Grants:Project/UG BG/Wikimedia CEE Spring 2017/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2017-18 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/UG BG/Wikimedia CEE Spring 2017.
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 grantee's first 3 months.

Summary

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

CEE Spring 2017 was conducted between March 21st and May 31st - the main focus was on writing articles about the countries and regions of CEE, which took place in 29 languages, writing about 31 countries or regions.
Additionally to the main contest, we (and in this case especially User:Spiritia) created a side challenge for articles about notable women in the CEE region, that helped create additional 314 articles in mostly non-CEE-languages.
During the contest, every week was dedicated to 2-4 other countries/regions, which were highlighted on the CEE Spring blog each week. The blog posts were then also spread on social media, mostly Twitter and Facebook.

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.

The setup is similar to last year - every participating language/country/region has a local organiser who makes sure that the tasks were completed on time.
The timeline for the project was defined to illustrate the different stages of the project. Every week of the contest was reserved for 2-4 participants to highlight their treasure trove of articles and focus on interesting aspects of their cultures.
Similar to last year, the statistics helped participants judge how well or how badly they were doing or which participating community wasn't doing that well in order to write more articles about the community in question.
In order to work towards specific goals we set for this year, we created a few side challenges mentioned above to help out with those metrics.

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.

The outcome is still to be determined due to a problem with how the bots for the contest are counting articles, leaving out at least one component essential to the contest. The preliminary Botik stats show around 4700 articles - combined with the 100wikidays side challenge this means that _at least_ 5000 articles have been created.

CEE / Non-CEE	Language	Number of articles per language	Number of editors per language	Source
Non-CEE	Arabic	65	6	Meta
Non-CEE	Catalan	2	1	Meta
Non-CEE	Chinese	10	1	Meta
Non-CEE	English	46	5	Meta
Non-CEE	English	40	10	English WP (in addition to those listed in Meta)
Non-CEE	Finnish	10	1	Meta
Non-CEE	French	20	1	Meta
Non-CEE	German	3	1	Meta - Nature
Non-CEE	Hebrew	1	1	Meta
Non-CEE	Italian	12	3	Italian WP
Non-CEE	Ladino	4	1	Meta
Non-CEE	Malayalam	29	2	Meta - Women (28), Meta - Nature (1)
Non-CEE	Norwegian (nb)	6	1	Meta
Non-CEE	Norwegian (nn)	4	1	Meta
Non-CEE	Panjabi	30	1	Meta
Non-CEE	Spanish	28	4	Meta
CEE	Belarussian	17	1	Meta
CEE	Bulgarian	24	2	Meta
CEE	Georgian	9	1	Meta
CEE	Macedonian	10	1	Meta

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.

Since the funds are reserved for reimbursing local organisers who spent their money to buy prizes for the winners of their local contests, no funds have been spent so far. This part of the project is scheduled from June/July onwards.

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.

The learnings are usually discussed at a "Lessons Learned" session at the CEE Meeting, as was the case last year. The etherpad represents the rough outline of the outcome of that session, we will link the polished version of last year's results as soon as the document has been uploaded to Commons!

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.

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.

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. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this grant at the end of your project, please also mention this here.

As outlined in the timeline, the next steps will be determining the winners of the local contests by June 30th and then sending out the prizes to them and/or reimbursing the local organisers for the costs of the prizes they bought by July 31st.

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?

Everything has been fine so far, since the administrative overhead for this project is fairly limited due its tried and trusted model.