Link to your annual plan, for the upcoming funding period. Annual plan is approved by the general assembly and has thus not been prepared yet. This grant proposal however takes form of our annual plan (the two documents reflect each other very well).
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.
The program portfolio of Wikimedia Czech Republic for year 2017 focuses on support and promotion of Czech Wikipedia as well as other Wikimedia projects, namely Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and Czech Wikisource. 2 of our 3 programs remain similar to last year: Media Acquisition Program which aims to improve Wikimedia Commons content, and Education & Institutional Collaboration, where the main focus is on bringing up a new generation of Wikipedians by organizing courses, workshops and lectures. The extent of these two projects is mostly similar to last year although the Media Acquisition Program will not include competitions or purchase of equipment and Education program will work on new challenges such as working with secondary schools. The 3rd project - Wikidata Content & Community - is new and has organically grown from the Media Acquisition Program over the course of the year 2016 and we decided to scale up the Wikidata-associated projects due to the potential of Wikidata and the significant interest of the community in this Wikimedia project.
Please use the templates provided to add information about each program you are planning for the upcoming funding period.
Media acquisition support
Participants of WikiTown in Mariánské Lázně, 2016
The Media acquisition support program is a long-term strength of Wikimedia Czech Republic. Its goals include photographic documentation of all Czech villages and protected areas but also other types of points of interest or objects. By providing reimbursement and technical support to Czech photographers in the so-called Mediagrant framework, the participants of the program have taken >100,000 pictures and used them to illustrate >22,000 articles. Eventually our aim is to have all articles related to the Czech Republic illustrated with adequate pictures. In 2017, we will move one step closer towards this goal by providing support for almost 14,000 newly uploaded pictures (3000 used in Wikimedia projects). Associated workshops will also focus on improvement of related Wikipedia articles (200,000 bytes added).
There will be few changes to the Media acquisition support program. It is entirely volunteer-driven and has a dedicated community of people willing to continue in its goals. We decided to leave out the largely unsuccessful local photographic contests and we do not plan to purchase any additional photographic equipment this year. Another change is that the Wikidata object documentation project (Map of Points of Interest in the 2015 APG plan) is now a part of a new Wikidata-oriented program of its own.
The ultimate targets of the program – photographic documentation of all Czech villages and protected areas – will be achieved sooner or later in subsequent years. We have started intensive discussions on new goals that would motivate our photographing community (one such goal would be to take pictures of all unphotographed yet geo-located items on Wikidata, which are presented by the Wikimedia Commons Android app).
Assigned to:
The Media Acquisition Program has historically been a decentralized initiative able to make many decisions without the board. There is a coordinating expert body nicknamed the "Eye" of Mediagrant - members currently are Packa and Cheva and they oversee most of the projects included and directly organize the photo-workshop. WikiTown is co-organized by a different local Wikipedian each year in collaboration with Vojtěch Dostál, next year the executive director will also have a say.
Projects:
Mediagrant – This is a successful photodocumentation program of notable objects in the Czech Republic (towns/villages/settlements, nature reserves and other protected areas, bodies of water or any other encyclopedically interesting objects). In a nutshell, every photographer in the Czech Republic can join and take pictures of the above mentioned sights. WMCZ is reimbursing for the travel expenses.
WikiTown – an annual weekend event aiming at photodocumentation and improvement of articles in a chosen city which had been poorly documented before. It serves to improve information about places which are further from the "beaten path" and most Mediagrant photographers (see above) would not pay a visit there. The goal of the event is to maximize our efforts and produce as much encyclopedic and photographic information as possible during one week-end (800 pictures, 200,000 bytes).
Photo-workshop – a weekend-long traditional event aiming at fostering the photographing community of Czech Wikimedians and improving their skills at practical hands-on courses or theoretical lectures on photography. Survey among 2016 Photoworshop participants show that this is a much-needed event and helps to fuel the photographic community of the program as a whole.
Photographic equipment lending service – we lend cameras and other photographic equipment in our ownership and track the usage of these equipment using Wikimedia Commons templates. At least 9 people will make use of our photographic equipment in 2017.
Education and institutional collaboration
How to teach senior citizens to write Wikipedia – workshop for librarians and social workers in Elpida centre in Prague, 2016
Our efforts to collaborate with educational institutions date back to 2011 when a university-oriented ambassador program was started. This was later reinforced with a successful spin-off which concentrates on seniors. Educational institutions such as schools and libraries play an important role in our outreach efforts and work in this environment is intensifying year-by-year. Since 2016 it has been supported by two part-time employees – project managers, who have played a crucial role in formulating 2017 goals. Our education manager Gabriela has managed to professionalize and grow our education efforts in 2016, most significantly scaling up the projects, creating a Train the Trainers pilot, improving sharing of resources among Wikipedia trainers, and participating in an international campaign aimed at secondary school pupils. These projects will be fully explored in 2017. At the same time, Marek has taken up the role of the Wikipedian in Brno, a WiR-styled position mostly aimed at the collaboration with Masaryk University and community building in Brno. This successful initiative will also continue and will be reinforced with collaboration with new institutions. The professionalization has enabled us to improve the results of the existing projects and start completely new initiatives and we are going from 4 projects in 2016 to 9 projects in 2017. Our educational efforts are having immense impact on Czech Wikimedia community, with 5,720,000 bytes expected to be added to Wikimedia projects over the course of the year and 432 newly registered users.
Assigned to:
Our education manager Gabriela Boková is responsible for the coordination of this program but is regularly mentored by board (next year, the ED will be also involved of course). The Brno initiative is the most independent of the projects and is overseen by Blahma who is also regularly mentored by the board (for more on our program managers, see the Staffing plan). Individual courses in Czech cities are coordinated by different Wikipedia trainers (the main principal trainer in Prague, Vojtěch Veselý, also coordinates the didactical work behind the projects) and the program attracts many other volunteers. Gampe is the go-to person for GLAM.
Projects:
Innovation of the Students Write Wikipedia and Seniors Write Wikipedia projects – After we revamped the senior education program in 2016, we plan to experiment with the student education program in 2017. We will provide 2–3 on-campus workshops for those courses where students encountered technical problems in past or produced lower-quality articles. This will lead to improved editing experience and feeling of community which we will measure through questionnaires. Senior program will not go through any dramatic changes but we will concentrate on involving experienced seniors (past participants of the course) in peer-to-peer teaching and we will also continue training new trainers among librarians. In terms of SMART criteria, the student-oriented project concentrates on content generation and will produce 2,700,000 bytes of encyclopedic content while the senior project also focuses on new Wikipedians (90 newly registered with at least 10% retention rate) besides content (2,000,000 bytes).
