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Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Presentation & Outreach/Report2013-1

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Interim report accepted
This interim report for a Project and Event Grant has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
  • To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:PEG/WM CZ.
  • You may still comment on this report on its discussion page.
  • Please visit Grants:PEG/WM CZ/Presentation & Outreach to comment on or read the final report.
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This report covers development of Wikimedia CZ's "Presentation & Outreach" grant after the submission 2012 report, e.g. from July 2012 to the end of April 2013.

In this period, P&O grant spent 121968 CZK, and while continuing with already working projects such as Student Write Wikipedia, GLAM, representing Wikipedia on relevant exhibitions, also partially financed 2012's Wikipedia conference. Major news was Czech Republic's first Wiki Loves Monument participation, which was quite high with more than 17k contributed images, and negotiations for first major media donation in the Czech Republic: 3000 stereographic slides from Charles University's Faculty of Science Geographical Library. WMCZ has also partnered with an advertising agency, leading to creation of video and prints inviting people to contribute to articles about nature.

Projects

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Students Write Wikipedia (Czech Ambassador Program)

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Students Write Wikipedia Poster

Czech education program Studenti píší Wikipedii (Students Write Wikipedia) kicked another term in early spring of 2013 with 8 participating faculties and nine projects.

The projects are distributed across all major cities of the Czech Republic and also vary in their topic. From various fields of natural science to social studies, the programme now covers all major branches of human knowledge - with minimal expenses. The progress in the program was presented at the Education Leaders Workshop in Milano.

In report period, expenses for the programme totalled 4515 CZK (including 3175 CZK for propagation materials prints filed in other topic).

GLAM: Digitization of stereograms

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Saint-Étienne-du-Mont., Paris, beginning of 20th century, from the Geographic Library

The most visible GLAM effort is the upcoming digitization of pre-WW1 stereographic slide collection from Geographic Library of Charles University's Faculty of Science.

At the moment this includes negotiations of the final contract and technical preparations, done with help of other institutions (National Technical Museum Prague and Technical Museum in Brno).

So far the expenses were pretty minimal (900 CZK) and are covered in Mediagrant tickets 291 and 315. The proposed project for scanning of 3000 delicate slides has expected budget around 115000 CZK and will be submitted to grant committee later this quarter.

Other GLAM activities

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We have also obtained other free materials from the Geographic Library, some digitized in on Commons, others made available to WikiProjekt Geographie at German Wikipedia.

There are ongoing talks with Masaryk University in Brno about possible cooperation, including "Students write Wikipedia" activities and release of images. Apart from that, we have been given photos from Moravian Gallery in Brno, and got promised pictures from Central Archives of Surveying and Land Register in Prague.

Promotion of Protected Areas Project

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"Wikipedia is looking for second-best experts on nature"

The campaign promoting Protected Areas project was a result of continuing in partnership with an advertising agency, that has previously worked with us on print designs for 10 years of Wikipedia. The campaing was based on the idea that the animals themselves are the best experts to write about nature, but actually cannot write anything meaningful, so Wikipedia is looking for the second-best people to contribute. The campaign featured a video with wild pigs editing Wikipedia, several prints and audio clips, and a landing page made to look like being written by a wild pig.

The video did not a become a viral hit with only several hundred views, other media saw more success – the prints were picked up by several magazines, and sparked thalk about longer-term partnerships. User:Chmee2 was also invited to talk on a national radio station about the Protected areas project, and audio clips were broadcasted by one more radio station.

Overall, the campaign helped to raise awareness about the project, although it's difficult to directly measure effects of prints. What we know is that the campaign's landing page has seen several thousands of accesses, peaking in September when there was a direct click-through using one of the images on Czech Wikipedia homepage.

In this campaign we have partially paid production costs, total expenses paid from P&O were 11581 CZK. Apart from further spreading of "you can actually edit this" message among the public, the major positive effect was that we got a set of high-quality free media that we can use on other occasions. This is useful to bear in mind when cooperating with various advertising firms – while they are quite familiar with the concept of pro bono work, releasing materials under a free license is usually new for them, and it's worth to negotiate that.

