Grants:IEG/WikiAcademy Albania
Project idea
editWhat is the problem you're trying to solve?
editOnline information about Albania in the albanian wikipedia is poor and in many cases it's not correct. In addition multimedia like audio, video and images are way less present than plain text which accompanies them. There's almost no material about the traditional "anf fol" clothing, traditional Albanian music and in general, there is lack of information regarding the elements of cultural heritage of the Albanian country. There is definitely a great need for more information that would help not only growing the number of tourists that explore and find their way to visit Albania, but also making this information open and accessible for the albanian citizens, enabling them to be better informed. Last but not least, educational materials in the Albanian Wikipedia are also poorly present at the momemt. It is also clear that there is a small number of Wikipedians in Albania working on solving the issues mentioned above.
What is your solution?
editWe believe that the best way to reduce the lack of information in the albanian wikipedia is to inform youngsters about the importance of solving these issues and explaining ways of joining Wikipedia through adding new articles, editing existing ones and/or promoting the biggest platform of knowledge sharing. The idea is to initiate a tour that will include meetups, workshops and presentations in schools and universities.
A project pilot called WikiAkademia Shqiptare has already started in four (4) albanian speaking cities with very positive feedback at the moment. WikiAkademia Shqiptare it’s a project of Open Labs, which has started since September 2013 and it includes a group of people aiming to improve the quality of information in the albanian Wikipedia. We started with a presentation in State University and a high school in Tetova, Macedonia with 150 participants and after that we continued with a school in Durres with 110 participants and Elbasan with 102 participants. Since the awareness of Wikipedia as a platform in Albania seemed low at the time, we focused more on presentations that were related to the importance of Wikipedia and not that much in adding new contributors. The idea was simple: if you can not understand the importance of the change Wikipedia can bring than it doesn’t matter if you are a contributor or not.
The plan is to focus on two main schools in two different cities. Initially we plan to train teachers in one high school and one university in Tirana, and one high school and one university in Elbasan. We have already held workshops in these schools, so we won’t start from scratch and the feedback that we had from the first workshop was positive which promises commitment and good results from the teachers. This way it will be easier to get more active contributors.
After the trainings, we surely plan to assist the teachers in any unclear issue they might have in the future through a dedicated mailing list and a knowledge base in albanian we are already building. In addition each one of the representatives of the Wikiakademia Shqiptare project will be available, not only to support them online by making Skype conferences with the students but also to hold on-going workshops. We will also include them in our events like Wikipedia Weekend (our flagship event), Open Source Conference Albania or Wiki Caffe that we organize frequently.
In the meantime, as part of the "Wikiakademia Shqiptare" project, we organized the first ever Wikipedia Weekend in Tirana, featuring two days dedicated to all things Wikipedia. The goal was to spread the importance of Wikipedia through a big community event and involve as many youngsters in albanian wikipedia editing and grow the community of local wikipedians. All the activities are documented in the microsite created for this purpose, which can be found here
We had a collaboration with Ministry of Culture for the Wiki Loves Monuments Albania project. Also, we helped in Wikikultura project, which is the first governmental initiative towards open data. It concerns the public data of the Ministry of Culture and its dependency institutions, list of the previous ministers and the periods they governed, the projects and activities held by these institutions, all the funds used to organize these events, the legal basis on which the Ministry operates, all the information regarding the monuments of culture in each city in Albania, details about the albanian tangible and intangible heritage. We also have contacted ministry of education and ministry of youth and they are very optimist about our project.
Project goals
edit- Sharing knowledge through floss software and technology
- Informing Albanian youngsters about Wikipedia
- Teaching youngsters and influencers (teachers and university professors) the usage of Wikipedia
- Creating the albanian Wikipedia 'ambassadors'
- Community building
- Collaboration with the public administration (the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Culture)
- Promoting the albanian cultural heritage through Wikipedia, making information accessible by all interested parts, albanians or foreigners.
- Presenting and digital archiving in a structured and organized platform all the objects of cultural interest in the Republic of Albania.
- Increase awareness mainly among the youngsters about the importance of albanian cultural heritage through volunteering by improving or adding information on Wikipedia about the issues of cultural heritage.
- Decentralization of Management - the information about the cultural heritage updated by many approved institutional users into a platform that will be active for a long time (Sustainability).
Project plan
editActivities
edit1. Making a tour all over Albania with presentations and workshops.
| Month | City | Number of Presentations/Workshops | Place |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | Tiranë | 5 | High School/University |
| February | Elbasan | 5 | High School/University |
| March | Tiranë | 5 | High School/University |
| April | Elbasan | 5 | High School/University |
| May | Tiranë | 5 | High School/University |
| June | Elbasan | 5 | High School/University |
2. Collaborating with Ministry of Education and Ministry of Culture.
- Ministry of Education can provide easy access in Schools and Universities.
- Ministry of Culture can promote WIKI LOVES MONUMENTS. And provide the necessary materials of cultural heritage and monuments in Albania.
3. Activities like Wikipedia Weekend in Tirana. Inviting people from abroad and also local speakers, to share their experiences with Wikipedia in order to inspire the youngsters here in Albania to get more involved with Wikipedia.
4. Meetings at Open Labs hackerspace, to talk about Wikipedia and different subjects like females on Wikipedia, lack of multimedia material on Wikipedia Albania, short articles, typos ect.