Innovation of the Wikipedian in Brno project – The "Wikipedian in Brno" initiative includes projects directed at community development in Brno, the 2nd largest city of the Czech Republic, and WiR-styled collaboration with local institutions that financially and logistically support the activities. The projects planned for 2017 (which are also formulated in the staffing plan, section Wikipedian in Brno) are one step further from targets achieved in 2016 and include several long-term goals (community support in the city of Brno including regular meet-ups, support to local courses for students and seniors and to the trainer community in Brno) but also several new activities:
Extension of the present Masaryk University Creative Commons directive to applicable works produced by any part of the university (faculty, department, specialized center etc.) which shows interest to participate. This is based on the success and positive reception of the directive introduced in 2016, which applies to the works of the university's Press Office and External Relations and Marketing Office only.Wikipedia Club in Brno
Start of cooperation with Masaryk University Archives with the aim of exploring which of its valuable materials could be released under a Wikipedia-compatible free license. Various use cases (such as work for hire, work of a deceased author, work created under an earlier copyright law, student work, anonymous work) will be explored with help of the university's lawyers. As a proof of concept, at least 100 pictures will be released by the archives and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, of which >20% will be used in Wikimedia projects.
Implementation of a set of plugins linked to the VisualEditor's reference generator which can process sources published by Masaryk University, simplifying usage of academic sources in Wikipedia.
A short bilateral meeting of head representatives of Wikimedia Czech Republic and Masaryk University to mutually inform each other about the results of our collaboration and to explore new opportunities.
2 public lectures in the Moravian Library given by subject experts who present reputable sources for their field of expertise and suggest how present Wikipedia articles should be improved using these sources. This will stimulate the interest of Wikipedians in specific key areas and also serve as a meeting opportunity for Wikipedians writing articles in similar fields of expertise and of subject experts discovering the potential of Wikipedia.
Collaboration between the Moravian Library and the Czech Wikisource community to digitize and proofread a book of choice in the Proofread Page environment and make it available in Wikisource as a showcase of the project’s potential usefulness to GLAM institutions.
Better integration of several public databases with Wikidata items and Wikipedia articles, including authority files, digitalization registry, Kramerius digital library and other sources of valuable librarian content. Fostering usage of Wikipedia and Wikidata in librarian databases and vice versa. This will improve Wikipedia's services to the readers.WikiClub organizers in Prague
Wikipedia Clubs – since 2016 we have started organizing regular weekly clubs, offering space for Wikipedians who prefer editing in a company of others or for those in need of peer help on some particular issue. They are often frequented by former participants of our senior courses and thus play a role of "courses for advanced seniors". In 2017 we will continue in supporting these two clubs (one in Prague, one in Brno) which are run entirely by volunteers and only coordinated and evaluated by our education team.
Train the Trainers – We already have almost 20 Wikipedia trainers in the Czech Republic but we plan to improve their skills and recruit even more. We will organize 1 workshop for new Wikipedia trainers (aiming to teach them the basics) and 1 workshop for the advanced trainers (aiming to develop their skill according their needs). Methodical guidelines for teaching seniors will be formulated and shared as a part of the existing learning pattern. We will also create a status of a "certified Wikipedia trainer" as a guarantee of quality for our collaborating institutions.
Teach (with) Wiki program – We have participated in the international EduWiki Campaign of the Education Collaborative in autumn 2016 and concentrated on the work with elementary school pupils. The campaign lead to 5 articles in press and 1 TV interview with our education manager and we received positive feedback from representatives of the Ministry of Education to whom we presented the idea. For 2017, we aim to broaden our attention to pupils of both elementary (13-16 years old) and secondary schools (17-19 years old). We will create simple-to-use lesson plans which can be used by teachers to plan a 45-minute school lesson that concentrates on teaching digital literacy. We expect at least 10 teachers will participate in 2017, which means about 250 pupils will learn about Wikipedia. The lessons will not involve direct editing by the pupils but we hypothesize that gaining some information about Wikipedia may lead pupils to start experimenting with it (after all, this is the age when many of the prolific Czech Wikipedians started editing). The program will kick off with 1 course for teachers aiming to introduce them to teaching with Wikipedia in 2016. However, in the long-term, because digital literacy is one of the priorities of the Czech government, we also plan to officially accredit the lesson plans in the system of postgradual teacher's education and gain additional financial resources through EU grants for year 2018.
#1lib1ref campaign 2017 – This is a planned international campaign for January 2017 aimed at librarians, similar to the first round of the initiative. We will create a landing microsite on Czech Wikipedia (or Meta), and send out an e-mail campaign to Czech librarians thanks to our large network of collaborating libraries as well as contacts with the Librarian Institute of the National Library. We hope to attract at least 75 Czech librarians who will add a reference to Czech Wikipedia and thus learn to improve the quality of the encyclopedia. In addition to this, we will improve the knowledge of Wikipedia in the Czech libraries by organizing at least 2 Wikipedia courses, mostly as a door-opener for subsequent collaboration and also to recruit at least 1 new librarian as a Wikipedia ambassador (and course leader).
Wikipedian in residence at Faculty of Science, Charles University – We will negotiate an establishment of a Wikipedian in residence who will contact research group leaders or core facility employees and teach them to upload the photographic material that they produce in their daily work. Many of these images are of high educational quality. This will be a short 1-month contract funded from university sources, or co-funded from chapter reserves if needed. We expect to upload at least 100 valuable images with usage of >30% in Wikimedia projects.
The Wikidata Content & Community program is a logical extension of our Wikidata efforts in 2016. These stemmed from the need to foster the Wikidata community and use it to significantly improve the data related to Czech points of interest. The nearby unphotographed points of interest are now displayed in the Wikimedia Commons app, developed recently by a volunteer community independent of us (IEG grant). Support of Czech Wikidata and open data is a strategic priority of Wikimedia Czech Republic and the initiative will significantly grow in 2017. We expect at least 15,000 Wikidata pages to be significantly improved during our workshops and we plan to open up formal collaborations with at least 3 new public institutions – proving that chapter can significantly help development of Wikidata via negotiations with these institutions which would be difficult without Wikimedia Czech Republic's backing. Significantly, we are also nurturing the Czech Wikidata community and improving critical Wikidata-related abilities.
First Czech Wikidata workshop, in Pardubice, 2016
Assigned to:
This new initiative is coordinated by Vojtěch Dostál (in charge of 1 workshop, participation on hackathon and and the Wikidata in academia initiative) but others take part too: for example, Blahma will organize the 2nd planned workshop and Martin Urbanec is the go-to person for technical stuff.
Projects:
Wikidata workshops – After a successful September 2016 Wikidata workshop in Pardubice, there will be 2 similar events happening in 2017, each for 10 people. We expect to improve data related to the Czech Republic, disseminate knowledge of advanced analytical and editing techniques related to Wikidata among Czech Wikidata enthusiasts, and foster the community. One of the events will be organized at the Masaryk University, aiming at researchers potentially interested in using the Wikidata Query Service in their work. We will also involve the Otakar Motejl Foundation, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University and OpenAlt in the donations and transfer of structured open data from Czech public databases.
Wikidata at academia – Wikimedia Czech Republic will participate on a university course at the prestigious New Media Studies department of Charles University. Analysis of Wikidata using Wikidata Query service will be taught to 1 class of university students, aiming to develop a Wikidata-aware community of young Czech data scientists and make a first step to support usage of Wikipedia in research (and research of Wikipedia itself). Besides the course, several Wikipedia- and Wikidata-oriented topics for their Bachelor's and Master's theses will be offered to the students. We will also explore a research project aimed at automatic data updating from public databases together with the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University.
