Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Community Ireland/2018

Application or grant stage: grant in progress

Applicant or grantee: Wikimedia Community Ireland

Amount requested: 42,321.07 EUR (52200 USD)

Amount granted: 42,321.07 EUR (52200 USD)

Funding period: 1 April 2018 to 31 March 2019

Application created: 21 February 2018

Recommended application date: 01 February 2019

Midpoint report due: 15 October 2018

Final report due: 30 April 2019

Application

Background

Link to these documents, for the upcoming funding period, only if you have them.

1. Link to your organization's staffing plan, for the upcoming funding period. Staffing Plan Google document
2. Link to your annual plan, for the upcoming funding period. This organization does not have an annual plan.
3. Link to your strategic plan, which includes the upcoming funding period. This organization does not have a discrete strategic plan.

Please add your grants metrics to this sheet. Note that requirements for shared metrics have changed for grants starting 1 January 2017 or later. Please visit this worksheet to add or view grants metrics targets and progress.

Programs

Please describe any changes to your programs for the upcoming funding period, including the addition of new programs or any programs you are no longer doing. Include your rationale for any major changes to your programs here.

Please use the templates provided to add information about each program you are planning for the upcoming funding period.

Community Outreach

As a strategic focus in 2018/2019, we want to focus on developing a more diverse and larger group of volunteers in our community. This is not only to better represent diversity in Ireland in language and background, but to make our group more robust and to expand the amount of events and support the group can provide to the wider Irish community. This overarching goal is something that has developed out of our own experience over the past 4 years, but to also work towards the wider Wikimedia movement goal of knowledge equity.

Goal: to increase engagement of Irish speaking advocates and educators with Vicipéid at all levels. Irish is the official language of Ireland, and WCI have noted their lack of adequate representation of Irish speakers within the group. Those who are engaged in teaching Irish or in its promotion are of particular interest to our group as Vicipéid offers an avenue to expand their work, whilst increasing the profile of Vicipéid. This targeted outreach will be aimed at both those who teach or study Irish, as well as those who speak Irish within their daily lives and advocate for its use and promotion (often known as Gaeilgeoirí).

Activity: We have held 3 editing workshops on Vicipéid since 2014 and these have been key learning opportunities for WCI. In 2018/2019 we will expand our engagement with this community by holding 2 more. These will allow us to learn more about their needs, hopes and aspirations for working with Vicipéid.

• We will increase our visibility within the Irish speaking community by increasing our number of Irish speaking volunteers from 3 to 8. In doing so we will better reflect the language diversity of Ireland, as well as representing a unique language group internationally within the Wikimedia movement. Most importantly however, these Irish speakers would be in a much better position to speak for and understand the wider Irish speaking community than WCI can currently.
• We will continue our work with Irish speakers to improve Vicipéid for editors, enabling and expanding editing tools. Through our previous workshops, the lack of tools such as Citoid have been noted by our participants and can be a barrier for contributing by new and existing editors. This also draws on the Wikimedia movement strategy, framing the provision of these tools as part of knowledge as a service.

Goal: to increase the number of active volunteers by holding non-editing Wikimedia events. Wikipedia editing events tend to attract a specific audience, and we would like to expand the types of events we host to broaden the potential audience and participants engaging with our community. This would include running more events and outreach focused on promoting the use of sister projects such as Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.

Activity: The key element of this plan will be an open day in 2018. The purpose of this day would be to showcase all of the various projects that WCI have held since 2014, such as Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Science. More importantly, the day will demonstrate the various projects that could be held in Ireland but we have not had the capacity or specialism to hold yet. Examples of these potential projects would be Wiki Loves Earth, language activism around Wikipedia in Wales and Scotland, and Wiki Cheese. It will give attendees a space to talk over their own ideas on Wikimedia in Ireland, and their ideas for events, campaigns or projects. This event will be held as a flagship event in our new fixed desk space in Dogpatch Labs. Through the open day and regular events, we aim to increase our active volunteers in WCI from 15 to 20.

• In holding this open day, we aim to broaden the appeal beyond that which we generally attract with editing or other events we have held up until now. In particular, we will focus on inviting members of groups and societies made up of women, minority groups, and small language communities. We will have displays of the winning photographs from the previous years' Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Science. There will also be a selection of printed materials aimed at the various types of projects or platforms demonstrating the potential projects that could be undertaken in Ireland. These will also highlight the skills shortages that our group currently has, and how we are looking to bridge those gaps. This idea of highlighting explicitly how volunteers can contribute is inspired by other Wikimedia groups such as Wikimedia Deutschland and Wikimedia Österreich.

Activity: We will continue to hold monthly meetups to recruit volunteers and engage editors. These monthly events take place in the Dublin hacker/maker space TOG on the last Wednesday of the month from 7-9pm. These are described as an informal event, open to anyone with any or no editing or Wikimedia experience. We have discovered in 2017/2018 that turnout to these events can be low, but it is important that there is a regular event available. It allows for people who can't attend one month, to plan ahead for a future event they can attend.

