Grants:PEG/WM ES/CUSL8/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY 2013-14 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/WM ES/CUSL8.

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.

Compliance and completion

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

Is your project completed?: YES

Did you use any of the grant funds?: YES

Activities and lessons learned

This section describes what the grantee did, and what the grantee learned from implementing the project. This section should be useful to others implementing similar projects and is an opportunity for the grantee to reflect on the project's performance.

Activities

Provide a detailed list of activities performed to complete this project, descriptions of these activities, and the amount of time spent on each activity. This section should also include a list of participants, or a link to pictures, blog posts, or videos from the project or event.: We performed the following activities:

Participation in evaluation committee

There is no time scheduled for this activity, being up to each member. In my case it was 1 hour for each project.

Two representatives of Wikimedia Spain were part of the committee to provide feedback to students and chose the winner projects of the contest. We sent an open call for members of WM-ES who could be interested in taking part in the committee. Two people showed interest, but the specially limited period of time for evaluation that the contest had this years made them refuse. So, the two people who were part of the committee last year (who already knew how it worked) were the only two volunteers: Guillermo Rodríguez and Manuel Palomo (coordinator). The organization committee was glad with our work and showed interest to invite member of WM-ES again for next edition of the contest.

Presentation on Wikipedia and WM-ES in the conference

45 minutes

Introducing Wikipedia

Guillermo Rodríguez, member of WM-ES was responsible for making it. But due to health problems, the day before the conference he refused. As no other member of WM-ES was available, Manuel Palomo (again, coordinator) had to go in his place. The presentation was in the first slot of the first day (the conference took two days), and seemed interesting to the people (in fact). The presentation finished showing the main guidelines for Wikipedia edition.

Editathon

There was no fixed time for it having the participants freedom to commit during the two days of the event. This is the first time that someone organize an editathon like this one. It was a different way to do it and it could be an example for next activities.

Editing during the event

We ran the editathon in parallel to conference programme activities during all the conference. Tomás Saorín (member of WM-ES) showed his availability to be in the conference to support the editathon, but unfortunately could not finally be there. So it was Manuel Palomo the only person to support the event face-to-face. Anyway, two members of WM-ES board (Santiago Navarro and José Emilio Mori) provided very important on-line support making valuable refinements of the participants editions, answering questions via IRC and providing edition advice in a Google Drive shared document.

We would like to highlight the number of “virtual” (i.e. non in the event) contributors: up to 15 of the 33 editors who indicated their location (those with "(D)" following their name), so, the community of Free Software and Wikipedia knew the event and wanted to participate in it. The Contest has been running for 8 years, creating an important community of people interesting in it and willing to collaborate. In fact, some of the winners of the first editions are working now as lecturers in Universities or professionals in important I.T. companies and keep collaborating for the committee.

We created a Wikipedia page (in Spanish) to coordinate the editathon. And a Google Drive shared document for wiki-syntax tips and other indications (its concurrent edition and “in-line comment” features made it more suitable than other wiki page). In this case, many people could edit on Wikipedia with this documentation and few explanations, so we didn't need to run a "traditional" workshop.

Gamification of the event showing a ranking of editions

As we can see in the table, most wiki entries chosen were related to open source technologies and communities, especially in Spanish Wikipedia, but also in Catalan and English.

During the event we had 5 breaks to gamificate the editathon, presenting wiki t-shirts (see red one in the picture) to those people who had contributed more. Additionally, people also highly appreciated the dynamic ranking of Wikipedia user and entries with most editions during the event.

Talk about Free Knowledge and licensing by an invited speaker

1 hour

Carlos González Morcillo talk on "Amnesty for imprisoned pixels"

In the second day we had a very illustrative-yet-funny talk on “Amnesty for imprisoned pixels: the importance of open formats and free licensing in graphical design” by Carlos González Morcillo (Associate professor in the University of Castilla La Mancha and Blender certified trainer). Carlos not only made a really funny presentation interacting with participants, but he also took time to check the software repositories of the nominated projects, finding several images made with privative software and even some with unclear origin. We showed participants different repositories to find free licensed images (including Wikimedia Commons) and encouraged them to use free software for future projects. We would like to publicly thank Carlos for the nice work done free of charge.