Prague pre-hackathon & Wikimedia hackathon in Vienna – Wikimedia Austria is organizing a Wikimedia hackathon aiming to involve local communities and help them develop for the first time. We want to bring together the international community of Tech people who are interested in the "Nearby" function of the Wikimedia Commons Android App (formerly: "Map of Points of Interest") and together improve it with a map and other features desired at the time of the event. Some of them are set to meet in Prague with the local Wikimedia Tech community while other will only be present via a videoconference; all will gather for the main Vienna event.
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.
Wikimedia Czech Republic's employees at a rare moment of not working :)
Besides the amendments to our programs, Wikimedia Czech Republic is also undergoing significant organizational changes. Professionalization of key activities (two part-time employees in the Education program) has lead to an unprecedented growth in our project outcomes (as seen from our 2016 interim report) and increased our capacity for sustainable programmatic growth. We actively build our volunteer community as well as member basis (52 members compared to 43 a year ago). We also formulated the first-ever strategic plan which seeks further professionalization of the chapter to support our programmatic activities but also the significant operational work. The model of a "working board" is no longer sustainable in an organization which has significantly grown in recent years and we aim to share our responsibilities with an executive director - whose aim will be to make all these things from the strategic plan happen over the next years. With regards to our plans in the education program in 2017, we also plan to make an adjustment to the education manager's staff time as shown above, and somewhat decrease the staff time of the "Wikipedian in Brno" position.
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.
Executive director
Please link to a detailed job description, which shows how this staff person will help your organization achieve its goals.
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?
This person is a regular staff person who will be working at 1.0 FTE throughout the year.
Use a percentage of that person's total hours to show how they will spend their time on different programs and activities.
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.
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.
Media acquisition support
Mediagrant (a travel reimbursement program for photographers)
Mediagrant is a traditional project of Wikimedia Czech Republic which has brought thousands of pictures to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. As a rule, these pictures are related to the Czech Republic. At the beginning of 2017, before Mediagrant was opened for photographers, its rules had gone through a thorough revision discussed on Czech Wikimedia pages. General rules, as well as related pages, were adapted to serve the community best. From previous years' experience, it is clear that the Czech photo season has just started and most journeys are expected during July and August. Still, there were already 10,810 uploaded pictures in the Mediagrant project in 2017.
WikiTown aims to document areas of the Czech Republic which were largely ignored by the Czech Wikipedia volunteers, often because of the area's remoteness or the absence of Wikipedians in the surrounding region. This year's WikiTown focused on the town of Litovel and the surrounding area (blog post here). Fourteen volunteers from all over the Czech Republic spent a weekend in Litovel and, together with other online volunteers, intensively dealt with the documentation of the town and its surroundings. The working space for editing was provided by the Municipal Library of Litovel. The event also included a presentation of WMCZ activities at the square in front of the local town hall. During the two days of the event, the participants managed to document objects in the town, 63 villages, and scanned a number of historical photos and pictures from the local resources. The number of photos taken during WikiTown is 1,053 (as of July 10th) but will increase as it is still early. We also created 85 new articles, edited 277 pages, made 859 edits and added 83,600 words. The edited articles have had 104,000 views (see metrics here). This year's novelty were photos taken from a drone, thanks to which we acquired about 50 unique aerial photographs of the town and its immediate surroundings. As local institutions and people are in favor of subsequent cooperation, we decided to continue in our activities there. For example, Jan Kameníček visited Mr Kollmann, who is a local historian, and donated 90 more valuable pictures for Wikimedia Commons. The cooperation will likely continue.
The photographic equipment is in constant use for both Mediagrant photo journeys and other events. Until June 30th, the equipment was used for taking and uploading 462 pictures. WMCZ own three cameras which are now distributed in a more clever way: one camera is placed in the WMCZ office, second is lended hand-to-hand among Wikimedians in Prague and third is located in the Moravian city of Brno.
The aim for this year has been to improve the education program through on-campus workshops, especially for courses where students regularly encountered technical problems in past or produced lower-quality articles. One problem we encountered is that not many wikipedians can teach a Wikipedia lesson during the regular working hours. Finally, we figured out the solution and we invited students from underperforming courses in Prague to a Wikiclub which takes every Wednesday 5–7.30 pm so students can pick a week which suits them. In total, 21 courses were organized during summer term 2016/2017. We only have metrics for winter term (because summer term is still open); there were 1 545 173 added bytes, 100 created articles and 148 improved articles.
The program is proving hugely popular and is growing every year. We started courses in Plzeň, Miroslav and České Budějovice and we still have courses in Praha, Brno, Olomouc, Zlín and Ústí nad Labem. We are still in touch with our graduates from this year in Prague, either through advanced courses or at the regular Wikiclub where seniors can spend some extra time after their lesson ends (Wikiclub in Prague takes place immediately after the lesson for seniors, in the same PC room). This year, we organized or helped organize 11 courses in total (3 from them were for advanced seniors).Participants of course How to teach seniors to edit Wikipedia Amazingly, we have 4 active librarians who organize their own courses independent of us (Zlín, Ústí nad Labem, Česká Lípa). 66 seniors participated in courses for beginners. We have a record number of participants per course - 25 on a winter course in Prague. We have also redesigned the training for librarians, the aim of which is to raise new teachers of Wikipedia in regional libraries. We divided the formerly one day seminar into two shorter seminars and required homework before each part of the training. Now, the results are much better than before. We evaluated the course with our participants and they feel more self-confidence in individual skills (editing, adding pictures and so on) than the participants of previous courses. According their homeworks we also see that they are more skilled (compared to previous participants). We are eagerly waiting how many of the graduates will start their own course for seniors in their library. The certified librarians have received a special barnstar on their user page.
Course in Prague, 2017
Wikipedia course in Miroslav, 2017
Course in Plzeň, 2017
Our "Wikipedian in Brno" (Marek Blahuš) continued his work at Masaryk University in Brno. The position consists of collaboration with local institutions and activities aimed at community development in the 2nd largest city of the Czech Republic (most of WMCZ board and active members reside in Prague). The position of the Wikipedian in Brno has ended by the end of June 2017 due to mutual agreement and the results stated below can be considered final.
This year, Masaryk University was unable to co-finance the Wikipedian in Brno, but has remained open for collaboration within its lasting partnership with WMCZ and the free content generation mechanisms set up at the university in 2016 continue to work inertially: All first six 2017 issues of its 20-page Muni magazine consist mostly of CC-BY licensed text and images, and this and more free content is also available on the web. In June 2017, a meeting with the director of Masaryk University Archives led to an exploration of what kind of historical photographs from the archives could be legally released to Wikimedia Commons and under what conditions; this meeting was followed by a bilateral meeting in which WMCZ's new executive director was introduced into the history of the Masaryk University partnership. The university is also willing to collaborate further with WMCZ on educational activities and Wikimedia promotion. Brno Wikipedians provided on-site support to organizers of the Edit-a-thon at Brno Observatory and Planetarium in April.