Major events

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User:Chmee2 presents our projects in Havlíčkův Brod
 
WMCZ booth at Autumn Book Fair

Autumn Book Fair Havlíčkův Brod

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In October 2012, four WMCZ volunteers set up a booth at Autumn Book Fair in Havlíčkův Brod. The booth reportedly attracted more visitors than last year, who mostly knew Wikipedia, but were rarely aware that they could edit it. Free handouts (such as Protected Areas Memory Game and partner magazines) were able to pull in people, which could then be provided with information and leftlets. Our "Nature experts" video has shown as a very useful way to attract especially younger audience.

We found out that our Wikimedia Commons leaflets could be more up-to-date – thay state that there are 4M files at Commons, while currently it more than 16M, and they are not particularly clear in explaining how to describe authorship information. Also, for non-English speaking people, English-only category structure in Commons is a problem.

Overall our participation was a success, we handed out 260 magazines and 450 (i.e. all available) memory games. The expenses were 7996 CZK.

Wiki Loves Monuments

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Building of Gymnázium Josefa Kajetána Tyla in Hradec Králové, first prize in Czech Wiki Loves Monuments

Czech part of Wiki Loves Monuments, a major media-gathering and promotion effort, attracted 398 volunteer contributors, who brought in 17131 new pictures, putting the Czech Republic on seventh place among 36 participating countries. As a rough measure of quality, the average file size was 2.6 MB, which was a slightly lower than global average (3.1 MB). Other possible measure of success can be almost 30 per cent coverage of ca. 40000 listed monuments during the first year.

The competition took a lot of work of three very dedicated volunteers, but was deemed worth it, because of large number of received images, as well as raised awareness of contribution possibilities. The Prizes, provided by 5 sponsors, were handed out at the award ceremony that was part of 2012 Wikiconference.

One comment was that sorting out through thousands of entries in three people is quite a lot work, and would benefit from some sort of automation. Nevertheless, the organizers consider the competition a success and would like to repeat it in the coming year.

Total expenses were 79943 CZK, which included fees for conference hall where Wikiconference also took place and domains for the next year. However, most of the expenses were covered by sponsors, so the final toll on P&O grant was only 9088 CZK.

Wikiconference

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2012 Wikiconference

2012 Wikiconference took place on 24th November in National Technical Library in Prague and featured 12 session, including talks about education partnerships, QR code partnership with Prague 10, and Wiki Loves Monuments award ceremony. The venue was paid, but turned out to be a better choice, since the infrastructure in the library was able to better accommodate more than 100 participants of the event, including the Ambassador of the Republic of the Philippines, who came to pick up the prize for one of WLM winners.

The conference was generally agreed to be successful, gauging by reaction of WMCZ members and also on Wikipedia. However, commentators noted minimal presentation of minor WMF projects, and schedule with limited time for discussion.

The expenses were 31756 CZK, including a poster session and a lease of the conference hall (which was filed under WLM in our tracker).

Book Fair Ostrava

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This year's Book Fair in Ostrava was joined with two other fair (Travel and Weddings), which increaded attendance, but also meant that lower proportion of people were actually interested in what we offered. We've fully used our stock of memory games and older Wikimedium magazines. However, the interest was less than we hoped for, and ultimately not worth higher expenses for Ostrava Fair (18750 CZK, more than twice than what we spent for Havlíčkův Brod). Due to recommendation of participants (Limojoe and Packa) and unsatisfactory price-output ratio our attendance on this fair will most probably will not continue next year.

Others

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2012 issue of Wikimedium magazine

Finance

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This part is common for both P&O and Mediagrant, as the two are funded from the same pool of money.