Goal: to improve the coverage of Irish monuments on Wikipedia, Vicipéid and Wikimedia Commons through the Wiki Loves Monuments contest. 2016 and 2017 saw a decrease in the number of participants and uploads to the competition. In light of this, the approach taken to WLM will change in 2018 in an attempt to mediate this decline by looking into different forms of participation with the photos and relevant content. Part of this is looking at other country's experiences with the competition over a number of years, and how they have looked to increasing and improving articles relating to monuments previously photographed.

Activity: To improve retention and participation in the contest we will conduct 3 photowalks outside of the contest period with the help of established Commons contributors with an interest in WLM. These will be facilitated by members of our group, and a visiting Wikimedian. They will be focused in areas outside of the larger urban areas, and in smaller cities and towns such as Kilkenny, Limerick, Wexford or Carlow.

• Cash prizes in 2018 will be increased to come in line with other European countries (such as Malta). Attempts to secure sponsorship or partners to add to those prizes will be made over the early months of 2018.
• The launch event held during a heritage festival in Dublin, Archaeofest, has been a success for community outreach. However, this cannot be said for the awards event, which rarely attracts many people. For this reason, we are going to move away from an awards night and allocate the money elsewhere.
• Further work will be undertaken to buildi on the work conducted by the WLM contractor in 2017, to improve and expand the data relating to Irish monuments on Wikidata. In particular to diversify the monuments and sites that are included in the competition (more modern listed buildings, post boxes and other street furniture.) By moving the focus away from older monuments in Ireland to more unusual or modern ones, it could diversify the participants and interest in the competition.

Education and Advocacy

Education outreach remains a key focus for WCI, not only to promote the use of Wikipedia in education, but to also improve understanding of Wikipedia in academia, and as a vehicle to increase our volunteer base. We take a broad definition of education, and our programmes and outreach relating to education not only exclusively focused within traditional educational institutions. We define our work with professional organisations (such as our 2017 collaboration with the Digital Repository of Ireland) and cultural institutions as part of our education and advocacy around open knowledge, open licences etc. Through these sorts of events we advocate for the use of Wikipedia and its sister projects, as well as for open projects and an open knowledge ethos more generally. The second element of these partnerships and events with diverse groups of participants is to bridge the content gap in relation to Irish subjects as well as Irish specific areas of knowledge and information.

Goal: to build upon and expand GLAM partnerships developed in 2017. A key partnership that WCI has developed in 2017 is with the Digital Repository of Ireland. This work has centred on education and advocacy around copyright and open licences in relation to cultural objects and data. Holding these events on copyright and CC/open licenses was in response to specific requests for training and information on the subject from the Digital Repository of Ireland and the National Library of Ireland.

Activity: Two pilot events were run by WCI and the Digital Repository of Ireland in 2017. There are ample opportunities for the two groups to continue this work, and we aim to hold 2 more such events with the DRI and their stakeholders in 2018. These workshops will build on the previous events on copyright, and look towards the potential projects between GLAMs and Wikimedia projects such as Commons and Wikidata.

• As there was considerable interest in the copyright and CC/open license workshops in 2017, we will continue to offer this to organisations who are interested in improving their knowledge on these subjects. By improving the understanding of this area, it could be the beginning of more partnering of Irish GLAMs with Wikimedia projects and our group.

Activity: 2017 saw 3 events hosted in partnership with the Library of Trinity College Dublin, outside of using Wikipedia in the classroom. In 2018, WCI will be partnering with staff in the Library to hold an event for Art+Feminism and to mark the centenary of women's suffrage.

• In 2017, the Project Coordinator was asked by the Library Association of Ireland to create a small learning module for information professionals called Evaluating Information as part of a programme called Rudai 23. This coincided with #1lib1ref in January 2018, and there are now plans to use this as the basis to rolling out a more formal Irish #1lib1ref in 2019.
• We will be partnering with Wikimedia UK to deliver training events with Amnesty Ireland, highlighting and focusing on subjects and materials specific to Ireland. WCI and WMUK will continue to collaborate on joint goals across our countries, including work on events in Northern Ireland, an area which has previously proved challenging to foster engagement within.

Goal: to build upon and expand educational partnerships developed over previous years. These partnerships fulfil two objectives: informing both lecturers and students on open knowledge as well as digital skills, whilst also adding to the content relating to Irish or other relevant subjects.

Activity: Increase our third level education outreach from 5 institution to 8; increase from 5 course to 8 with approximately 400 students participating; facilitate student team work to improve or create 200+ articles over the course of 2018/9.

• Promote the use of Wikimedia as an educational tool, both for written and visual assignments, working intensively with 8 university lecturers as they deliver relevant modules across 8 courses in 2018/2019.
• Engage with library and other teaching support staff in at least 3 universities, using #1lib1ref as a means to engage library and other information professionals.
• Present workshops or talks at 3-4 educational conferences over the course of 2018/2019 to find new audiences and partnerships.