We also continued organizing the monthly local community meetups that have been occurring regularly for more than two years and are an essential element which holds the community updated and collaborating. 16 different Wikipedians participated in the first six meetups of 2017, with an average participation of 8 people per meetup. Equally importantly, minutes from the meetups that provide a summary of what has been discussed, including useful links and data, are regularly read by at least 5 to 10 other non-participating Wikipedians (who are incited to use the Thanks functionality of MediaWiki software) – this shows the importance of taking those minutes, as well as the countrywide outreach of Brno activities. The meetup in June exceptionally took place outside, in the wildlife garden to which Wikipedians donated a linden tree last year, with permission of the town hall. A leading community member of Bulgarian Wikipedia living in Brno decided to start attending our meetups after having followed them on-line over the past year.
Since 2016 we have started organizing regular weekly clubs, offering space for Wikipedians who prefer editing in a company of others or for those in need of peer help on some particular issue. They are often frequented by former participants of our senior courses and thus play a role of "courses for advanced seniors". During the first 6 month we have a Wikiclub not only i Prague (ones per week) and Brno (ones per two weeks) but also in Česká Lípa (ones per month) and in Plzeň (ones per two weeks). We have created a new tool on Tool Labs specially crafted for automatic generation of metrics that best describe the activities of Wikipedia club participants – it will be used for reporting of metrics.
Wikipedia Club in Brno was moved into a new location in the Moravian Library, with support from this institution and still presided by a motivated teacher from Masaryk University Faculty of Arts. Periodicity was changed from weekly to biweekly, which resulted in each meeting being attended by 1 to 4 beginning Wikipedians, mostly graduates from earlier Wikipedia courses for senior citizens. Due to lower interest from the public, the proposed group course in spring was changed into individual consultations; however, of the few attendees, one would travel 90 minutes to reach Brno, which proves his motivation and the continuous need for such learning opportunities across the country.
In Prague, we experiment with organizing edit-a-thons for a special topic time by time. The goal of edit-a-thons is to attract non-Wikipedians to start to write to Wikipedia about topic that they like. At the moment this approach is experimental and we are still evaluating its benefits. In the first half of the year took place 26 Wikiclub meeting in Prague. Each meeting is documented and metrics are recorded.
We used to have almost 20 Wikipedia trainers in the Czech Republic but some of them have finished their studies and started to work and they are not time-flexible anymore. Some of them are too busy and they can teach only seminar, not a course. We found two new trainers in Plzeň so we did not organize workshop for new trainers (we trained them individually). Now we have 9 active trainers and six others who can help with short term events.
For advanced trainers, we organized a seminar about copyright which is useful for trainers and also for the entire community (12 people were participating). We also recorded the session for those who could not attend – see video here. In June we organized a meeting for established trainers, focused on sharing good practices, an evaluation of the first half of the year and a planning the next six month. Here is a presentation with some nice charts regarding our participants and a summary with outputs.
We designed a methodical guideline on how to teach Wikipedia to senior citizens which we recommend as a source of information for trainers and also for librarians who intend to teach Wikipedia. Trainers especially appreciate the part with instructions on key issues that beginners on Wikipedia can encounter.Trainer meeting in June 2017
Vojtěch Veselý, festival DialogParticipants on Wiki workshop, festival Dialog
We have already organized workshops on 4 teacher conferences where we showed them how to use Wikipedia as a tool for developing critical thinking and digital literacy (see pictures from Google Education festival here). 22 teachers joined our Facebook group named Teach (with) Wiki. We have a very good feed-back. We also visited several schools and prepared workshops for pupils where we explained them how to use Wikipedia, how it works and so on. The target is to develop a strategy for working with the youngest contributors to Wikipedia.
We applied for an official course certificate which is awarded to educational institutions by the Ministry of Education. The results are not yet available.
We added some new activities to our Teach (with) Wiki microsite, which is intended as a source of Wikipedia-teaching material for primary and secondary school teachers. There is one activity focus on what is an encyclopedia and how to create it (we work with primary, secondary and tertiary sources) and the second one is how to (not) work with Wikipedia (work with critical thinkink)
#1lib1ref campaign 2017
We joined the international campaign #1Lib1ref (15th January–3rd February 2017), created a landing microsite on Czech Wikipedia, promoted it through the Librarian Institute of the National Library and we created Facebook group for librarians named Wikilibraries. We hoped to attract at least 75 Czech librarians who will add a reference to Czech Wikipedia but in the end only 10 librarians participated and added 34 revisions (all metrics here). Besides lower interest among librarians than expected, it is also because not all librarians correctly used the hashtag in their edit summary. Blog post here.
We negotiated an establishment of a Wikipedian in residence who will contact research group leaders or core facility employees and teach them to upload the photographic material that they produce in their daily work. We have received funds from AVAST foundation, during summer we would like to find a person who will be the Wikipedian in residence and during September and October he/she should carry out the project.
GLAM
We organized the Astronomical edit-a-thon at the Brno Observatory and Planetarium, which had 11 participants. During the editathon, they created 26 new articles while adding 144 608 bytes and making 212 edits.
We already organized two Wikidata-related events in 2017. The first of them was a specialized presentation titled "Data journalism with Wikidata", which was given to a group of 10 students of journalism in Brno in May 2017. The second was a regular workshop (blog post here) in June 2017 tailored to the needs of the Czech Wikidata community. There was enormous interest in this workshop and 12 people took part in the community-based program selection. A total of 16 people attended - both beginners and experienced Wikidata editors. We split the group in two and offered a "beginner" set of talk as well as a more advanced one for those who have already extensively worked with Wikidata. The topics included SPARQL, programming infoboxes with Lua, intro to JSON and using pywikibots as well as a simple HarvestTemplates tool. At the end of the event we discussed work related to WikiProject Czech Republic and one of the practical outcomes was a mass addition of links to cultural monument items to lists of cultural items on Czech Wikipedia (see example). The goal of the Czech community for 2017 is to have a Wikidata item for each of the thousands of cultural monuments in the Czech Republic. Thanks to people from our community, we already cleaned the data before the workshop by thousands of manual and robotic edits, and added 5000 new items related to the Czech cultural heritage in the days immediately after the workshop. It proves that the workshop is a catalyst for this kind of 'shock' improvements in Wikidata.
