This page is a translated version of the page Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Ukraine/2018 and the translation is 2% complete.

Application or grant stage: in progress

Applicant or grantee: Wikimedia Ukraine

Amount requested: 108,465 USD (98500 USD + 10% contingency) (-)

Amount granted: 108,400 USD (98,500 + 10% contingency) (-)

Funding period: 1 stycznia 2018 to 31 grudnia 2018

Application created: 1 listopada 2017

Recommended application date: 1 listopada 2017

Midpoint report due: 15 lipca 2018

Final report due: 30 stycznia 2019

Application

Background

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

Link to your organization's staffing plan, for the upcoming funding period. Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Ukraine/2018/Staffing plan
Link to your annual plan, for the upcoming funding period.

Our annual plan is approved by the Annual General Meeting, usually held in the second half of December. We will prepare the annual plan for 2018 based on the feedback we collected from volunteers on the projects (current and new ones). We collected this feedback on the public page with the description of activities (tasks) and we asked community members to support them and indicate in what capacity (organiser, participant etc): Wikimedia Ukraine in 2018 (in Ukrainian).

Link to your strategic plan, which includes the upcoming funding period.

We do not have one at the moment. We are working on preparing one, with initial discussions during the Wikimedia 2030 strategy process that will be followed by a community survey before the end of this year.

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 view global 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.

We reorganised our programmes into different groups. We have chosen the most prominent outcome as the most logical way of grouping programmes.
New major programme: Wikicamp 2018. The two main reasons of launch of this programme are, on one hand, the active development of the Wikipedia Education Programme activities in schools for the last two years, with a group of teachers from across the country involved in promoting Wikipedia in schools, and on the other hand, successful organisation of wikicamps in other CEE countries, notably in Armenia.
We put Crimean Tatar Wikipedia into a separate programme to highlight and dedicate more resources to this programme targeting this minority language. We are working on development of Crimean Tatar Wikipedia since 2013, but we are planning to organise them into a programme in 2018.
For the same reasons we put Physical QR codes into a separate programme. We are working on it since the first project in Odesa in 2013, but we did not have any organised effort in this direction. We intend to dedicate more efforts to it next year as well.

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

Content Gap

This programme is focused on bringing new content into Wikimedia projects. As growing Wikipedia and its sister projects is, in general, the goal of respective online communities, WMUA is willing to work on closing certain content gaps. Various online contests and field expeditions are designed for reaching this goal. While there are long-lasting projects like WLM and WLE photo contests and CEES article contest which will be held for the seventh, sixth and third time respectively (since their mission is believed to not yet be accomplished), we also plan some new projects.

Article Contests

Wikimedia Ukraine announces contests since 2011. The open competition proved to be one of the best ways to lessen content gaps that are identified, bring new content on specific topic and new editors into Wikiprojects. They also attract those users who are not interested in pressing Edit button until getting the motivation and appeal to write on the topic they care or know about.

The need for every contest was an obvious gap in content in some field such as theoretic physics (a topic too narrow to be written by amateur volunteers), military topics (as it was in 2014 when it was all in news) or cultural heritage monuments (topic too vast to be efficiently covered without promotion).

In 2018 we will continue organising article writing contests. Volunteers have already commited to organise CEE Spring 2018, Wiki Loves Monuments/Wiki Loves Earth article contest, Articles on Music, Scandinavian Spring.

Lessons learned from the article contest are documented here.

Photography Contests

We plan to bring again three photo contests (WLE photo contest (international), Wiki loves Earth Ukraine, Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine, Wiki Science Competition) that we organised in 2017 and previous years. Each year natural and cultural heritage sites under state protection get more and more images to illustrate articles but there are still significant gaps, such as entire districts without a single photo.

Five editions of Wiki Loves Earth (we launched it in 2013) in Ukraine brought images of 3301 protected sites out of 8170 in state cadastre. In the last few years we also developed cooperations with organisations such as ecological movements and natural heritage protection organisations to reach more audiences and get more content. This helped us generate both new media content (such as a special nomination on this year) and new article content (notably owing to donation of materials on natural sites).