Goal: to work with science communication advocates and organisations in Ireland to promote the use of Wikimedia through the image competition Wiki Science. In 2017, WCI trialled the image competition Wiki Science for the first time in Ireland. Supported by the Science Gallery and the Designist in promotion and prizes, there were 81 uploads from 25 contributors.

Activity: Host Wiki Science again in 2018, looking to expand and build on the competition.

• Bridging the content gap in relation to scientific subjects is not something the group has previously focused on outside of some editing events which touched on historical biographies of Irish scientists. Given the response we had to our modest Wiki Science in 2017, we feel that there is an appetite for more initiatives of this kind in Ireland.
• In 2018 we aim to expand the competition, by partnering with 2-3 scientific organisations to promote the competition more widely.
• Increase the number of participants from 25 to 50.
• Increase the numbers of uploads from 81 to 160.
• Hold an editing and uploading event during Science Week in November 2018 to increase image usage.

Staff and contractors

Please describe any changes to your staffing plan for the upcoming funding period. These should include increases in staff or contractor hours, new staff positions, or staff positions you are removing. Include your rationale for any staffing changes here.

For each new staff or contractor position, please use the template provided to add information about each new staff or contractor you are planning for the upcoming funding period (or to describe significant increases in hours or changes in job descriptions for existing staff). You are not required to provide this information for existing staff where no changes are required.

Project Coordinator

1. Please link to a detailed job description, which shows how this staff person will help your organization achieve its goals.

   The Programme Coordinator job description can be found in the WCI Staffing Plan Google document

2. How long is this staff person or contractor's planned engagement with your organization, and how many hours will they work over the course of this grant?

   The person is a regular staff person who will work 37.5 hours per week.

3. Use a percentage of that person's total hours to show how they will spend their time on different programs and activities.

   Breakdown of staff time can be found in the WCI Staffing Plan Google document

Budget and resource plan

Link to a detailed budget for the upcoming funding period. This budget should include all of your organizations expenses. Please specify which expenses will be covered from your APG.

Google Sheet

Midpoint report

This is a brief report on the grantee's progress during the midpoint reporting period: 1 April - 30 September 2018.

Program story

Please link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements during the reporting period.

Press interview/coverage on a workshop on diversity on Wikipedia in relation to women, POC, and other minorities on Wikipedia in the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre A member of WCI and a very active editor on Wikipedia, Antiqueight, approached the Project Coordinator earlier in the year about the possibility of taking part in the programme of the Irish Science Fiction and Fantasy Con, Octocon. As a longstanding member of the Irish SciFi and Fantasy community, she liaised with the Octocon programme committee to decide on what would be the most engaging and interesting way to encourage their attendees to think about issues of representation on Wikipedia. This has resulted in a panel discussion, followed by a Wikipedia editing workshop that will take place during Octocon 2018. The panel will be made up of Antiqueight as a participant and moderator, Rebecca O'Neill as a fellow Wikimedian, and Juliet E McKenna, a British fantasy author who had previously had her article on Wikipedia flagged for deletion. The panel will address issues of the lack of representation of women, POC, and other minority communities on Wikipedia both within articles and in images hosted on Wikimedia Commons.

Progress

Please add text or a link to a page with details on your program progress. This should including reporting against each of the SMART objectives form your proposal.

Community Outreach

Goal:Increase engagement of Irish speaking advocates and educators with Vicipéid at all levels.

Progress:

• A delegation of 3 of the members of WCI travelled to Wales to take part in the second Celtic Knot conference, and presented a paper on the development of Vicipéid in the year since the last conference in 2017 entitled Vicipéid in Ireland. As a result of the contacts and collaboration during the conference, the citation templates were improved in Irish to include specific templates for citing journals and the web in consultation with the Vicipéid community. This will make adding citations on both basic and visual less complicated for newer editors not familiar with formatting citations manually. This improvement, along with the activation of the Sandbox (Clár Dubh) last year are key to the strategy of making Vicipéid more friendly for new or inexperienced editors.

• Following on from first use of Vicipéid and the Outreach Dashboard as part of a university module in DCU in 2017/2018, this will be repeated this year by Meghan Dowling.

• In preparation for Seachtain na Gaeilge (Week of Irish) 2019, WCI are working with a number of groups and institutions to partner on a series of events on editing Vicipéid in March next year.

• Prominent member of the Vicipéid and Wikipedia community, Dr Claire Murray, has been conducting outreach within the Irish speaking community through the podcast Motherfoclóir and by being a guest curator of the associated Twitter account which has over 10,000 followers.

Goal:Increase the number of active volunteers by holding non-editing Wikimedia events.