Wikidata at academia
A member of Wikimedia Czech Republic has given 3 lessons of 1.5 hours about Wikidata as a part of an academic course "New Media Studies II" at the Institute of Information Studies of Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. The course has strenghtened our relationship with the institute, which shares our interest in data analysis and internet research. We were able to provide 20 enrolled students with both a theoretical and a practical background on Wikipedia and Wikidata, including a hands-on elementary workshop of Wikidata Query Service programming in SPARQL. The teaching material, which is based on our experience from previous Wikidata workshops, is available for everyone to download. We suggested topics on Diploma theses related to Wikipedia/Wikidata in hopes of attracting new Wikipedia researchers, and are working with employees of the institute to deepen our collaboration through eg. student projects. The long-term goal is to
Prague pre-hackathon & Wikimedia hackathon in ViennaScreenshot of Wikinity, a new desktop tool for those searching for places in need of a picture, colour-coded for various types of objects in the Czech Republic
Long-term goal of our chapter is to provide a map of "nearby unphotographed objects" in need of picture. A desktop solution – Wikinity tool – was recently developed by our volunteer member. Although we do not have a way of measuring the number of pictures uploaded immediately after the search in Wikinity, we have anecdotal evidence that this is indeed happening. Since the tool has been published it has been used 940x to display a map of unphotographed sights. Nearby map is an improvement to the Wikimedia Commons App made during the Prague Prehackathon 2017
A portable version of the "map of unphotographed objects" was in the 2016 grant proposal but was postponed until 2017 because we decided to coordinate our efforts with identical ideas emerging from the Wikimedia Commons Mobile App community. We became partners to this team of volunteers and helped them in various ways – giving feed-back to various features, promoting the app in Wikimedia channels and helping with program evaluation. Most importantly, thanks to our long-lasting collaboration with Wikimedia Austria, we organized Wikimedia Prehackathon Prague in May 2017 to foster the development of the Wikimedia Commons Mobile App (blog post here). 9 people attended the prehackathon, of which 5 were previous contributors to the Wikimedia Commons App; 3 of these were female developers. The event took place in the office of Wikimedia Czech Republic and significant improvement in the Wikimedia Commons App was made at that time (see full list of achievements here). Importantly for us, the list of nearby unphotographed objects can now be displayed on a map.
All of the foreign participants of the prehackathon then continued to the Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna which took place a few days later. This was a significant advantage because the participants from abroad did not have to travel home and back to Europe, which would increase the costs of the events. We recommend that this model where prehackathons are organized in countries close to the venue of the hackathon is repeated in future. Full lists of improvements to the app, made during prehackathon and hackathon, can be found here. We continue to support the community and comment on the proposals; we also helped with the grant renewal for 2017/2018. We will work on promotion of the app in 2018 and have created a Facebook page for that purpose.
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.
Mediagrant is the traditional project of Wikimedia Czech Republic. It exists in various forms since 2009 and it has successfully brought thousands of pictures to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. According to the rules the files within the scope of Mediagrant must illustrate encyclopedic content and be related to the Czech Republic. At the beginning of 2017 (before Mediagrant was opened for photographers) its rules had gone through a thorough revision discussed on Czech Wikimedia pages. General rules, as well as related pages, were adapted to serve the community best. In 2017 we uploaded 24,542 pictures in the Mediagrant project. The Mediagrant as a staple of the Czech Wiki community has several smaller and larger projects that have their own long- and short-term contributors. The most sucessful sub-projects of Mediagrant are Foto českých obcí (Photos of Czech Municipalities), Chráněná území (Photos of Natural Monuments), Židovské památky (Jewish Monuments), Vodstvo (Water Bodies), Lidová architektura (Folk Architecture) a Události (Events). Mediagrant encompasses most of the Media Acquisition activities of Wikimedia Czech Republic
4th WikiTown (a Wiki-takes event in regional towns, 9th – 11th June 2017)
WikiTown aims to document areas of the Czech Republic which were largely ignored by the Czech Wikipedia volunteers, often because of the area's remoteness or the absence of Wikipedians in the surrounding region. This year's WikiTown focused on the town of Litovel and the surrounding area (blog post). Fourteen volunteers from all over the Czech Republic spent a weekend in Litovel and, together with other online volunteers, intensively dealt with the documentation of the town and its surroundings. The working space for editing was provided by the Municipal Library of Litovel. The event also included a public presentation of WMCZ activities at the main square in front of the local town hall. During the two days of the event the participants managed to document objects in the town, 63 villages around it, and scanned a number of historical photos and pictures from the local resources provided by the town library. The number of photos taken during WikiTown is 1,590. We also created 85 new articles, edited approx. 200 pages, made 859 edits and added 83,600 words. The edited articles have had 104,000 views (see metrics here). An interesting and new contribution were photos taken from a drone, that provided around 50 unique aerial photographs of the town and its immediate surroundings. As the local institutions and people willing to cooperate further, we decided to continue in our activities in Litovel after WikiTown. For example, one local citizen started supplying us with more photographs of the city after the WikiTown; she has uploaded 407 photographs so far. Our Wikipedian Jan Kameníček stayed in contact with local historians Vítězslav Kollmann and Lubomír Šik as well as with employees of the Museum Litovel and other cultural institutions in the town, who all help to verify various information for Wikipedia articles. Mr. Kollmann has donated 116 valuable pictures for Wikimedia Commons so far and is willing to provide more if needed for illustration of Wikipedia articles. Thanks to this the work on the Litovel topics continues and Czech Wikipedia Featured Article Muzeum Litovel is one of the results.
This event was organized by Juandev and Aktron, two long active Czech Wikipedians. It focused on documentation of a remote area in the southernmost tip of the Plzeň Region. Based on special maps and other materials (like this or Wikidata maps) 7 participants were taking pictures of local villages (240 in four days!), towns, culture monuments, protected areas or famous trees. 7,508 pictures were uploaded and categorized on Commons and more than 2,800 of them were linked to Wikipedia articles (the processing took several weeks, depeneding on user). The event has surpassed by the number of files acquired some older Wikiexpeditions done in the region. The event was based on the experience gathered from Photos of Czech Municipalities program as well as from earlier Polish Wikiexpeditions, where Czechs participated earlier.
Participants during a planning for a day at Wikiexpedition
Processing and uploading of the data in evening hours
A photographed chapel in Bolešiny-Slavošovice
The Wikiexpedition took place in a region rich of cultural monuments and traditional folk architecture
The annual Photo Workshop took place on 16th December in Prague. It was made under the guidance of Spock Lone Wolf, an experienced wikipedian and a professional photographer. The event was attended by 4 photographers and focused on shooting small objects in various photographic tents. The results were mostly educative. Despite a fact that only 25 images of typical czech pastry, confectionery, open sandwitches etc were made, present volunteers learned a lot about the photography in a light tent that WMCZ owns for some time. The workshop was widely promoted, yet it didn't reach the original goal (8 attendees and 200 content pages). The reason is probably too specialized topic as well as the “busy” christmass time. It however brought more attention to the topic of product photography and served as an investment into skilled photographers that will generate more images of such a kind later on in 2018.
Testing the photographic tent in WMCZ headquarters during 2017 Photoworkshop
The event focused mostly on traditional Czech pastry that was not present on Wikimedia Commons
The photographic equipment is in constant use for both Mediagrant photo journeys and other events. The equipment was used for taking and uploading 985 pictures. WMCZ own three cameras which are now distributed in a more clever way: one camera is placed in the WMCZ office, second is lended hand-to-hand among Wikimedians in Prague and third is located in the Moravian city of Brno.
We did not purchase any significant photographic equipment this year except for one set of rechargeable AA batteries for camera flash and one camera bag.
In this year we have decided to join the Wiki Science Competition 2017. The Czech round took place between 28th October and 27th November and attracted 23 photographers. They uploaded 113 images in these categories: General photography, Image sets, Microscopy images and People in Science. As jurors were chosen Petr Vilgus and Jan Loužek - both wikipedians and photographers. They awarded the 9 best images, whose authors were presented with the awards at the 9th annual Czech Wikiconference on 2nd December 2017.
