Grants talk:Project/Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos International Team/2021 coordination/Midpoint

Midpoint Report accepted

Dear T Cells and Macdanpets,

Thank you for submitting this Midpoint Report! I am approving it now with the following comments:

• It’s great to hear that you’ve had such robust participation in this campaign, with 58 affiliates in 52 countries coming on board. It’s especially meaningful that 66.67% are newcomers. I have two questions about this:
  • (1) Can you share how you defined “newcomers” for the purpose of this measurement?
  • (2) Do you have any thoughts about what made your campaign so successful with newcomers? Are there specific aspects of the campaign in general, or your outreach and training strategies in particular, that you think account for making the campaign so appealing for newcomers? Do you think your low implementation barriers are the critical factor? Your social media engagement? Something else?
• Hearing that one participant was disqualified for disruptive editing, I am curious what approach your campaign takes to proactively establish friendly space guidelines? I haven’t reviewed all of your campaign pages, so I wondered if you include these anywhere or might like to add them in future years, and possibly reference them in your organizer guide?
• I love that one of your campaign’s priority goals is “ to grow communities that are underrepresented on Wikimedia projects.” Clearly you are making good progress! Thank you for sharing about the importance of the regional ambassadors to creating a welcoming environment. That’s a great point of learning. Are there any other best practices you would recommend to others who are seeking to include underrepresented communities? For your Final Report, you might want to consider focusing a learning pattern on how to include underrepresented communities in campaigns (for example, you could share ideas like having regional and not just centralized ambassadors, having a liaison for underrepresented communities in the organizing team, having low barrier implementation guides, organizing translation of materials, key social media strategies, planning for active/ongoing responses to talkpage questions, and any other strategies you think could help campaign organizers be more inclusive).
• You mentioned that you included a community liaison for underrepresented communities in your campaign international team. Could you share more about what the responsibilities of this role is and how the person in this role carried them out? What kind of skills did you hope this person would bring? Did you feel that having this role made a significant difference in achieving your goal of creating a newcomer-friendly space? Would you recommend that other campaigns include this role in their organizing teams?
• I have no doubt that responding on an ongoing basis to questions by email and talkpages was a “nontrivial” task. I’m really impressed by your commitment and diligence in maintaining such active ongoing community engagement with this project, both on the proactive side (with layers of outreach and communication) and the reactive sides (responding to questions, etc). You clearly ran this campaign in such a thoughtful and comprehensive way.
• “Photos have been added to 105,862 articles in 275 languages Wikipedia”... Wow!!
• Thank you for sharing about the issues with the hashtag tool. Can you say a little bit more about what is needed?
• I was not aware of the PetScan tool. It sounds like you are offering a service by onboarding users in how to use it. I wonder if any of your training materials could be incorporated into documentation for the tool.

You are clearly managing this campaign so skillfully and it’s inspiring to see how much impact it is having. Congratulations on all your good work. We are lucky to have your contributions in bringing this project to life.

Warm regards,

Marti (WMF) (talk) 18:55, 26 July 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for your feedback, User:Mjohnson (WMF). You were an inspiration to me in the project grant and I really learned a lot from you. Thanks for all you did at project grant. I'd like to respond to your questions above.

1. For the international team, the participants are the local organizers and our primary responsibility is to provide adequate support for local organizers and help them to effectively implement the campaign. So, we defined "newcomers" as new participating communities (language projects and Wikimedia affiliates). 
2. There is adequate preparation for the campaign this year. We understand the impact of early planning in multilingual campaign of this nature. So, we started planning at least three months before the campaign. This gives us enough time to prepare all the necessary documentations to support local organizer. #WPWPCampaign is a new campaign and a new experiment. Based on our learning last year, we developed best practices on how to implement the campaign which the local organizers found extremely useful. In 2020, there was no reasonable documentation on how to use the tracking tool (hashtags). We design a guide on how to use the WPWP Campaign Hashtags and this was shared with all participating communities. Communication is also a critical factor this year. The international team was actively engaging local organizers, responding to their questions and providing support for all their needs. All the resources and support we provided accounted for the low implementation barriers and the promotion on social media this year is really awesome. We promote the campaign on social media at least twice weekly with various promotional materials. Surprisingly, our followers on Twitter increased by at least 50%. It is still a growing handle but we are really proud of its rapid growth rate. We improved our participating instructions based on the feedback we received last year and the instructions are clearer compared to last year.
3. Thanks for your feedback on the Friendly Space Policy. To the best of our knowledge, we haven't seen a single participant that violates the Friendly Space Policy. We are monitoring participation via the tracking tool. But, we agreed there should be a dedicated page for documenting issues relating to the Friendly Space Policy. This is something we will definitely implement in the next editions.
4. We appreciate your recommendations about knowledge sharing via the learning patterns. We did create a learning pattern on how to organise a multilingual campaign as part of this mid-term report. We will consider writing additional learning patterns during our final report based on your above recommendations and our learning. We'd like to document and share our learnings with future organizers of similar campaigns.
5. We are really excited to learn that you like the idea of a "community liaison for underrepresented communities" The roles of the community liaison for underrepresented communities is to facilitate the campaign in these communities, facilitate communication and promote the campaign in these regions. We could not effectively engage this person this year because the appointment was a bit late. But they helped facilitate one or two meetings with some underrepresented communities. Next year, we will clearly defines their roles, and expectations and there would be more engagements.
6. We need an alternative to hashtag tools. The hashtag tool requires that you add the hashtags as part of your edit summary to track contributions. This comes with its own limitations and problems. Many people don't bother to give a clear edit summary, they sometimes insert it on the body of articles (by mostly new editors). They just add only the hashtag and that doesn't say anything about their contributions and that's problematic at different levels. We want a tool that would not require adding a hashtag as part of the edit summary. This way, disruption by new users could be minimized as they would be encouraged to provide edit summaries for their contributions.
7. We have a simple documentation for the use of PetScan but not sufficient enough to support participants. In the next editions, we plan to get an expert who knows how to use the tool to help with documentations on its usage.

Thank you so much for accepting our mid-term report, Marti (WMF). We hope to timely submit our final report in October 2021 before the due date. T Cells^Talk 21:36, 27 July 2021 (UTC)