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Grants:PEG/MrjohnCummings/UNESCO Wikimedian in Residence/Report/Interim report

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Interim report accepted
This interim report for a Project and Event Grant has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.



Project status

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Are you complying with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?
Answer YES or NO.
Yes
Do you expect this project to be completed by the date specified in the approved grant submission?
Yes
Did you use any of the grant funds?
Yes

Note: I have secured a grant for 50% of my time on the Connected Open Heritage project, allowing the continuation of the Wikimedian in Residence project until March 2017.

  • Both projects will benefit Wikidata, both in documentation and in tools and processes
  • Connected Open Heritage will improve the explanation of the benefits of sharing content and data with Wikimedia and other documentation.
  • Connected Open Heritage will help make importing data into Wikidata easier which means both UNESCO and its inscription partners (e.g World Heritage Sites)

Activities and lessons learned

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Activities

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Not all activities are reported here but have been reported to WMF staff, some of the project’s activities cannot currently be made public because:

  • Some activities and decisions by UNESCO have not been made public yet.
  • Some activities are still in development.
  • Some activities relate to issues within the organisation that impact the project.

Goal 1: Train UNESCO and its partner organisations to contribute to Wikimedia projects

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  • Development of the UNESCO Mediabank in cooperation with UNESCO staff to automate the process of uploading content to a public repository where automated tools can import the content into Wikimedia Commons, this will completely avoid the need for training for Commons for the 70 UNESCO offices. The creation of the UNESCO MediaBank will significantly reduce the number of people needed to be trained and will have a better outcome than directly training people.

Goal 2: Make content from the archives of UNESCO and its partners available on Wikimedia projects

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  • Adoption of open licenses by UNESCO for media content and data where possible.
  • At least 20,000 files added to Commons in the next 2 months through UNESCO Mediabank.
  • Identified tools needed for uploading content to Wikimedia Commons from Mediabank.
  • Created categories on Wikimedia Commons and uploaded 1000 files as a trial.
  • Wikimedia Foundation used one of the images from UNESCO as the front cover for the 2015 Annual report and for the Wikipedia 15 campaign.
  • Working with Jens Ohlig and Wikidata volunteers to import UNESCO data into Wikidata from UNESCO inscriptions and UIS including, all World Heritage sites, Biosphere Reserves, Geoparks, Memory of the World and statistics on Education rates of primary and early secondary school. This work is used as the basis of guides for importing data into Wikidata.
  • Importing text content from UNESCO to Wikipedia to be used as missing Wikipedia articles for UNESCO inscriptions.
  • Working with Biosphere Reserves to make their content available on Wikimedia Commons.
  • Setting up Wiki Loves Earth for Bisosphere Reserves
  • Working with Creative Commons on a possible way to host CC IGO licensed content on commercial platforms. Tools exist to easily import content to Commons from these commercial platforms e.g Flickr.

Goal 3: Create a model and resources to encourage other UN organisations and their partner organisations to engage with Wikimedia

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Activity Need
Created Wikiproject UNESCO A central place to organise work with the Wikimedia community and potential new contributors from within UNESCO and its partner organisations. Has a number of new features created using existing tools:
  • Finding unused media: A series of drop down menus to show which files are not used from a specific Commons category on each Wikimedia project in each language.
  • Create and improve Wikipedia articles: A new use of Dynamic Wikidata Lists to create a kind of multilingual Wikimedia project article list.
  • Translate UNESCO media descriptions: A drop down list to show which UNESCO media files are lacking a description in which languages with a simple guide to add new languages.
  • Add data using sources: a list of tasks to complete within Wikidata that are outlined and tracked using Wikidata queries.
Simple media reuse guide for Wikimedia Commons Created for people working in publications in UNESCO but usable by everyone. The current guide is difficult to use and requires people learn a lot of background information before using the content.
Wikidata: Partnerships and data imports There was no clear guidance for organisations with data on why or how to make the content available on Wikidata. I needed this for working with UNESCO partner organisations.