Progress:

• The open day has been postponed for the moment, this is primarily due to the lack of spare volunteer time. However, the work on outreach has been continued within the events we host at TOG and events in which we partner with other groups and institutions. Materials are being created with the potential projects that new volunteers could work on, or areas that the Irish community do not have the capacity to work on. Another factor in not holding the open day is that we are increasingly finding that established groups and institutions are approaching us to collaborate on Wikimedia projects rather than us having to activity seek out such partnerships. From these events, we are finding that we are finding more allies within communities that are not necessarily focused on Wikimedia, but for whom working with Wikimedia can further their own goals. This can be for Irish language advocacy or development, educators looking for novel teaching tools, librarians seeking to widen the digital events they host, or those in cultural institutions looking to change Irish attitudes to more open licencing.

• The monthly events at the Dublin TOG hackerspace have seen an increase in participants since April 2018. From having 2-3 participants in 2017, the most recent months (July, August, September) have seen 8-10 people taking part and learning to edit, with about 40 individuals attending in total, the majority of which are new editors. The events are particularly multilingual and multicultural, with the majority of the editors not editing English language Wikipedia. Languages represented are Irish, Portuguese, Mandarin, German, Czech, and Spanish. Providing pizza seems to make the event more appealing, as people are often coming straight from work so providing them with something to eat makes the event less of an imposition. There are a small number of attendees who return to the event, who have begun to help with their fellow, newer, editors, particularly those who are using the translation tool or are working across language Wikis.

• Other outreach events that WCI has been represented at are Cultural Night 2018 at TOG, Maker Faire 2018, and the Happy Hack 2018.

Goal:Improve the coverage of Irish monuments on Wikipedia, Vicipéid and Wikimedia Commons through the Wiki Loves Monuments contest.

Progress:

• The list of monuments eligible to be photographed for WLM expanded from 1214 in 2017 to 6290 2018. This widening of the breath of sites eligible to be included, along with the number of sites for which there was no image currently on Wikimedia Commons seems to have precipitated a greater engagement with the contest. As of the close of the competition, 126 participants uploaded 1060 images. 93 of the uploaders in 2018 are newly registered on Commons. Compared to 50 participants and 851 images in 2017, and 119 participants and 710 images in 2016, the effort in expanding the list seems to have reversed the decline in participation and uploads over the past 2 years. There was also an increase in pictures of monuments with no image previously, and a decline of images of sites that are already represented very well on Commons. It is planned that events, both in Irish and English, will be planned around creating or improving articles based on the new monuments photographed in 2018.

• 
  Meghan Dowling - Celtic Knot, Aberystwyth, Wales
• 
  TOG editing workshop with pizza 29 August

Education and Advocacy

Goal:Build upon and expand GLAM partnerships developed in 2017.

Progress:

• Our continuing partnership with the Library of Trinity College Dublin with an Art+Feminism event, Visualising Women, in March 2018. The event drew interest from the local news site, the Dublin InQuirer, on the gender gap on Wikipedia. The majority of participants were Library staff interested to incorporating editing or awareness of Wikipedia into their own projects.

• There are have been continuing collaboration with GLAM partners: Following on from the first event held with the National Gallery of Ireland for International Women's Day in March 2018, we have since held another event with the Gallery for Heritage Week 2018 and the European Year of Cultural Heritage called Stories and Connections. Many of the participants were staff members who had taken part in the March event, and made more substantial edits due to their existing familiarity. This repeat event with staff has had a significant effect on our rate of returning editors in these metrics, with 50% of these editors having previously edited.

• First image donation to Wikimedia Commons from an Irish GLAM: Sybil in Limerick. The Hunt Museum, under the new directorship of Jill Cousins (formerly of Europeana), became the first Irish cultural institution to donate images directly to Wikimedia Commons. In collaboration with Hunt Museum staff and using their resources, the 45 images were uploaded using Pattypan, a first for both GLAMs in Ireland and for WCI. The image donation took place during three days of events in the Hunt Museum from 17-19 May to celebrate their exhibition and collection relating to the Irish designer Sybil Connolly. During the event the article on Connolly, along with related articles on forms of Irish lace, textiles, and those who worked with her.

• The Project Coordinator, through her work with various institutions above as well the workshops on copyright held last year with the Digital Repository of Ireland and the National Library of Ireland, has been invited to give a presentation at the annual day of seminars for the Cataloguing and Digitisation sub-committee of the Council of Cultural Institutions in Ireland. This demonstrates that not only is there an increased awareness of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects generally, but that WCI is known as the local affiliate. The presentation will take place 22 November, and the audience will include GLAM professionals from various cultural institutions from across Ireland.

• The Project Coordinator has also been asked to consult on ongoing work in a large cultural institution about their image licensing policy, which is currently confidential.

• 
  Visualizing Women at Trinity
• 
  Heritage Week workshop NGI 2018
• 
  Example image uploaded from the Hunt Museum from the Sybil Connolly events
• 
  Second example image uploaded from the Hunt Museum

Goal:Build upon and expand educational partnerships developed over previous years.