Wikimedia Ukraine launched an idea of turning Wiki Loves Earth international 2014, and all four previous edition were primarily driven by Wikimedia Ukraine as an official organiser with an international team (covering countries from Belgium to Australia) behind it. Every year we reach more countries, particularly in Asia and Africa where we have both experienced organisers and strong newcomers who do their first photo contest ever. In 2018 we plan to continue running the international part of Wiki Loves Earth as a project driven by the chapter, but we will consider spinning it off in 2019 if we manage to organise a mature group capable of running the project independently in the way Wiki Loves Monuments is run.

Wiki Loves Monuments photo contest is an important part of our activities, as we run it since 2012 and get significant results both in terms of number of photos and participants (approx. 30,000 photos from roughly 500 participants each year) and outreach (significant attention from partners and general public). Our major challenges are improving coverage of monument lists (Ukraine has no official monument register, thus we have to contact national and local administrations to get their official lists) and improving regional coverage. We have built the biggest monument database ever in Ukraine with roughly 80,000 known monuments out of 150,000 existing in Ukraine, and after six years of the content we have images of about 26,000 of them. We are constantly working on improving the contest and collect the feedback from out participants.

GLAM (БоГеМА)

Libraries and museums professionals are among those who are interested in getting editing skills as a part of the professional development. Libraries and museums are our constant partners and places where we organise workshops, editing events and award ceremonies. Our efforts were also directed to encourage GLAM institutions to contribute to the Wikimedia projects as an integral part of their work.

The challenge for us is the general lack of digital strategies of Ukrainian GLAMs. Most of them have websites, but many of them think that publishing their collections online will drive visitors to the website instead of visiting the museum or library itself and thus harm them. Despite having very rich collections, arranging a content donation thus usually requires significant time for negotiations and trainings by volunteers and staff.

Content donations can be tracked on Commons (link, see institutions from Ukraine). We will keep pursuing further donations of free content to Wikimedia Commons and improving the content of Wikimedia projects by increasing the participation of the community in WMUA-GLAM activities and GLAM staff itself.

Wikiekspedycje

Wikiexpeditions bring opportunity for Wikimedians and newly registered users to visit places and sites with the goal of documenting topics that lack coverage on Wikimedia projects with media. Wikiexpedition participants are asked to create or expand corresponding new articles, illustrate them with images, and report on their contribution on the WMUA wiki and WMUA blog.

We run this programme since 2011 and we supported expeditions in almost all regions of Ukraine. They come in a variety of formats, including one-day cycling expeditions to some sites that lack coverage, two- or three-days tours to some specific places identified by expert Wikimedians (such as archaeologists or nature scientists) or long expeditions organised with partners and our partial support like Inside of Living. An example of the wikiexpedition report page is here, and media from our expeditions are on Commons.

VeloMonth 2017 Awards in Lviv. A new user who registered only a few days before the contest, is receiving her souvenirs
VeloMonth 2017 Awards in Lviv: participants, jury and organisers
Participating Countries Wiki Loves Earth from 2013 to 2017
Eurasian spoonbill in Danube Biosphere Reserve. One of the winners of Wiki Loves Earth 2017, a featured picture on Wikimedia Commons
WLE Ukraine 2017 organising committee
WLE Ukraine 2017 group photo
WLM/WLE exhibition poster in Vinnytsia
WLM/WLE exhibition in Khmelnytskyi
Wiki Loves Monuments special nomination for schoolchildren. Winners and participants with the souvenirs
Photo contests leaflets
A donated book from Maksymovych Scientific Library during Open Access Week

Program Objectives:

to improve Wikipedia's coverage of topics that were prioritized by the community

to increase the quality and quantity of photographic content about protected nature sites, cultural heritage sites, photographic and other media content that help to discover science

to ensure photo contest content is used to illustrate Wikimedia projects through organising an on-wiki collaboration (contests)

to improve the content of Wikimedia projects by increasing the participation of the GLAM institutions and the participation of the community in WMUA-GLAM activities

to improve the content of Wikimedia projects by increasing content on locally-oriented topics

Program Metrics:

Shared metrics

Total participants: 3140
Number of newly registered users: 1255
Number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects: 118 700

Grantee-defined metrics

Number of volunteers involved: 40
Number of media files used: 13 550

Timeline:

March 1 – March 31: Scandinavian Spring contest

March 21 – May 31: CEE Spring article contest

May 1 – 31: Wiki Loves Earth Ukraine photo contest

September 1 – 30: Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine photo contest

November 1 – 30: Wiki Science Competition

Increasing Participation

We seek to different groups and individuals, including under-represented in our community by supporting and organising trainings aimed at increasing participation in the Wikimedia movement. We are working with our community to find opportunities to increase participation and improve the climate for newbies in Wikimedia projects. This is done through outreach activities, partnerships with particular outreach institutions, on-wiki initiatives (such as Wikimarathon). These activities have parallel aims of improving content and attracting more participation from the target groups.