Payment totals for WMCZ consolidated grants, as of 2013-05-08
grant topic tts unpaid paid overpaid paid
change since
last report
Presentation
and
Outreach 		Czech Ambassador Program 9 - 2167.00 CZK - 1319 CZK
GLAM 5 - 5802.00 CZK - 380 CZK
Conferences. Talks. Presentations 12 2984.71 CZK 31944.50 CZK - 13984 CZK
Presentation Equipment 7 - 49299.80 CZK - 0
Printed materials 14 - 96903.00 CZK - 47603.20 CZK
Exhibitions 2010-2011 8 - 65215.00 CZK - 0
Exhibitions 2012 4 - 30659.00 CZK - 21740 CZK
P&O misc 16 462.00 CZK 45455.08 CZK 578.00 CZK 43465 CZK
P&O totals 3446.71 CZK 327445.38 CZK 578.00 CZK 121968.08 CZK
Mediagrant Czech municipalities 90 2119.00 CZK 19295.08 CZK - 10774.50 CZK
Vernacular works 4 - 2000.00 CZK - 0
Protected natural areas 85 1032.00 CZK 15240.50 CZK - 7154.50 CZK
Scientific photography 4 232.00 CZK 270.00 CZK - 150 CZK
Important events 2 - 97.00 CZK - 0
Water bodies 0 - - - 0
Jewish monuments 10 - 5162.50 CZK - 1905.50 CZK
Czech zoos 0 - - - 0
One-time requests / misc 28 820.00 CZK 96443.75 CZK - 7933.50 CZK
MG totals 4203.00 CZK 138508.83 CZK - 27918.50 CZK
Grand total 7649.71 CZK 465954.21 CZK 578.00 CZK 149886.58 CZK
Paid out in total 466532.21 CZK 136277.08 CZK

An up-to-date version of this table is available in WMCZ grant tracker.

Account balance

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In 2010 we received 34260 EUR (868148.40 CZK) from WMF as funding for our consolidated grant programs.

As of 2013-05-08, WMCZ grant account balances are:

account balance ~ in CZK change
since last report
common account CZK 691.66 CZK 691.66 CZK -970.19 CZK
savings account CZK 460401.61 CZK 460401.61 CZK 358962.23 CZK
common account EUR 10 EUR 258.75 CZK -4757.95 CZK
saving account EUR 14.11 EUR 365.09 CZK -488595.17 CZK
total 461717.11 CZK -134791.06 CZK

Conclusions

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Lessons learned

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  • Wiki Loves Monuments is a great thing, but sorting through the entries would benefit from automated processing. It was quite a lot of work for people involved, but at least some of them wants to do it again next year, which emphasizes how satisfying working on such project must be.
  • Viral videos are mostly a myth. It does not hurt to make a funny and interesting video, but it won't probably be a magic bullet.
  • Working with advertising agencies can bring great media, but there's still a lot of things you need to do yourself, to get out the message. Own promotion and partnership with magazines is what made current attempt more successful than previous "Don't keep it to yourself" visuals.
  • Memory game is quite popular (we've fully distributed the first two print runs, totaling 3000 copies), and seems to be an excellent way to get our materials to people.

Impact

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Reach
It seems that Wikipedia is well known source of information in the Czech Republic, so there's not much to do in this regard – pretty much everyone who stopped by WMCZ exhibition booths has already known the encyclopedia. What people don't know as widely are Wikipedia's sister projects, so our materials also emphasize those – especially Commons, which is probably most useful for most people. Efforts like Wiki Loves Monuments also draw attention to it.
Quality
Even though P&O grant is not primarily about increasing quality of Wikimedia projects, some of its activities have the "side-effect" of bringing new quality content. This includes especially academic cooperation programmes (Students Write Wikipedia brings new articles from soon-to-be-qualified contributors, while GLAM acquires rare media), but also Wiki Loves Monuments where having photos of thousands of encyclopedia-worthy subject is an obvious improvement.
Credibility
P&O increases Wikipedia's credibility in various ways. Apart from the route of improving quality, which in turns makes the encyclopedia credible, its credibility is also increased by explaining how exactly editing and quality control processes work. This is part of many P&O programmes: by ambassadors working on Students Write Wikipedia, on exhibitions like Book Fair Havlíčkův Brod both through direct contact and distributed leaflets, and talks supported through P&O. Also, cooperation with academia via GLAM and SWW efforts further show that Wikipedia is to be taken seriously.
Participation
Since awareness of Wikipedia is already pretty high in the Czech Republic, increasing participation (i.e. helping people to edit and contribute media) is the main goal of the most of P&O efforts:
  • Student Write Wikipedia directly guides students into contributing to Wikipedia.
  • Promotion of Protected Areas effort shows people that their contribution to improvement in this specific area is welcome.
  • Inviting people to contribute is the main theme of our exhibition presentation and associated printed materials, as well as various talks.
  • Finally, Wiki Loves Monuments was a major activity that attracted many new contributors.
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