Giving one prize to winning students

It was a honor by the committee, 5 minutes

Manuel Palomo, representing the WM-ES chapter, gave one of the prizes to the winning students in the Award ceremony (picture)

Lessons learned

What lessons were learned that may help others succeed in similar projects? Consider the following questions and respond with 1 - 2 paragraphs.

What went well?

The project in general went on well. The editathon was probably the main activity, and showed interesting lessons. Most participants are students and IT professionals who have a strong commitment to Free Software. They have usually dedicated long time to learn and master the different technologies they use in their projects, usually because of their principles. Sometimes they have also worked very hard and long time to get into a certain community and contribute to a free software project. Nevertheless, when asked if they had contributed to Wikipedia (so easy as clicking "Edit"), only a few had done an "occasional" commit. So we encouraged them to contribute to the Wikipedia improving the entry of their favorite piece of free software.

We made an unusual (and perhaps somehow "innovative") approach: a very short on-the-fly demo for editing, not making a specific seminar on the topic and concurrent editing while the rest of the event went on. Participants were people used to code or write (re)Structured text and at the same time checking e-mail, software repositories or social networks. So just a short cheat sheet was enough. Members of free software communities, they are used to work only on “relevant” issues, and autonomous learning new skills. They appreciated immediate feedback and corrections on their writing and gamification in the form of statistics and rankings (in fact, people complained when the stats were not properly calculated). Also, the dissemination of the editathon resulted in quite a few people contributing on-line (the Contest Community is active)

Slide of the talk of Carlos González Morcillo.

Also, the talk of Carlos was very interesting. Most participants are used to focus on "freedom of code", and the talk showed the issues concerning freedom of media.

What did not go well?

We hoped to engage people in Wikipedia or WM-ES, but seems that most people made a special editing effort during the event, but later did not continue. The reason behind it is difficult to find. Or we could say that this experience not change, at least for the moment, their free time dedication. Certainly most participants were students, and short after the event they had their exams. Additionally, students or not, attendees were people who usually contribute to free software projects in their spare time, so dedicating time to Wikipedia probably meant dedicating shorter time to other project where they had a strong commitment for long time. We created a template and added it on their discussion pages on Wikipedia to thank them their work at the editathon and to remember them that they can keep editing on Wikipedia. (July, 28th).

Additionally, we were specially unlucky with Guillermo and Tomás rejections, and also with two other Wikipedians of Seville, who could not attend the event. We sent some e-mails to Wikipedia users from Seville and its province to invite them to the event, to the editathon and to do a meetup, but they couldn't attend the event. So we missed a good chance to have a meeting and keep direct contact of the small (at the moment) Andalusian Wikipedia community. We could consider that it “did not go well”, but there was nothing to do about it.

Finally, in this edition of the contest there was no project related to Wikipedia or wikis. Unfortunately, when the grant was approved the time for new projects to join the contest was over. Anyway, we hope that the editathon and talks will help participants in next edition consider wiki as a possible target of their projects. Other aspect is that most students have already defined their projects before joining the contest. As a results, we should work on dissemination in each institution (i.e. University), being more difficult.

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

Perhaps we could try to create a special prize in the contest for the Wikipedian contributor among participants. With some gamification applied along the development phase (from the beginning of the academic year until April), perhaps we could improve students enrollment in Wikipedia. Anyway, somehow it how require redefining the experience (finding more collaborators, creating a gamificated site/platform, etc). Also, we could try to look for more Wikimedia users in the region and invite them (in fact we did it, but without success because of different reasons), and we could send more press releases before and after the event.

Project goal and measures of success

This section should reference the project goals and measures of success described in the approved grant submission. See Grants:PEG/WM ES/CUSL8 to review the goals and metrics listed in the approved submission.

Project goal

Provide the project goal here.: We think the Final phase Award Conference is an interesting event to spread Wikimedia Foundation projects and to help to get students involved in this Open-Knowledge community. We estimate that there will be around 50 attendants to this event.

Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 paragraphs.: We think we did. Although it is difficult to objectively measure, anyway there are a few indicators of “visibility”. First, we disseminated information about the event in different associations and groups of interest (Open Knowledge Foundation Spain, Spanish Wikipedia Cafe, WikiAnda, Sevillapedia, AsturLinux and KDE user group among others). The information was always welcome and receivers accepted to disseminate the information in their environment as well.; As for impact during the event, we send information that was published in Barrapunto (the most important Spanish free software) entry page. Trying to be a bit “challenging” we entitled it: 1 commit to Wikipedia for every 1.000 times read.; We also used social networks during the conference, mainly Twitter and Facebook, and some other users joined us on Twitter to spread and comment the event. Interestingly, a Spanish IT company contacted explaining that the Wikipedia entry about them was deleted, and it was created again in a proper way.; The project was also one of the two selected by WM-ES as showcase of the sessions of Wikimania the coolest projects done by the Wikimedia movement. (no link for this yet).; Additionally, thanks to one of the many messages we sent to mailing lists of interest, we were contacted by a local group of Wikipedians from Almeria, of which we haven't ever heard, to see collaborations.

Measures of success

List the measures of success exactly as provided in the approved grant submission, and evaluate your project according to each measure listed there.

Number of attendees. If lower than 30, we will regard that as a failure: success. There were around 40 attendants in the two days of the event (a bit less than in previous editions of the event). 38 people participated the in editathon (including “virtual” - non in the event). Additionally, there were some people in the event who seem did not participated in the edithaton.
Media stories. If more than 2 positive stories, we will regard that as a success: success. Stories:Barrapunto web site, Meneame, Linux Hispano, Diario Tecnología, Informática Libre, Muy Linux, University of La Laguna website, University of Cadiz website and WM-ES blog
Photos and videos. If we fail to cover these event with photos and videos and upload them: success. We created a category in Commons with media of the event, and we can find 8 pictures now, and additionally, the organization committee uploaded to Flick more pictures with a CC-BY-SA licence, and they can be upload to Wikimedia Commons.
Number of Wikipedia pages that receive contributions during the edithon. More than 10 will be a success: success, 42. 36 pages in Spanish, and 3 in Catalan and one more in English, so 42 in total.
Number of new registered Wikipedian users. More than 5 will be a success. Note: if the majority of the attendants already have an account this measure will be discarded: success, 23. 23 new accounts

In addition, we have other metrics in WMES:

22 of the edited articles were created during the event (one in Catalan and 21 in Spanish)
More than 93000 bytes of information were added to the articles
Besides, seven participants uploaded files to Wikimedia Commons (14 files).

Provide an overall assessment of how your project went according to these measures.: The project went on well. Perhaps we expected more participants, but that partly falls out of our scope: we did our part on dissemination, but the main effort was made by the organization committee. As member of the committee in previous editions, we already discussed many times different ways to improve the number of attendants, but it highly depends on the context: venue of the event, dates, etc. Additionally, in some conferences was considered a course with credits for the grade program: it caused the conference hall to be crowded, but the participants showed little interest. However, the figures are very possitive: many new users started editing Wikipedia and many new articles were created and many others edited with a improvement of their quality.
If you were to plan a similar project, would you measure it differently? If yes, please explain how.: I think the measures are right. Perhaps they could be further refined: not only number of pages that received edits, but also their time distribution. And not only registered accounts, but also if from those accounts users keep contributing after the event (and applying some gamification to contribute to it). Also, as commented before, the Wikipedia edition could be incorporated into all the months that the development of projects take, but that implies longer time and a reward worth the time. The reward could be a special prize or being considered among the aspects to evaluate projects. But we hope that the seed was planted among the participants.

Impact

This section ties this project to Wikimedia's broader goals, and shows what the project accomplished.

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic goals? Please answer in 1 -2 paragraphs and include specific measures of impact such as the number of readers or editors reached by a particular project, or the number of articles edited or improved.