(The page replaced this page)

Wikimedia Documentation Directory tool Currently documentation about Wikimedia projects is spread over all Wikimedia projects and on external sites, previous attempts to create a directory of content on wiki has lead to a series of out of date and incomplete pages. This tool aims to avoid this issue by simply creating a searchable database of existing resources from any source. It includes tags to allow people to find content more easily. I worked with Hay Kranen to create the tool, here is the idealab page for the tool.
Outline for Wikimedia documentation directory version 2 Whilst the first version of the Wikimedia Documentation Directory is a useful tool, there are many opportunities to make it more useful, I outlined a project plan on Idealab.
Partnerships and Data Imports page No central place do discuss discuss data imports into Wikidata. I needed this to plan data imports from UNESCO and partner organisations.
Public planning of project metrics There is no central directory of tools to use for project metrics and so it is difficult to know what can be measured and what tools are missing. I created the page and asked other to suggest tools, this has allowed me to create a fuller list of tools than I could do individually and also highlighted gaps where no tool exists.
Worked with Wikimedia UK on the development of an in person trainer course. I needed this to provide other chapters and user groups with training resources when running training with UNESCO staff and partner organisations.
Guide for Biospheres to contribute to Wikimedia projects A simplified guide for Biosphere Reserves (but could easily be adapted to other audiences). Currently information on why contributing to Wikimedia, how to do it and how to measure outcomes is spread over several pages on different Wikimedia websites.
Identified bugs and tools missing

Goal 4: Disseminate and promote information on the project and its outcomes, open licensing and engaging with Wikimedia

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Lessons learned

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What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects, or that may change the way you are doing this project?
What went well, or is going well
  • I expect to reach all project goals during the second set of funding and have completed most of goals 2 and 3 shortly after the first set of funding.
  • We will shortly begin mass uploading content from UNESCO in a way that is sustainable and needs no additional staff time or training outside their existing work
  • Being able to offer metrics on the audience of content made available on Wikimedia projects is essential for organisations to understand the benefits of contributing to Wikimedia projects.


What did not go well, or is not going well?
  • Because of the lack of resources for training (something I am addressing with Wikimedia UK) and the Wikimedia Foundation study showing the 1% retention rate of new editors I have concentrated on alternatives to training that will provide the same effect. Once the resources are complete I will pair UNESCO partners with local Wikimedia groups to run projects based on the needs of the partners.
  • Working with and representing UNESCO when talking to external organisations means that the resources I provide to people must be very high quality. Much more of my time than expected has been needed to create some of the resources that were required to run the project, this work is reflected in the number of documents I have created. The project has highlighted a lot of shortcomings in existing resources and this has meant that I have had to create new resources and find novel solutions to problems..
  • It is very difficult and time consuming to mass import content to Wikimedia Commons.
  • It is very difficult and time consuming to upload data to Wikidata and there is currently no OTRS system for making data available under a CC0 license.


From your answers above, do you plan to change anything you are doing as your project continues?
  • I expect to reach all project goals during the second set of funding and have completed most of goals 2 and 3 during the first set of funding. Whilst it is now clear the goals of the project do not fit precisely what is possible at UNESCO they still provide a useful framework, only goal 1 may require some modification.
  • Some of the individual targets may no longer be relevant as they do not accurately represent the value of the work done and the progress made towards the goals especially relating to the documentation I have created and the cultural change achieved. Many of the individual targets have not been met due to the extra work needed to create documentation that are prerequisite to fulfilling the goals.
  • To look for more opportunities to achieve some of the same outcomes as editor training in other ways. E.g instead of training staff to create Wikipedia articles on subjects request that existing encyclopedic descriptions are made available under a Wikimedia compatible license and imported into Wikipedia using Wikidata queries to see where the content is needed. Provide training where there is sustainable support and the same outcomes cannot be achieved in another way that uses less staff time.
  • There are many opportunities for the project outside the project goals, UNESCO are experts on some of the structural problems within Wikimedia including the engagement with the global south, diversity and gender. Additionally there is a great deal of opportunity to understand Wikimedia in the context of education as a whole through UNESCO’s role as a global monitor for education. In short, there is a lack of time rather than lack of opportunity for activities with UNESCO.