Wikimarathon

The 5th edition of the Wikimarathon dedicated to the 14th anniversary of Ukrainian Wikipedia is planned for January, 27-30. It aims to attract as many people as possible to enrich the free encyclopedia and to have a record number of new articles as for four days. The organizational stress is made on appeal through media to participate and on setting collaborations with libraries, educational institutions, and NGOs for hosting workshops led by Wikimedians. 20 volunteers have affirmed their interest in conducting workshops and/or engage nearby institutions to host them. Wikimarathon 2017 (link) resulted in 2031 articles (428 of them were created by bots) and impressive media coverage. The average daily number of articles was 4 times bigger than the average number of articles created in Ukrainian Wikipedia along the year.

Wikipedia Education Program

Wikimedia Ukraine organises Wikipedia Education Programme (WEP) events since 2011.

For the first years our focus was on working with university students, and we worked in two directions: one was to sign a memorandum of cooperation with university administration and organise workshops for lecturers hoping that they would implement the teaching model we offer, the other was to find already interested lecturers, answer their questions and help them work with students' articles during the semester. However, few years ago we found out that Ukrainian students usually come to higher education institutions with no idea of how to write an article without falling into plagiarism, are not afraid of plagiarism and do not try to avoid it. Since 2017 we focus primarily on cooperation with universities where we have already identified lecturers interested in working with WEP, and we intend to keep this focus in 2018.

Since 2016 we are actively developing work with high school teachers. We hope to engage a new large group of them into using Wikimedia projects in classroom which means teaching young students to work with sources and learn to be careful about possible plagiarism before they get used to it. So far we have organised around ten workshops for teachers from all over Ukraine, many of participants now feel empowered to spread the word in local circles of teachers. Many of them have organised successful Wikipedia classes in their high schools. Working with high schools is now the major focus of our Wikipedia Education Programme, and we intend to develop these activities.

Our commitment is to provide high-quality trainings (usually two-day long trainings for teachers, several sessions for students) to make sure they have necessary knowledge to become new editors. In 2017, for example, we reached 90 teachers with two-day trainings after getting request from teachers associations to bring such.

Wikicamp 2018

This is a planned event for high school students engaged in editing Wikipedia in classes led by teachers who passed our trainings. The camp is to be based in a sports and health complex affiliated with lyceum in Kremenchuk (Poltava Oblast, Central Ukraine) for 20-25 high school students. Project is led by Oleh Kushch. Initiative was inspired by the success of the Wikicamps in Armenia and education course on Wikipedia for schoolchildren by named teacher, and is in line with the development of the Wikipedia Education Programme for high schools in Ukraine.

Wikiworkshops on demand

There is a high demand for learning sessions on editing Wikimedia projects, and we have a significant track record in organising those. The demand may come from partner organisations who want to improve coverage of some topic on Wikipedia or from volunteers who identified an interesting opportunity. These trainings may happen in bigger cities where we have a developed community or in regions where we do not have experienced Wikimedians yet. They come in a variety of shapes from those targeting professional communities (notably librarians) to those targeting general public, usually in form of edit-a-thons.

Lessons learned from the workshops we organise are documented here.

Crimean Tatar Wikipedia and beyond

Crimean Tatars are a minority people in Ukraine, vulnerable due to the historic circumstances. We already established relations with several representatives and non-profits of Crimean Tatars, “ALEM” organisation to name one, in order to raise awareness about Crimean Tatar Wikipedia and bring more users to it as well as cover related topics in Ukrainian Wikipedia. We organised activities related to Crimean Tatar Wikipedia since 2013, but we never had a full-scale programme on it. In 2018 we want to develop these activities, notably by involving our partners in celebrating 10 years of Crimean Tatar Wikipedia.

