Grants:Project/Wikimedians of CEE/CEE Spring 2019/Final

This project is funded by a Project Grant

proposal

finances

final report

Report under review

This Project Grant report has been submitted by the grantee, and is currently being reviewed by WMF staff. If you would like to add comments, responses, or questions about this grant report, you can create a discussion page at this redlink.

• To read the approved grant submission for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Wikimedians of CEE/CEE Spring 2019.

• Review the reporting requirements to better understand the reporting process.
• Review all Project Grant reports under review.
• Please Email projectgrantswikimedia.org if you have additional questions.

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

Part 1: The Project

Summary

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.

• CEE Spring 2019 was conducted between March 21st and May 31st of 2019 - the main focus was on writing articles about the countries and regions of CEE, which took place in 27 languages, writing about 29 countries or regions.
  • Esperanto and Slovakian returned after one or more years of absence from the contest
  • Republika Srpska did not participate this year
• Like last year, we (and in this case especially User:Spiritia) created a side challenge for articles about notable women in the CEE region, that helped created 267 articles in mostly CEE languages. The prizes consisting of postcards from many different places in the world were especially appreciated because they had a personal touch you couldn't buy with money. This is probably one of the main takeaways: Prizes with small monetary value sometimes have a better draw and effect than expensive prizes
• During the contest, every week was dedicated to 2-4 other countries/regions and 1 broad topic (i.e. culture, food, etc.). Contrary to previous years, the social media engagement on an international level was severely limited due to other commitments of the international team. Interestingly enough, this had no effect on the results, making it questionable how effective this was in the first place. Of course, long term effects of this social media absence might not be as beneficial.

Project Goals

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.

Plan vs. Reality

These goals have been set based on expectations based on quantitative data analysis from the international organising team and last year's results and will be used as a measure of success.

Numbers based mainly on Wikimedia CEE Spring 2019/Statistics/Authors list

• Total number of participants from CEE: 450 500 (11% over goal)
• Total number of female participants from CEE: 20% (90) 48 (47% under goal)
  • As a side note, it is still difficult to discern the female participants because it requires users to change the default setting
• Total number of participants worldwide: 500 ~510 (many CEE Women users are also CEE users)
• Total number of female participants worldwide: 20% (110) same result as above
• 40% of all newly created and significantly edited biographies are about women
  • 2033 articles about women - which is most likely significantly more than 40% (since it makes up about 17% of all articles)
• At least 50 new articles on topics of every CEE community participating
  • Achieved by adding international prizes for every editor who manages to write articles on all CEE communities, which was more emphasised this year. The lower number of articles on every CEE community is based on the issue that some communities lack the proper English article base to provide enough articles to translate, which only gets lower when adding minority languages this year
  • Achieved for all participating communities - some non-participating communities like Repulika Srpska and Sorbia are lower. Source

Have the nice to have goals been achieved?

These goals have been set based on qualitative estimations by the international organising team.

• 10% of the participants in all countries are new users
  • 127 new users, 25% of all users - reasons are still unknown and will be updated if they become known. This leads directly to the need of being in closer contact with the local organisers after the contest in order to break down the effects of the local and international efforts. This number might also originate from users taking part in contests in other languages than the wiki they usually edit in.

Strategic

• Closing the content gender gap (correlates with the quantitative goal about biographies about women)
• Adding more content on minority groups in the CEE region and expanding the list of topics in order to diversify the content created
• Further development of the regional partnership Wikimedia Central and Eastern Europe

Unused metrics

See Grants:Evaluation/Program_resources/Writing_competitions#Metrics Metrics from the Program resources.

We would compute these global metrics but will not define goals for them

• % increase in contribution rate per participating user as compared to user's contribution rate outside the competition timeframe
• # of participants editing X months after the event:
• # of participants who are active editors (5 edits/month) X months after an event:

Project Impact

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.

The project impact can be viewed in the project goals section and on Wikimedia CEE Spring 2019/Statistics. In general, the impact of the project has been better than in the previous years based on the numbers, although the activity of the interional team was lower than in previous years. This might indicate how much influence the local organisers have on the outcome compared to the international team, which might make a re-evaluation of the tasks necessary for next year.

Methods and activities

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

• 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.

