Grants:PEG/Manos Kefalas/Wikipedia School in Athens, Greece/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY Pending has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:PEG/Manos Kefalas/Wikipedia School in Athens, Greece.

You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email grants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?: YES

Is your project completed?: YES

Activities and lessons learned

School for adults logo

School for primary & secondary students logo

Wikipedia Festival artistic work,
printed on t-shirts

Activities

We used a blog site for the school activities. Program of lessons, announcements, directions to come to school, purpose of lessons, work of school editors uploaded in Wikipedia and Commons, along with tagging for statistics are all in one page: http://wikipedia-school-kaisariani.blogspot.gr/
We used el.wikipedia banner to attract people to participate. Half the population of Greece lives in Athens, where Wikipedia School resides, so this was fairly targeted. We only did three banner calls.
We developed a series of tools to help newcomers.
1. Template:Toolcase, where someone can find whatever needed to contribute, just a few clicks away.
2. Developed and added, to user sandbox page, functionality for users to work with multiple sanboxed articles that are automatically organized and moved to live articles with simple clicks and without errors. A proposal after this (and a live example in English) has been put in enwiki.
3. Developed and added a tool to understand, use and compare Wikidata along with Wikipedia infoboxes. Proposal to use in enwiki (along with live example), is here.
In every occasion given, having the school running continiously, we helped anyone who asked for guidance and lessons through the contact form of school's webpage or recommendations, and participated in a lot of meetings to promote Wikipedia. Not all fruited but after that we had a tank of thankful people (schools, educational institutions, libraries, museums, companies etc) to work with.
Some lessons were held over the phone, in distant cities/villages of Greece, from home, after requests. Some of these editors came to Athens also, for a lesson or two.
Wikipedia School was engaged in a school contest for contributing in Wikipedia, as an educative supporter of the event. This was extremely benificial:
1. Lessons at schools were without a target until then and interest had been partially lost because we could have lessons only once a week and after school hours. Students were extremly motivated by the contest.
2. After having the contest editing experience, during the closing ceremony where 26 schools took part, national-wide, the rest of the schools that had been contributing in one article for a month or two, saw that three schools (Wikipedia Schools!) had been contributing to Wikipedia as a "Good Learning Practice" for the whole school year, producing tenths of articles each, and expressed their interest on this.
A wiki (Wikipedia) page was created to make Wikipedia School an official part of Adult Learning Program of Ministry of Education.
Education material was produced and shared between Wikipedia Schools or everyone showed interest, according to this base (so far) that connects Wikipedia Schools via educational objectives. Lessons are not translated in English yet and a lot are only distributed via email so far.
Wikipedia School teacher attended paid university lessons for teachers of informatics:
1. Producing teaching material became more efficient and by the rules of experts.
2. Wikipedia School came in touch with education system core, as the deliverable was Wikipedia School Project.
On May 12 we had the biggest event for Wikipedia in Greece, so far: Wikipedia Festival. People hepled by Wikipedia School participated to this open call, along with Wikipedia veteran editors and anyone who supported, promoted, contributed to Wikipedia and had something to share to all. It was an unofficial Wikipedia conference where we all met each other and built relationships. We did not use Wikipedia banner to call for participation, so the event was a huge success on its own, especially compared to any past open activity.
Lessons in Kaisariani school continiued until July 31, with low participation, using appointments. Today (August 5) we had a new student via skype.

Lessons learned

What worked well?

