Grants:Project/Atudu/Wiki Loves Butterfly - Phase V/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2020-21 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Atudu/Wiki Loves Butterfly - Phase V.
You may still review or add to the discussion about this report on its talk page.
You are welcome to email projectgrantswikimedia.org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the first half of the grant period.

Summary

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

Best possible number of field documentation in different zones of different provinces (as entry permitted) in spite of Covid Pandemic deadlock.
Pretty good number of species documented and good number of pictures uploaded in Wikimedia commons.
Article creation and development.
Uploading data in Wikidata.
Balanced team work, proper task allocation and dedicated responsibility sharing by members.
Nice local level communication and campaign ensuring good outreach.
Co-organizing National level Butterfly meet in North-East India.

Methods and activities

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

While setting up our initial field documentation planning at the outset, we doubted that the sustaining Pandemic deadlock shall put obstacle and restrictions in our movement.
Hence, in July, 2021, we changed our strategic set up in carrying on field documentation in respective local hotspots by our respective members residing thereon and at the same time to send teams where ever entry restriction and permission of movement will be slackened a bit.
Subsequently, we regularly communicated with forest departments of different zones and got current updates.
This really worked well and we had so far field documentation programmes at many zones and forests and wildlife Sanctuaries in North East India and West Bengal in every month sending 2 or 3 two-membered teams at a time in different zones.
Members also motivated and inspired new butterfly enthusiasts in respective areas and created new wiki contributors who also joined and started field documentation programmes and uploaded images in Commons, thus giving impetus to the project's progress.
Our long experiences and past learning in successfully handling previous 4 phases of WLB Project helped is a great deal in our critical situation decision making process.

Midpoint outcomes

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

1725 images are uploaded till now.
Total number of valued images are 167
Total number of quality images are 236
Total number of featured images are 4[[1]]
66[[2]] articles are created and updated in BnWP
6 new wiki-contributors made
Co-organized North-East Butterfly Meet, 2021 at Namdapha National Park.

Offline activity metrics


Metrics	West Bengal	North East India
Field-works	9	9
Photo-walks	0	0
Butterfly meets	0	1
Wikimedia meet-ups	0	0
Edit-a-thons	0	0

Month-wise progress outcome

Finances

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

Apart from obstacle and challenges posed by Covid-19 Pandemic restricting movements and entries at many parts of North-East India; we encountered the weather challenges on field.
This year, North-East India and West Bengal have encountered record excessive rain and bad weather condition affecting our documentation.
Though we plan our documentation dates after detailed consultation with weather forecast sites and area wise meteorological departments, still foul weather came unexpectedly.
Next part, we shall try our level best to be more accurate about weather condition.
We also hope, Pandemic restrictions for entry to North-East Forests will be slackened more allowing us to document in these forests and hotspots.

What is working well

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

Our balanced team work management
Proper task allocation
Dedication responsibility handling by each team member
Monthly team meeting and updates
Your learning pattern link goes here

Next steps and opportunities

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

Special forum on article writing to increase the number of new articles.
More rare species to be documented and more quality images to be uploaded and to increase the number of valued and quality images.
Bring more new enthusiasts to be included in the project as well as in the great wikimedia movement.
New hotspots to be covered if entry permitted in pandemic situation.
Our plan of butterfly and wikimedia workshop with school students is still not materialised, if oppertunity comes we shall utilize properly.

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

Team members dedication and energy level is quite amazing. Out of their busy schedule, academic pressure and tight job schedule, they manage time and take responsibilities of the project work.
It is truly gratifying to watch newcomers growing as wikimedians.
Student members are greatly served and satisfied to get the WMF financial support in the project which enable them to pursue their loving interest of documenting the world of butterfly.
To sum up, though this WLB Project, Wikimedia movement has given us a newer scope of a beautiful world of workability, knowledge sharing and broaden our mental horizon.