it by ourselves this time.

Lessons learned

What worked well?

We believe that this contest went pretty well. The following aspects were new (compared to our previous contests) and went really fine:

The contest topic, "Vacations", was well received, and a really diverse set of photos of Colombia resulted of it.
The contest was open for two months instead of one. That allowed us to receive more photos.
The Facebook contest worked very well, and got us a lot of new followers.

What didn't work?

While the writing contest worked just fine, we expected more participants.

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

While we didn't have trouble when checking who won the Facebook contest, we noticed that it was a bit difficult to check who followed WMCO's page and who didn't. As this was a restriction for voting, we could have had trouble with that. We still don't know how would we solve that problem next time, but now we know it exists.
We would make a lot more emphasis on motivating participants to categorize images, so they would categorize their photos by themselves or helped us to categorize other people's photos.

Learning patterns

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

Provide the original project goal here.: The contest seeks to promote the use of Wikivoyage and Wikimedia Commons, as well as attracting people to these projects and the Spanish Wikipedia. Potentially, it would bring new members to the Wikimedistas de Colombia User Group.; The goal of the project is to produce high quality photos and reviews to be used mainly in Wikivoyage, but that could also be used in Wikipedia. The photos and articles will enrich the content about cities, towns and interesting places of Colombia. The photos will be uploaded into Wikimedia Commons.
Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 short paragraphs.: We believe we did it. We got a lot of material about the country, and part of it has a really good quality. Also, even the material that doesn't have an outstanding quality is useful for the projects, which can be observed by the fact that there are images already being used to illustrate existing Wikivoyage pages.; The amount of reviews was small. We think that was the main weakness of the project. However, it's important to note that the Spanish Wikivoyage is a small project as a whole, so the contest's impact is still comparatively significant.

Progress towards targets and goals

Project metrics

Project metrics	Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
100+ people participate in the event.	175 participants in the photographic category, 6 in the writing category.	Target successfully reached.
20% increase in Facebook followers for Wikimedia Colombia (157.8 new followers)	93.6% increase (739 new followers).	Target successfully reached. We included here a few followers we got during march, when winners were announced. During January and February only, the increase was 91%.
1000+ photos uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.	4311 photos.	Target successfully reached.
30+ Colombian cities or towns pictured.	305 Colombian cities or towns.	Target successfully reached.
40+ photos being used in Wikivoyage pages.		To be exactly measured. However, please do note that we know for a fact that more than 30 photos were being used in Wikivoyage pages at a certain point in January.
10+ itineraries or 40+ reviews (or a combination of both) written.	42 texts written, between itineraries, reviews and complete articles (which comprise several reviews).	Target successfully reached.

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	22	Measured with Wikimetrics + custom stats page.
2. # of new editors	153	Measured with Wikimetrics.
3. # of individuals involved	175	Measured by custom stats page. Includes the organizing team.
4a. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	30+	Exact value to be confirmed.
4b. # of new images/media uploaded to Wikimedia Commons	4311
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	14	Wikivoyage articles. Doesn't include the 30+ articles that were improved by adding images.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	76373 (text in Wikivoyage), 8770540000 (images in Commons)	Text measured by us. Images measured by the Wikimetrics Magic Button.

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

For now, we know the team was motivated by the work, and we managed to establish a good working flow, way better than previous years. As for participants, they seemed motivated too, but we cannot now for sure (for now) if the motivation will impact their participation in the projects in a long term.

Impact

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

We think we impacted in the three proposed priorities:

We increased participation in Wikimedia Commons and, to a lesser extent, Wikivoyage. We still need to wait more time to know if the some of the participation increase will be permanent or not.
We improved the quality of the Spanish Wikivoyage by adding information and pictures. Also, we increased the amount of images of Colombia in Wikimedia Commons, some of them of places that didn't have images at all.
We promoted Wikivoyage a lot during the contest, given the nature of it. While we can't measure the impact of this, we believe that this kind of promotion of projects other than Wikipedia and Commons is important and can bring new readers to them.

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	Item description	Unit	Number of units	Actual cost per unit	Actual total	Budgeted total	Currency	Notes
1	Web domains	wikimediacolombia.org	Renewals	2	52,240	104,480	120,000	COP
2	Web domains	wikilovesmonuments.co	Renewals	1	99,990	99,990	100,000	COP
3	Web domains	wikilovesmonuments.co (partial reimbursement)	Unit	1	33,000	33,000	33,000	COP	(Partial) reimbursement of the last domain renewal for our wikilovesmonuments.co domain.
4	Prizes	Kindle Paperwhite	Units	2	433,650	867,300	1,000,000	COP	Includes shipping.
5	Prizes	External hard drive	Units	2	290,500	581,000	600,000	COP	Includes shipping. Disks had to be bought in two different stores, for very similar prices. Average price shown.
6	Prizes	Chromecast 2	Units	3	167,000	501,000	600,000	COP	Includes the price for the public award.
7	Prizes	Wikivacaciones mugs	Units	15	10,625	170,000	0	COP	Mugs of the event for each winner (7), each organizer (4) and each juror (4). Include shipping. The mugs weren't planned in the beginning, but they were bought with some of the remaining money from the prizes.
8	Shipping	Prize shipping	Shippings	5	9,000	45,000	100,000	COP
9	Extras	Extra, minor expenses	-	-	-	18,200	81,000	COP	Extra minor expenses: shipping of organizer mug (8,200), bank fees (about 10,000).

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): $2,535,000 COP

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): $2,535,000 COP

Total amount spent on this project: $2,435,500 COP

Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project: $2,435,500 COP

Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.: NO

Remaining funds

Remaining funds have been used or will be used for other approved mission-aligned activities. This use has been requested in writing and approved by WMF.

Are there any grant funds remaining?: 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.)

129,560 COP

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.

If possible, in order to avoid the complications of returning the funds to WMF, we'd like to use the funds in future activities.