Map of established wikimeetups for Wikimarathon 2017
In Kolyndiany school (Ternopil oblast)
Training for librarians in Rivne
In Khmelnytskyi Library
In Kremenchuk lyceum
Workshops for librarians in Rivne

Program Objectives:

to engage more educators by organising at least 10 trainings

to engage more students by organising at least 2 courses and 10 presentations

to continue the particular focus on under-represented regions, such as Southern and Eastern Ukraine, by organising at least one such training there

to continue responding to the requests of different communities by holding at least 5 Wikiworkshops for those who ask

to continue promoting Wikipedia in education by giving presentations of innovative uses of Wikipedia and related projects on educational conferences and fairs

Program Metrics:

Shared metrics

Total participants: 830
Number of newly registered users: 385
Number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects: 2150

Grantee-defined metrics

Number of volunteers involved: 40
Number of media files used: 50

Timeline:

January 27 – 30: Wikipedia birthday Wikimarathon

2 weeks in June – August: Wikicamp

During the year: editing events

Community Support and Development

Wikimedia Ukraine has been offering support to the Wikimedia communities in different ways. We will continue organising events, offering microgrants and giving supportive gifties not only for WMUA members who are active offline volunteers but also for all editors that inform us of their needs and deserve to be encouraged. There is still a room for perfection to our communication with volunteers and showing our appreciation to them and thus we are committed to reaching it.

Community Events

Face-to-Face meetups are important opportunities for both chapter and wider community members as opportunities to strengthen online collaborations, share learnings and get new skill, as well as start new projects or launch initiatives to improve existing ones. They are especially important given that Ukraine is the biggest country in Europe and our community is spread across the country.

We will again organise Ukrainian WikiConference for the community (the annual meeting of Wikimedians, chapter members or not, from all over Ukraine) and the Annual General Meeting (mandatory annual meeting to approve reports, discuss plans and elect the new Board) for the organisation. We will also try once again to establish having regional events as we envision them (being gatherings of local Wikimedians from underrepresented regions with some invited participants from outside the region): we did not yet reach this goal in previous years due to lack of organising force.

Trainings for Volunteers

In order to have a stronger community, we provide trainings on specific skills that Ukrainian Wikimedians need. The topics for such trainings (and proving their need) emerge from after-events conversations, for instance, we had trainings on conflict resolution or social media in previous years. The need for more technical skills will be covered by Wikihackathon we plan to organise next year. Another need is to have trainings for trainers: due to increasing demand for holding Wikipedia workshops we need more people who can effectively present Wikipedia in front of the audience. There is vivid interest among volunteers in this kind of trainings for 2018.

Scholarships

Choosing community members or assigning staff members to participate in international events is an opportunity to learn from colleagues abroad, speak about our local projects and mediate experiences to our community. We would like to continue having positive outcomes of having Ukrainian Wikimedians at international events, such as Wikimania, regional Wikimedia CEE Meeting and thematic events, such as Wikisource conference, EduWiki etc.

Microgrants

This project is aimed to provide financial assistance for activities of volunteers that will result in promotion and/or contribution to Wikimedia projects. Each year we contact with organisers of festivals or public events to get accreditations for volunteer photographers, cover travel costs for attending events. We would be glad to purchase books or other small items which would make volunteer work on contributing to wikiprojects more comfortable (link to landing page of the project).

Thematic weeks/months

Thematic (collaborative) editing weeks and months is a bottom-up project that runs non-stop in Ukrainian Wikipedia. Anyone is welcome to announce the topic, writing period and invite users to start cooperative work aiming to improve and create articles focused on specific topic. Wikimedia Ukraine tries to pursue the project proposing to initiators of weeks an opportunity to choose the best contributor(s) of a thematic week/month and entrust us to deliver souvenirs. These can be wikisouvenirs that we have or sponsoring the purchase of special ones (related to the topic). Apart of these souvenirs, we also promote thematic weeks/months via WMUA blog and social networks. International editing weeks or months like Asian Month, Hungarian Revolution of 1956 also demand organizational support.

Wikizghushchivka (Condensed milk)

This project of encouraging most productive contributors of the month with a real can of condensed milk (as a virtual one is a token of appreciation native to Ukrainian Wikipedia, similar to barnstars in English Wikipedia) has been awarded since 2011, although with breaks due to organisational challenges. Each month we send a can to the most active experienced user and the most active newbie of each Ukrainian project (Wikipedia, Wikiquote etc.). Now we have volunteers to revive the project and all the contributors will eventually get their “prizes”. We are eager to continue supporting this unique initiative.

