Grants:Project/Rapid/Anass Sedrati/Wikipedia Event in Rabat/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2016-17 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/Rapid/Anass Sedrati/Wikipedia Event in Rabat.
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 rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Goals

The five Goals of our project were to:

Raise awareness about wikipedia between people in general (students in particular)
Network with university and explore means of collaboration
Recruit new editors
Increase skills for existing editors
Add or improve content

The first goal was completely achieved. Awareness about Wikipedia was booming after the event. The most interesting thing was that even if not physical attendance was big, the role of media of talking about the event as primordial. Many national media talked about the media and interviewed us. An example of this media is the electronic newspaper "Hespress" (ranked 1 in Morocco) that wrote an article and published a video with us. Here is an example of an article: http://www.hespress.com/hi-tech/330194.html And a video that had 7000 views until now: http://www.hespress.com/videos/330147.html . The media talked about the event in different languages, for example in French: http://lematin.ma/express/2016/l-inpt-abrite-le-premier-evenement--wikipedia--organise-au-maroc/258655.html and even in English: http://www.magatv.net/wikipedia-in-morocco/ In order to raise awareness we have also recorded the whole event on Youtube and made the link public on the Facebook page. Our aim is that the continuation of the idea stays even after the event, and that even people in other cities can learn from the event. This is the link for the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWatZn-G0a4 Our digitalisation project was in order to spread the awareness far behind the physical presence, and make the content available to everybody (by publishing the Slides on Wikimedia Commons as well). We have created a Facebook group for the interested people (https://www.facebook.com/groups/1666035837022213/) with 40 people now, and we are working with them now in order to keep the contact, support them, and hopefully make many new editors for Wikipedia in a near future.

Outcome

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1 Event	1 Event
between 100-150 participants	Around 50	The event was held on a rainy saturday morning. This might be strange, but the rain and the fact that it was a saturday morning did not help many people to come. Fortunately, we had the material on media and Internet, so many people contacted us even if they did not come.
10 new editors	9-10 editors	This is just the number of people who manifested the interest and created an account. We have now to work with them so that they become regular editors.
Increase skills for existing editors	Creation of Facebook group	in the group, we are also talking between experienced wikimedian on advanced skills, for example we teatched how to report some articles that are inappropriate
Raise Awareness about Wikipedia in Morocco	Big Media coverage in different supports

Learning

What worked well?

What worked well was the big media coverage and the outreach that the project had. This had first raised awareness about Wikipedia in Morocco, and second made many people contact us, and ask us about the encyclopedia. We are now thinking on creating a "legal" association to make the scope of our work bigger, and to continue on organizing such events. There is a big interest around wikipedia in Morocco, and we can definitely host periodically such presentations on a local scope. The fact that we have business cards helped us a lot to create more connections. We have gathered many contacts from different people in variated organizations, which can help us in the future for expanding the scope of our projects and getting more editors. One important aspect with the business cards is that they will serve us even for future events, for example, intra- wiki events.

What did not work so well?

What did not work so well was that we did not have the affluence we expected, even if 200 people confirmed their presence on Facebook. This can be explained by weather conditions, as people are not used to go out when it rains. Moreover, the choice of saturday morning revealed itself to be not optimal, even though it was the only time me and Reda were available.

What would you do differently next time?

We will work on chosing a better date and timing for the organisation of the event. We did not know for example that the students had exams at the week where we presented (as the date of the exams was decided after that we booked the room in the school and chose the date of the event). We will try next time to have events during weekdays, for instance at the end of the afternoon (18-19h). According to more experienced event organizers, this time is the most effective if one wants to have more physical affluence in a given event.

Finances

Grant funds spent

We have spent the full Grant (and even a little more) following the given payments:

Business cards (English) = SEK 499.84 = MAD 548,5
Business cards (Arabic, Berber, French) = SEK 1083 = MAD 1188
Printing Roll-ups/Kakemono = MAD 200
Food and Drinks = MAD 319

Total spent = 2255,5 MAD

As you can see, the total is a little bit higher than 2000 MAD, but the difference of 255,5 is ok for us, and we can afford to pay it by ourselves, since you have provided us with support, and the event was successful and draws an optimistic path for the future of Wikimedia Morocco.

Remaining funds

No

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?