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Grants:APG/Proposals/2018-2019 round 1/Wiki Education Foundation/Progress report form

< Grants:APG | Proposals | 2018-2019 round 1 | Wiki Education Foundation

Purpose of the report

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This form is for organizations receiving Annual Plan Grants to report on their progress after completing the first 6 months of their grants. The time period covered in this form will be the first 6 months of each grant (e.g. 1 January - 30 June of the current year). This form includes four sections, addressing grant metrics, program stories, financial information, and compliance. Please contact APG/FDC staff if you have questions about this form, or concerns submitting it by the deadline. After submitting the form, organizations will also meet with APG staff to discuss their progress.

Metrics and results overview - all programs

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We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees' programs. Please use the table below to let us know how your programs contributed to the Grant Metrics. We understand not all Grant or grantee-defined Metrics will be relevant for all programs, so feel free to put "0" where necessary. For each program include the following table and

  1. Next to each required metric, list the outcome/results achieved for all of your programs included in your proposal.
  2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome.
  3. In addition to the Global Metrics as measures of success for your programs, there is another table format in which you may report on any OTHER relevant measures of your programs success

For more information and a sample, see Grant Metrics.

Metric Achieved outcome Explanation
1. number of total participants 8,423 We're on track to meet our goal.
2. number of newly registered users 8,061 We're on track to meet our goal.
3. number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects 8,287 We expect to fall a little short on this goal, as we've emphasized more detailed edits to fewer articles over smaller edits to more articles in all programs.
4. quantity: words added to the article namespace 6,906,454 We're on track to meet our goal.
5. quality: number of articles increasing by at least 10 points on the ORES scale 2,255 We're on track to meet our goal.


Telling your program stories - all programs

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Wiki Education Staff, February 2019

In the first six months of 2019, Wiki Education has really begun to execute our strategic plan by focusing on its three main objectives of equity, quality, and reach. We've been systematically tackling the strategic objectives laid out in our plan — while also having success with the growth of our new revenue model.

Wiki Education's impact to the English Wikipedia continues to be significant. Throughout all our programs, we supported 8,423 people as they edited the English Wikipedia. And their edits are noteworthy: Between January and April, Wiki Education's program participants averaged 3.84% of all the active editors on English Wikipedia. While the average is 3.84%, there's a lot of variability due to the cycles of the academic calendar. For example, in January we only brought 2.17% of English Wikipedia's active editors, but in April, we brought 4.96%. All told, we're proud that our programs make such a noticeable impact on the active editors numbers, and we are helping stop the slide of active editors that has been such a focus of the Wikimedia movement for the last decade.

Our success isn't just in impact to Wikipedia: We've also had success in the long-term financial stability of our organization. In late 2018, we introduced a new earned income model, called "selling services", where we offer courses on Wikimedia projects for a fee, through our Wiki Scholars & Scientists Program. In the first half of 2019, we've been growing that model, more than doubling our revenue between the first and second quarters of the year. We're extremely proud of the growth of revenue, and look forward to increasing it even more in the remainder of the year.

Other highlights of the first six months related to our strategic plan include:

  • Equity: More than 800 students in 35 courses related to race, gender, and sexuality added around 780,000 words of content to English Wikipedia this spring.
  • Quality: Our new partnership model has resulted in a big quality push while simultaneously producing revenue for our organization.
  • Reach: We've empowered academics to improve content that is in high demand, such as the article on the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year.

Student Program

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In 2019, we aim to keep our Student Program at the same level of impact as 2018. This impact is enormous: Our student editors represent 19% of all the new editors to the English Wikipedia.

What's worked well
California State University at Sacramento professors Rachel Miller and Julian Fulton present on teaching with Wikipedia using Wiki Education to their colleagues during a session sponsored by the teaching & learning center on campus.

So far, our plan is working well. We — surprisingly — had the *exact* same number of courses we supported in spring 2019 as we did in spring 2018: 400. We were not expecting to repeat our successes from 2018 nearly so precisely, especially given the high number of people we're working with! But we're pleased with both the quality and quantity of student work being produced through the program. Those 400 courses added 6.6 million words of content to the English Wikipedia so far in 2019, putting us well on our way to meeting our annual goal of 11.2 million words from the Student Program (our spring is traditionally more productive than our fall, so this is an expected breakdown). We're also well on track for our other goals:

Measure of success Goal (2019) Progress to date % completed Notes
Total Participants 16,000 8,345 52% We're on track to meet our goal.
Newly Registered 15,500 8,010 52% We're on track to meet our goal.
Content Pages Improved 19,200 7,799 41% We're a little behind where we should be, as student editors this term have added more content to fewer articles, which is overall a good thing.
Quantity 11,200,000 6,600,220 59% We're a little ahead where we should be, as student editors this term have added more content to fewer articles, which is overall a good thing.
Quality Articles 4,500 2,139 48% We're on track to meet our goal.
What hasn't worked well

We collaborated with Wayne State University on a grant application to do a pilot of a Wikidata Student Program with their library science school. Unfortunately, we didn't receive the grant — but we had a really great follow-up conversation with a program officer there that helped us understand the flaws in our grant proposal. She encouraged us to apply again next year. We are planning to revise the proposal this year and submit again, with the expectation that we'd get the money in 2020 instead of 2019. So we still intend to do this project, just a little later than anticipated. But that hasn't stopped us from engaging with Wikidata; see the Wiki Scholars & Scientists section for more details.