Progress:

• All Digital Week Hackathon at University of Limerick was the first Wikipedia editing event to held on campus with the University of Limerick. The Project Coordinator was contacted by a member of staff from the university library to lead a workshop on editing Wikipedia for other library and associated staff as part of a week of events called All Digital Week. Along with a presentation on Wikipedia editing, and a workshop, there were also discussions on the place of Wikipedia within academic libraries and teaching. Nine information professionals took part, making edits to topics of interest to them so that they could better understand the process of contributing to Wikipedia.

• Academia and Wikipedia: Critical Perspectives in Education and Research 18 June 2018 at Maynooth University, the first conference on Wikipedia in Ireland. This conference was convened, organised and hosted by the Dean of Teaching and Learning and instigated by Dr Brian McKenzie, a member of WCI. The Dean's department funded the event, provided the space within Maynooth, hosted the keynote speaker, and catered the event. WCI acted as a supporting partner, aiding in the dissemination of the call for papers through Wikimedia channels, providing support through the selection of papers, and providing some conference materials such as conference bags. The presenters represented the Wikimedia internationally and from Ireland, with the attendees primarily coming from Ireland. The keynote speaker was Dr Bernie Hogan, who spoke on representation on English language Wikipedia. It is hoped that given the attendance from across Ireland, that more third level educators will approach WCI to incorporate Wikipedia editing into their teaching.

• The conveners of the 2018 DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) conference on Digital Literacies in HEIs in University College Cork solicited a submission from WCI to provide a workshop for the attendees of the conference. The workshop entitled Wikipedia skills workshop for researchers and lecturers was provided by members Shannon and Eugene Eichelberger, and saw nine educators taking part in the workshop.

• First editing event with secondary school students (transition year students) took place on 17 September through the local library in Gorey, County Wexford. Transition year students are usually between the ages of 15 to 17 and are taking part in a year of schooling between the two major state exams where they are encouraged to develop skills outside of traditional classroom based learning. As part of this curriculum, there is a new emphasis on introducing the topics of citations, referencing, plagiarism, and assessment of sources to prepare students for university or higher level education. The workshop was a pilot event with 10 students being introduced to Wikipedia broadly and then to how to add information and citations to Wikipedia articles. This is the first time that WCI have held an editing event with a group younger than university age. It is planned to continue these events, and to look to fostering the use of Wikipedia editing with transition year activities relating to the teaching of critical digital skills and referencing.

• First event with a Northern Irish university. An aim of both WCI and WMUK for a number of years has been to foster engagement with Wikipedia in Northern Ireland, with little success thus far. WCI was contacted by Clare Thomson, the e-Learning Developer at the School of Medicine in Queens University Belfast to facilitate an editing event with a cohort of 2nd year medical students as part of a module on citations and referencing. Initially, the contact was to just solicit support through learning materials, but the ability to support Thomson's student group with a presentation in person, made her far more confident in that module and in pursuing Wikipedia in other settings. On foot of the success of that pilot module, the Project Coordinator has been invited back to give a seminar on Wikipedia for Educators to other staff within QUB on 5 November. The aim of this is to build on the use of Wikipedia within modules in the School of Medicine and foster its use in other schools within the university.

• Given the timing of this midterm report, the current metrics look low as the period covered is primarily exam and the holiday period for students of all levels. We expect that the events beginning in late September and early October and running into the semester in the new will see us achieving the goals we have set ourselves for the whole grant period.

• Appointment of the first Irish Wikipedian in Residence, Dr Niall O'Mara was appointed the World's First National Healthcare Wikipedian in Residence as part of the National Doctors Training and Planning (NDTP) and the HSE National Health Library and Knowledge Service in September 2018. The appointment of this position developed out of conversations instigated by WCI community member, Dr Conor Malone. In consultation with the wider WCI group, Dr Malone successfully proposed the WiR position to the HSE and oversaw the recruitment and appointment of Dr O'Mara late this year. Dr O'Mara works as the WiR two days a week, and is currently consulting with the various stakeholders to identify the groups, areas of knowledge, and resources to target as part of his work. WCI's Project Coordinator's work in relation to this position has been putting Dr O'Mara in contact with WikiProject Medicine members, as well as fellow WiR, and those who have worked with similar projects with libraries in the past. The Project Coordinator also liaises with Dr O'Mara on the development of workshops over the next few months.

• 
  Robin Owain at Wikipedia conference, Maynooth
• 
  Keynote speaker, Dr Bernie Hogan, presenting at the Wikipedia conference, Maynooth
• 
  Academia and Wikipedia keynote speaker Dr Bernie Hogan

Spending

Please report your organization's total spending during the reporting period, or link to a financial document showing your total spending.

22,352.03 Euro

Final report

This is the final report for your grant, describing your outcomes from the period *.

Program story

Please link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements during the reporting period.

The profile of Vicipéid within the Irish speaking community continues to rise through the work of editors such as Dr Claire Murray, through both her editing and outreach. Her work on the platform and her advocacy was highlighted most recently on the Irish news website, The Journal. This piece, The Irish language version of Wikipedia is going strong, was written by the author Darach Ó Séaghdha who has written two books on the use and communities around the contemporary use of the Irish language. We are continuously learning from the Irish language community about what is important for them regarding the tools and support they want for both existing and potential editors.