For the remainder of the project I expect to achieve the following, this list does not include all activities planned (some can not be made public at this point)

Within the first 2 months

  • Import image content from UNESCO
  • Promote Wiki Loves Earth to Biosphere Reserves
  • Finish reusing content guide (include reuse restrictions outside copyright.
  • Import content from Biosphere Reserves (and potentially other inscription programmes) to Commons (ongoing throughout project timeline).
  • Complete the a simple guide to contributing to Wikimedia projects for SIDS, Biospheres and other inscription programmes

Within the first 4 months

  • Have training materials available for people to use for training
  • Run training with UNESCO and partner staff (ongoing)
  • Have a working data uploading system working for Wikidata and import data from UNESCO Institute for Statistics (ongoing)

Within the first 6 months

  • Find a way for Wikimedians to use UNESCO references more easily

Outcomes and impact

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Outcomes

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Provide the original project goal here.
  1. Train UNESCO and its partner organisations to contribute to Wikimedia projects: The project will create and improve content receiving 100,000,000 views per year on Wikimedia projects, educate 1000 people in over 200 organisations to learn more about Wikimedia projects. This will include 200 newly registered users trained to contribute to Wikimedia projects and 500 articles formally reviewed by experts.
  2. Make content from the archives of UNESCO and its partners available on Wikimedia projects: This project will facilitate the upload of 30,000 images, audio files, videos, data and other content to Wikimedia projects from UNESCO archives (24,000 images), UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) and other sources including 10 organisations changing their content license to be Wikimedia compatible, a completed pilot project is outlined in the Goal section.
  3. Create a model and resources to encourage other UN organisations and their partner organisations to engage with Wikimedia: We will contribute to the process of creating comprehensive resources (documentation and a tool chain) which will be an amalgam of existing resources and new resources created by myself and the wider Wikimedia community. This project will act as a model that can be followed by other UN agencies and their partners to open up their content and engage with Wikimedia and the wider open education movement.
  4. Disseminate and promote information on the project and its outcomes, open licensing and engaging with Wikimedia: To disseminate information about and produced by the project as widely as possible with the aim of moving further towards making open licensing the standard for scientific, cultural and educational organisations and engagement with Wikimedia common practice.
Do you expect to reach your project's goal? Why or why not?

I expect to reach all project goals however Goal 1 may need to be reworded because I have found other ways to achieve the outcomes of the goal that may be more effective than in person training.

Progress towards targets and goals

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In the past 6 months UNESCO has gone from an organisation that had very little engagement with Wikimedia to an organisation making most of its content available under an open license and promoting contributing to Wikimedia to its partners across the world. There are many more in progress activities than completed ones, this is mainly due to the lack of high quality resources available to work with that I had to create that the activities are dependent on, I would estimate that I have spent 70% of my time creating basic documentation. Additionally my decision to focus on sustainable solutions to each task as opposed to short term unsustainable activities.

Goal 1: Train UNESCO and its partner organisations to contribute to Wikimedia projects

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Because of the lack of resources for training (something I am addressing with Wikimedia UK) and the Wikimedia Foundation study showing the 1% retention rate of new editors I have concentrated on alternatives to training that will provide the same effect. Once the resources are complete I will pair UNESCO partners with local Wikimedia groups to run projects based on the needs of the partners. The original plan was to provide training for UNESCO staff to upload content to Wikimedia Commons. However it became apparent this was neither practical or sustainable, I had to find alternative methods for individuals within these organisations to contribute indirectly to Wikimedia projects. Wikiproject UNESCO has clear instructions for new contributors to contribute to Wikimedia projects once training has been provided.

