Grants talk:PEG/WM BE/Wiki Loves Art 2016/Report/Interim3

Hi Romaine. Thank you for this interim report. Congrats on a successful project thus far! The number of participating institutions, photos uploaded, participants, and media attention is very impressive. It sounds like the main activities remaining are the closing event for institutions and working on adding images to Wikipedia and items to Wikidata. We look forward to hearing about this in the final report. We understand it is hard to engage the photographers in writing or improving articles. Can you target a different group (art historians, art history majors, etc.) through a writing contest?

We understand the primary goal was to use the contest as a means to develop partnerships with museums. Your assessment that good relationships have been established is very encouraging. Do you already have a sense at this early stage if you will be developing future activities with any of these institutions?

Other primary goal was to engage more volunteers in offline activities and you are hopeful you will be able to keep in touch with many of the participants. However, you also indicate that the negative image of the Dutch Wikipedia has had a more serious impact than you expected. This is frustrating I'm sure and I wonder what you think WMBE can do, if anything to help improve the situation.

Lastly, the brochures look great! I just printed them out for my own reference :) I know the design and translation in three languages is no easy feat! Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 01:42, 21 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi Alex Wang (WMF), Thank you for your message. To answer your questions:

I do not think we are (yet?) in the position to reach out to various target groups, as I do not think pulling those would help getting forward. Doing a big project like Wiki Loves Art takes a huge time investment, and gives little room for other activities. In general I think our best strategy is twofold, one is to keep the existing contacts with interested people at GLAMs active (keeping the fire hot) and second is to go to studydays, workshops and local conferences to show we exist and are open for those who are interested and willing to work with Wikimedia. This combined with receiving requests to talk, meet and collaborate with interested GLAMs. With Wiki Loves Art, the initiative was mainly at our side, in the next period the initiative is at their side and we must think how we get a durable collaboration.

Concerning future activities, we are already talking with some of the institutions. Our goal is to develop next year with each of the institutions a partnership, but this is not always that easy, because of the content that is not always suitable. Collaborations can reach from edit-a-thons to content donations, so I think we have enough options to continue with each of them.

Concerning the negative image, this line originates from our former treasurer and we have a talk about the budget for WMBE 2016 S1 what I gave a background situation on. The issue exists, but the negative impact is to my opinion less than my former colleague thought. I am not sure if I will keep these lines in the final report, but for the moment I took over the basis from the second and first interim report as a start for this project. But concerning our relationship with Wikipedia communities, I think this has to grow. I do see chapters in other countries with board members/staff from outside the Wikimedia movement, and I am sure there are good reasons for, but I think it has as side effect the local community does not feel recognised and looses a bit of touch with the chapter. In our chapter all positions are filled with people from the communities, but our chapter was only found by a few members of the community (and not the whole community), so it also needs time to grow there in familiarity. We asked the participants if we could stay in touch with them with our newsletter, and this resulted in a large grow of people who will stay informed, something we need to be conscious of to maintain.

I am happy you like our brochures. I remember that you or your colleague from the grants team in the proposal phase of the grant thought that everything goes digital these days and that printing was less needed. Seeing how the impact of it was in the past 18 months I am even stronger that the just digital thought is not right. It is just not possible to say that there is a brochure somewhere online, that does not work. And being able to give something physical to people when they meet is a little present, and something they can become fascinated by later on, as well being passed to other colleagues. And past Friday we had a studyday for GLAMs, in what one of the speakers is one of the examples in the brochures, something really connects well together towards our public.

I am also happy that you recognise the translations are no easy feat. I like to thank the volunteers that helped but especially also the staff of other chapters and other organisations that helped us and without them it was not possible to have these brochures with sufficient quality. However we have to say that we are still disappointed regarding your decision to cut out support for translations in the WMBE 2017 grant request, something my colleagues definitely want me to mention. We think it is sad that recognition of the complexity and difficulty does not lead to recognition that it should be supported. Romaine (talk) 07:41, 21 December 2016 (UTC)