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Grants:Project/Magioladitis/Why women don’t edit Wikipedia/Final

< Grants:Project | Magioladitis/Why women don’t edit Wikipedia


Report accepted
This report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2017-18 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.



Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the grantee's project.

Part 1: The Project

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Summary

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In a few short sentences, give the main highlights of what happened with your project. Please include a few key outcomes or learnings from your project in bullet points, for readers who may not make it all the way through your report.

The project consisted of the following main points:

  • We organised workshops to discuss with females about Wikipedia, show them how to write articles on Wikipedia and motivate them to active participate in the Wikimedia movement.
  • We setup a website and various Wikimedia pages to support organising the meetings and suggesting articles to edit.
  • We organised the first ever female oriented Wikimedia hackathon in Greece, called WikiFemHack, where we invited active females in Wikipedia and in the IT area to talk about their experiences.
  • We organised meetings with feminist organisations and groups of females to discuss their point of view about Wikipedia, tried to gain trust so that they invest time on Wikipedia and perhaps later choose to start importing some of their material (newspapers, press releases, photos, etc) in Wikimedia Commons.
  • We participated in the organisation of CorfuPedia, a school project aimed to add articles in Wikipedia, by organising meetings for female students and educators.
  • We distributed a questionnaire in over 250 females to ask their opinion on Wikipedia and their relation to technology,. We summarised the results in a survey.
  • We created a list of missing pages about females on Greek Wikipedia and asked people to contribute by creating content or enriching the corresponding Wikidata items.
  • We reduced the gender gap within the Wikipedia Community User Group Greece by recruiting females to the team.
  • We reduced the gender gap within the Wikimedia Community by recruiting females to the project.

Project Goals

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Please copy and paste the project goals from your proposal page. Under each goal, write at least three sentences about how you met that goal over the course of the project. Alternatively, if your goals changed, you may describe the change, list your new goals and explain how you met them, instead.

Goal: The goal of our project is to reduce the gender gap in Greek Wikimedia community and gender bias in Greek Wikipedia articles.

Outcome:

The gender gap was reduced. The graph shows the percentage of editors in Greek Wikipedia per gender based on the overall number of registered editors that have declared their gender via the Preferences special page. The percentage is obtained by dividing the number of editors declaring themselves as females by the number of editors who have declared their gender in general.

 


Goal: We expect to increase female participation in Greek Wikimedia community and an amount of articles to be created or expanded.

Outcome:

There was a slightly increase of pages about women in Greek Wikipedia.

 

MARKELLOS contacted me and told me that he was inspired by the project and added 300 Wikidata item for women only in October 2017. More details can be found in Greek here.

Geraki inspired and created Wikiproject Women in Red in Greek Wikipedia. Shortly, 11 members joined the Wikiproject.

In the frame of the project the first female oriented Wikimedia Hackathon was organised in Greece. For details in English please check the Community Digest here. For more details in Greek please check here and here.

Wikimedia User Group Greece has now a female member.

The hackathon and the workshops resulted in participating in the WikiGap organised by the Swedish Embassy in Cyprus in March 2018. The first ever person from Cyprus to participate in a CEE meeting is female.

Project Impact

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Important: The Wikimedia Foundation is no longer collecting Global Metrics for Project Grants. We are currently updating our pages to remove legacy references, but please ignore any that you encounter until we finish.

Targets

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  1. In the first column of the table below, please copy and paste the measures you selected to help you evaluate your project's success (see the Project Impact section of your proposal). Please use one row for each measure. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please include the number.
  2. In the second column, describe your project's actual results. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please report numerically in this column. Otherwise, write a brief sentence summarizing your output or outcome for this measure.
  3. In the third column, you have the option to provide further explanation as needed. You may also add additional explanation below this table.
Planned measure of success
(include numeric target, if applicable) 		Actual result Explanation
3 talks (2 x Athens, Thessaloniki) 6 + 1 talks (Rethymno, Thessaloniki, 2 x Corfu, 2 x Athens and 1 in CEE Meeting in Warsaw)
1 presentation to an educators' conference -- Instead of a presentation, we preferred to switch to a hands-on experience by organising additional workshops. We already had a presentation in late 2016. Next one is expected to happen in early 2019.
2 workshops (Athens, Thessaloniki) 5 workshops/edit-a-thons 2 x Athens, Corfu, Thessaloniki, Rethymno
3 meetings (Athens, Thessaloniki) 6 (2 x Athens, Thessaloniki, Igoumenitsa, Ioannina and one with educators in Corfu) Meetings with female groups to discuss the gender gap issue. Not counting organisational meetings.
2 videos 3 videos A tutorial video on how to assign gender on Wikipedia (see here for a better version of this video) and a video presenting the gender gap issue (recorded from talk). An additional video was released from my talk on Working with female organisations in CEE meeting
1 scientific paper 1 extended report
250 questionnaires 256 questionnaires