Learning story

Please link to one learning story that shows how your organization documents lessons learned and adapts its programs accordingly.

Clare Thomson's OER19 presentation, Wikipedia in Medical Education: A subterfuge, tracking her development of a module around editing Wikipedia for digital and information literacies with Richard Fallis in Queens University Belfast, the first Northern Irish university to work with Wikimedia Community Ireland and Wikimedia UK.

Results

Please add text or a link to a page with details on your program results. You should report on each of the objectives you included in your Simple APG application.

Community Outreach

Goal:Increase engagement of Irish speaking advocates and educators with Vicipéid at all levels.

Overview

WCI's work on increasing use, understanding, and promotion of Vicipéid has begun to create interesting and varied collaborations. This has resulted in coverage by Irish language activists such as seen in our Program Story above, as well as more teachers and advocates contacting us with ideas and plans to collaborate on future projects.

Results

• Over the past 12 months, WCI have facilitated 3 editing events relating to Vicipéid:

1. A module within Dublin City University (DCU) devised and taught by Meghan Dowling.
2. An impromptu Vicipéid editing session at the TOG meetup celebrating the joint birthdays of Wikipedia and Vicipéid in January 2019.
3. The first editing event was held in an Irish language secondary school with a group of Transition Year (TY) students.

The module in DCU is the second time that this has been offered to students by Meghan Dowling. The course saw 14 students, who had not edited Vicipéid or any Wikimedia project in the past, create 26 new articles on Vicipéid, edit 50 pages, and upload 33 images.

As has been the trend with the monthly editing events in TOG, a large proportion of the editors edit on other language Wikipedias rather than English language. The event held in TOG in January also served as a celebration of the joint 18th birthday of Wikipedia, and the 15th birthday of Vicipéid. Owing to this, 4 of the 5 attendees were Vicipéid editors, resulting in an organic Irish language editing event.

Due to the continued advocacy of Vicipéid by Dr Teresa Lynn, we were approached by a teacher in a Gaelscoil (an Irish language school) to explore how Vicipéid could be used in the classroom or how they could encourage students to contribute to it. Discussions resulted in Rebecca delivering the first editing workshop with a small group of TY students on Vicipéid. The students were given a brief introduction to all of the Wikimedia projects, the concept of references and citations, and then were guided through how to make their first edits on Vicipéid. The workshop drew on the Irish language teaching materials developed by Meghan, and resulted in the 8 students (aged between 15 and 16) creating 1 new article, editing 12 articles, as well as exploring the translation tool.

• As we find that there is increasing interest in Irish language editing events, we will need increased capacity of members in the group who can deliver workshops in Irish and are more familiar with the unique aspects of Vicipéid. We also wanted to ensure that our activities with the Irish language were informed by those from the Irish speaking community. With these considerations in mind, we aimed to increase the number of Irish speaking members of our group from 3 to 8. As of March 2019, 7 of our active members are Irish speakers and editors on Vicipéid. Given the levels of interest in Vicipéid, we expect that going forward a larger proportion of our new members will be from the Irish speaking community.

• We continue to work with the Irish language community as they identify issues regarding tools and certain untranslated features on Vicipéid. Both Rebecca and Meghan have been working with fellow Wikimedians, primarily from other small language Wikipedias, to continue some of the work started at Celtic Knot 2018 as well as other tools and untranslated areas of Vicipéid as they come to our attention.

• We undertook localisation of the Wikipedia mobile platforms for Android and iOS to the Irish language, led by Dr Gabriel Beecham with other contributors. The Android app has gone live, with work continuing on the iOS version. These localised interfaces increase the utility of the mobile platforms for Irish language speakers in accessing all Wikipedia language projects, and they also make it easier to use the apps as a tool to increase visibility and editing of Vicipéid content.

Goal:Increase the number of active volunteers by holding non-editing Wikimedia events.

Overview

In response to how 2018 developed, it was decided that the open day was not something that would help the group to achieve its goals. As we indicated in our midterm report, due to the group now being well established and our work becoming better known or recognised, we are finding that Wikipedians, volunteers, and partners approach us rather than us having to very actively trying to form these relationships.

Results

• WCI has now been active for 5 years, with the group forming from an event held in April 2014. This longevity has started to mean that our capacities are growing, as well as diversity within that group. The active membership of our group is now at 20, reaching our goal of increasing our active member from 15 to 20. 9 of our members are women.

• We continue to hold monthly editing events in TOG on the last Wednesday of every month, with a break for the Christmas/New Year period. The attendance levels continue to remain high, with at least 5 people attending each month and upwards of 10 people some months, with a total of 26 attending the 4 events which took place from October 2018 to March 2019. The diversity of languages being edited has remained a feature, with a large proportion of attendees being visitors to Dublin or some newly arrived residents. This appears to be both a feature of the event taking place in a hackerspace as often those in the hacker community will visit a local hackerspace while travelling, and secondly advertising on Meetup which travellers and people new to a city often use it to find events of interest.

