Grants talk:PEG/Agripo/WikiVillages du Cameroun/Report

Hi Elns. Thank you so much for this very thorough and interesting grant report. I apologize for the long delay in reviewing the report and providing comments. It has been an unusually busy time for our time and we are way behind on reports. This is one of the most informative and insightful reports we have seen in a long time and really appreciate all the time and effort put into writing it. We know it takes considerable time to collect metrics, reflect on learnings, and tell the story of your project in a way that engages people and really admire everything the team has done to do this successfully. The report is approved and we have a few comments/questions below. We look forward to your responses.

1. Congrats on a successful writing contest! Overall, the increase in coverage of Cameroon villages through articles, photos, maps and other information is very impressive! The report mentions a lot of other indicators that the contest met and exceed the goals of increasing awareness and coverage, as well as setting up structures for longer-term contributions. For example, all of the great media coverage, the creation of the two portals, very high image reuse rate, and the fact that 95% of new articles were written by new contributors and a handful of them have continued to contribute regularly.
2. The report mentions that "Agripo directly supported about 20 contributors as needed". Can you specify the type of support given and what the impact was?
3. It would be great to learn more about the Wiki-agripo initiative. What have you been doing since the writing contest ended or what are some of the future plans?
4. It is very interesting to note that you had a much lower number of people participate than expected, but much higher output of articles, which means a small number of people wrote a lot. You noted that this could be because the contest was targeted at the general public and writing on Wikipedia takes a very specific type of person. There are lots of other models you could try out for future activities and we are happy to discuss them with you.
5. It's great that you called out the impact of having a strong collaboration between an experienced Wikimedian and a local nonprofit. This partnership is often key to successful projects.
6. One of your goals was to have at least 20 new users become active contributors 9 months after the contest. Do you have an update on this statistic?
7. Thank you for raising the issues you faced in terms of working with the French Wikipedia community. We agree that "one country should not be able to exercise unilateral hegemony over the review and evaluation of other countries’ encyclopedic content. It is important to ensure that the collaborative governance of content production does not replicate an outdated colonial system". This is an ongoing issue on many Wikipedias, especially languages that are spoken in may places, such as French, English, and Spanish. Having the strong support of experienced Wikimedians to help train new users as well as defend their edits and navigate the Wikimedia bureaucracies is key. We hope to support more communities in addressing this challenge and are happy to talk about ideas.

Thank you again for this great project and your very informative report! Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Answers

Thanks Alex Wang (WMF) for this great feedback and the approved grant report. The answers are below.

• The support was mainly to follow new contributors by helping them to understand edit criteria and principles, facilitating correction of their contribution and made a tailored based assistance of each contributor. Frequently, we also exchange with them by emails on their difficulties.
• Wiki-agripo initiative is the follow-up activities supported by our organisation ( Agripo) to improve the content on Cameroon by focusing on three themes: villages, plants and Bassa community in Cameroon. At the end of Wikivillages, we continue to work on these 3 themes. The Cameroon portal has 4321 articles at the end of Wikivillages. Now, this national portal has 6136 articles (with a progress of 1815 articles). Of these 1815 articles, the number of articles added through wiki-agripo was 1489 articles on villages, plants and Bassa. So with 1489/1815 percentage of contribution, we are happy to certify that our action has contributed on 82% on the progress since the end of Wikivillages. The metrics of wiki-agripo are below

Themes	Wikivillages 2016	Now -2017	Impact
Plants of cameroon	157	335	178 new articles
Villages of Cameroon	1367	2657	1290 new articles
Bassa community	586	607	21 new articles
Wiki-agripo 2017	2110	3599	1489 new articles

Due to the fact that PEG funding process was too difficult for a small organisation like Agripo, we plan to continue the work with progressive activities related to these 3 themes. The first collaborative editing called wiki-agripo 1.0 will be based on plants of Cameroon.We submit this proposal this week [[1]]

• During our next project "wiki-agripo 1.0" we plan to use another model with a group of 10 students interested on plants.

• Yes, we have statistics on active new users 9 months after the contest. We only have 3 active new users. During this contest, we understand one thing, it is too difficult to have frequent active users in Africa. But we have another strategy based on diversity and proximity. We are sure that if each year we can involve 25 new users, we could help to create a positive dynamic on the national portals. Now, our aim is not related to duration of active new user, but the number of contributions we can convince to create and to tell them to convince other contributors. It is a rollout strategy.

Thanks again and we hope that Wikimedia Foundation will support wiki-agripo progressive initiative ! Best regards, Elns (Elns) 19:29, 21 August 2017 (UTC)

Congratulations

This initiative is a great achievement Diana2trump018 (talk) 20:39, 19 November 2017 (UTC)