The winning photo of the entire contest
The Last Wiki Loves Monuments Exhibition
The last installment of the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012-2014 exhibition took place on 2nd November 2017 in the European House in Prague. This was the final display of the exibition originally initiated by the Czech National Library of Technology in 2015. The event was supported by the Czech National Heritage Institute and The Silesian Museum in Opava.
10 years of Wiki Project Photography
The WikiProject Photography that started all our successful photography-related projects celebrated its 10 years in February 2017. It is the mother of Mediagrant, WikiTowns, Wikiexpeditions, Photos of Czech Municipalities and much more. In its long history over 100 photographers participated in it and it created countless media that are used by Wikimedia projects as well as by varous third parties reusing the Free content WMF projects host. It also laid foundations for more collaborative activities – as Wikipedians learned to make maps to focus on the areas not yet photographed vs. already covered. The procedure was later on automated with Wikidata or other programs like GIS etc.
The aim for this project for this year has been in improvement the education program through on-campus workshops, especially for courses where students regularly encountered technical problems in the past or produced lower-quality articles. In 2017, we have organized 5 seminars for students. One problem we encountered is that not many wikipedians can take a Wikipedia lesson during the regular working hours. Finally, we figured out the solution. We invited students from underperforming courses in Prague to a Wikiclub which takes every Wednesday 5–7.30 pm so students can pick a week which suits them. 18 studets visited the wikiclub in Prague this year.
Still we would like to support the Students Write Wikipedia program a bit more. It lead us to conduct a research focusing on students' learning needs regarding basics of editing Wikipedia. We are still collecting data (the winter semester ends in mid February 2018) so we have not evaluated the research yet. Once we have done it, we would like to design an accesible way for students to learn how to edit Wikipedia without a seminar or workshop with a Wikipedian.
We also wanted to expand the group of teachers involved so we offered a presentation of Students write Wikipedia at university faculties. Unfortunately, the universities have a lot of offers for different educational programs and our project was not considered as a priority.
In total, 22 courses were organized during school year 2016/2017. There were 2,513,198 added bytes, 164 created articles and 168 improved articles. We are not sure if we have all data since 2017 was the year when we transfered data from the Wikipedia course interface to the Program & Events Dashboard. It was very difficult to communicate this big change to the teachers involved. They were well acustomed to the older interface.
We can also see that the group of active teachers is smaller. At universities, there is a lack of students Wikipedians who are in touch with teachers and who can motivate them to join the program Students Write Wikipedia. In 2018, we will focus on how to attract more teachers to the program.
The program proved to be hugely popular and is growing every year. In 2017 WMCZ started new courses in Plzeň, Miroslav and České Budějovice. Aside from that lectures are continuing in Prague, Brno, Olomouc, Zlín and Ústí nad Labem. We are still in touch with our graduates from this year in Prague, either through advanced courses or at the regular Wiki Club where senior graduates can spend some extra time when their lesson will end. Thus they have an opportunity to test the newly amassed knowledge right on a spot. In Prague the Wiki Club takes place right after the lessons for seniors, even in the same PC room). 20 seniors have visited the Wiki Club in 2017.
17 courses in total (some of them were for advanced senior citizens) were supported and organized by WMCZ in 2017. Amazingly, we have 4 active librarians who can organize their own courses on an independent basis (Zlín, Ústí nad Labem, Česká Lípa). 152 senior citizens participated in above mentioned courses, we have obtained a record number of participants per course – 25 on a winter course in Prague.
We have also redesigned the training for librarians. This activity focuses on creation of new educators of Wikipedia in regional libraries. We divided the formerly one day seminar into two shorter seminars and required homeworks to be done before a next part of the session would start. Now, the results proved to be much better than before. We evaluated the course with our participants and they feel more self-confident in individual skills (editing, adding pictures etc.) than the participants of the previous courses. According to their homeworks we can also see that they are more skilled now (compared to previous participants). We are eagerly waiting to see how many of the graduates will start their own courses for senior citizens in their library. The certified librarians have received a special barnstar on their user page.
As the program grew to a size where its management proved to be uneasy for existing workforce, we have decided to hir a new colleague - Anna - who takes care of coordination of seniors courses. Anna's position is funded by donors. She works for WMCZ one day per week. As a result of hiring this new employee. Education Manager Gabriela can focus more on the developement and strategy within the WMCZs education programs instead coordination-related administration.
The program still attracts an attention of Czech media, as can be seen in the timeline, listing all the activities related to the program (courses, seminars, articles, inteviews..). One of our senior graduates talked about the Senior Citizens Write Wikipedia program on TEDx Solidarity Park (ee are waiting for the video to be published).
We updated our program leaflet where we present aggregate data for the whole project (2014 - 2017). There are 323 participants, 15 cities where we organized total 49 courses, added almost 9,000,000 bytes and created or improved 6 382 articles.
Participants of the How to teach seniors to edit Wikipedia course.
Senior Citizens in Brno 2017
Vojtěch Veselý presenting the Senior Citizens lectures in Prague
Our Wikipedian in Brno – Marek Blahuš – continued his work at Masaryk University in Brno. His position consists of collaboration with local institutions and activities aimed at community development in the 2nd largest city of the Czech Republic (most of WMCZ board and active members reside in Prague). The position of the Wikipedian in Brno has ended by the end of June 2017 due to mutual agreement and the results stated below can be considered final.
This year, Masaryk University was unable to co-finance the Wikipedian in Brno, but has remained open for collaboration within its lasting partnership with WMCZ and the free content generation mechanisms set up at the university in 2016 continue to work inertially: All first six 2017 issues of its 20-page Muni magazine consist mostly of CC-BY licensed text and images, and this and more free content is also available on the web. In June 2017, a meeting with the director of Masaryk University Archives led to an exploration of what kind of historical photographs from the archives could be legally released to Wikimedia Commons and under what conditions; this meeting was followed by a bilateral meeting in which WMCZ's new executive director was introduced into the history of the Masaryk University partnership. The university is also willing to collaborate further with WMCZ on educational activities and Wikimedia promotion. Brno Wikipedians provided on-site support to organizers of the Edit-a-thon at Brno Observatory and Planetarium in April.
We also continued organizing the monthly local community meetups that have been occurring regularly for more than two years and are an essential element which holds the community updated and collaborating. 16 different Wikipedians participated in the first six meetups of 2017, with an average participation of 8 people per meetup. Equally importantly, minutes from the meetups that provide a summary of what has been discussed, including useful links and data, are regularly read by at least 5 to 10 other non-participating Wikipedians (who are incited to use the Thanks functionality of MediaWiki software) – this shows the importance of taking those minutes, as well as the countrywide outreach of Brno activities. The meetup in June exceptionally took place outside, in the wildlife garden to which Wikipedians donated a linden tree last year, with permission of the town hall. A leading community member of Bulgarian Wikipedia living in Brno decided to start attending our meetups after having followed them on-line over the past year.