Goal:Improve the coverage of Irish monuments on Wikipedia, Vicipéid and Wikimedia Commons through the Wiki Loves Monuments contest.

• The result of WLM 2018 were included within the midterm report. As more secondary schools approach us to work with Transition Year students, it is envisaged that we will use the corpus of local images as inspiration for articles and other content that can be added to both EN Wikipedia and Vicipéid, as well as use of the images on Wiki.
• Based on our work on WLM over the past 5 years, our member Dr Sharon Flynn was invited to take part in a Heritage Ireland 2030 consultation event in National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG). Following on from this, Sharon then presented on WLM, editing Wikipedia, and uploading images to Wikimedia Commons to a group of final year Archaeology students in the University.

• 
  Éanín, WCI's representative on the Wikimedia Cuteness Association, celebrating Vicipéid's birthday

Education and Advocacy

Goal:Build upon and expand GLAM partnerships developed in 2017.

Overview As outlined above, we are increasingly finding that both GLAMs and educational institutions are approaching us to collaborate with them with both ongoing and new projects.

Results

• In the past year, we had envisaged that we would partner again with the DRI to host more events on copyright. However, this did not fit with the DRI's calendar of events, so we put our energies into other elements of our programs. Rebecca was invited to present on Wikimedia GLAM projects and partnerships by the Council of National Cultural Institutions Cataloguing & Digitisation sub-committee at their annual seminar: Opening up Cultural Collections: Providing access in a digital environment on 22 November 2018. The presentation titled Using Wikipedia as a point of access for Cultural Collections, explored how GLAMs across the world have partnered with Wikimedia groups and individual Wikimedians to increase access to their digital collections. The Council of National Cultural Institutions is an Irish statutory body which has a wide reach within the Irish GLAM community, representing 11 of the largest GLAMs in Ireland. This presentation touched on some of the issues and concerns that many GLAMs have around copyright and open licenses for digitised and cultural content. It also highlighted some examples of poorly represented areas on Wikipedia relating to Irish material culture, and how other countries have used open licences to improve the international profile of their countries heritage.

• Our partnership with the Hunt Museum continues, with the Museum's commitment to the partnership outlined in its new Strategy 2025. Following on from the initial upload of the images from the Museum's Sybil Connolly collection, the Hunt Museum has committed to publishing all of its digitised images to the Public Domain and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. This will include a new set of 3D renderings that are currently being created. Rebecca will be working with the Museum's staff and interns on Pattypan (or other relevant tools) to facilitate these uploads. We are in discussion with the Museum to partner on an event that would provide introductory training to other Irish GLAMs on Wikidata along with other Wikimedia projects in 2019.

• Within our education and GLAM outreach, working with librarians has been the most successful way of partnering for events. Over the past year we have hosted a number of editing events:

1. Continuing our relationship with the library of the National Gallery of Ireland, we have begun a new project working with the cohorts of Transition Year students they take twice a year for work placement. As part of this week, Rebecca held an editing workshop with the 12 students, introducing them to Wikipedia and then guiding them in making their first edits. The students used books and materials from the NGI library to make edits to pages relating to women artists from the Gallery's collections. From the feedback that the Gallery gathered from the students, we are planning to continue this partnership into 2019. Some of the feedback from the students: "I learned that I'm able to edit Wikipedia. Wikipedia is run by us.", and "I learned lots about Wikipedia, which I have been taking advantage of for years."
2. Once again we worked with The Library of Trinity College, Dublin to deliver an event for Art+Feminism. This event, Writing Women Writers, encouraged students and staff to edit pages relating to women writers featured within the collections of the Library.
3. We held a workshop to celebrate Dublin City University Women's Week in March 2019. The event was open to the entire staff and students of the University, and focused on Irish women in the Arts.

• In late 2018 and early 2019, the HSE Wikipedian in Residence Dr Niall O'Mara, led much of the outreach to librarians in Ireland by focusing on working with Irish Health Sciences Libraries. These libraries are generally embedded within hospitals and universities. Niall has hosted editing events, and presented at meetings and conferences on the benefits of those in health education using Wikipedia in teaching and outreach. An interview with Niall and Rebecca was recorded for the 'Librarians Aloud' podcast from Academic & Special Libraries Section of Library Association of Ireland.
• The BRAVE:Edit event that was planned for 2018 in Ireland with Amnesty Ireland has been delayed to 2019. Amnesty Ireland and WCI have two Brave Edit events planned for May and September 2019.
• Following on from some initial conversations with Lar Joye, the Port Heritage Director at Dublin Port, in 2019 WCI will provide training and mentoring of their heritage intern regarding Wikimedia projects. This training will cover Wikipedia editing using the library and other materials the Port holds, as well as the intern making an initial assessment of the Port's archive regarding suitability for publication under an open licence.