Wikizghushchivka
Wiki Conference 2016 opening session
Wiki Conference 2017 Wikiexpeditions session
Volunteer on the way to get photo pass for Eurovision 2017
WMUA Hackathon 2016
Mastering Social Media Training 2016
Wikipedia Asia Month Ambassador reward
Community health & Education session talk by Helixitta (a female Ukrainian Wikipedia administrator, who has received a scholarship to attend the event from Wikimedia Ukraine)

Program Objectives:

to increase the community participation and skill level

to empower users with the techniques and skills that needed for Wikimedia projects

to provide incentives to the community, supporting wide range of volunteer initiatives with the materials and souvenirs they can use

to ensure members and volunteers engagement and committing by supporting/organising online and offline events

Program Metrics:

Shared metrics

Total participants: 232
Number of newly registered users: 25
Number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects: 250

Grantee-defined metrics

Number of volunteers involved: 20
Number of media files used: 100

Timeline:

February: Wikihackathon

May: trainings for volunteers

June: WikiConference

December 21 – 22: WMUA Annual General Meeting

During the year: other activities

Promoting Wikimedia and Free licenses

Misleading information concerning Wikipedia and other Wikiprojects as well as free licenses keeps popping up in mass media. During last year WMUA members talked several institutions (incl. Ministry of Defense) into releasing content on their web-sites under CC-BY license. Now more media in Ukraine know what a free license means, how Wikipedia works, how to reuse content from Wikimedia projects, but the level of awareness is still lower than preferable. We see a need in preventing and resolving misunderstandings by providing readable information about Wikimedia projects and having talks with journalists, incl. in partnership with Creative Commons Ukraine.

Media Publicity

Wikimedia Ukraine considers media visibility and publicity to be an important resource for attracting volunteers, creating public trust and reaching out potential institutional partners. Since 2011 we regularly update our blog (with an average of 100 posts per year) which regularly become news articles in online media. Maintaining several pages in social media proved to be a good platform for getting and providing feedback on different issues, demonstrating notable results of our work and reaching out public persons with free knowledge related questions.

Free panorama advocacy

We continue spreading information about freedom of panorama among journalists and politicians. In 2016 and 2017 we designed related infographics and engaged in discussions on draft laws that touch free panorama and/or free licences topic, this will be continued.

Lessons learned from our experience with ordering/developing infographics are documented here.

Wikipedia-linked QR-codes

There was a successful pilot in placing QR-codes on historic monuments in Odesa several years ago but due to lack of volunteers it was not worked out further. We have commitment from volunteers now to revive this idea and work with local authorities in other cities on placing QR-codes that lead to Wikipedia articles on historic buildings.

Ukraine Freedom of panorama Flashmob in Kyiv (Maidan)
An infographic explaining freedom of panorama in Ukrainian
Freedom of Panorama round table in Liga Business Inform, Kyiv, 2015

Program Objectives:

to encourage regulatory and legislative changes that will benefit the Wikimedia projects, allow for freedom of panorama in Ukraine

to increase awareness of Wikimedia projects and respect for the licenses (copyright)

to improving understanding of free licenses and their usage in Wikimedia projects

to popularize Wikipedia by enabling easy electronic access to the information about city sites

Program Metrics:

Shared metrics

Total participants: 100
Number of newly registered users: 5
Number of content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects: 20

Grantee-defined metrics

Number of volunteers involved: 15
Number of media files used: 10

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.

One new position (Accountant) at 1.0 FTE, making our staff increase from 2.25 FTE to 3.25 FTE. All three other positions remain unchanged.

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.

The accountant position is our most recent hiring (she started with us in the end of October), the full job description is here. In our 2017 grant this was budgeted as accounting fees for an external company, but following our site visit report this year and discussions with WMF staff we decided to hire an accountant. She will be working full-time in our office in Kyiv, she is reporting to the Chair of Board and will work closely with the Treasurer. We estimate that half of the accountant's time will be spend on reporting to the state (which will reduce burden of the Chair of Board who had to submit these reports himself) and another half on accounting of expenses on our projects.

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 Spreadsheet, with a copy on Meta soon.

Midpoint report

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

Program story

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

Local Cultural Heritage and Notable People: Аrticle Contest for Libraries

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.