Grants:Project/Rapid/Artexte MAC Art+Feminism editathon 2020/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2020-2021 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/Artexte MAC Art+Feminism editathon 2020.
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

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

Our project had three main goals that were either attained or partially attained.

Our first goal was to recruit new editors of which a majority were individuals underrepresented in Wikimedia's editor make-up, mainly women and BIPOC folks. A majority of the editors participating were women and folks of BIPOC communities. However, we believe that there is still work to be done to engage with editors and potential editors of BIPOC communities.

Our second goal was to increase the skills of existing editors. We believe that this goal was met successfully through peer to peer knowledge sharing. Editors with only prior knowledge of Wikipedia had the opportunity to be accompanied in their introduction to both Wikidata and Wiki Commons.

Our third goal was to improve the coverage of content on the work of artists and authors that are women, people of colour, Indigenous people and people from the LGBTQ2S+ community. We evaluate this success through the significant number of new articles as well as articles improved in the targeted communities. We believe that one factor that aided in this success is the creation of a list of suggestions of articles to be created, translated and improved. Bibliographic resources made available to editors helped to supply strong sources in order to contribute to Wikimedia projects while respecting community guidelines on notability. The following are a few notable new articles created Zina Saro-Wiwa, Firelei Báez, Germaine Arnaktauyok, Pamela Edmonds, Tim Whiten.

As a whole, we are extremely happy with the outcome of the project. The context of the pandemic gave us additional challenges that helped us rethink our offer and develop new ways of reaching folks on the Web and onsite. It gave us an opportunity to challenge our methodology and try new ways of reaching editors.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets. Please be sure to review and provide metrics required for Rapid Grants.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
2 edit-a-thon events	2 edit-a-thon events	March 13th 2021 and December 11th 2021
80 participants	32 active editors	In the context of the pandemic, we held 1 online event and 1 hybrid event. In both these events, we had less active participants than initially expected. More people came to the virtual and hybrid events but didn't sign into the dashboard.
30-40 new editors	19	We included all editors that followed our introductory training in French or in English.
150 articles created or improved	50 articles created and 286 articles improved 3 Commons uploads	Although we had fewer editors than initially planned, the editors that responded to our call to action were dedicated to their contributions.
10-15 repeat participants	10

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

What worked well?

Having an online event through Zoom allowed us to connect with editors outside our immediate area, breaking the traditional geography barrier that many editors in our community were experiencing. We received positive feedback from many out-of-town participants.
Both events were accompanied by public programming that worked well and helped us engage critically with participants on issues surrounding Wikimedia projects, such as representation and reliability of sources. The public programming was documented and continues to be seen to this day. For the March event, there was a public discussion between artist Michaëlle Sergile and curator Geneviève Wallon, it is available for viewing on Artexte's YouTube channel. For the December event, we had a live Web radio broadcast featuring DJ GLOWZI and interviews with current and past Art + Feminism representatives, the broadcast is available through Montez Press Radio on the Web.
As documentation to supply to participants, we created a zine that was produced in French and English. It includes beginner information for editing in Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wiki Commons, it also includes a task lists for editors and highlights of our past events. It is a fun, playful document that was well received by our community. We believe that it will help beginners continue editing after their initial introduction.

What did not work so well?

Although we had planned to send the documentation as a pre-event mail-out package, we were not able to receive mail addresses of many participants beforehand. Therefore, the packages were mainly sent to participants after the event or were given to them onsite. We also had a surplus of zines that we decided to send out to folks in the community that we are trying to represent in order to keep on developing our relationship for following events.

What would you do differently next time?

The important lesson-learned from this cycle of events is that going back to a 100% onsite event is not an option. There are participants that need our events to have an online presence in order to be reached. Our next events will therefore either be hybrid or online only.
It would be interesting to have more feedback from participants on the events themselves, for our next event, we will prepare an optional survey to be filled out by online and onsite participants.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

Budget and expenses
Expense (description)	Budget (USD)	Actual expense	Explanation
Publicity	400 $	349,20 $ (425 CAD)	Slightly lower because the social media package was not taken at the second event. There was a communication error with the service supplier.
Mail-out supplies	48$	61,84 (75,27 CAD)	Higher than planned, material costs rose in 2021
Mail-out postage	152$	173,82 $ (211,55 CAD)
Low-cost stickers	100$	147,79 $ (179,87 CAD)	Printing fees rose in 2021
Gift cards	100$	98,60 $ (120 CAD)
Unforeseen expenses	80$	57,15 $ (69,55 CAD)	Bank wire transfer fee and food and drink for second event that was held in a hybrid format virtual and onsite
TOTAL	880 $ (1071,01 CAD)	888,40 (1082,24 CAD)

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

None.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

Project page

March Outreach dashboard

December Outreach dashboard

March archive of the round table discussion available on YouTube

December archive of our live web radio broadcast: Montez Press Radio