Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Basque Wikimedians User Group - 2024/Final Report
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Part 1: Understanding your work
[edit]Per the recent update on the Wikimedia Foundation Affiliates Strategy process, Wikimedia Affiliates that are General Support Fund grantees will fulfill their affiliate reporting requirements through their final or yearly grantee report.
If you are a Wikimedia Affiliate, you will use this form for your affiliate reporting and to address the affiliate health criteria. You do not need to submit a separate report to AffCom. Follow the guidance in the green boxes to report on how you met the corresponding affiliate health criteria.
If you are not a Wikimedia Affiliate, aligning your responses with the affiliate criteria is optional and not required.
1. Please share to what extent your programs, approaches, and strategies contributed to addressing the challenges you shared in your proposal. If they did not contribute as you believed they would, please share what obstacles you faced and what, if anything, you learned from them? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 1.) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 1.1 (Goal delivery). Describe how you actively delivered on mission goals, e.g. content creation.
During 2024 we started a new approach after some years working, mainly, with a grant from the Basque Government. Our new approach had a new diversity of granting sources, adding this WMF grant to the pool. That allowed to have an Executive Director, not linked directly to the grant by the Basque Government, which allowed us to center in new projects and organization.
In our 2024 Annual Plan ([1]) we designed some projects related to this new approach. Some of them have been succesful, but some others had to be redesigned during the year.
In January we made the annual BWUG meeting, and there we presented the new program approach and diversity of projects, which was received well. One of the projects proposed in this meeting was "The history of Basque Country in 100 objects" which have allowed us to align some of the annual projects into one wider project. This is the case for the GLAM institutions we wanted to work during 2024: instead of centering in a couple of institutions, we have opened the project to more than 20 museums and archives, and worked with those in very specific objects. This approach has been extremely succesful, as the project allowed us to rethink the "Ikusgela podcast" we wanted to design, guiding it to a very specific GLAM-Wikimedia project.
In education, we opened the idea of Pedagogy proposals program, and we have partnered with two institutions for this project: HUHEZI Faculty in the Mondragon University and Talaios Cooperative. Both organizations' expertise allowed us to create two new pedagogy proposals ([2]) and start thinking on three more that will be ready by 2025, but started during 2024. However, we have still problems trying to implement this proposals in schools, and this is something we have to rethink during 2025.
Talking about education, we also had two international collaborations within the Erasmus+ project. This project finished in December 2024, but opened us to new collaborations in the future, especially with Wikimedia Ireland Community.
The possibility of having new funding from the WMF also opened our participation in the Wikimedia Hackathon, where one of our staff members worked in redesigning the Basque Wikipedia main page ([3]), bringing a whole new experience in design and usability.
We planned the Summer Wikimeeting 2024, our first annual Basque Wikimedia conference. However, summer wasn't working in our schedule, so we moved it to the annual meeting, which was held in January 2025. A very succesful meeting, we gathered 32 wikimedians, with a whole day learning and sharing program ([4]).
One of the things we wanted to do and didn't work was a new approach to Wikiprojects, as the current onwiki community is not using them in the best ways. We had a couple of meetings with people from the WMF, and talked about it in the Hackathon, but we couldn't reach any good solution. The Events platform WMF is working on is not the best for us, as we are using Dashboard and UKBot for a mix of what that platform can make, and moving to another one doesn't seem a better solution.
We have worked with Basque diaspora during 2024, but we couldn't get what we expected, as this takes more time than thought, and not having a dedicated volunteer for that lagged the effort. In the last months of 2024 we have dedicated some time from a staff member to work on.
At the same time, we have make new Ikusgela video series and improved the on-wiki platform: [5]. We have tried to make things even better, with metrics, onwiki commenting and liking, but this should be solved by the WMF and is not investing on multimedia or improving Wikimedia Commons. The recent conversations about this topic suggest a new path, but still are designed as a scarcity game where we don't improve the platform, but have volunteers discussing what it should be done. Ikusgela (and many other multimedia projects) could be better if the WMF had a rick multimedia plan, which we can help (and have promoted during this year) but it's not in our hands.
We think that the new organization approach financed with WMF funding is better, as we can work on a wider range of things and be more innovative.
2. Is there a plan to build on the key successes you had? If yes, please describe the plan and if no, please share the limitations to do so. For instance, did the activities lead to any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future? (required)
We have learnt from success and failures, as usual. We would like to share two of each, as those are changing how we act during 2025:
1- As mentioned above, the project "History of the Basque Country in 100 objects" ([6]) has changed wildly our relation to GLAM institutions. Instead of trying to work with one or two institutions each year, which can lead to failure, we have worked with more than 20 institutions during this year, but asking a very small amount of materials. That approach has been proved succesful, as some of the usual problems we face when working with museums (scale, licenses, time...) are wildly reduced. Licensing is not such a big problem when you are talking about very specific objects in the museum, instead of the usual "give me all you have". The main problem we faced when beginning this project was the working pipeline: how are we licensing the images? How are we going to work with them? How are they going to "approve" the description we make? Working on small batches has been proved successful, and this is something we would like to share and continue.
