Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Belgium Yearly grant 2023/Final Report
Report Status: Accepted
Due date: 30 January 2024
Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund
Report type: Final
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General information
editThis form is for organizations, groups, or individuals receiving Wikimedia Community Funds or Wikimedia Alliances Funds to report on their final results.
- Name of Organization: Wikmedia Belgium v.z.w.
- Title of Proposal: Wikimedia Belgium Yearly grant 2023
- Amount awarded: 41807.44 USD, 40000 EUR
- Amount spent: 19390.67 EUR
Part 1 Understanding your work
edit1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented.
Single year budget, but continuing and building upon the experience of previous year’s grants. Since we are a small chapter with few volunteers, board members, and project leaders, we relied upon collaboration with the employees of other larger cultural institutions and organisations. We kept, activated new partnerships, and improved existing partnerships with educational institutions, museums, and heritage organisations. We formally signed several new partner agreements. We continue to collaborate with neighbouring chapters. We are member of Wikimedia Europe, and WikiFranca. We effectively support our volunteers financially, and through providing documentation and training. We keep an active communication with our volunteers (via wikimeets and social platforms). We used our budget to support our activities. We continue to plan and execute our activities using Wikidata, Wikidata Query, SPARQL, OpenRefine, Pywikibot, ListeriaBot, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Campaign & Events Tool, Montage. Meta, Phabricator, GitHub, and other tools like Montage, Toolforge, Wikimedia Cloud tools PAWS, and Quarry.
2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals?
Collaboration with cultural institutions (GLAM and education) was the cornerstone of the deployment of the Wikimedia Belgium strategy. Being able to implement two projects with the Friends of Wikimedia Belgium Fund was extremely important, and it contributed to the credibility of Wikimedia Belgium. Implement projects and activities together with other organisations and institutions. We had an activity to let the Library of the European Parliament use Wikidata as an ISBN inventory. We have developed a Pywikibot script to import ISBN data into Wikidata. We use OpenRefine and prototype other Pywikibot scripts in the future. We used Wikisource to publish a public domain book. We help build and publish the Dutch book “Writing for Wikipedia”. We contributed writing the book “Erfgoed ontsluiten via Wikipedia“. We collaborate with adult educational organisations to organise sessions “Writing for Wikipedia”.
3. Would you say that your project had any innovations? Are there things that you did very differently than you have seen them done by others?
We based our writing sessions on a Wikidata inventory of thematic subjects (lemmas), and their attributes. We have documented how to conduct our writing sessions. This was the base for the new book about using the Wikimedia platforms to document heritage as free knowledge. We apply this method for most of the writing session with prefefined subjects.
https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Manage_Wiki_projects_using_Wikidata
4. Please describe how different communities participated and/or were informed about your work.
Education, museums, heritage, folklore, cultural institutions, women's organisations, adult education. Newsletter, Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, meetings, prospects for potential activities. We organised 4 photo campaigns under the “Wiki Loves Heritage” umbrella: Wiki Loves Heritage, Wiki Loves Living Heritage, Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Pajot-Zenne.
5. Documentation of your impact. Please use the two spaces below to share files and links that help tell your story and impact. This can be documentation that shows your results through testimonies, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, etc.) social media posts, dashboards, etc.
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Activities/2023
6. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.
| A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups | Agree |
| B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community | Agree |
| C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups | Agree |
| D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives | Agree |
| E. Encourage the retention of editors | Agree |
| F. Encourage the retention of organizers | Agree |
| G. Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement. | Agree |
7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?
We assisted 17 year old pupils how to write good Wikipedia pages about local monuments, history, or well-known women (Beveren, Herzele, Liège).
Part 2: Your main learning
edit8. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?
We learned that we can benefit from the experience, and/or the capacity of other larger cultural institutions and organisations. It helps to provide writing session participants with proactively ListeriaBot tables of interesting (new) pages (by language). Learning the basics of copyright. Repeatedly explain copyright. Explain (the advantage of) free knowledge licenses. It is an added value if references are provided by e.g. from a museum archive, collection, or library. Learn how to search for and register article references. Communication (via e.g. newsletter, or social media) is a continuous effort. We need to translate and publish into Dutch, French, and English. This requires considerable extra effort and time. We might need more communication via the national press (journals and magazines) at regular times. We did do this already in the past, but we need to repeat this yearly.
9. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?
Participants started to write about their own preferred subjects. We were contacted by e-mail by a lot of people, for different reasons. They appreciated getting timely and decent answers. Some people (including journalists) do not understand how Wikipedia works. They are very astonished that there are no paid editors. We need to continue to explain this all the time. It was needed to explain this even in the Europen Parliament as part of the "EU large websites bill". We get invitations from archives, heritage institutions, and museums to plan and conduct writing sessions with them, because they don't have experience in writing.
10. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?
We continuously improve our way of working. There are intense interactions between and amongst Wikimedia Belgium, its partners, and its volunteers.
We need to and would like to start developing Lua scripts to automatically update Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons from Wikidata. We continue to develop Pywikibot scripts. We continue to suggest potential new functionality for Wikipedia and other platforms. We continue to support the Wikimedia communitity on Meta and other management platforms.
11. If you were sitting with a friend to tell them one thing about your work during this fund, what would it be (think of inspiring or fascinating moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes, or anything that feels important to you)?
Learning to write for Wikipedia is not a single-session activity. It helps to have 2 or more sessions. For certain museums we have monthly sessions. Experienced Wikipedia editors can start to couch. First-time participants to writing sessions are very emotional when they complete a first article. Most organisations and institutions want to keep in close contact with us. They typically contact us year after year to continue to organise activities and writing sessions. Educational institutes, including universities, and colleges, start to consider Wikipedia as a trustfully and valuable resource. The Friends of Wikimedia Belgium Fund was a good idea to be established. It allows Wikimedia Belgium to be known to the wider public. It allows the public to receive a tax reduction for their gifts.
12. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedia organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work. For instance, guides, training material, presentations, work processes, or any other material the team has created to document and transfer knowledge about your work and can be useful for others. Please share any specific resources that you are creating, adapting/contextualizing in ways that are unique to your context (i.e. training material).
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Belgium_Projects/ListeriaBot/Query
Part 3: Metrics
edit13a. Open and additional metrics data
| Open Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Additional Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of activities developed | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of volunteer hours | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
13b. Additional core metrics data.
| Core metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | We learn the public that Wikipedia is written by volunteers, not by paid authors. We learn them that anyone can contribute in a lot of ways, including funding our activities. | ||||
| Number of editors | We welcome new editors, we give them an appropriate training, complementing their skills and knowledge. We provide them with the book "Writing for Wikipedia". | ||||
| Number of organizers | We welcome university professors who assign writing tasks to their students about subjects related to their curriculum. We invite museums to organise writing sessions related to their collection. We seek libraries to conduct specific writing sessions. We support women organisations to create or amend Women in Red articles. |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| N/A | We seek GLAM institutions to provide us with public domain data, that we can upload to Wikidata, so that we can create lists of candidate Wikipedia pages. We can subsequently amend those Wikidata items with additional statements and relationships. When the Wikipedia pages have been written we register those pages on Wikidata. We check what languages are still missing, so that we can translate articles. | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
14. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?
No
15. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future.
The Fluxx metrics part above is too complex to fill in, therefore we created a Google spreadsheet. Please find the results report as built from the Outreach platform:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15Ulgn14-yFH384uItsppjfe9xPOf2CsH
16. Use this space to link or upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., dashboards, surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, etc).
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
- N/A
Part 4: Organizational capacities & partnerships
edit17. Organizational Capacity
| A. Financial capacity and management | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| B. Conflict management or transformation | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| C. Leadership (i.e growing in potential leaders, leadership that fit organizational needs and values) | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| D. Partnership building | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| E. Strategic planning | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| F. Program design, implementation, and management | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| G. Scoping and testing new approaches, innovation | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| H. Recruiting new contributors (volunteer) | This capacity is low, and we should prioritise developing it |
| I. Support and growth path for different types of contributors (volunteers) | This capacity is low, and we should prioritise developing it |
| J. Governance | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| K. Communications, marketing, and social media | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| L. Staffing - hiring, monitoring, supporting in the areas needed for program implementation and sustainability | This capacity is low, and we should prioritise developing it |
| M. On-wiki technical skills | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| N. Accessing and using data | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| O. Evaluating and learning from our work | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| P. Communicating and sharing what we learn with our peers and other stakeholders | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| N/A | |
| N/A |
17a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
Peer to peer learning with other community members in conferences/events, Formal training provided by a Wikimedia Movement organizing group (i.e., Affiliates, Grantees, Regional or Thematic Hub, etc.), Formal training provided from outside the Wikimedia Movement, Peer to peer learning with other community members (but that is not continuous or structured), Using capacity building/training resources onlinee from sources OUTSIDE the Wikimedia Movement, Using capacity building/training resources online from sources WITHIN the Wikimedia Movement
17b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
Lack of staff time to participate in capacity building/training, Lack of volunteer time to participate in capacity building/training, Lack of knowledge of available capacity building opportunities
18. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your organizational capacity has grown, and areas where you require support?