Story

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Looking back over your whole project, what did you achieve? Tell us the story of your achievements, your results, your outcomes. Focus on inspiring moments, tough challenges, interesting antecdotes or anything that highlights the outcomes of your project. Imagine that you are sharing with a friend about the achievements that matter most to you in your project.

  • This should not be a list of what you did. You will be asked to provide that later in the Methods and Activities section.
  • Consider your original goals as you write your project's story, but don't let them limit you. Your project may have important outcomes you weren't expecting. Please focus on the impact that you believe matters most.

Greek Wikipedia has few articles, especially articles concerning women's issues. Moreover, the synthesis of the Greek Wikipedia community is largely male oriented. we wanted to raise awareness of these problems and increase female participation in Wikipedia projects, Wikimedia community and at the same with creating more articles of female interest.

One of the main method of the project was to get connected with females groups, listen to their opinion, gain trust and motivate them participate in Wikipedia. We also organised a series of public talks to address to people and make them aware of the problem, including high School students, and we organised a series of editathons in various cities in Greece where after a short introduction to the problem we showed to females how to edit Wikipedia and asked them to contribute to the project. At the end we conducted a survey on more than 250 Greek females asking their opinion about Wikipedia and whether they edit it and what problems they face online, with interesting results. The project has created some onwiki motivation and impact with a slight increase in both number of female editors and number of female biographies in Wikipedia.

Survey(s)

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If you used surveys to evaluate the success of your project, please provide a link(s) in this section, then briefly summarize your survey results in your own words. Include three interesting outputs or outcomes that the survey revealed.

  • The results of the questionnaire that reflects the opinion of over 250 women about Wikipedia can be found at Academia.edu and Researchgate.

Other

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Is there another way you would prefer to communicate the actual results of your project, as you understand them? You can do that here!

Methods and activities

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Please provide a list of the main methods and activities through which you completed your project.

Meetings with female groups

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Meeting with female educators in Corfu

One of the main purposes of the project was to get connected with females groups, listen to their opinion, gain trust and motivate them participate in Wikipedia actively by motivating them to cintribute in Wikipedia and in its sister projects with articles, photos, material, etc.

  • We got connected with the following groups:
  • We organised invitation-only meetings with Telesilla subscribers in Athens, Igoumenitsa, Ioannina
  • We organised a meeting with MOV activists in Athens
  • We organised Skype and in-person meetings with SheSharp members
  • We organised a meeting with female educators in Corfu
  • We organised a meeting with female high school students and teachers participating in the school project CorfuPedia
  • We organised a discussion as a session of a European Meeting of Women organised by RCWA.

Public talks and short editathons

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  • We organised a series of public talks to address to people and make them aware of the problem. Namely, we organised a talk in the Second Chance School of Corfu, a school for adults which we had good connections already since the school in the past has organised a wikiproject. Moreover, adult education is considered a benefitial ground for organising Wikipedia activities and motivating people on contributing. (See for example: Magioladitis, M. & Skiadopoulos, K. (2015) Conclusions of the use of Wikipedia as educational mean in secondary education and in adult education, «Η εκπαίδευση στην εποχή των Τ.Π.Ε. και της Καινοτομίας», pp. 763-770, ISBN 978-960-99435-8-1)
  • We organised a series of editathons in various cities in Greece where after a short introduction to the problem we showed to females how to edit Wikipedia and asked them to contribute to the project
    • We organised hands-on Wikipedia in Athens with the aid of Telesilla in their offices.
    • We organised an editathon in Athens in cooperation with Mov which was well advertised in all media
    • We organised a tutorial and editathon at the National Library of Corfu. We addressed mainly to female University students.
    • We organised a tutorial and editathon in Rethymno.
    • We organised special sessions for gender gap during Corfupedia, a large scale school project that aimed to add content in Wikipedia.
    • We participated in a Thesswiki editathon consisted only by women
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    Talk in a Second Chance School
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    Talk in Athens
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    Editathon in Corfu
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    CorfuPedia