2- As we wanted to make more videos for the Ikusgela platform, but making videos is pretty expensive, we talked about how to use our staff time to make videos cheaper. Instead of hiring all the process, we wanted to use our own knowledge. That's why we have managed to pay for a whole series on Human Evolution, as this is the topic of expertise of our Executive Director. And we have also worked in the scripts of a future scientific knowledge series using some LLM assisting. This two experiences have changed the way we work on the videos, but added extra work to our staff.
3- On the bad side, we launched a whole pedagogic proposals system, named Wikikasi, in order to provide schools with learning materials based on wikimedia projects. The project itself is working, and we have published two proposals so far, but we are having troubles involving new schools. This project is expensive, and we are not getting the results we wanted. We are working on solving the issue, and we hope to have better news in the upcoming months.
4- One of the results of the "History of the Basque Country in 100 objects" should be a podcast, and we have reserved some funding for this, in an alliance with Berria newspaper, which will co-produce the podcast with us. However, we haven't calculated well the scale of the project, and when talking to people who can script the podcast itself we have found that we can't do it with the current budget. We are now thinking on how to retake the idea, and even if this is possible, which will affect the final outcome.
3. Please provide a link to reports that detail the activities that took place in the last year. This can include an annual report, Meta pages, and websites. If there are no links available, briefly describe the implemented activities and programs below or upload any files. (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 3.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.1 (Affiliate health & resilience), 4.1 (Internal engagement), 4.2 (Community connection), and 4.3 (Partnerships and collaboration):
- Describe your activities engaging new users, new members for your decision-making body(ies), and developing leaders and organizers (2.1).
- Describe your activities creating or hosting spaces to encourage greater collaboration and engagement among your members (4.1).
- Describe how you engage with the contributing community that you serve and/or support (4.2).
- Describe your partnerships with other affiliates or with non-Wikimedia entities (4.3).
4. Are you interested in sharing what you achieved or learned this year with the wider community through different peer learning programs (e.g. Let's Connect program, Diff)? (optional)
We have shared at Let's Connect program, and we can share again if needed.
5. Did you collect feedback from your community or target groups on how the activities implemented impacted them? If yes, please attach/provide information on the results (e.g. community surveys, stories, impact booklets/reports, interviews with partner institutions, etc). Did you collect other impact-specific data? (required)
For affiliates, the response to Question 5. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criteria 4.1 (Internal Engagement), 4.2 (Community Connection), or 4.3 (Partnerships & collaboration), where applicable.
We wanted to collect impact within Wikikasi secondary proposals, but we haven't reached schools so far, so we are not able to give impact there.
We collected the impact of the alliance with the Ikastolas to improve Txikipedia articles. This results are included in the annual report.
We have also measured the impact of each of the videos in Ikusgela, which are also mentioned in the extended annual report PDF.
6. During the fund period, did your efforts do any of the following? (required):
For affiliates, the response to Question 6. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criterion 2.2 (Diversity balance).
- 6.1 Bring in participants from the following groups: women, indigenous groups
- 6.2 Develop content about the following underrepresented topics or groups of people: women, indigenous groups
- 6.3 Support the retention of: Editors, Organizers, Partnerships
7. What, if any, effective tactics or approaches can you share that worked well when dealing with the programs under points 6.1-6.3 that you selected? (optional)
Our main concern is actually writing about the Basques, so we are "indigenous group" in its own. One of the tactics we have succeeded has been working with museums in very specific topics about the Basque people and culture. This is a good partnership strategy, because we haven't asked for much, but a little bit to every one.
We have worked too in Ikusgela, with videos about Basque Culture. Working with University professors on these topics have been a good approach.
We have worked also in promoting WikiWomen groups, and some of our members are taking a growing strategy for these kind of groups.
