Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2012-2013 round1/Wikimedia Argentina/Progress report form/Q2

Receipt of this report

Thank you, Osmar and Wikimedia Argentina, for submitting a complete progress report for 2013 Q2 on time. We look forward to reviewing it in detail in the coming weeks. Please continue to monitor this discussion page for our comments and questions, and contact us at any time if you have any questions or concerns. We will be in touch later today with instructions regarding the next installment of grant funds and to notify you any changes to your eligibility status that may have resulted from the submission of this timely report. Best regards from FDC staff, Winifred Olliff (Grants Administrator) talk 17:19, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for this report

We recognize your work on this thoughtful and timely report. We appreciate that you report openly about your current and anticipated challenges and share your learning about your activities thoughtfully with the rest of the movement.

We encourage all entities to also read the staff summary of this quarter’s progress reports in addition to these comments.

Warm regards, KLove (WMF) (talk) 03:11, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Appreciation

• Congratulations to the Spanish Wikipedia community on reaching the 1,000,000th article milestone!
• Congratulations also on hosting your first activity in La Rioja, the northwest area of Argentina. We hope this may be a stepping stone for launching more activity within that region.
• We appreciate your innovative work on the legislative edit-a-thon, despite some of the challenges you faced around the event date. Congratulations on attracting 35 people to the event, most of whom were new editors.
• We look forward to the results of your innovative GLAM programs (including the partnership with the Cultural Institute of Buenos Aires) and your GLAM-education crossover work.

Congratulations! KLove (WMF) (talk) 03:11, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Katy for your review and your compliments! --Osmar Valdebenito (WMAR) (talk) 21:40, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

We would like to learn more

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions about this report. KLove (WMF) (talk) 03:11, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

1. Great suggestion to include sysops in future meetups in order to avoid problems with the blocking of multiple participants using the same IP address! Do you have a link to more information about the diversity workshop? Did any participants continue to edit after the workshop?
2. It is interesting to learn about your editing workshops in different venues. Given the challenges in retaining newly-trained editors, how do you encourage them to continue to participate once the workshop has ended?
3. You report it is difficult to understand the impact of presentations and you are struggling, like many entities, to track the individual contributions of participants after an activity. What are your plans for addressing this challenge?
4. Thank you for sharing your observations about challenges in producing up-to-date printed materials that reflect the actual conditions on the sites and the associated challenges of distributing and using them effectively. This may be a challenge many volunteers are facing as they try to conduct outreach with printed materials. What is your strategy for ensuring these printed materials reach the right audiences?

1. We don't have more information about the participation of the people after the Gender Meeting. This is some of the things that worry us (especially when the workshop is given by a volunteer and not by a staff member) and we are trying to improve this. One of the things we are working on is a small survey to apply after the event, where we will ask them their username so we can follow their participation. Also, for this workshops, we are working on a manual with procedures to be followed (including this), and that will be very useful to replicate activities with volunteers outside the Buenos Aires, where it is more difficult for us to follow the activities.
2. There are two possible ways to continue their participation: one is making them participate in other activities (such a new edit-a-thon) and they will slowly continue to edit more on Wikipedia and the other is to encourage and support them to do it virtually (through mails or other contact forms). In the first case, we have been very succesful (most of the people that go to one edit-a-thon, they participate in the next one) but we haven't started yet with the second way. Since we the mails of the people registered for the edit-a-thons, we can send them a newsletter talking about our activities (inviting them to join) but also we expect to send more personalized mails encouraging them to continue the work.
3. As we said before, we want to introduce a survey for this kind of activities, where besides the user name, we will ask their e-mail so they can be in contact with us. Also, we started to give the editing manual that was produced by WM-AR the past month and we hope this will encourage them to participate more.
4. I think one of the most important things is to keep in mind the obsolesence of the material. Probably, you won't be able to create a product that will last for months or years, but if you know that before hand, probably you will focus on those things that will last more. In the case of the manuals, although the Visual Editor will replace a lot of the way newcomers will start editing Wikipedia, the ideas behind Wikipedia (the five pillars, for example) won't change. Some data (like the number of articles in a Wikipedia) will change every single day... so instead of saying "English Wikipedia has 4.6 millions of articles", you can say other things like "Wikipedia has millions of articles in English and is the largest set of information available online" and it will be as helpful as the first one.

--Osmar Valdebenito (WMAR) (talk) 22:52, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for responding, Osmar, with these reflections. I appreciate it! Best, KLove (WMF) (talk) 22:57, 23 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks to you, it is always welcomed any reflection about our activities. --Osmar Valdebenito (WMAR) (talk) 00:50, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Suggestions for future reports

• Keep up the good work. We appreciate the informative reports.
• Thank you for your gender gap work! WMAR has been actively working in this area longer than some other chapters and we are interested in learning more about how these conversations around the gender gap are beginning to lead to more outcomes.
• You might consider contacting WMCH or reviewing their report for Q2, as they report some successful strategies for integrating older people and younger people in workshops together. We know WMSE is also using printed materials in some of their awareness campaigns, so you might also take a closer look at their programming around the Swedish Parliament awareness project to get some ideas on how to address your current challenges.

Thank you for taking these suggestions into account in the future. KLove (WMF) (talk) 03:11, 9 September 2013 (UTC)