Success in sustaining the learning group came in the middle of March, where it was decided to have the lesson split in half. First hour was the technical help to each student and the second hour was dedicated to Wikipedia storytelling, analyzing behaviors, playing games and in many ways learning how to live together with others inside Wikipedia (and maybe real or internet life as an extent).
- Education program is editor value creation oriented as much as article creation oriented.
Shielding new users by developing and using a user-friendly multi-sandbox workplace: Multiple articles are organized and developed inside sandboxes. With single clicks sandboxes are moved errorlessly to live articles. Protection is so good it almost eliminated the need for second hour's special classes.
Template:Toolcase is something no student of Wikipedia School can live without. Speeds up everything.
All students are volunteers.
Teacher participated in university seminars for educators covering both adult and primary/secondary education, and used material in Wikipedia School.
Sharing teaching material with Wikipedia Schools in secondary education.
Wikipedia School for adults has been running for more than a year, constantly (paused for August and September 2014 only), grabbing opportunities all along.
Helping libraries, museums, schools, companies, educational centers with lessons, and they gave back.
Teaching adults more than once a week.
Target is needed for young students. Without the contest, failure was close.
An internet site for volunteering offered to host Wikipedia School promotion. Following this, a job searching site hosted the Wikipedia School ask for participation, too. We decided not to use Wikipedia banner for the rest of the year to call for participation at school, after a steady flow of interest was expressed. The difference from Wikipedia banner was that through this job seeking site we had 5 times more expression of interest from women, than men.
Openness to Wikipedia community, using Village Pump to: inform of the Idealab talk of the project, ask for advice, consulting and sharing of knowledge, ask to build questionnaires for evaluation of the lessons and the teachers in order for the community to have control over the action, call to participate in teaching, call to Wikipedia pages where Wikipedia School education material as well as material to make Wikipedia classes part of adult education program of Ministry of Education were put to be worked onwiki, inform of sending people who stated interest to attend Wikipedia School classes to attend classes held by other members of the community in other cities (i.e. 13 to Thessaloniki), call everyone for participation in Wikipedia Festival with scheduled or even intercalary presentations and also call through user pages of people with known Wikipedia promoting activity to participate with even out of the ordinary (special speech or content - custom themes) presentations.
Focusing on work and being steps ahead instead of losing precious time on critique trying to prove not being an elephant.

What didn't work?

Ttzavaras and ManosHacker could have secondary grade classes only once a week, after school hours. Estimates were wrong about participation and article creation, it was not the same as Ttzavaras had achieved during previous years, when students could visit him during school hours, have advice, support and paradigm. DADRITS, the professor of Karlovasion Gymnasium of Samos island, on the other hand was a teacher inside the school and did all well, even if he also had to take students outside school to the local library after school hours.
Cold or rainy days, especially during Christmas holidays do not help participation, in Greece.
Students need example, they like to see their teacher 's live edits to grow interest in contributing. As Wikipedia School project was very demanding, teacher's (Manos Kefalas) contributions on articles were low. This was balanced by uploading student contributions on school's web page and students were longing to see their contribution there. During August holidays there were no contributing updates on school's web page and students asked for it. Ideally the teacher should contribute regularly and students' contributions should be shown without long delays (holiday update inactivity should also be noticed).

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

Wikipedia lessons in secondary education are not possible as a full year project for many professors at schools. Wikipedia contrinuting might be better for them to be a continue of another project, exploiting its results (knowledge collected and understood).
Measuring of success should be based on results of the project (there had been very low sample at the time of proposal). Discussion, with proper quantitative and qualitative analysis, will also help towards a better measuring of success.
Three lessons/week for adults plus once a week for second grade students, for one teacher only, is exhausting, especially when someone has to handle a lot more than a thousand emails, maintain a site with student contributions, check contributions and help, prepare teaching material, go to appointments and give lectures to promote Wikipedia and do Wikipedia Festival almost all by himself. Help came from veteran editors when a lesson had to be tought elsewhere at the same time, fortunatelly. This is not an easy task if someone is self-employed as an IT, in Greece during crisis. But it was necessary in order to have success and give example. The solution is to invite once more and let other people do things, too, hoping they now motivate after this first success. A first try was given and thank messages were received.
Evaluation tools (or at least platform) for Wikipedia and Education are needed, strongly, and are still missing. No evaluation minifies advance.