Project resources

All resources on stats in detail, participants, results, and organisational information can be found at Wikimedia CEE Spring 2019.

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 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.

Acknowledging our differences

CEE region is all about the differences: in both our languages, writing systems, demographics, religious and historical background, as well in our local Wikip/media performance and community specifics. In the region we have both language versions with more than a million articles (Russian with 1.4 M and Polish with 1.2 M) and versions with less than 10 thousands articles, like Crimean Tatar and Erzya Wikipedia. The differences in the size of the local encyclopedia and the internal dynamics of the respective wiki community determine to a great extent the differences in the localization and the stricter or looser implementation of the CEE Spring contest rules.

Outside influences

The level of participation in each language is also massively influenced by external events. For example, Armenia did not contribute a lot in 2018 due to the 2018 Armenian revolution, but was back even stronger in 2019 than before. Turkey has the issue of Wikipedia being blocked, although the recent ruling by the Supreme Court of Turkey might also affect the 2020 version of CEE Spring positively. Some communities have expressed that the contest is too long, so, for example, Macedonian community run CEE Spring only for a month.

What does the international team need to do?

As mentioned above, hosting a blog and Facebook website might not be necessary, although it is still to early to say if this is the case or not. This year's result are in stark contrast to the level of activity from the international team, making it necessary to think more about which roles the international team and the local organisers need to fill. Falling back on purely administrative work and focusing more on supporting local organisers directly might be more efficient than general websites and remarks.

Next steps and opportunities

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.

See you at Wikimedia CEE Spring 2020!

Part 2: The Grant

Finances

Actual spending

Prizes on local level
	Local usergroup	Amount in EUR	in USD	Transfer/Western Union charge/ conversion fees in EUR	in USD	Total EUR	in USD
Reimbursements	Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group	400.00	444.97	23.50	26,14	423.50	471.12
	Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey	200.00	222,49	63.34	70.46	263.34	292,95
	Wikimedians of Bulgaria User Group	423.48	471,09	–	–	423.48	471,09
	Wikimedians of Erzya language User Group	400.00	444.97	23.50	26,14	423.50	471.12
	Wikimedia Russia	399.00	443.86	31.67	35,23	430.67	479,09
	Wikimedians of Bashkortostan User Group	400.00	444.97	31.67	35.23	431.67	480,20
	Wikimedia Community User Group Greece	330.48	367.64	–	–	330.48	367.64
	Wikimedia Russia - Tatarstan	400.00	444.97	23.50	26.14	423.50	471.12
	Esperanto kaj Libera Scio	100.00	111.25	–	–	100.00	111.25
Prizes bought by Wikimedia Austria	Wikimedia Community User Group Georgia	405.21	450.00	–	–	405.21	450.00
	Azerbaijani Wikimedians User Group	393.70	430.92	–	–	393.70	430.92
	Wikimedians of Latvia User Group	280.00	311.48	–	–	280.00	311.48
	Wikimedia Community User Group Belarus	278.10	307.03	4.31	4.79	291.79	324.59
	Esperanto kaj Libera Scio	108.10	120.25	–	–	108.10	120.25
Prizes on international level
CEEspring Women – postcards (+stamps)		23.80	26.48	–	–	23.80	26.48
other
WMAT staff / overhead		–	–	–	–	500	556.30
Total expenditures		4541.87	5042.37	201.49	204,13	4752.74	5370.38

notes:

• For the conversion between EUR and USD we used www.oanda.com/lang/de/currency/converter/ with the conversion rates of 2019-12-20. If the purchases were paid for in other currencies than Euro the respective dates of the original purchases apply.

Remaining funds

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:

• Yes, there are unspent funds, we can either wire them back or it can be deducted from the next installment of either the next CEE Spring grant or our APG.

Documentation

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

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

• Yes

Confirmation of project status

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

Please answer yes or no.

• Yes

Is your project completed?

• Yes

Please answer yes or no.

• Yes

Grantee reflection

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!

It would be great to have a customised approach for recurring projects instead of having to copy and paste most of the text and changing only certain sections. The same should be the case for the application itself. We know this formula works, so why have us jump through all the hoops every year?

Expense

Approved amount

Actual funds spent

Difference