Regular editation meetings started in 2016. Wikipedia Clubs, are offering a friendly space for Wikipedians who prefer editing in a company rather than alone. They also can be a good place for Wikipedia volunteers who like a personal approach when dealing with complications during editing at home. Wikipedia CLubs are often frequently attended by former participants of our senior courses and thus play a role of "courses for advanced seniors". Aside from the major cities (Prague and Brno), WMCZ arranged a new Wiki Club on a regular basis in Česká Lípa (once per month) and in Plzeň (once per two weeks). We have created a new tool on Tool Labs designed for automatic generation of metrics that describe properly the activities of Wikipedia Club participants – it was used for reporting of the metrics achieved. During the first semester we also counted Wikidata edits but later on we dropped with this practice, as the Wikidata contributions proved to be off the scale in comparison with Wikipedia. And the amount of data was simply too big.
Wikipedia Club in Brno was moved into a new location in the Moravian Library. The event is supported by this institution and still oversighted by a motivated teacher from Masaryk University's Faculty of Arts. Its periodicity was changed from a weekly to biweekly basis, which resulted in each meeting being attended by 1 to 4 beginning Wikipedians, mostly graduates from earlier Wikipedia courses for senior citizens. Due to lower interest from the public, the proposed group course in spring was changed into individual consultations.
During second semester the Brno Wiki Club was arranged only once per month, as the students and wikipedians in Brno aren't interested in this kind of activity and Wiki Club works pretty much as an additional acitvity for seniors citizens.
In Prague, we experiment with thematical edit-a-thons time by time. The goal of such edit-a-thons is to attract non-Wikipedians to engage with Wikipedia in a topic that they like. At the moment this approach is experimental and we are still evaluating its results. For now we are convinced that might be a good way how to support diversity in content on Wikipedia and how to initiate the idea that anyone can edit Wikipedia. In 2017 there were 44 Wiki Club sessions in Prague. Each meeting has its results logged and metrics are recorded.
Wikipedia Club in Česká Lípa, 2017
Vojtěch Veselý, festival Dialog
Participants on Wiki workshop, festival Dialog
1Lib1Ref
We joined the international #1Lib1ref capaign (15th January – 3rd February 2017), created a landing microsite on Czech Wikipedia, promoted it through the Librarian Institute of the National Library and created a Facebook group for librarians called Wikilibraries. We hoped to attract at least 75 Czech librarians who will add a reference to Czech Wikipedia but in the end only 10 librarians participated and added 34 edits (all metrics here). Aside from the lower interest among librarians than expected, a rather sub-prime result was due to a improper additoin of a related hashtag. See our blog post from the event.
GLAM
We have arranged the Astronomical edit-a-thon at the Brno Observatory and Planetarium, which was attended by 11 participants. During the edit-a-thon, they created 26 new articles while adding 144,608 bytes and making 212 edits.
With the support of Regional Museum in Slaný we arranged the Slánsko edit-a-thon on 11th november 2017 The focus was put mostly on significant people, buildings and organisations of the Slánsko area. 8 wikipedians wrote 10 new entries and what is more valuable: we have established a cooperation which will continue.
Wikipedian Jan Kameníček arranged three more events in Olomouc: Píšeme Wikipedii Olomouc (We write Wikipedia) – three-part Wikipedia workshop for 6 participants at Research Library in Olomouc (23.3.–6.4.), Ženy a věda (Women and Science) – Wikipedia editing workshop for 4 female beginners on 27th of April (this action has produced one new regular Wikipedian Miroslava Fišerová) and seven-part workshop (17th May – 17th November) for 85 students of SPŠS Olomouc (secondary school). These were related to free licence, Wikimedia Commons and uploading. 74 of them has created their accounts on Wikipedia.
Astronomical edit-a-thon in Brno.
Wikipedians being toured during the 2017 Olomouc workshop in Research library in Olomouc
A tour in the warehouse of the Olomouc research library
New articles were made during the Olomouc research library workshop in September 2017
Participants of the edit-a-thon
One of the obtained photographs – teachers from Slaný grammar school in 1908.
Another historical photo – Slaný's Prague Gate in 1850
We negotiated an establishment of a Wikipedian in residence who will contact research group leaders or core facility employees and teach them to upload the photographic material that they produce during their daily work. We have received funds from the AVAST foundation. During summer months we hired a student who became the Wikipedian in residence. Later on, in September and October he contacted 40 people and also 12 reasearch teams. Unfortunately, only 3 people joined the project and uploaded 14 pictures. We've tried to motivate them by participating in the Wiki science competition but it didn't help. When we evaluated why the project wasn't successful as planned we found out that people would be willing to contribute with new pictures, but they have done simply too much and they deal with a problem how to choose those that might be contributive to Wikipedia.
Despite of that we are willing to continue in this undertaking. In 2018 the focus will be on specific projects and competitions (f.e. The Sicience is Beautiful) where we want to ask for a release of specific pictures for Wikimedia Commons.
Wikidata content & community
Wikidata workshops
We organized three Wikidata-related events in 2017.
The first of them was a specialized presentation titled "Data journalism with Wikidata", which was given to a group of 10 students of journalism in Brno in May 2017.
The second was a regular workshop (blog post here) in June 2017 tailored to the needs of the Czech Wikidata community. There was enormous interest in this workshop and 12 people took part in the community-based program selection. A total of 16 people attended - both beginners and experienced Wikidata editors. We split the group in two and offered a "beginner" set of talk as well as a more advanced one for those who have already extensively worked with Wikidata. The topics included SPARQL, programming infoboxes with Lua, intro to JSON and using pywikibots as well as a simple HarvestTemplates tool. At the end of the event we discussed work related to WikiProject Czech Republic and one of the practical outcomes was a mass addition of links to cultural monument items to lists of cultural items on Czech Wikipedia (see example). The goal of the Czech community for 2017 is to have a Wikidata item for each of the thousands of cultural monuments in the Czech Republic. Thanks to people from our community, we already cleaned the data before the workshop by thousands of manual and robotic edits, and added 5000 new items related to the Czech cultural heritage in the days immediately after the workshop. It proves that the workshop is a catalyst for this kind of 'shock' improvements in Wikidata.
The third was a Wikidata workshop for female participants of programming courses run by a Czech educational organization "Czechitas". The aim of this NGO is to educate girls and women in coding and prepare them for new professional careers. A total of 30 participants took part in our 3-hour lesson which combined theoretical introduction with practical hands-on course of SPARQL on real data (presentation slides here). We have developed a short lesson curriculum which can now be recycled for various target groups and offers exciting intro into the world of Wikidata. Collected anonymous feed-back was mostly very positive, with participants praising a new way to access information, which is wholly different from Wikipedia, and liked having mastered the basics of a new language similar to SQL. One participant suggested we should take part in the mentoring program of Czechitas next year to involve some of the volunteers in some real Wikidata work.
Participants of the Czechitas workshop arrived to the office in unexpectedly high numbers. After the crowded intro, we were fortunately able to move them into a bigger room :-).]]