Stabilize infrastructure
Increase participation
Improve quality
Increase reach
Encourage innovation

In the grant we identified 3 priorities of the Feb 2011 Wikimedia Strategic Plan that our proposal could work on:

Increase participation: we planned to get more students, academic staff and practitioners involved in Spanish Wikipedia and other wiki-projects, specially in computer science-related stuff.
Improve quality: we planned that students, academic staff and practitioners to contribute to Wikipedia during the "editathon".
Encourage Innovation: we planned students who participants to develop Wikipedia related software tools and systems.

For increasing participation, at least for the moment, it seems that most of new registered user have not kept editing. Anyway, we would like to highlight the value of participating in the editathon. Was surprising that most participants had not considered contributing to Wikipedia as a way to contribute to open knowledge. Maybe they return to Wikipedia in a near future or, at least, help spread the message of Wikipedia contribution as a way to help the community.

We created a template for the “Talk” pages of Wikipedia entries improved in the editathon. An example can be seen here

We created a similar one for the “Talk” of the contributors, so they see that the grant report is available and encourage them to keep contributing to Wikipedia.

As for “encourage innovation”, as commented before, in this edition of the contest there was no project related to Wikipedia or wikis. Unfortunately, when the grant was approved the time for new projects to join was over. Anyway, we hope that the editathon and talks will help participants in next edition consider wiki as a possible target of their projects. Anyway, most of students have already defined their projects before joining the contest. We should work on each institution (i.e. University), being more difficult.

We also checked the number of visits to the pages edited during May (from the date of the editathon), June and July. We made a ratio to get the average of visits per day. We can see that the average number of visits during May and June was higher to that in July. We suppose that this is due to the effect of the editathon. Anyway, further study would be required to confirm it, for example checking if the visits to the rest of Spanish Wikipedia pages also decreased during that month or checking how the pages created were indexed in search engines.

Finally, we checked the size of the pages on July 27th and compared it with their size after we finished the editathon. We see that 56% of the pages we worked on, enlarged their size after the editathon. And 70% of the new pages that were created during the editathon augmented their size after the event. Taking into account the scarce enrollement of new editors in the event, probably the users who edited those pages are previous editors who contributed to the event or other users in Wikipedia community. Anyway, we consider it interesting, as the event somehow helped to create new (relevant) pages (or focus on other existing ones that needed improvement) that are now receiving contributions from the Wikipedia community.

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.: 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.

Number	Category	Item description	Unit	Number of units	Actual cost per unit	Actual total	Budgeted total	Currency	Notes
1	Travel and accommodation to Seville	Travel and accommodation for two students	Student1: flight + taxi + 1 night in hotel Student2: mileage(see note) + 1 night in hotel	Student1: 1 Student2: 1	148,14 265,38	413,52	600	EUR	Students only stayed one night in the hotel. One of them did not had a flight and chose traveling in own private car
2	Travel and accommodation to Seville	Travel and accommodation to Seville for a speaker to talk about Free Knowledge or licensing	train + taxis	1	110,4	110,4	350	EUR	The speaker did not stay in hotel, he found good trains to come and return in the same day
3	Travel and accommodation to Seville	Travel and accommodation to Seville for a person representing WM-ES	taxi + mileage(see note) + highway + bus + 1 night in hotel	1	124,67	124,67	350	EUR
4	Food & Beverages	Lunch for Day 1	Per person	20 (organizers, selected students and speakers)	6	120	120	EUR	Official University Campus catering regular service
5	Event dissemination	T-shirts	1 Shirt	20	6,8605	137,21	140	EUR	T-shirts with WikiMedia logo, contest logo and "Do you wiki?" slogan

Note: we paid 0,19 euros per km, according to official Spanish law December 3rd, 2005 (19986)

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): 1750

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if the Project and Event Grant is your only funding source): 1750

Total amount spent on this project (this total should be the total calculated from the table above): 905,8

Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project (this total will be the same as the total amount spent if the Project and Event Grant is your only funding source): 905,8

Are there additional sources of revenue that funded any part of this project? List them here.: No

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of 884.20 EUR were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:PEG/WM ES/Wiki Loves Monuments Spain 2014.

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.)

844,2

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.

New grant request: Grants:PEG/WM ES/Wiki Loves Monuments Spain 2014