Grants:Project/Rapid/UG ELiSo/African month 2021

Tell us how you'll carry out your project. Be sure to answer the following questions:
1. What content will the contest focus on, and why is it important to your community?

The focused content is about Africa - geography, history, culture, people etc. The project is local adaptation, originally from French Wikipedia.

The topic and the contest are used especially as a way to provide an interesting opportunity for new Esperanto speaking Africans to engage on Wikimedia projects for their first time. Africans are very underrepresented in our community and their voices and perspectives are missing in our projects and its content. As our preliminary contacts with Africans showed, they are aware about Wikipedia and read it but mostly don’t know that they themself can edit it. By this contest we intent to help several Africans to do their first steps in Wikimedia world, hold contact and relations with them and afterward encourage them to stay and contribute long-term.

2. How have you let relevant Wikimedia communities know about this proposal? You are required to provide links to on-wiki pages to inform these communities about your proposed work. Examples of places where this can be done include community discussion pages, affiliate discussion pages, or relevant project talk pages.
You may also provide information about external social media channels you may be using.

Village Pump in Esperanto Wikipedia and Wikivoyage (the projects focused), the Twitter channel and Facebook page of our organisation Esperanto and Free Knowledge, Facebook group of Esperanto Wikipedia (practically used for all the projects), Telegram group of Wikimedia movement in Esperanto, mailing lists of Esperanto Wikipedia and the organisation Esperanto and Free Knowledge.

3. How will you let participants know about the contest? In what ways will you be communicating with them?
For example, these can include on-wiki spaces, social media channels, mailing lists, messaging apps, or physical/online gatherings.

The “usual” communication will take place in Village Pump in all Esperanto language Wikimedia projects, the Twitter channel and Facebook page of our organisation Esperanto and Free Knowledge and all the Esperanto language Wikimedia projects that we have access to, Facebook group of Esperanto Wikipedia (practically used for all the projects), other Esperanto language Facebook groups, Telegram group of Wikimedia movement in Esperanto, mailing lists of Esperanto Wikipedia and the organisation Esperanto and Free Knowledge, article and event on website of our organisation, page on an Esperanto events site, site notices in the Esperanto Wikipedia and Wikivoyage (possibly also of another projects).

We will ask our partners to spread the information in their communication channels to their members, activists and supporters.

Because a big part of the goals of this competition is to invite African esperantists to actively participate in Wikimedia projects long-term, there will be special attention to this aspect. We will contact activists from other organisations that already have strong contacts with African esperantists, to invite them to the competition and to also invite their close ones. As our Sub-Saharan African contacts have stated, Africans are very sociable, have many friends and extended families, communicate a lot (a very lot) and help each other. We will utilize that to extend our reach. As we want to use this competition as a springboard to facilitate long-term relationship with and participation of African esperantists, we will ask them to also join our mailinglist and social media to be in easier contact for future.

Our effort for gratis outreach will be supported also by paid advertisement. Part of it is planned to increase likes on the Facebook page of Esperanto Wikipedia (as Facebook is reported to be very used by African esperantists) as one of the means to hold contacts for a long time and at the same time increase social proof. Another part is planned to be used to send targeted visitors to the competition page (to be decided whether directly on Wikimedia projects or to our website with dedicated email opt-in, again to catch contact information for long-term relationship and involvement).

4. How will you judge the contest and award prizes?
Note: Grantees, judges, and other contest leaders are ineligible to receive prizes. Grantees who are serving as judges may not receive gifts through grant funding.

The basic criterions is topic alignment, language, factographical and style quality. Articles in not full alignment with these criterions will either be disqualified or will receive only proportional amount of points.

Articles in Wikivoyage will receive 2x more points to spotlight this new project (migrated from Incubator on 2020-12-15) and invite more participation to it.

Then the amount of points will be calculated according to the raw size of the articles in bytes.

It is still in discussion how to judge articles from African newcomers in a way that is both fair and also encourage them to continue their participation long-term. Probably there will be special category for them, maybe some other setting - subject to discussion.

Awards are planned to be gift cards and delivered digitally.

5. For photo contests, what is the strategy to get images used on projects?

Not applicable - not a photo contest.

6. Are you running any in-person events or activities? If so, you will need to complete the steps outlined on the Risk Assessment protocol related to COVID-19. When you have completed these steps, please provide a link to your completed copy of the risk assessment tool below:

No in-person events or activities.

7. Is there anything else you want to tell us about this project?

We have mentioned it several times, but we again emphasize that this competition is not so much about the content created during the competition, but mostly about reaching out to underrepresented community. The competition is an opportunity for a focused campaign targeted to do the first steps in wiki world (“Now is the world writing about my continent! I have to write something also!”) and to create a structure, contacts and relationships for supporting long-term, non-competitive active participation.

We are aware that reaching out to underrepresented community is a challenge. We are doing it for the first time on such a scale. We are sure we will learn quite a lot in the process and will be able to use it during the next African month and other projects.

Impact

How will you know if the project is successful and you've met your goals? Please include the following targets and feel free to add more:

For writing contests:

Number of participants: 15
Number of articles created or improved: 100

Additional targets:

Number of participants from Africa: 5
Number of participants from Africa active (10+ edits in sum in all projects) 1 month after the competition: 2
Number of new likes of the Facebook page of Esperanto Wikipedia: 300
Number of email addresses of Africans collected: 50

Resources

What resources do you have? Include information on who is organizing the project, what they will do, and if you will receive support from anywhere else (in-kind donations or additional funding).

Team:

Radioamatoro
- former Chief-Editor of the magazine “Esperanto en Afriko” (“Esperanto in Africa”) …
KuboF Hromoslav
- experienced organiser, great contacts with high level Esperanto organisations (for planned partnerships)
We are searching for additional team members to help with some, mostly simple but repetitive, tasks. These people are intended to take such roles also for future projects. By doing that we want to transfer our experiences and increase the effectiveness and sustainability of our organisation.

What resources do you need? For your funding request, list bullet points for each expense and include a total amount. Budget:

outreach: 220 EUR
- 100 EUR for Facebook page likes
- 120 EUR for directing visitors to contest page
prizes: 445 EUR
- African newcomers: 265 EUR
- regular contributors - writing: 90 EUR
- regular contributors - translating: 90 EUR

total: 665 EUR

Endorsements

Community members are encouraged to endorse your project request here!

The project did a great job in French Wikipedia, there is an active community in the Esperanto on, there is no reason it won't boost it on this topic. Psychoslave (talk) 20:54, 15 March 2021 (UTC)