- Helped:
Having motivated board members, and advisors. Having partners with whom we could develop projects. Building partnerships with many organisations and with the (Flemish) government. We have a chair that is early retired, has plenty of time to manage the chapter, has a wide knowledge of and experience with administrative and legal tasks, general ledger, financial reporting, managing budgets, fundraising, and setting up partnerships.
- Hindered:
Lack of volunteers, project managers, specific board members skills or participation. Not everyone understands how the Wikimedia platforms technically work.
- Where do we need support:
How to start and manage freelance activities. How to attract (more, young, female) volunteers. People seem to hesitate participating in the organisation.
19. Partnerships over the funding period.
| A. We built strategic partnerships with other institutions or groups that will help us grow in the medium term (3 year time frame) | Strongly agree |
| B. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to bring in more contributors from underrepresented groups | Strongly agree |
| C. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to build out more content on underrepresented topics/groups | Strongly agree |
19a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
Board members’ outreach, Partners proactive interest
19b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
Lack of staff capacity to respond to partners interested in working with us
20. Please share your learning about strategies to build partnerships with other institutions and groups and any other learning about working with partners?
- Helped:
Completed two projects of Friends of Wikimedia Belgium. Building the partnership with the King Boudewijn Foundation was very helpful.
We were supported by the international Photo contests (Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Living Heritage). Volunteers were readily available for evaluating photos via Montage tool.
- Hindered:
There are more organisations requesting partnership than we can support because we don’t have employees and too few volunteers. We have problems collaborating with larger institutions. Respective budgets do not match.
Partners are willing to collaborate with Wikimedia Belgium. They are interested in how we work, and which projects we have. They are willing to be educated about the Wikimedia platforms. They are very happy with the documentation we provide.
Part 5: Sense of belonging and collaboration
edit21. What would it mean for your organization to feel a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement?
We love being part of the international movement. It is very important to see the projects of other affiliates. It is very important to contribute to and watch the Let’s Connect sessions.
22. How has your (for individual grantees) or your group/organization’s (for organizational grantees) sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?
Increased significantly
23. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.
We were dissatisfied that smaller chapters were not invited to physically participate at the 2023 Summit. We are happy that we can participate again in 2024.
We were refused to physically attend at the 2023 Berlin conference. This was a bad experience. A virtual partipication is much less effective than a physical participation, because there is more interaction on a life meeting amongst participants. We are part of a smaller language community.
24. How has your group/organization’s sense of personal investment in the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?
Increased significantly
25. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.
We have sent two board members to (other) international meetings. We took the initiative ourselves to participate.
26. Are there other movements besides the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement that play a central role in your motivation to contribute to Wikimedia projects? (for example, Black Lives Matter, Feminist movement, Climate Justice, or other activism spaces) If so, please describe it below.
Amazon, the general Belgian womens’ organisation
Supporting Peer Learning and Collaboration
editWe are interested in better supporting peer learning and collaboration in the movement.
27. Have you shared these results with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?
Yes
27a. Please describe how you have already shared them. Would you like to do more sharing, and if so how?
Presentations at Wikimedia Conferences.
28. How often do you currently share what you have learned with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees, and learn from them?
We do this rarely (less than twice a year)
29. How does your organization currently share mutual learning with other grantees?
Wikimedia Europe WikiFranca Wikimedia Nederland Let’s Connect
Part 6: Financial reporting and compliance
edit30. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.
19390.67
31. Local currency type
EUR
32. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters/Reports/Wikimedia_Belgium/Financial/2023
33. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.
There were not really changes. We tried our best to use the budget as much we could reasonably do. We could not develop other projects, because of the lack of volunteers.
34. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?
34a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.
20,613.84 EUR We did not have the opportunity to attract a freelance. The volunteers did not take up all potential support.
34b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?
B. Propose to use them to partially or fully fund a new/future grant request with PO approval
34c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.
40,000.00 Budget 2023
4,51 Leftover 2022 beyond already paid back begin 2023
19,390.67 Expenses 2023 20,613.84 Unspent budget for 2023
20,000.00 EUR will be used for the grant 2024
613.84 EUR will be returned to the WMF
35. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?
As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund 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.
36. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
Yes
37. 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 Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
Yes
38. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.
We still lack contacts with Wallonia, the French part of Belgium, and Brussels. The partnership with the French speaking regional department of education allowed us to grow in the French speaking part of the country.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2023_winners#Belgium
https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Loves_Heritage/2023/Report#Winners