WikiFemHack

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Participants to WikiFemHack by gender

One large part of the project was to participate in the organisation of WikiFemHack, the first ever female oriented Hackathon in Greece. The hackthon was organised by Wikimedia User Group Greece with the help of SheSharp and Open Knowledge Foundation and took place in Thessaloniki.

We event was divided in three sessions: a) Talks on gender gap b) hacking wikicode and c) editing articles on Wikipedia and Wikidata

  • More than 10 speakers talked in the Hackathon (Camelia Boban, Charalampos Bratsas, Florence Devouard, Vicky Fiska, Isla Haddow-Flood, Ariel T. Glenn, Eliza Camberogiannis, Marios Magioladitis, Efthimios Mavrikas, Dimitrios Papadopoulos, Kostantinos Stampoulis, Zana Strkovska, Fotis Tsalampounis)
  • Many women shared their own experiences from their interaction with Wikipedia
  • We invited women that work in IT to share their experience
  • We had Skype sessions before the event with various female initiatives: CodeGirls, WikiDonne, WikiWomen, Women in Red, Wiki Loves Women SheSharp
  • In the event we had 56 registered participants (15 men, 40 women, 1 trans-gender)

Research

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  • We distributed a questionnaire and conducted a survey on more than 250 Greek females asking their opinion about Wikipedia and whether they edit it and what problems they face online. The results of the survey were published in Academia.edu and Researchgate and can be found in a section below.
    • We chose the population with the following principles:
      • subscribers of the magazine "Telesilla", a feminist magazine
      • participants to the WikiFemHack, a Wikimedia hackathon held in Greece
      • female participants to workshops organised nationalwide.
  • We presended the results in many occasions. Namely, in CEE meeting in Warsaw we gave a talk Working with feminist groups where we discussed our finding with out Wikimedians.

Online and Offline Promotion

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Wiki Loves Women leaflets
  • We created a website to promote the activities http://gendergap.wikimedia.gr/
  • All activities were covered by posts in the official website of Wikimedia Community User Group Greece
  • All activities were covered by posts in our official website http://magioladitis.gr/category/gender-gap/
  • We were official supporters of CorfuPedia, a school project aimed to contribute to Wikipedia with content about Corfu's local history
  • In all Wikimedia Community User Group Greece events (Wiki Loves Earth/Monuments, etc.) we distributed leaflets of Wiki Loves Women and other material
  • We had tweets about the events regularly

Project resources

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Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Even if you have linked to them elsewhere in this report, this section serves as a centralized archive for everything you created during your project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

 
Workshop in Corfu
 
WikiFemhack - Hacking session
 
WikiFemhack - Talks session
 
Workshop in Athens
 
Workshop in Rethymno

List of presentations (click to read the slides) Evetything is avaliable on Wikimedia Commons, Academia.edu, Researchgate

Slides Title Location Date Academia.edu Researchgate Video Miscellanea
  Expanding Women's Role in Wikipedia Rethymno, Greece 14 October 2017 [1] [2] blog entry
  Πως βλέπουν οι γυναίκες τη Βικιπαίδεια (Gender gap in Greece) Thessaloniki 7 October 2017 [3] [4] blog entry
  Working with feminist groups Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017 24 September 2017 [5] [6] Watch on YouTube blog entry
  Expanding Women's Role in Wikipedia Public Central Historical Library
Corfu, Greece 		10 July 2017 [7] [8] blog entry
  Strengthening Wikipedia's female view Athens, Greece 18 February 2017 [9] [10] Watch on YouTube  
  The gender gap in Wikipedia and in technology Corfu, Greece 13 February 2017 [11] [12] blog entry

Learning

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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 took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well

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What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? 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.

