Grants talk:Project/Rapid/AGDastider/Amar Ekushey Article Contest 2022

Community announcement

The Bangla Wikipedia community has been notified in the village pump on 12 February 2021. Thanks. — ANKAN (talk) 16:58, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

Recommendations from the SAARC Committee

Dear Applicants! On the behalf of the committee I am posting these suggestions for you.I hope you will find this useful.

• The SAARC Committee would like to suggest that the organisers should work towards including more women editors. To encourage participation of Women editors we recommend a special prize for active participation by women editor/s.
• Organisers should arrange an orientation session which will help in creating good content in the existing stub or very small articles.

Organisers should consider creating a feedback form to track new users and how they started contributing? This is important to understand the effectiveness of amount spend on ads and outreach activities.

• The project organisers should plan for an outcome where, if anyone is interested in creating new articles after having this experience of upgrading small articles, support and encouragement should be provided.
• What are the reasons that the Bangla community is using Facebook as a promotion medium? Please provide an explanation for the facebook ad strategy (previous year numbers, budget allocation)including the amount allocated. Considering that the active users of Facebook have come down drastically are the grantees willing to test other mediums?
• It would be useful to read the report from last year to understand the impact of the contest. Please provide links if any.

Considering the COVID situation, how many participants will be there for the offline event? Is there an assessment for the necessity of such an event?

• Token of appreciation for reviewers: 650 x 12 persons = 7,800” is this given as a gift voucher or cash?

“Facebook promotion: 8000” The active user of Facebook has come down drastically. Are the grantees willing to test other mediums?

• Is there any impact analysis of facebook done? Young people have moved to instagram or tiktok etc. Last year how much was used for facebook ads?
• Any idea how many new users contributed after seeing through facebook ads?
• Any feedback form created to track new users of how they started contributing?
• What was the budget for last year's event? A link would be useful to read the report from last year

Thank You !--आर्या जोशी (talk) 03:17, 16 February 2022 (UTC)

@आर्या जोशी: Thank you very much for your time and valuable suggestions. I am trying to reply to be best abilities.

Suggestion: We would like to suggest that the organisers should work towards including more women editors. To encourage participation of Women editors we recommend a special prize for active participation by women editor/s.

Reply: Thank you very much for the suggestion. For the sake of fairness, we have started community discussion. The first round of discussion happened during the weekly Contest Office Hours. In that discussion, the contestants and the reviewers gave us some observations. We have started a short RfC on the village pump upon those observations. I will let you know what the community feedback is. The VP discussion link: https://w.wiki/4rLY

Suggestion: Organisers should arrange an orientation session which will help in creating good content in the existing stub or very small articles.

Reply: Thank you very much for the suggestion. Each year we prepare a contest portal page where interested people can find all the rules and directions. Besides written texts, we included a video link that explained the steps to participate in this contest. There is a link to short text tutorials explaining how to use the content translation tool. There is a list of the articles also which needed to be improved, so participants need not find the articles themselves.

Besides that, if any contestant faces any problems, there are three ways they can ask for help. They can ask questions on the Contest talk page on Wikipedia. We have a dedicated Telegram group where they can ask questions. And there are also weekly Contest Office Hours that happen every Friday evening via Zoom during the contest where we often show live demos via the screen share feature of Zoom.

All the details of how to look for help are listed on the front page of the contest portal.

Suggestion: The project organisers should plan for an outcome where, if anyone is interested in creating new articles after having this experience of upgrading small articles, support and encouragement should be provided.

Reply: Thank you for the suggestion. Usually in our feedback form for the participants, we ask if they want to get future updates about Wikipedia (by being a member of the mailing list) and also encourage them to keep editing on Wiki. Also, during the contest, we organize weekly Office Hours where we provide support for any Wiki-related queries. We shall definitely consider inviting them to create new articles as well during our future communications. Also, we have a running mentorship program on Bangla Wikipedia. New Wikipedians get assigned to a mentor who is an experienced Wikipedian [1]. These mentors are the primary contact points for the new Wikipedians and help them to navigate through Wikipedia. The organizers will review again and try to find out if any extra steps are needed.

Questions regarding Facebook paid promotion:

Question: Is there any impact analysis of facebook done? Young people have moved to instagram or tiktok etc. Last year how much was used for facebook ads?

Any idea how many new users contributed after seeing through facebook ads?

What are the reasons that the Bangla community is using Facebook as a promotion medium? Please provide an explanation for the facebook ad strategy (previous year numbers, budget allocation)including the amount allocated. Considering that the active users of Facebook have come down drastically are the grantees willing to test other mediums?

Reply: Thank you for these questions. Let me try to explain our overall promotion strategy so you have a better understanding of where the Facebook Paid promotion fits in.

Promotion: The Philosophy

We have access to limited resources due to legal restrictions. We always try to manage to achieve as many things as possible with the resources we get. From our previous experiences with the press and other social channels, we found this kind of event has the potential for greater outreach beyond the participation of the contest. For example, “Nation X has a national team for game Y” is a piece of information. On the other hand, “Nation X has a national team for game Y who is playing the world cup” is news. The latter gets much greater attention and coverage yet the information is also conveyed. The reality is many people are not aware that there is a Bangla version of Wikipedia. We see this as an opportunity to create awareness about Bangla Wikipedia also.