The next six months

In our proposal, we talked about a new project with Dr. Alex Lockett, who is undertaking a project to evaluate our current resources for areas where we can include a deeper focus on knowledge equity for all courses — e.g., encouraging students to consider how many women or people of color they are citing, or creating discussion prompts about structures of power and privilege that have influenced their topics. We expect to get input from Dr. Lockett in August, and will spend time this fall implementing her recommendations. We're really excited to tackle this aspect of knowledge equity, aside from our ongoing work to recruit courses working in topic areas related to race, gender, and sexuality.

Wiki Scholars & Scientists

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NARA Wiki Scholars - Spring 2019
What's worked well

In 2018, we launched a pilot of the program we have renamed the Wiki Scholars & Scientists Program, in which we lead academic experts through a synchronous virtual course in which they learn how to edit Wikimedia projects. We started with Wikipedia courses in 2018, and by late 2018 we had introduced a revenue model, in which we charged participants a fee for the experience. By 2019, all courses offered through this program were in a fee-for-service model. We are testing three specific payment models: (1) the individual participants pay for their spot in a course; (2) an institution purchases an entire course and offers it for free to their staff or members; or (3) a hybrid of the two, where an institution advertises it to their membership, sometimes offering scholarships for participants. This revenue generation model has already shown its growth potential, as we've steadily increased the amount of money brought in from this program each quarter, as the chart below demonstrates (the previous quarter from last fiscal year is included as a reference point). Everything we've learned so far tells us this revenue generation model will be a good long-term model for our organization, and could serve as a revenue generation model for others in the Wikimedia movement as well.

Screen capture of Wiki Education program participants' edits to the English Wikipedia article on the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, as seen here: https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/courses/Wiki_Scholars/NARA_Wiki_Scholars_-_Advanced_(2019-05)/articles/edited?showArticle=51316504

Not only is the program bringing in revenue, it's also producing great content on Wikipedia. To date in 2019, we've completed two full-length beginning Wikipedia courses and one advanced Wikipedia course, and we are in the middle of running an additional four full-length beginning Wikipedia courses. Our two full-length courses focused on (1) topic areas related to women's suffrage, in collaboration with the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and (2) topics related to science, in our Communicating Science initiative. We had also previously run two for-fee courses in 2018 in collaboration with NARA, and thus we had a pool of people to draw from to create a shorter advanced Wikipedia editing course, in which six participants collaboratively edited the article on the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. These experts completely overhauled the article, adding new sections and providing much better information in the existing sections. We're extremely proud of the work they did on the article, and encourage all Wikipedians to take a look.

Measure of success Goal (2019) Progress to date % completed Notes
Total Participants 175 69 39% We've had fewer participants than expected to date, but the participants we have had have been more productive, which is overall a good thing.
Newly Registered 155 51 25% We've had fewer participants than expected to date, but the participants we have had have been more productive, which is overall a good thing.
Content Pages Improved 525 224 43% We expect to be able to meet this goal.
Quantity 250,000 180,753 72% We anticipate far exceeding this goal, as our participants have been extremely productive.
Quality Articles 100 54 54% We're on track to meet this goal.
What hasn't worked well

Initially, we had incorporated two peer reviews as part of the course. But we learned that peer review did not generate sufficient productive feedback or learning for participants relative to the amount of time and effort they spent. Whereas students in our other program are learning about topics together, academics have already specialized and are less willing to criticize outside of their domain. Early this year, we decided to eliminate the peer review from the curriculum and instead encourage our Wikipedia Experts on staff to review content. This has improved the challenges related to peer reviews dramatically, and we will be using this version of the timeline from here on out.

The next six months

In the next six months, we expect to continue to grow and experiment with our Wikipedia course offerings. We are currently running four courses, and we expect to run many more in the second half of the year as the hard work our Advancement team put in during the first half of the year begins to pay off in terms of contracts.

We are also excited to launch a new Wikidata course offering in July. Our team has been hard at work developing curriculum and training materials for a "Wikidata for Librarians" course. The Association for Research Libraries has helped us get the word out to librarians, which has helped us fill the slots in the course, and we're eager to debut this new course in July. We expect to spend late August and early September adapting our Wikidata courses based on our learnings from the July courses, with a likely launch of additional course offerings later in 2019.

Other projects

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Chief Programs Officer & Deputy Director LiAnna Davis led a workshop, along with Wikimedians from Jordan, Macedonia, Serbia, and Indonesia, at the Wikipedia+Education Conference in Donostia on how to use the Program & Events Dashboard for an education program.
Our former Google Summer of Code Intern Pratyush Singhal and current Intern Ujjwal Agrawal working together at the Wikimedia Hackathon.