  • Attendance in workshops exceeded expectations. Many females came, discussed with us, shared experiences and opinions.
  • Female organisations seem eager to continue collaboration with us.
  • Many females do not realise they are the subject of online harassment. In the meetings, several females stated that while they spend many hours online they never experienced harassment. After discussing on real life examples, they realised that they were the subject of online harassment without even realising it. This is something very helpful for them.
  • Organising gender gap events editathon in us participating in WikiGap the first ever editathon in Cyprus. A female user from Cyprus is joining CEE Meeting 2018.
  • Most of the Wikipedia editing contests on Greek Wikipedia now contain special motives for females. Namely, Wikimedia Community User Group Greece organised two editathons on technology which distributed prices between males and females evenly.
  • Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red started on Greek Wikipedia: el:Βικιπαίδεια:Επιχείρηση Γυναίκες στα Κόκκινα
  • WikiFemHack was successful, attracted a lot of media attention.
  • Wikimedia Community User Group Greece now has a female member. More female editors expressed their interest to join.
  • Grants:Learning patterns/Creating new articles was very helpful in the process.
  • Grants:Learning patterns/Edit-a-thon worklists was helpful too.

What didn’t work

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What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • The new content created at this phase was not as it was expected. Discussing with people who participated in similar activities in other countries this seems to be normal. Very few females would come in an editathon and started creating content right away. We had provided lists with suggested articles and shown all the basic tools: Visual Editor, Content Translator but very few would be prepared to start editing. The majority of the audience was participating in order to discuss, learn about Wikipedia and share life experiences from their online life. We should keep in touch with the participants, have regular communication in order to gain enough trust for Wikipedia and it sister projects. Many participants would feel confident enough to upload photos on Facebook and on instagram but not that much on Wikimedia Commons. Providing tools for them would also be a nice thing to do.
  • At some point, we decided to create short videoa with femals sharing their experiences from Wikipedia and from attending the workshops. Lack of equipment and time did not allow this.

Other recommendations

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If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

  • It would be nice if Trust and Safety was present in some of the workshops. Many questions involved of how to detect harassment and how to deal with it.

Next steps and opportunities

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Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • Expand this work in Cyprus. During our work, it turned that Wikimedia Community is capable of expanding in Cyprus with women to have a lead role in that.
  • Women to take over similar activities. It would be very interesting to see women taking similar initiatives. We know have the capacity for that.
  • Feminist organisations to contribute with content in Wikimedia Commons. The history of feminisism in Greece still needs to be covered. I initiated discussions that may lead in the future feminist orgnisation to contribute with photos and leaflets they have created in Wikimedia Commons.

Part 2: The Grant

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Finances

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Actual spending

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Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Expense Approved amount Actual funds spent Difference
Posters €60.00 €50.00 €10.00
Other print materials €300.00 €271.00 €29.00
Swags €200.00 €200.00 €0.00
Travelling expenses €2500.00 €2501.33 €-1.33
Soft drinks, etc. €420.00 €487.30 €-67.30
Incidentals €120.00 €95.60 €17.00
Total €3600.00 €3612.63 €-12.63


Remaining funds

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Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

  • No

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

Documentation

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Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadmin wikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

  • Yes

Confirmation of project status

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

Please answer yes or no.

  • Yes

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

  • Yes

Grantee reflection

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We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being a grantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the Project Grant experience? Please share it here!

The project was a learning experience, first of all, for myself. I had no idea how many problems women face online. During this year I met some amazing people. There are many women who love technology, IT, gadgets, who would love to contribute online in free knowledge and still hesitate to participate more actively. The project gave me the opportunity to travel in places around Greece and discuss about Wikipedia, a subject I love to discuss about. Following my activity to the project I got an invitation by the Swedish Embassy in Cyprus to talk in the Green line, a thing that I consider a great lifetime experience. I would like to continue contributing to the gender gap area and most of all I am proud that I see more initiatives from women to emerge. At some point, I felt I was getting tired of traveling almost every two weeks but certainly I do not regret the time I spent for this project.


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