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Wikimedistas de Uruguay/Reportes/Reporte de actividades 2020-2021

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About the User Group

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In 2013, Wikimedia Uruguay civil association was founded and in 2014, it was established as an official Wikimedia chapter. From 2013 to 2018, the group was active and organized several activities. However, there were some problems with the operation of the civil association, including out-dated statutes that put serious constraints for running the organization and lack of legal or financial support to maintain the non-for-profit organization. This led to disruptions to the normal functioning of the group.

In 2020, a group of former chapter members and Wikimedia editors living in Uruguay carried out the process of downgrading from a chapter to a user group. This institutional framework allowed for re-grouping while at the same time carrying out activities to promote Wikimedia projects. In 2020, the Wikimedistas de Uruguay User Group was established.

Wikimedistas de Uruguay currently includes 10 members who are free culture activists, feminists and human rights activists. Several of them are also Creative Commons Uruguay members. During 2020-2021, the group has been very active, doing at least one public activity per month. The activities have been around some of the interests of the group, namely, gender & diversity, climate change & sustainability topics, and culture & education, including partnerships with GLAM institutions and art collectives.

Governance

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The group currently has a pretty flat structure. It is our belief that transitioning to the User Group was a good idea, because it has removed the burden of following through unnecessary governance issues for a group of our size. This flat structure has allowed us to focus our monthly meetings to talk about the activities we want to carry out.

Since we have applied to a grant (see more below), we are proposing an Advisory Board structure to help us move into a next phase. We will be consulting with AffCom about the different possibilities that exist for organizing ourselves in a more formal structure and make sure we are abiding by the rules established for User Groups & Affiliates.

Grant application (Annual Plan 2022-2023)

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The User Group has applied to a grant application to fund 2022-2023 activities. The application can be read here and we are happy to say that it has been approved.

We have attached an Annual Plan 2022-2023 with activities, budget, and an estimated timeline.

Partnerships

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During 2020-2021, we have worked with the following partners:

  • Centro de Documentación del Instituto Cuesta Duarte del PIT-CNT.
  • Archivo X and Colectiva Cocó (arts collective).
  • FFLA-CDKN (Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano-Climate & Development Knowledge Network).
  • Creative Commons Uruguay.
  • Área de Promoción Sociocultural, División Derechos Humanos, Diversidad Sexual, Ministerio de Desarrollo Social (MIDES).
  • Plan Ceibal.
  • Mediared (alternative media collective).
  • Wikimedia Chapters and User Groups in the region.

For 2022-2023 we plan to incorporate the following partners:

  • UNESCO Chair on Open Education at Núcleo REA-University of the Republic
  • UNI 3, a non-formal education organization for senior citizens

Additionally, some members of the User Group are also part of the following initiatives:

  • Art+Feminism
  • Wikimedians for Sustainable Development User Group
  • WhoseKnowledge?
  • Open Climate, an alliance with other organizations from open knowledge projects.

Activities 2020-2021

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During 2020-2021 we did several trainings, edit-a-thons, workshops, coffee hours, and talks. Here is a detailed list of all the activities we did. The name of the activities are in Spanish.

Additionally, we created 2 Wikiprojects:

2020

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Summer break runs from December-February.

2021

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Lessons learned

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Overall, after over a year of doing activities, we realize that our ability to implement more strategic interventions require funding and support. As a group of volunteers, we rely on one-off tactics that we can easily implement, but this is not enough to scale our impact and to realistically improve content and participation from Uruguay.

Luckily, there are eager partners on the ground that want to work with the group. However, maintaining these relationships takes time and needs more carefully designed engagement strategies.

Additionally, we have learned several lessons after carrying out our activities, mainly edit-a-thons and training workshops.

  • Outreach: currently we are not targeting specific participants but rather a broad category of the ‘general public’. We are able to target more specific participants when we work with partners, but often it is unclear that the activities are benefiting the participants in the ways in which they envision and that they are being retained. Additionally, our current capacity for doing outreach is limited and it varies greatly from partner to partner.
  • Motivations: the activities work better when we are able to align them with values that are significant for participants (i.e., “I want to write my own biography” vs. “I want to communicate about climate change in my country” produces radically different results and engagement). This is consistent with the Movement Organizers report about the motivations that activists have to become organizers in the movement.
  • Collaboration: subject matter expert awareness of knowledge gaps on Wikipedia are key to identifying topics for impact and driving participation among experienced editors, but this knowledge is not being captured in ways that speak to on-wiki communities. Our experience in building expert knowledge into Wikiprojects (for the “Wikiproyecto Cambio climático” and the “Wikiproyecto Artes visuales de Uruguay”) has proven to be an interesting avenue to facilitate collaboration, but they require time and more work needs to be put into thinking how these tactics could become sustainable.
  • Follow-up: edit-a-thons are one-off events. Retaining participants after the event requires follow-up activities that need to be more carefully designed. The same is true for partnerships with institutions that require more commitment and relationship building.

Another important lesson that we have learned is that for the most part edit-a-thons don’t work for turning people into active, experienced or engaged Wikipedia editors. Edit-a-thons are useful tactics in certain situations. They are a “necessary evil” in the sense that partners ask to have edit-a-thons because they are the first tactic they learn about in the Wikimedia space, but that doesn’t mean that it yields the expected results in terms of growing or improving content or engaging new participants. Edit-a-thons focus partners on understanding “how to edit Wikipedia”, but after several years of doing these activities, it might be worth trying to explore with partners “how do Wikimedia projects fit in my dayjob/my activism/my workflow?”. We believe that answering this question will lead to stronger and more active programs.

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