Wiki Education has also engaged in smaller scale programs work in the first six months, as described in our grant proposal.

  • As part of our consulting efforts, we were asked to provide feedback on the annual report of VVIT WikiConnect, a Wikimedia student organization at Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology of Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India. We offer our consulting services on program plans pro bono for members of the Wikimedia community as part of our service to our global collaborators, and VVIT WikiConnect's Krishna Chaitanya Velaga took us up on this offer. The club was specifically seeking any suggestions for improvement on last year's work as well as ideas for how to make the club more sustainable into the future. We offered detailed feedback to the group, which was well received.
  • We improved the Dashboard platform's capabilities and usability, making it easier to create and configure new programs, extending the training module translation system, and improving accessibility. We also attended the Wikimedia Hackathon, where we focused on making the Dashboard operate better for global education programs like the "Studenti" program in Czechia. In May, we kicked off three new internship projects which will add statistics about references and citations, make it easier to track cross-wiki programs, and create an Android app for accessing the Dashboard.
  • We've worked with Lane Rasberry, Wikimedian in Residence at the University of Virginia Data Science Institute, to submit an application for a project in which their data science graduate students embark on a capstone research project. We've submitted a proposal to create a Wikipedia Quality Index, in which we can measure article quality by broad subject area over time. We are optimistic that it will be selected as a project, and look forward to beginning work on it with the students this fall.
  • Our Visiting Scholars remains in maintenance mode; our handful of active Visiting Scholars continue to find the program extremely valuable, and the content they add to Wikipedia is excellent. As planned, we are not growing this program in 2019. The work this program has achieved on wiki thus far is as follows:
Measure of success Goal (2019) Progress to date % completed Notes
Total Participants 10 9 90% We don't expect to add another Visiting Scholar this year.
Newly Registered 0 0 n/a As expected.
Content Pages Improved 750 264 35% Several Scholars have been less active than expected.
Quantity 500,000 125,481 25% Several Scholars have been less active than expected.
Quality Articles 100 62 62% The work our Scholars have done has been of extremely high quality, however.
  • Our development, finance, administration, human resources, and governance work continues to ensure our organization functions well, and we want to recognize all their hard and often under-appreciated work!

Revenues received during this six-month period

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Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 2 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

  • Please also include any in-kind contributions or resources that you have received in this revenues table. This might include donated office space, services, prizes, food, etc. If you are to provide a monetary equivalent (e.g. $500 for food from Organization X for service Y), please include it in this table. Otherwise, please highlight the contribution, as well as the name of the partner, in the notes section.
Revenue source Currency Anticipated Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Anticipated ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Explanation of variances from plan
Selling Impact USD $2,455,000 $475,080 $72,877 F G $547,957 $2,455,000 $547,957 A Q2 expected $300,000 grant didn't come in until early July, throwing our numbers off, but we expect a large Q3.
Selling Services USD $280,000 $24,691 $79,596 F G $104,287 $280,000 $104,287 We are extremely pleased with our growth in this area to date.
TOTAL USD $2,735,000 $499,771 $152,473 F G $652,244 $2,735,000 $652,244 We expect a large Q3 will make up much of our current gap.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars

"Selling Impact" is the bucket term we use for foundation and individual philanthropic support for our organization's impact. "Selling Services" is the bucket term we use for our earned income model, splitting out money we expect to raise by providing our services.

Spending during this six-month period

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Please use the exchange rate in your APG proposal.

Table 3 Please report all spending in the currency of your grant unless US$ is requested.

(The "budgeted" amount is the total planned for the year as submitted in your proposal form or your revised plan, and the "cumulative" column refers to the total spent to date this year. The "percentage spent to date" is the ratio of the cumulative amount spent over the budgeted amount.)
Expense Currency Budgeted Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Cumulative Budgeted ($US)* Cumulative ($US)* Percentage spent to date Explanation of variances from plan
Student Program USD $510,123 $121,721 $115,456 F G $237,177 $510,123 $237,177 46% We are on track with our spending.
Scholars & Scientists Program USD $680,797 $150,326 $158,666 F G $308,992 $680,797 $308,992 45% We are on track with our spending.
Technology USD $410,854 $84,867 $91,392 F G $176,259 $410,854 $176,259 43% We are on track with our spending.
General/HR/Finance/Admin/Board/Fundraising USD $1,004,468 $244,295 $212,661 F G $456,956 $1,004,468 $456,956 45% We are on track with our spending.
TOTAL USD $2,606,242 $601,208 $578,176 F G $1,179,176 $2,606,242 $1,179,176 45% We are on track with our spending.

* Provide estimates in US Dollars


Compliance

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Is your organization compliant with the terms outlined in the grant agreement?

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As required in the grant agreement, please report any deviations from your grant proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

  • As described above, we did not receive the grant to fund the Wikidata Student Program as expected, so we have delayed the start of this program until we receive grant funding for it.

Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

  • Yes

Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Grant funds as outlined in the grant agreement? Please answer "Yes" or "No".

  • Yes

Signature

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Once complete, please sign below with the usual four tildes.

Resources

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Resources to plan for measurement

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Resources for storytelling

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