Wikimedia Armenia/Reports/2019-05

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2019

May

Public Discussion on “Participation in the EU-Armenia CSO platform formation process and reducing threats and hate speech against the human rights defenders”

On May 2, 2019 Public Discussion on “Participation in the EU-Armenia CSO platform formation process and reducing threats and hate speech against the human rights defenders” took place with the initiative of Armenian Lawyers Association. The first panel of the discussion was devoted to International Civil Society Week 2019, which took place in Belgrade in April. Representatives of Armenian delegation spoke about the conference, about the main organizer CIVICUS, called the local CSOs to join the platform and actively engage in this international platform. The executive director of Wikimedia Armenia Gayane Vardanyan was one of the Armenian delegates and she shared her insights from the conference with discussion participants. She put on the table several theses such as How to engage grassroots to civic movements? How the civic movements should interact with organized CSOs to better address the needs and better use the existing resources? How the cooperation with donors should be structured, what should be the modality of rapid response and etc? She called the discussion participants to think over these questions in the Armenian context and see if there was a need for new structures, skills and resources in this regard.

Medical WLS

On May 8-12, Wikimedia Armenia organized an editing event in Tsaghkadzor in the framework of “I create an important medical article” campaign. Some participants of "I create a vital article" project were also at the event. Event participants translated medical Wikipedia articles from English.

In similar community events, Wikimedia Armenia puts a lot of efforts to raise awareness among Wikipedia users about editing tools and encourage participation in discussions. For this purpose, Wikimedia Armenia employee Dato Abuladze introduced advanced editing practices and tools for Wikimedia projects, as well as several Wikipedia policies, tips on how to participate in the discussions better, and more.

At the event, the Applicant Coordinator of the Public Health Department of the American University of Armenia (AUA) Astghik Atanyan led an interesting training where she presented the public health sector of Armenia and MPH (Master of Public Health) program of AUA.

	Medical WLS (May 8-12)
	Number of participants	Wikipedia
participants	43 (23 new)
created/improved articles/entries		59/59
edits		541
bytes (net sum)		3 400 000

Opening ceremony
Editing process
Group photo

Translation skills

In order to support the capacity building of Armenian Wikimedia community, Wikimedia Armenia organizes regular capacity building trainings for the community. Last year we have conducted a poll in order to identify the needs of the community members on the training topics. Among the topics we observed a significant interest toward improvement of translation skills. In order to fulfill this interest Wikimedia Armenia hosted Mariam Karapetyan, YSLU professor, wikieditor, who let a workshop titled “Translation Tricks and Techniques”, on April 26. At the workshop, Mariam Karapetyan presented common tricks of text translation and how to avoid frequent mistakes. Mariam Karapetyan discussed with the audience about the ways and methods of translation process and what tools may be helpful to improve the quality of translation. Last but not least, she also introduced several online tools and dictionaries for better translation.

Tutorial for Western Armenian Wikipedia Editors

In May 2019, a tutorial on improving Western Armenian Wikipedia articles was prepared, published, and shared on Wikimedia Armenia's social media channels. The tutorial focused on correcting some of the most common language mistakes that have been noticed in articles in Western Armenian. This is the second tutorial prepared in 2019, aiming at improving the quality of the articles.

Tutorial for Western Armenian Wikipedia Editors

Wikimedia CEE Spring 2019

The Central and Eastern Europe collaboration։ Wikimedia CEE Spring 2019 was held on March 21 - 31․ Wikimedia Armenia organised the participation of Armenian Wikipedians in this collaboration, prepared and published lists of articles about Armenia for the Wikipedians of other countries, so they could create and significantly improve those articles․

As a result, 1196 articles about 31 countries of Central and Eastern Europe on 32 different topics were created in Armenian Wikipedia. 45 users participated in this collaboration from Armenia, three of them created nearly 200 articles. Out of 1196 created articles, 196 were about women.

Cooperation with the Central Bank of Armenia

In May 2019, the Central Bank of Armenia has launched a campaign called "My financial month," designed specially to help citizens and raise their awareness of how to manage their personal finances. The cooperation with Wikimedia Armenia was one of the directions of this campaign.