Learning patterns

New

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

Provide the original project goal here.: Train more than 100 people (capacity for our four schools = 80 participants concurrently, which gives an estimate of more than 250 participants if School works in an osmotic way) on how to be successful Wikipedia editors, provide certificates for their CVs, upraise hope and optimism level as a new school, warm up people and educational institutions for more Wikipedia schools

Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 short paragraphs.: Yes, aproximately. 60 people wrote full articles form Kaisariani School only, 11 students from Karlovasion Gymnasium, and undocumented number of students at 24th Gymnasium of Athens. We finally had only one school for adults running for the whole year in Kaisariani and from the middle of Spring to Summer in Penteli at the Diorthodox Center of the Church of Greece (a lot less often). The School was a real hope for a better Wikipedia from its very beginning, national-wide television came to cover the opening event. People who were helped by Wikipedia School came and filled in Wikipedia Festival all day long. People from Ministry of Education were in deep informed on Wikipedia School activities, watched Wikipedia Festival and have promised to help using Wikipedia as an education tool inside schools.

Progress towards targets and goals

Project metrics

Project metrics	Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Number of people who start the lessons throughout the school year: 100 adults, 50 students	More than 120 adults, more than 40 students	Not everyone who attended classes signed his/her presence
Percent of participants who complete their lessons (beat 50%): adults 80% (80), students 60% (30)	adults: 50%, students: 75%	Manos Kefalas students only. Adults: Very osmotic, they were free to come to classes whenever they wanted (no contract). Students: given a target (contest) they did well. - The metric was met when three courses were attended and a writing of a new article was achieved.
Percent of participants who state (in questionaries at the end of the lessons) that learning to be a wikipedian inside the school changed them for the better as a person and/or in their lives: 85% (94)	more than 90% (orally)	Manos Kefalas students only. When we sometimes did only technical lesson, not connecting Wikipedia to human values and skills during the second half of classes, people talked to each other about missing it. This was revealed to the teacher by the end of the school year. This dual lesson practice sustained the learning group dramatically.
Number of articles created (not stubs) or dramatically changed: adults 300, students 150	228 (Kaisariani adults) 24 (Kaisariani students), 25 (Karlovasion students), unknown (Poligono students)	Adults: Estimate was optimistic as a 2nd adult systematic school was expected to operate back then. Secondary students: lessons were held only once a week, after standard lessons, which also means a lot of Wikipedia lessons were lost, and there was no real target (contest) until the half of school year, which pulled us back a bit
Percent of participants that completed the lessons, who remain active as editors after their lessons are over: beat 15%, 17 people after one year	29% (2 edits after 4 months)	Manos Kefalas students only. Seems promising, we have to wait and see.
Number of new schools or municipalities that reproduce Wikipedia School in their own ground: 4	Penteli school for adults has already begun, for non adult schools we will know at the end of October 2015	new season has yet to come
A decision of Ministry of Education that Wikipedia School can be a standard lesson inside "For Life Learning" education program for adults	-	Funding for "For Life Learning" education program for adults has been paused due to economic crisis in Greece. Wikipedia School lessons have been prepared to be proposed.

Global Metrics

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the Global Metrics. We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" where necessary.

Next to each required metric, list the actual outcome achieved through this project.
Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for an edit-a-thon which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	9	Editors who hepled Wikipedia School by teaching classes, producing education material, mentoring or helping manually
2. # of new editors	102	Manos Kefalas students only. Some accounts were created by ManosHacker to overcome the 6 accounts limit per ip, some were created during summer 2014 lessons, some already existed. Not all accounts were marked to be followed and not all students created an account. Only those who kept the school's toolbox in their sandbox are taken into account for project metrics (117).
3. # of individuals involved	190+	Not counting students not taught by Manos Kefalas: Editors, students left out of metrics, people who: donated hardware (10 PCs + 10 screens), lectured, donated printing / promotion material / artistic work, helped in logistics, cooked catering snacks, helped with posters, deliveries, promotion, accountant or advertising, embraced school in Kaisariani Municipality, etc.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	209	Manos Kefalas students only. 110 own pictures, 99 transfered to Commons from other sources. Fair use images in elwiki are not taken into account.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	578	Manos Kefalas students only. 570 (elwiki) + 8 (enwiki)
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	10874188	Manos Kefalas students only. (8419981 + 2454207)

Learning question: Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

Yes, it did. Veteran editors came by themselves to watch lessons and helped teaching. Editors with whom were conflicts in the past came to Wikipedia Festival and supported it. Thanks were received for calling for participation for a next year's Wikipedia Conference after the paradigm of Wikipedia Festival. A user group has now open activities.