Goal 2: Make content from the archives of UNESCO and its partners available on Wikimedia projects

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UNESCO have agreed to make all their content available under an open license except where existing licensing agreements prohibit it. I have worked with UNESCO staff to collate all existing UNESCO materials and defined the needs for a central content repository for UNESCO that can automatically upload content to Wikimedia Commons with no additional staff time needed. Mediabank is now complete and will be populated with content in the next 2 months. All UNESCO media content produced by all UNESCO staff members in all 70 offices (barring licensing agreements with 3rd parties) can now be made available on Wikimedia Commons with no additional staff time or staff training. Wikiproject UNESCO has a section to organise contributions and reuse of UNESCO content.

Goal 3: Create a model and resources to encourage other UN organisations and their partner organisations to engage with Wikimedia

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Working with and representing UNESCO when talking to external organisations means that the resources I provide to people must be very high quality. Much more of my time than expected has been needed to create some of the resources that were required to run the project, this work is reflected in the number of documents I have created. The project has highlighted a lot of shortcomings in existing resources and this has meant that I have had to create new resources and find novel solutions to problems..

Much more of my time than expected has been needed on this part of the project creating some of the resources that were needed to run the project. High quality documentation on the benefits and practicalities of contributing to Wikimedia projects is scarce and often in hard to find places or does not exist in a form that is usable by external organisation. Much of the existing documentation was either too technical, not complete or did not fit the audience e.g was very in depth and required too much background knowledge to be useful to an external audience.

Goal 4: Disseminate and promote information on the project and its outcomes, open licensing and engaging with Wikimedia

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UNESCO is the leading UN organisation on education. The largest opportunity at UNESCO is the ability to influence organisations to contribute to Wikimedia through open licensing, something that has already started to happen. The next step will be to create a formal partnership between UNESCO and Wikimedia Foundation

Measures of success

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Target outcome Achieved outcome Explanation
Goal 1
Number of people engaged who are not currently involved with Wikimedia projects: Target 300 At least 150 during the Biosphere Congress
Number of organisations engaged to contribute to the project at a lower level, general education for a larger group including information about open licensing: Target 100 At least 100 during the Biosphere Congress
Number of organisations engaged to contribute to the project to a high level including after the project's completion date through partnering them with local Wikimedia organisations to run educational and training workshops, editathons and other activities. Target 5 Agreed to work with 4 Biosphere Reserves and 4 Small Island Developing States to provide training to contribute to Wikimedia projects.
Number of organisations who have changed their content licenses to be Wikipedia compatible: Target 3 At least 4 Biosphere Reserves and several Intergovernmental Organisations
Number of existing active editors involved in the project: Target 75 At least 30 through creation of Wikidata partnerships discussion page and Mix n’ Match lists for UNESCO inscriptions.
Number of new contributors who understand how to use at least 2 of the Wikimedia metrics tools available: Target 40 - Not applicable until the resources have been created to provide training.
Number of new users who use the tools to make decisions on if to and how to engage with Wikimedia projects. Target 25 - Not applicable until the resources have been created to provide training.
The number and quality of recommendations to improve tools available by organisations using them. Target 10 10
Number of pageviews per year of information and content added to Wikimedia projects as part of the project. Target: 30,000,000 Not Available Yet Content will not be uploaded until May, however the goal will be exceeded once this content is made available
Percentage of new users continuing to contribute to Wikimedia projects once trained: Target 10% - Not applicable until the resources have been created to provide training.
Number of Wikimedia articles that have been formally reviewed by experts at the organisations. Target: 100 - Not applicable until the resources have been created to provide training.
Number of different language projects contributed to by new and existing users as part of the project. Target: 30 - Not applicable until the resources have been created to provide training.
Goal 2
Number of images, audio files, videos and other content uploaded to Wikimedia projects, files will be added to a set of categories on Wikimedia Commons for easy measurement. Target: 10,000 At least 20,000 by the end of May.
Percentage of content released that is reused on a Wikimedia project other than Commons. Target: 4,000 - Not applicable until content has been uploaded
Number of languages that the files are used on. Target: 50 1,000 files currently on Commons files are used on over 30 languages. Will expand once content has been uploaded
Create and improve content receiving 100,000,000 views per year - Not applicable until content has been uploaded
10 organisations changing their content license to be Wikimedia compatible 4 This has been achieved through informal conversation. I am still creating documentation for the organisations, once this is complete I will be able to use UNESCO channels to push it out to many organisations.
Goal 3
Contributions to creating comprehensive resources: Target: 65% of people surveyed say they find the documentation useful. 100% All people who have used the publication guide within UNESCO have found it useful, staff have used the guide for creating resource for Mobile Learning Week and World Heritage Magazine.
Improved documentation for the tools available to release and measure impact of content e.g GLAMwiki toolset, Flickr2Commons and Commonist, BaGLAMa, Treeviews and GLAMorous. Is included in guidance for Biosphere Reserves.
Number of connections made between Wikimedia volunteers and UNESCO and partner organisations. - Not applicable until the training resources are complete.
Goal 4
Goals not applicable until large amount of content is released in May
Provide an overall assessment of how your project is going according to these measures.
I am behind the targets of most of these measures, however I have created many resources listed in Goal 3 that are not accurately reflected in the original targets. This is because much of the basic documentation that is needed to run the project did not exist at the start of the project and I have had to create it.
Currently the tools do not exist to effectively import statements from external databases however I am working with Wikidata staff to create the resources needed to do so. Using the existing tools I have imported items for all UNESCO inscription programmes to Wikidata to create an index for automated creation of Wikipedia articles across at least 3 languages using existing UNESCO descriptions. I am working with Jens Ohlig from Wikimedia Deutschland to address this and create documentation so that other organisations can import data to Wikidata easily see Wikidata data importing online tool guide for more information.
While doing this project, have you decided to track any other measures of success not listed in your grant submission? If so, please list them here.