Goal:Build upon and expand educational partnerships developed over previous years.

Overview

In 2018-2019 we aimed to increase our third level education outreach from 5 institution to 8; increase from 5 course to 8 with approximately 400 students participating; facilitate student team work to improve or create 200+ articles over the course of 2018-2019.

Results

• Over 2018-2019 we worked with 7 universities: Maynooth University, University of Dublin, Dublin City University, Queens University Belfast, NUI Galway, University College Cork, and Trinity College Dublin. While in the past year we did not work with the 8 universities we had aimed to, in 2019 we have events planned with the National College of Art and Design and the University of Limerick based on contact made this year.
• We worked with 8 lecturers to deliver Wikipedia editing to 8 student groups with a total of 210 students. We have found that the highest interest in using Wikipedia in teaching is coming from lecturers teaching in Masters programmes. This has resulted in a smaller number of students that we had aimed to work with, but their engagement with Wikipedia has been more meaningful and impactful for Wikipedia, as generally Masters students are more familiar and comfortable with the writing style, have a greater knowledge of the areas being covered, are better trained in finding suitable sources, and referencing those sources correctly.
• The student groups edited 153 articles, creating 28 new articles (26 of them on Vicipéid).
• Over 2018-2019, Ireland saw its first academic conference dedicated to Wikipedia as detailed in the midterm report. As well as that, Rebecca presented on behalf of Dr Niall O'Mara at the Health Sciences Libraries Group Annual Conference on Wikipedia in healthcare education on 28 February 2019.
• Feminists in EdTech (FemEdTech) collaborated to host an online Wikipedia editing initiative from 11 to 23 February, supported by Dr Sharon Flynn in NUI Galway.
• Continuing our relationship with Clare Thomson and Richard Fallis in Queens University Belfast, Rebecca delivered a workshop for a group of 11 other librarians and elearning officers from QUB and the Ulster University titled Wikipedia for Educators. The workshop introduced Wikimedia projects generally, the benefits and case studies of using Wikipedia editing as a teaching tool, as well as the Outreach Dashboard demonstration.

Goal: to work with science communication advocates and organisations in Ireland to promote the use of Wikimedia through the image competition Wiki Science.

Overview

Based on the success of Ireland's first Wiki Science in 2017, WCI held the competition again in 2018. However, most other countries and the international competition are held every two years, so the 2018 Irish competition was held without the aid of the international banners and other on-Wiki promotion. This resulted in lower metrics than in 2017, but given the reception and interest that the competition garners we believe that it was still a useful project for increasing understanding of open licence images and the benefits of uploading to Wikimedia Commons within the science community in Ireland. We have discussed our experience with the organisers of the international Wiki Science competition, and we may decide to run it ever second year given our limited reach without the international support. We will review this position after the 2019 competition.

Results

• We continued our partnership with the SCI:COM conference to promote the competition and to exhibit the winning images at the conference. This serves both to get the word out about the competition while it is open for submissions, but then also is invaluable outreach at the conference to meet individuals and those in organisations interested in science communication.
• Participation of 20 uploaders, down from 25 in 2017.
• The number of uploads was 74, down from 81.
• Owing to the saturation of events around Science Week, we were unable to hold an upload event in 2018. During SCI:COM 2018 we discussed the possibility of holding such events in 2019 with a number of interested partner groups.
• One of the most impressive effects of the competition is the use of an image from the Irish competition to illustrate the Wikidata entry for Engineer. The person featured in the photograph is a female Irish engineer and science communicator, who is also an advocate for scientists who are LGBTQA+.

Other activities

• In August 2018, we were approached by the charity Teen Turn to work with them at a large national event for young people called Zeminar on 13-15 November 2018. Teen Turn work specifically with teenage girls from disadvantaged backgrounds to get them meaningful work placements with tech companies, and they have expressed an interest in working with WCI to explore how learning about Wikimedia projects could play a part in their work. For Zeminar, we shared their booth at the event for 3 days, acting as an interactive show and tell, demonstrating to teenagers how Wikipedia works and getting them to make micro edits to articles. The event sees around 15,000 young people aged between 15-20 attend, so was an invaluable and interesting outreach event for WCI. There are plans to repeat this partnership in November 2019, and to explore how we can partner on other events or projects. Another effect of this event was making contact with Irish speaking advocacy groups such as Gael Linn, and has lead to us starting discussions on how we could collaborate on their projects with teenagers and schools in 2019-2020.
• As part of their month long celebration of International Women's Day, Accenture invited Rebecca and our Deputy Chair Eugene to facilitate a morning editing workshop on 22 March 2019. The workshop was titled Women in Tech and saw staff members of Accenture learn how to edit Wikipedia. One article on an Irish activist, Philomena Canning, was published after the event.

• 
  Wiki Science winning images on display at SCI:COM
• 
  Wiki Science winning images on display at SCI:COM

Spending

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Detailed budget for 2018/2019

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41091.15