Impact

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic priorities?

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects?

Yes. We have active editors for whοm it would be almost impossible to contribute to Wikipedia without lessons, organized sandboxes and a helping toolcase.

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

Tried to teach quality contributing by theory, examples, games, building proper arguing and doing talks. We had almost no reverts in contributions.

Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

2nd Gymnasium of Kaisariani had 10 PCs running Windows 2000 and no modern internet browser could work (this is the case troughout Greece in most public schools). We now have a modern environment and students, secondary and adults, reach Wikimedia projects as editors, and the rest of the students as readers.
As a systematic school, Wikipedia School is giving hope and optimism, building strength against the Wikipedia reliability arguing. Credibility comes from Wikipedia collaborating with institutions like museums, as Wikipedia School did.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

This section describes the grant's use of funds

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here? Answer "Yes" or "No".: Yes

Expenses

Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions and dates. Review the instructions here.

Number	Category	Item description	Unit	Number of units	Actual cost per unit	Actual total	Budgeted total	Currency	Notes
1	School equipment	Server hardware	1 computer tower	1	1877.33	1877.33	1874.94	EUR	Intel® Xeon® E3-1271 v3, 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 ECC UDIMM, NVIDIA® Quadro® K600 1 GB, 240GB SSD, 3 years warranty
2	School equipment	Server Operating System	1 license	1	214.97	214.97	214.97	EUR	Microsoft Multipoint Server Premium 2012 Academic (WinMultiPointSvrPrem SNGL LicSAPk OLP NL Acdmc - software assurance price)
3	School equipment	Server Terminal User Client Licenses	1 license	20	39.75	795.07	795.07	EUR	WinMultiPointSvrCAL 2012 SNGL OLP NL Acdmc UsrCAL (software assurance price)
5	Printed material	Prints for Wikipedia School & Wikipedia Festival	Various	-	528.90	528.90	650	EUR	500 3-fold leaflets, 50 posters A3, 40 certificates A4, 10 posters A0, 1 linoleum
6	Soft Drinks & Light Snacks	Presentation & ceremony events (1)	Catering (people served)	-	-	67.49	450	EUR	Gymnasium of Karlovasion (Samos island) ceremony
7	Closing event	All day event, workshop & presentation/review	Event	1	1,482	1,482	1,476	EUR	Wikipedia Festival: Hall rooms + computer lab equipment (13 PCs) - 1 day rental
8	Soft Drinks & Light Snacks	Closing event soft drinks & light snacks	Catering (people served)	150	2.29	343.68	450	EUR	Wikipedia Festival
10	T-shirts	Gifts	pieces	117	5.30 (average)	619.7	-	EUR	T-shirts with artistic wikipedia logo, had to print second time (100 + 17)

Note: Not all approved budget items were used or paid for, one (t-shirts) was added[1]. No 4 (backup internet connectivity) was not needed, No 9 (accountant services) was donated, No 5 (printed material) was a lot more but not charged (donated).

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): €7,184.48

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if PEG is your only funding source): €6,184.48

Total amount spent on this project: more than €7000

Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project: €5929,14

Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.: 2nd Gymnasium of Kaisariani (equipment & alarm system), Manos Kefalas (equipment and paid university lessons), Donors (Prints & Accountant professionals)

Remaining funds

Are there any grant funds remaining?

Answer YES or NO.

YES

Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.): 255,48 EURO

Remaining funds have been used or will be used for other approved mission-aligned activities. This use has been requested in writing and approved by WMF.

If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.

Please state here if you intend to return unused funds to WMF, submit a request for reallocation, or submit a new grant request, and then follow the instructions on your approved grant submission.

At the time Greece is under Capital Controls and it is not possible to wiretransfer any money abroad. Wikipedia School will continiue during the next school year, so the money left could be used as part of the funding needed for next season activities. Request for funding will be submitted during August.