A member of Wikimedia Czech Republic has given 3 lessons of 1.5 hours about Wikidata as a part of an academic course "New Media Studies II" at the Institute of Information Studies of Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. The course has strenghtened our relationship with the institute, which shares our interest in data analysis and internet research. We were able to provide 20 enrolled students with both a theoretical and a practical background on Wikipedia and Wikidata, including a hands-on elementary workshop of Wikidata Query Service programming in SPARQL. The teaching material, which is based on our experience from previous Wikidata workshops, is available for everyone to download. We suggested topics on Diploma theses related to Wikipedia/Wikidata in hopes of attracting new Wikipedia researchers, and are working with employees of the institute to deepen our collaboration through eg. student projects. The long-term goal is to
Thanks to our memorandum of collaboration with the National Heritage Institute (signed in 2015), we were able to negotiate the release of an important dataset – valuable metadata for all ~40,500 cultural monuments in the Czech Republic. The release was signed on the 7th September 2017 and imported into Czech Wikipedia's heritage lists soon after; the data then found their way into Wikidata soon after. The data amounted to 22,000,000 bytes on Wikidata, representing a huge amount of edits over several days. The most valuable part of the dataset are the coordinates for almost all heritage sites in the Czech Republic (which we did not have until now). They open way for new exciting projects such as photographic documentation of Czech monuments or intelligent auto-suggest of topics to write an article about, based on editor's current location. Import of heritage data was this year's leitmotif for the Czech Wikidata community (with about 50 members in the corresponding Facebook group) and activized the community a lot; we had several Facebook posts in that group per day and very lively discussions around the various Wikidata topics.
Prague pre-hackathon & Wikimedia hackathon in Vienna.
Long-term goal of our chapter is to provide a map of "nearby unphotographed objects" in need of picture. A desktop solution – Wikinity tool – was recently developed by our volunteer member. Although we do not have a way of measuring the number of pictures uploaded immediately after the search in Wikinity, we have anecdotal evidence that this is indeed happening. Since the tool has been published it has been used 1650x to display a map of unphotographed sights.
A portable version of the "map of unphotographed objects" was in the 2016 grant proposal but was postponed until 2017 because we decided to coordinate our efforts with identical ideas emerging from the Wikimedia Commons Mobile App community. We became partners to this team of volunteers and helped them in various ways – giving feed-back to various features, promoting the app in Wikimedia channels and helping with program evaluation. Most importantly, thanks to our long-lasting collaboration with Wikimedia Austria, we organized Wikimedia Prehackathon Prague in May 2017 to foster the development of the Wikimedia Commons Mobile App (blog post here). 9 people attended the prehackathon, of which 5 were previous contributors to the Wikimedia Commons App; 3 of these were female developers. The event took place in the office of Wikimedia Czech Republic and significant improvement in the Wikimedia Commons App was made at that time (see full list of achievements here). Importantly for us, the list of nearby unphotographed objects can now be displayed on a map.
All of the foreign participants of the prehackathon then continued to the Wikimedia Hackathon in Vienna which took place a few days later. This was a significant advantage because the participants from abroad did not have to travel home and back to Europe, which would increase the costs of the events. We recommend that this model where prehackathons are organized in countries close to the venue of the hackathon is repeated in future. Full lists of improvements to the app, made during prehackathon and hackathon, can be found here. Please note that we are waiting for the Wikimedia Foundation's post-event survey to provide us with detail feed-back from participants. In case of positive replies, we plan to continue supporting the team both logistically and financially, observing their IEG renewal application and considering hiring some of the developers in 2018 to increase their capabilities.
Nearby map is an improvement to the Wikimedia Commons App made during the Prague Prehackathon 2017
Heritage sites which protect textile factories in the Czech Republic - showing that most of these factories are close to the northern borders of the country. A Wikidata Query which produced this image is an example of what we can now do with this kind of data - something impossible even for the National Heritage Institute
Screenshot of Wikinity, a new desktop tool for those searching for places in need of a picture, colour-coded for various types of objects in the Czech Republic
Please link to a detailed financial report for your spending during the grant period. This should be in the same format as your detailed budget from your Simple APG application.
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Course in Prague, 2017
Wikipedia course in Miroslav, 2017
Course in Plzeň, 2017
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Participants of WikiTown Litovel in May 2017
A chapel of st. George photographed during the WikiTown Litovel
A public display at the main square in Litovel during the WikiTown
One of the pictures made during the photographic tours in the vicinity
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Participants during a planning for a day at Wikiexpedition
Processing and uploading of the data in evening hours
A photographed chapel in Bolešiny-Slavošovice
The Wikiexpedition took place in a region rich of cultural monuments and traditional folk architecture.jpg)
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Testing the photographic tent in WMCZ headquarters during 2017 Photoworkshop
The event focused mostly on traditional Czech pastry that was not present on Wikimedia Commons
The winning photo of the entire contest
Seminar about Wikidata for new media students
Participants of the How to teach seniors to edit Wikipedia course.
Senior Citizens in Brno 2017
Vojtěch Veselý presenting the Senior Citizens lectures in Prague
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Wikipedia Club in Česká Lípa, 2017
Vojtěch Veselý, festival Dialog
Participants on Wiki workshop, festival Dialog
Astronomical edit-a-thon in Brno.
Wikipedians being toured during the 2017 Olomouc workshop in Research library in Olomouc
A tour in the warehouse of the Olomouc research library
New articles were made during the Olomouc research library workshop in September 2017
Participants of the edit-a-thon
One of the obtained photographs – teachers from Slaný grammar school in 1908.
Another historical photo – Slaný's Prague Gate in 1850
A barn in the Slaný region in 1904.jpg)
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![Participants of the Czechitas workshop arrived to the office in unexpectedly high numbers. After the crowded intro, we were fortunately able to move them into a bigger room :-).]]](//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Kancel%C3%A1%C5%99_WMCZ_-_p%C5%99edstaven%C3%AD_pro_Czechitas_3.jpg/438px-Kancel%C3%A1%C5%99_WMCZ_-_p%C5%99edstaven%C3%AD_pro_Czechitas_3.jpg)
Participants of the Czechitas workshop arrived to the office in unexpectedly high numbers. After the crowded intro, we were fortunately able to move them into a bigger room :-).]]![The 2017 Wikidata workshop took place at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic]]](//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Pardubice%2C_Wikidata_workshop_2017-06-24_%282036%29.jpg/270px-Pardubice%2C_Wikidata_workshop_2017-06-24_%282036%29.jpg)
The 2017 Wikidata workshop took place at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic]]
![Participants of the Czechitas workshop arrived to the office in unexpectedly high numbers. After the crowded intro, we were fortunately able to move them into a bigger room :-).]]](/wiki/File:Kancel%C3%A1%C5%99_WMCZ_-_p%C5%99edstaven%C3%AD_pro_Czechitas_3.jpg)
Nearby map is an improvement to the Wikimedia Commons App made during the Prague Prehackathon 2017
Heritage sites which protect textile factories in the Czech Republic - showing that most of these factories are close to the northern borders of the country. A Wikidata Query which produced this image is an example of what we can now do with this kind of data - something impossible even for the National Heritage Institute
Screenshot of Wikinity, a new desktop tool for those searching for places in need of a picture, colour-coded for various types of objects in the Czech Republic
