Grants:Project/Rapid/The Africa De-stubathon/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2016-17 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/The Africa De-stubathon.
• 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?

• The contest was extremely successful. We set a goal of 500 articles minimum and ended up with 2041 article improvements and creations. More people signed up and showed enthusiasm than I had expected.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
500 article improvements	2041 articles improvements and creations	As we had no idea how many people would participate we only set a goal of 500 articles.
40-50 contributors	118 contributors	I had anticipated maybe 40 or 50 contributors would turn out, but we had 118 distinct contributors: 45 editors each improved 1 article 13 editors each improved 2 articles 22 editors each improved from 3 to 9 articles 19 editors each improved from 10 to 39 articles 9 editors each improved from 30 to 49 articles 5 editors each improved from 50 to 99 articles 5 editors each improved more than 100 articles (145, 152, 175, 208, 218 articles respectively)

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?

• The overall project was a major success, I think the most productive contest ever held on wikipedia. The contest was very well designed and the system where people submit their articles for reviewing under each country in an A-Z worked very well and will form the basis of future contests.
• The mechanism demonstrated how powerful this sort of scheme can be when the funding is right. Articles were improved for every African country, content improved which might never get improved in even 10 years otherwise.
• We had an amazing range of content improved from female athletes to military events, though I would say that wildlife and women bios displayed the biggest improvements.

• What did not work so well?

• The contest was so successful that very little didn't work well. If I had to say something it would be that not many people worked on promoting the core articles to Good Article status, but that was always a bonus for this project, the main emphasis was always on "Destubbing", basic content improvements of a wide scope of articles.

• What would you do differently next time?

• The only flaw I think was that it was admittedly time consuming to run, particularly the first two weeks. If I was to run or design a similar contest I would make it a rule that contestants have to share the workload in reviewing length/content of each other's articles when submitting. This works well with DYK on wikipedia, people just have to check an entry before they submit. That would ease the workload on a person to run it and make it more sustainable for other volunteers. A few people should ideally overlook the central running, and of course bots could probably be designed to automatically check length, I would look into that for future ones.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on. I received $1850 in pounds. The grant was used to buy Amazon vouchers for the following editors:

1. Ssriram_mt - $425
2. Cwmhiraeth - $200
3. Quetzal1964 - $180
4. Miyagawa - $175
5. Sturmvogel_66
6. Fsmatovu - $90
7. Clarityfiend - $80
8. Penny Richards - $80
9. Micromesistius - $55
10. Neil916 - $45
11. Level C - $30
12. Jowaninpensans - $30
13. MrLinkinPark333 - $25
14. Amakuru - $20
15. AmaryllisGardener - $20
16. Ask80 - $20
17. Brigade Piron - $20
18. Redolta - $20
19. StAnselm - $20
20. Ymblanter - $20
21. IgnorantArmies - $15
22. Kees08 - $15
23. Knope7 - $5

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

No, all of the vouchers were bought and proof of receipt sent to WikiMedia.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

Yes, the contest was so successful that I would love to replicate this and get people running them for different world regions and topics.