Promotion: The Design

The promotion for this event has multiple channels. Here I am listing those as per importance -

Channel 1: The Bangla Wikipedia

This is the main channel of the promotion. During the contest, a global site notice runs at the top of Wikipedia that states, “A contest going on that you can participate in” and it links to the Contest portal page which is the main landing page of our contest and all the contest-related details are there. We also announced on the Village Pump.

Channel 2: Social Media Channels

Bangla Wikipedia has various social media channels. It has a Facebook page with almost 80K followers. It has a verified Facebook discussion group with 6K members. It has a Twitter account, Telegram channel, and Telegram group. Besides that, there are several messenger chat groups of Wikipedians with different focuses. We promote the contest on all of these social media channels.

Channel 3: Press release

Every year, we send press releases to the national daily newspapers and notable news portals with the news of our contest. Roughly 50-60% of them publish the news on their news medium.

Channel 4: Facebook Paid Promotion

After each year's contest, we ask for feedback from our contestants and reviewers. One of the questions that we ask is, What else could be done to do better next time? More than once it was suggested that we should try paid promotion on Facebook or as they referred it as “Facebook Post Boost”.

After that, we also discussed this idea at our community meetup. We got responses in favor of this idea there.

Then, the organizers discussed and analyzed the possibilities and viability. During that discussion, we set a criteria list of the target audiences that we might want to reach via paid promotion. We agreed that an ideal target audience should have these characteristics-

• Have internet access
• Have access to a device to use the internet
• Have some free time to spare
• Have some habit or interest in reading and writing in Bangla

Upon these observations, we found Facebook is the optimal choice here. Because we see Bangla speaking student groups, literary groups, activist groups, etc. in larger numbers on Facebook than on any other platform. Years back there were active blogging platforms in Bangla but not so much these days. It is true both in Bangladesh and West Bengal, where most of the Bangla-speaking people reside.

2021 Facebook Paid Promotion Results

In 2021, we spent BDT 4,000 on Facebook platform promotion (which also includes Instagram). That post Ad reached 107,429 people on Facebook and 1,088 on Instagram (display ratio was automatically set by the Facebook algorithm). Post engagement was 9,845 on Facebook and 554 on Instagram. 76% of them were men and 24% of them were women.

The 40.16% of the post engagements were from the age range of 13 to 17 years, 40.91% from 18 to 24 years, 14.92% from 25 to 34 years, and 4.73% were from 35 years and above.

The post we used was a graphic image along with written text and a link.

Suggestion: Organisers should consider creating a feedback form to track new users and how they started contributing? This is important to understand the effectiveness of the amount spent on ads and outreach activities.

Reply: Thanks for the suggestions. We do take feedback from successful contestants each year but didn’t particularly ask how they found out about the contest. We can do that this year. Moreover, each year many contestants enroll but don’t finish the tasks. Last year we tried to reach out to a few of them asking what was the problem. The answers were either they found it hard to concentrate and ran out of patience (which is understandable) or they don’t feel interested in such kind of work anymore.

Moreover, Wikimedia Bangladesh publishes an online community magazine named, “WikiBarta” where interviews of Bangla Wikipedians get published. Here is the link of the interview of the winner of the 2021 contest, who was a complete newcomer yet won the top place. https://wikibarta.wikimedia.org.bd/article/1569/

Question: Token of appreciation for reviewers: 650 x 12 persons = 7,800” is this given as a gift voucher or cash?

Reply: It will be either given as a Gift Voucher or a custom-made memento if possible, with Wikipedia Logo on it.

Question: Considering the COVID situation, how many participants will be there for the offline event? Is there an assessment for the necessity of such an event?

Reply: We shall keep the number within 20, following the local COVID-19 guidelines and maintaining the safety protocols.

Question: What was the budget for last year's event? A link would be useful to read the report from last year.

Reply: The budget for last year’s event was 104,600 BDT / 1235 USD. You can find the last years budget from here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/TRahman/Amar_Ekushey_Article_Contest_2021.

Let me know if you have anymore feedback. Thanks. ANKAN (talk) 20:21, 18 February 2022 (UTC)

Final Recommendation from SAARC Committee

Thank you@ANKAN:for your responses. We are glad that you have answered our questions. SAARC Regional Grants Committee is pleased to recommend full funding for your fund application. We wish you the best of luck for the upcoming activities. We hope this project will enhance the ability of your community and will give new vision to other communities also. We hope you will follow all the guidelines and rules of WMF. Wishes!--आर्या जोशी (talk) 03:24, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

@आर्या जोशी: Thank you very much for your encouraging feedback. I would also like to thank the SAARC Regional Grants Committee for their kind response and for approving the grant application. ANKAN (talk) 14:38, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Request for extension

I would like to thank the grant committee for their timely support. The contest ended on due time, but it still has a few processes left to be completed including review and prize distribution. We got 205 submitted articles, on 40 of which the review process is going on. Therefore, I am requesting an extension for a month (up to 30 June). — ANKAN (talk) 12:46, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Approval of the request for extension

@ANKAN thank you for reaching out. We have extended the deadline for the submission of the final report to 30 June 2022. THasan (WMF) (talk) 03:30, 31 May 2022 (UTC)