Budget
edit
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Community engagement
editWikiAcademy Albania(WikiAkademia Shqiptare) is a project initiated from the Open Labs community based in Tirana. Open Labs is a hackerspace founded 2 years ago with the goal of building the community around free libre open source technologies and the importance of knowledge sharing. Open Labs members have organized more than 80 activities with average attendance of 15 people during two years on a low budget style. We are an active community with a good knowledge about the MediaWiki platform. Our community has started promoting Wikipedia in an organized way since November 2013, an experience that gives us confidence to continue the project in a more dynamic way.
Sustainability
edit- Including professors and teachers at our workshops we think would help make the trainings continue even after the ending of the project. They are in contact with the students during all the year so they will continue to teach after our workshops will be finished in that School/University.
- The involvement of the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Culture in the project gives us assurance about the sustainability of the project.
Measures of success
editNeed target-setting tips? Note: in addition to your project-specific measures of success, you will also be asked to report on some Global Metrics at the end of your final report. Please keep this in mind as you plan, and we'll support you as you begin your project.
- Number of training sessions - 30 sessions
- Number of trained teachers per session - 2 teachers in each session X 30 sessions = 60 teachers (in total)
- Number of students trained - 25 students in each session X 30 sessions = 750 students in total
- Number of registered new users - 10 new users per session X 30 sessions = 300 new registered users (this is approximate since we are not sure if there will already be registered users in each session)
- Number of articles written/improved - 5 articles per session X 30 sessions = 150 articles
- Number of participants still active 2 and 6 months after the end of program - There will be follow ups with emails/newsletter and Wikipedia messages to make sure that at least 100 students remain active. This is also an estimation since we have not used this metric before.
Get involved
editParticipants
edit- Greta Doçi
- Redon Skikuli
- Volunteer I would love to help out at the events and workshops to teach others about Wikipedia and how to edit it. Elioqoshi94 (talk) 10:55, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
- Volunteer To help... Gimi (talk) 13:24, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
- Volunteer I know how to contribute at Wikipedia thanks to WikiAkademia. I have seen the passion and enthusiasm in their work and i want to be part of it. OdetaD (talk) 14:37, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
- Volunteer I'm available for help. --Arianit (talk) 19:25, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
- Volunteer I want to help to make this project to finish the tour successfully and to be productive in the best way that i can. Progri.K (talk) 20:12, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
- Volunteer I strongly believe that through this project we can reduce the lack of information, so I would love to help in any means. ViolaCivici (talk) 20:44, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
- Volunteer Helping the team 109.69.5.249 17:16, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- Volunteer I want to help the team for the presentations / workshops and spreading the Wiki in Albania ! OrvenBregu (talk) 17:20, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- Volunteer I would like to help this project 217.73.143.191 20:24, 2 October 2014 (UTC)
Community Notification
editPlease paste links below to where relevant communities have been notified of your proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions. Need notification tips?
- Open Labs mailing list.
- Wikimedia Serbia
- Social Media pages(twitter, facebook) that our hacker space Open Labs and Wikiakademia possesses.
Endorsements
editDo you think this project should be selected for an Individual Engagement Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project in the list below. (Other constructive feedback is welcome on the talk page of this proposal).
- Community member: Elio Qoshi, Mozilla Representative. WikiAcademy Albania is a very effective initiative started in Albania, at the local open source community. For over a year volunteers have dedicated their time in promoting open knowledge and teaching others to edit Wikipedia with a very successful impact. Now it's time to take a step further and enlarge the impact of WikiAcademy in an exponential 109.69.5.244 10:51, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
- Wikipedia editor and promoter: James Michael DuPont. I support the initiative of Open Labs, they are a serious group who have made great strides in Albania to promoting open knowledge and Free/Libre Open Source Software. Albania is ripe for grant money, and the money there will go a very long way, the costs of living there are very low and the people in Open Labs are to be trusted with grant money. the people of Albania are educated yet isolated, they are interested in the world, yet burdened with a dark history that has yet to be full processed, the youth is striving to learn about the world outside Albania or even to learn about their own history, and the Wikipedia project will help in that regard. Mdupont (talk) 11:17, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
- Wikipedia editor and editathon offline event organizer: Arianit Dobroshi. We have found the model proposed by Greta to be very effective in Kosovo in getting youth to edit Wikipedia and contribute photos to Commons. We share the Albanian language and sq.wikipedia is in desperate need of more editors and higher quality articles. I would love to see this project succeed. ----Arianit (talk) 19:25, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
- Wikipedia editor and promoter: Shkumbin Brestovci. I'm all for it.--Bresta (talk) 22:21, 30 September 2014 (UTC)
- Manager, Wikipedia Education Program, WIkimedia Foundation: Anna Koval. I am excited about this proposal. I am hopeful about this project. And I am pleased with the outreach work already being done in WikiAcademy Albania. The proposed coordination with the Ministry of Education is promising and the proposed schedule of 20 presentations per month is ambitious. But this group is already off to a good start with a series of workshops at universities, high schools, and primary schools in 4 cities. 1 I look forward to working with Greta, whom I have been in contact with by email, and I plan on advising and supporting this project in the hope that it could become a Wikipedia Education Program. Anna Koval (WMF) (talk) 17:01, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
- Board member of Wikimedia Serbia, leading the project FemWiki in Serbia: Sanja Pavlović. I have met Greta Doci online just a few weeks ago, but just in this short period of time I've realized that her motivation for Wikipedia and free knowledge is very strong. I saw that she had a presentation "Women in Wikipedia" at some local event in Serbia. After that, I have contacted her and we together came to an idea to have a women wiki camp next year. I am happy to have the opportunity to endorse her application because I have no doubts that she is very good at what she does and I would love to support that. Trans Goat (talk) 22:34, 1 October 2014 (UTC)