Grants:Project/Rapid/Roda/Editing for Women's Health/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2021-22 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

• To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/Roda/Editing for Women's Health.
• 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 rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

We are happy with the goals we were able to achieve. SPecifically, we brought together 36 women (33 new and 25 planned) who completed a training course on wikipedia over this period. The training course included information about technical information as well as information about the culture of the community and specific problems related to women’s topics, training on gender-neutral language on wikipedia, all skills which they used later on when working together doing online editing.

We did not achieve the goal of increasing the skills of 5 existing editors because we were joined by 3 editors who were previously included. Their number of edits grew significantly in this training and collaboration period, when compared to their previous work. With this experience, we believe that our expectation to include 5 enditors was unrealistic because in Croatia there are not many editors, and not all of them are interested in topics relating to women’s health.

A report on edits created during the marathon is available on Programs & Events Dashboard. However, some of these articles were removed or put in drafts by other wikipedia editors, while other texts were not written on hr.wikipedia and instead were written for hr.wikipedia and transferred to sh.wikipedia. Regarding fully new articles (which did not exist previously), we are using the number 55 - 47 were written until the end of January 2022 on hr.wikipedia (55 on the date of this report). This number continues to grow and we plan to maintain this tempo of 5-10 articles per month in the upcoming months.

25 existing articles on hr.wikipedia were improved.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets. Please be sure to review and provide metrics required for Rapid Grants.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1 main event, 2 supporting events	1 main event - maraton 24. (zoom) and 25. 9. (live), 6 Supporting events	24. And 25. September 2021 we held the first WikiOna marathon with a total of 28 editors online and offline, supported by 4 experienced editors. As preparation, on September 7th and 22nd we held two introductory webinars. In November 2021 and January 2022 the webinars were held again followed by a webinar (2 hour webinar followed by webinar - 23 November webinar, 26 and 27 November marathon: 2 December webinar, 22 and 21 January 2022 half-day marathon).The interest for online activities was smaller than that for live activities, with 4-5 editors participating.
30 participants	42 participants at varoius events	42 participants (counting only people who were present at the training/webinar and marathon) invested 615 volunteer hours in training, preparing content and writing articles for Wikipedia. Alongside them, 6 volunteers invested 30 volunteer hours preparing activities (e.g. alongside workshops at the marathon including krav-maga, yoga, drawing mandalas etc). Volunteers also included 12 students from the Zagreb School for Midwives, who helped organise the materials for the event and the space before people arrived.
25 new editors	33 new editors	Of 38 participants, we consider 33 of them to be editors because they contributed to Wikipedia’s content directly. The others only learned about editing and did some test edits. This number grew in February by four new editors, and we believe that there will be even more in the future.
50 articles created or improved	55 articles created, 25 articles improved	Around 80 articles were written or improved in this time on hr.wikipedia, and 17 have been added to sh.wikipedia. These are articles linked to women’s health, human rights and women’s biographies. The editors also edited articles that were not related to these themes, and these are not included in our final number. Soon we will be opening a website for the WikiONA project where all the contributions will be noted.
Not set	36	Only two people participated in the initial webinar and no longer participated in activities, while the remaining people later participated in at least one activity (usually more) activities.

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

• What worked well?
• What did not work so well?
• What would you do differently next time?

All the marathon participants agreed that working in person (25th September) was a great experience and that they would like to work in this way on wikipedia in the future. This way of working gives them the opportunity to exchange ideas and get support from other editors, and gives them the time away from their families and work to concentrate on editing. We put a lot of effort into making the event a good one with a number of supporting workshops, allowing pets in, preparing vegan food and energy drinks. All participants also got promo materials that included T-shirts with the logo WikiWitch (only later did we decide to brand our marathons as (WikiOna), badges and USB lamps with “S/he can edit” written on them. Promomaterials were made for a total of 80 participants and we will be distributing these until the end of 2022 to all new editors.

We gave prizes to 4 editors (bookstore gift certificates) - two teenagers who were our youngest participants (15y), to the editor with the highest number of quality edits at the marathon adn to the editor who had the highest number of edits by the end of 2021.

After this we decided to hold another marathon in person in November 2021, which we postponed due to COVID. Later live marathons were also postponed or held on Zoom with a limited number of editors because of the lack of enthusiasm for online marathons.

For this reason we plan at least 3 events in-person in 2022, according to our current plans this will be in May, September and November.

What did not go well was that editors and admins on hr.wikipedia who knew about our marathon in advance, transferred the majority of our articles into drafts the next day without efforts to help inform of or correct mistakes ž, and sent a series of messages that demotivated a high number of editors from continuing to participate. Only one of admins activly helped and only 3 experienced users latter offered help and support, protocol for automatic translation was changes during the event as response to our ‘massive’ work which we experienced as blocking. This also postponed our media announcements, because we were not sure if an article we would mention in the press release would be un-published the next day, and whether our intent to remain on Wikipedia longer or if we would give up. We spent more time in preparation and managing situation than actual publishing of articles. Some of the new editors felt that the way some of the older admins and editors were acting was a form of aggression and they did not want to participate any longer. For this reason we only gave 2-3 media statements, although the interest was much higher. We took care to include new editors who we know personally, from other NGOs and institutions, out of fear that others may make a mistake in hr.wikipedia which would then cause the existing community to hate us even more.

Therefore, with the knowledge we have gained we would in future go forward with less fear and with a higher level of visibility on social media, with infographics and by including a larger number of editors.

Furthermore, we feel that we lack some of the technical knowledge needed to edit on Wkipedia and our goal in the next period is to increase our knowledge and put a higher emphasis on the technical aspects of editing in future webinars (e.g. how to put up photos that we need to have author’s permissions for, how to create templates and info-boxes, create categories etc). We feel we should be able to participate more actively in community discussions (cafe) which will likely be more common as some of our editors get voting rights on hr-wikipedia.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

Designing the webinar and event support - 4 persons, 10.500 HRK

Designing the promomaterials which we gave to editors (t-shirt logo, badges, USB lamp) - 2000 HRK

Total spent: 12.500 HRK

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

No

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

We were supported by the HrW initiative beyond training. We were supported by the only former female admin.

Now we finally feel empowered to continue working and have decided to organise educational webinars monthly for all new interested editors, which we began in February 2022. Furthermore, there is growing interest from the media in our work and in the future we will talk about including women on Wikipedia more in the media and on social media. Soon we will have a page for the WikiOna project on hr.wikipedia in order to motivate new and different editors so that our work on Wikipedia becomes more visible, and editors will be able to get badges for their contribution.

We are working with two institutions for higher education about holding trainings for students (Osijek, the 4th largest city in Croatia) and scientists (Split, the 2nd largest city in Croatia), and we plan this in 2022. We are linked to other initiatives and will participate in Women in the Technical Museum in Zagreb during International Women’s Day 2022.