Eight participants from different towns of Armenia created and improved 10 articles in Armenian Wikipedia on he financial topics. At first, all participants took part in a workshop at the Wikimedia Armenia office. They mastered editing skills on Wikipedia. They learned how to create articles from scratch, Wikipedia policies regarding the copyright and licensing of the articles․

Wikimedia Armenia agreed with the Central Bank, to continue the project supporting the creation and improvement of financial articles, especially from the list of 1000 vital articles․

Wikimedia Hackathon 2019, report by Narek Avetisyan

From 17 to 19 May of this year in Prague was held Wikimedia Hackathon 2019, in which I had an opportunity to participate. On the first day I attended the session of iNaturalist project. It has a large community of enthusiasts, some of them are also active in the various Wikimedia communities. There are also other programs in which I took part as a part of our hearings: Code health and quality metrics in Wikimedia continuous integration, Introduction to WikiLoop a Google's effort to contribute to open knowledge world, Discussion between WikiEdu Dashboard developers and users.

For me it's so important to be a part of this Hackathon, because after that kind of events we are acquiring many different sources of information, which is too important for our community. It is quite evident that any discussion that goes through a constructive environment unequivocally creates sound informational opportunities.

WikiClubs report

On May 1, the International Labor Day, Karvachar WikiClub coordinator Tamara Grigoryan organized a discussion on the importance of volunteering and volunteer work. WikiClub participants expressed their opinions and attitudes on volunteerism, discussed editing in the Wikimedia projects as a way of voluntary work and the possibility of other volunteer activities in their community. On May 10, Astghik Nalbandyan, the teacher of Armenian language and literature at Karvachar primary school, visited Karvachar WikiClub and led a training about the common mistakes and main rules of grammar and syntax of the Armenian language with the aim to help WikiClub members to conduct better translations.

On May 3, the mayor of Alaverdi city Sasun Khechumyan visited Alaverdi's WikiClub. Being a former NGO representative, he told the WikiClub members about the main issues in the field. The mayor also discussed with the WikiClub participants the main problems of Alaverdi city presenting the key ways toward their solution.

On May 19, in the framework of the International Museum Day, the participants of Hatsik WikiClub visited several museums of Gyumri. WikiClub members got acquainted with the activities and exhibits of a number of Armenian literary and artistic people.

On May 27, Goris WikiClub hosted the students of Access English Language Course led by their teacher Margarita Abgaryan. They got acquainted with wiki editing tools and WikiClub activities.

On May 30, Ddmashen WikiClub coordinator Shoghik Stepanyan organized an expedition to “Tsarav Dzor” (Thirsty Gorge) chapel to identify, photograph, collect medicinal herbs and learn more about them. The participants read the corresponding articles of the medicinal plants and added their photos to the Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia articles.

Méntha
Thymus
Méntha

New participants, May 2019
Active participants, May 2019

	Community population	New users	Active users	male/female ratio	Edits on Wikipedia and Wiktionary	Proofread pages in Wikisource	Uploaded files	Average daily views of created and improved pages
Alaverdi WikiClub	13100	1	28	50/22	513	18	4	1182
Arevatsag WikiClub	821	1	43	71/54	1453	37	2	1618
Gyumri WikiClub (KASA)	121976				35		0	193
Goris WikiClub	20300	6	25	48/14	406	200	3	2153
Ddmashen WikiClub	2806	1	37	46/38	1247	130	0	2176
Lernapat WikiClub	1661	1	39	133/147	2316	315	28	4642
Koghb WikiClub	4530	2	13	47/23	394	35	0	384
Hatsik WikiClub	1044	3	15	25/17	988	265	0	2557
Mrgavan WikiClub	1606			30/28	226		2	730
Spitak WikiClub	13100	1	15	48/38	109	200	1	163
Stepanakert WikiClub	55309	6	21	169/62	69	1	1	717
Vanashen WikiClub	2364	0	20	34/10	640	105	0	850
Vardenik WikiClub	9880	1	27	44/21	879	58	1	2433
Togh WikiClub	700	0	20	45/31	14	175	0	55
Karvachar WikiClub	500	5	36	52/51	1509	134	11	2778
NET sum	249697	28	339		10798	1673	53	22631

Saturday workshops

Every Saturday Wikimedia Armenia organizes open workshops-edit-a-thons at the WMAM office where new editors are taught how to edit different wiki projects. Anyone interested in wiki projects, Wikipedia, wiki editing and needed assistance, as well as wiki editors, who want to edit in pleasant atmosphere participate in these workshops-edit-a-thons.

	Saturday workshops
	May 4	May 11	May 18	May 25
participants	11	7	10	9
created/improved articles	4/3	2/0	2/4	0
edits	17	15	14	34
bytes (net sum)	54900	17900	203100	41900

4 May 2019
11 May 2019
18 May 2019
25 May 2019

This month in numbers


0	6709	2925	250	64	306
articles recorded for the Spoken Wikipedia project	pages digitized for the Digitization project	words pronounced for the Wiktionary project	vital articles improved for the I create a vital article campaign	new editors involved in all projects	I create a medical article campaign