Grants:Project/Rapid/New Zealand Fashion Museum/125 Suffrage Wikipedia edit-a-thon/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2018-19 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/New Zealand Fashion Museum/125 Suffrage Wikipedia edit-a-thon.
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?

Yes! We are pleased with how the event went and the outcomes achieved. We were thrilled to have several very experienced editors and repeat participants in our group which meant we were able to make some quality additions and improvements to articles. Although we began the event with an overview session, having several expert editors in the room also meant we were able to offer good one-on-one support to guide beginners through their first edits. For this event, our facilitator introduced wiki commons to the group which increased the skills of existing editors and sparked some really great conversations about copyright and the fashion industry. We held this event in a different venue to our first and were really pleased with its location and facilities. We would definitely be keen to use this venue again in the future.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1 event	1 event	Now our second event of the year. we may look to hold more in the future
10 editors	8+2 remote	Although we only had 8 people present, it was a productive day and valuable information was added. Please refer to our outreach dashboard here. It was also great to have 2 people working with us remotely.
5 new editors	3 new editors	Given our overall numbers, it was great to have 3 new editors.
10 Number of articles created or improved	14 articles created or improved. 2.72K words added.	Really pleased to have exceeded our target. This was due to our high ratio of return participants.
4 repeat participants	6 repeat participants	We reached out to people who attended our last event.

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?

Our venue, at the Ellen Melville Centre, was highly visible and situated in the heart of the historic fashion quarter in Auckland. This meant that several of the participants were able to take their own photographs of historic buildings nearby and add these to the commons as part of the day’s activities. We had planned a more structured photo-walk as part of the event, however given the number and type of participants on the day, we did not want to detract from people learning to edit and felt this was better left to individuals who were working on a relevant article. Had we been a larger group of editors, it may have made more sense to run a formal photo-walk.There is great existing research to support such a walk so this may be something to consider for a future event.

What did not work so well?

We fell short on the number of new editors we had hoped to attract and if we were to run another event we would need to think about how we can be more targeted in our marketing. In particular, we would love to see fashion students taking part and in the future would try and advertise through their networks.

What would you do differently next time?

Although the numbers of new editors was low the conversations had with them were incredibly in-depth. Conversations could be had that covered copyright around fashion houses and designer clothes, and we were also able to field questions from people skeptical of wikipedia as a whole. A larger group would leave less time for these in-depth conversations so a further event could require the day being broken down into tutoring beginners, editing and discussion of GLAM+Wiki collaborations.

Finances

Grant funds spent

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

Food and drink = $164.87 NZD
Facilitator = $150 NZD
Venue hire = $158 NZD

Total spent = 472.87 NZD (reflects deduction of underspend of 50.92 NZD)

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

We have $35.13 NZD remaining

Remaining funds have been used or will be used for other approved mission-aligned activities. This use has been requested in writing and approved by WMF.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

The New Zealand Fashion Museum is extremely grateful to the Wikimedia Foundation for the support to run two events this year. We hope to run more in 2019 and have learnt a lot from these events and how we can make our next event even better.