8. If you developed partnerships, which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors (optional):
Permanent staff outreach
Part 2: Metrics
[edit]| Metrics name | Target | Result | Comments and tools used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of all participants | N/A | ||
| Number of all editors | N/A | ||
| Number of new editors | N/A | ||
| Number of retained editors | N/A | ||
| Number of all organizers | N/A | ||
| Number of new organizers | N/A |
| Wikimedia project | Target - Number of created pages | Target - Number of improved pages | Result - Number of created pages | Result - Number of improved pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 1000 | 1000 | 2000 | |
| Wikimedia Commons | 300 | |||
| Wikidata | ||||
| Wiktionary | ||||
| Wikisource | ||||
| Wikimedia Incubator | ||||
| Translatewiki | ||||
| MediaWiki | ||||
| Wikiquote | ||||
| Wikivoyage | ||||
| Wikibooks | ||||
| Wikiversity | ||||
| Wikinews | ||||
| Wikispecies | ||||
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia | 20 |
11. Did you set other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required): Yes
11.1. Other Metrics.
In your application, you outlined some other open metrics that you would like to measure. Please fill out the achieved results for each of the open metrics you defined.
| Other Metrics name | Metrics Description | Target | Result | Tools and comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Secondary-school participants in Txikipedia | In the last 3 years we have run a project to teach secondary students the use of Txikipedia, engaging them with content creation. We plan to extend this project, adding more students and teachers. The number of participants for this year will be one thousand. | 1000 | 1600 | School reporting |
| Pedagogy proposals program | We plan to run a pedagogy proposals office, centered in projects creation and evaluation. Knowing how many students will participate is difficult, but we plan to build and test one proposal per season. Total proposals should be, at least, 4. | 4 | 2 | Report. |
| Online learning activities | We plan to give users the possibility to learn online. We expect to have a total of 20 editors doing these capacity building sessions. | 20 | 10 | |
| Summer Wikimeeting | At least 20 Basque editors should participate in this meeting where we will share knowledge, projects and experiences. | 20 | 30 | |
| Ikusgela series | We plan to improve our Ikusgela video series, as we give stability to our current budget, allocating more money to this project. This will allow us to create or publish one video per week during 2024. | 52 | 74 | Uploaded at Wikimedia Commons. |
Part 3: Skill Development / Capacity Building
[edit]12. Reflecting on your programmatic (external) and organizational (internal) work, did your grant support you to undergo any skill development that made a difference to your success? If yes, what skill was developed, and how did it lead to success? (e.g. received coaching on public speaking, attended training on nonviolent communication, hosted professional development conversations on leadership, learned and used a new tool for project management, etc.)? Can you share any materials? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 12.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.2 (Diversity balance) and 3.1 (Diverse, Skilled, and Accountable Leadership):
- Describe actions taken to prioritize gender balance in affiliate leadership, as well as any areas of diversity relevant to your affiliate's context (2.2).
- Describe the management, financial, or other leadership skills of your affiliate leaders. If you have a succession plan, please include it here (3.1).
- Describe any training or skill development (as outlined in the question above) (3.1).
- Incorporate into the annual report a disclosure of conflict of interests (if any) from the leadership (3.1).
Thanks to the grant we could assist to a couple of international meetings, which lead to new understanding of projects, alliances and knowledge of tools. Also, we could invest time on being part of the ED group, which helps with leadership.
13. What is one capacity/skill area that you would like to focus on for the next year? And how do you plan to achieve this capacity? (required)
We would like to learn more about Erasmus+ granting process, and we will work with people who know about it (WMEU, Wikimedia Ireland) so we could ask for some European grants by ourselves.
14. If you have additional information or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here. Use the space below to upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your report.
For affiliates, also use this section (Question 14.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.3 (Good governance & communication) and 3.3 (Universal Code of Conduct compliance).
- Describe and link to any public-facing information on affiliate leadership, membership, elections, and/or decision-making processes (2.3).
- Describe any activities incorporating, promoting awareness about, or enforcing the Universal Code of Conduct in your affiliate's activities (3.3).
Part 4: Financial reporting
[edit]For affiliates, also use this section (Part 4: Financial reporting) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 3.2 (Financial & Legal Compliance).
| Description | Planned / received budget for this category (EUR) | Amount spent (EUR) |
|---|---|---|
| Personnel costs | 49000 | 31938 |
| Operational costs | 8000 | 6428 |
| Programmatic costs | 28000 | 11634 |
| Total General Support Fund | 50000 | 50000 |
| Other revenue | 376786 | 376786 |
| Remaining funds from General Support Fund | N/A |
15. Please state the total amount spent from this fund in your local currency. (required)
50000 EUR
16. Please provide an overview of the amount spent from this fund in the following budget categories in your local currency. (required)
- Operational costs: 6428 EUR
- Programmatic costs: 31938 EUR
- Staff and contractor costs: 11634 EUR
17. Did you have any other revenue sources (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required): Yes
- 17.1. Provide the total amount received from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): 376786 EUR
- 17.2. Provide the total amount spent from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): 376786 EUR
18. Provide a financial report document which will provide the details of funds received and spent in the currency of your fund. (required)
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
18.2. If you have not already done so in your financial spending report, provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal. (optional)
N/A
19. Do you have any unspent funds from this funding?: No
20. Final confirmations (required)
- 20.1. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement? You must be in compliance with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement. In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the Wikimedia Foundation mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
- 20.2. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
- Yes
- 20.3. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
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