Grants talk:PEG/UG BG/CEE Spring/Report

Comments from WMF

Hi Лорд Бъмбъри and Polimerek. Thanks so much for this great report and all your efforts on the project. We are happy to approve this report. We also have a few follow-up questions and look forward to your responses:

1. ”The help provided specially for young local coordinators was well done and needed.” What kind of help was needed?
2. ”We would encourage cross-project cooperation with the projects Ethnography of the Carpathians, Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments.” Are you proposing this for 2017?
3. ”We would encourage participants to improve the articles in their lists on English Wikipedia before the start of the contest.” This is an interesting suggestion, can you please tell us more?
4. What were the paid staff responsible for?
5. The outcome of this year’s contest was much better than last year - what factors made this year’s contest so much more successful than the previous year?
6. Can the bots and tools created for the contest be used in other ways?
7. You noted that getting regular updates from the Base helped identify areas that needed support - can you share an example of what you mean?

Thank you again for organizing this successful contest! Not only has it been successful in adding/improving important content on the Wikimedia projects, it also has strengthened the relationship between communities in the CEE community. This impact is much harder to assess, but invaluable. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 03:53, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

Hi, Actually I wasn't involved in preparing the report, nor it was consulted with me, except the budget part of it. So, I hope the answers will be provided by authors of this report. Polimerek (talk) 11:29, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

Hi, Alex,

1. What we meant with “young” was inexperienced, new or new to organisational activities. Local organisers profited from advice about the rules on a local level; press releases written by the international team, which they only needed to translate in their language; the use of our multilingual blog for blog posts in their own languages when they did not have a blog themselves; as well as common tools for statistical analysis and the creation of the results tables.
2. Yes, we will encourage local organisers to put their most important nature reserves, monuments, and ethnographic objects in their lists. The Carpathian Ethnography project has already included cooperation with CEE Spring in it’s grant and plans for 2017 (by adding “Carpathian culture” category to the articles list). There are many opportunities to build cooperation with different projects and contests.
3. By improving the articles in English before the start of the contest the translations become more substantial and interesting to read.
4. The office staff of Wikimedia Polska was responsible for taking care of the paperwork needed to provide prizes for the local communities (by reimbursing or buying them). Also they contacted the local organizers and guided them through the process. he communication staff of Wikimedia Polska helped with the blog, social media and press releases. The staff of Wikimedia Ukraine helped with the communication with the local organisers. The staff of both Wikimedia Polska and Wikimedia Ukraine helped with advice and discussions on virtually every topic connected to the contest.
5. The major changes were the addition of prizes, the creation of an atmosphere of healthy competition among fellow communities and the international organisers as a focal point of communication.
6. Article list template with Wikidata support created just before the contest was widely used and later adapted for other purposes. E.g. the Europeana Art History Challenge where both the module for creating article lists with information about their existence in a set of languages and BaseBot for gathering results and creating graphics of the results were used, as well as the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 article writing contest where the module for creating article lists was used.
7. Thanks to the statistics, produced by User:Base, we could see that there were not many articles about education being created. This is why we organized a short mini-contest about women in science and education which helped us to address this issue and at the same time work to close the content gender gap. We will steer the topics this year using the same idea.

Best regards on behalf of the international team, --Nikola (talk) 22:17, 4 January 2017 (UTC)