Remember that you will need to report on Global Metrics in your final report.

  • Creation of documentation that can be used by other people working on Wikimedia directly or can easily be adapted to a general audience.

Impact

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Remember that you will need to report on your project's impact on WMF's mission and strategic goals in your final report.

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

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This section describes the grant's use of funds

Documentation

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Remember that you will need to send receipts or documentation of all project expenses to WMF at the time your final report is submitted.

Expenses

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Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions and dates. Review the instructions here here.
These expenses should be listed in the same format as the budget table in your approved submission so that anyone reading this report may be able to easily compare budgeted vs. actual expenses.
Note that variances in the project budget over 10% per expense category must be approved in advance by Project and Event Grants program staff. For all other variances, please provide an explanation in the table below.


Note: Because of delays in the project starting I was unable to attend the World Education Forum, the individual requests for reallocation of the travel budget can be found in sections 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 on the discussion page of the grant proposal.

Number Category Item description Unit Number of units Actual cost per unit Actual total Budgeted total Currency Notes
1 Travel Train ticket to Wikipedia Science Conference Eurostar ticket 1 £129.00 ($199) £129.00 ($199) $300 GBP
2 Travel Travel to Mozfest Eurostar ticket 1 £95.50 ($196.08) £95.50 ($196.08) $300 GBP
3 Travel Travel to Wikimedia UK meeting Eurostar ticket 1 £107.00 ($161.57) £107.00 ($161.57) $200 GBP
4 Travel and hotel Travel and hotel for the 4th World Congress of Biosphere Reserves Plane tickets and hotel booking (booked as combined package) 1 £849.07 ($1205.68) £849.07 ($1205.68) $1081.80 GBP Whilst previous budget items underspent this item used the remained of the travel budget, I covered all additional costs whilst at the conference.


Total amount spent on this project so far (with currency)
$26694.93 (WMF funding +$3412.75 in kind funding from UNESCO)
Total amount of WMF grant funds spent on this project so far (with currency)

$23,282.18

Based on your spending, will you need to request any changes to your budget? If you do, please see the guidelines for requesting changes to your budget.
Answer YES or NO.

No, I am requesting $20792.87 as per the initial grant request.

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