Grants talk:Project/Sarmad Yaseen/Initialization project for Iraq user group/Final
Note regarding underspend
editHello Sarmad Yaseen, Just updating on the reported unused grant funds of US$1990 here:
- US$700 fully funded Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 Rapid grant
- US$1,290 was returned and WMF's finance team confirmed receipt on 29 October 2018
Thank you! -- JTud (WMF), Grants Administrator (talk) 20:39, 30 October 2018 (UTC)
Welcome dear and sorry for the late response -- (talk)
Report accepted
editHello Sarmad Yaseen and Ravan,
Thank you for submitting this Final Report. I am accepting it now with apologies for the delay.
It sounds like you faced a lot of challenges in carrying out the plans you originally envisioned for this project, both because of instability in the country of Iraq, and because of cultural resistance to Wikipedia among the university professors you met with. I can imagine this was discouraging at some points, and so I just want to give you our hearty thank you for all your efforts to experiment and try out new ways of promoting free and open source education in Iraq. I appreciate your courage and commitment to giving it a try!
I am glad to hear that the Wiki Loves Monument portion of the work was successful, and that you focused on continuing with that project. Can I ask you to provide a link in the Project Resources section of the report to the 282 photos and the 3 local winners that you referenced? I would like the outputs of the project to be easily discoverable for anyone interested in viewing the results. If there are any other landing pages, brochures, social media posts, category pages or other resources created for this project, please link them in that section, too.
In regard to your efforts to build partnerships in the education space, you said that "70% of [instructors] are above 50 years old & they strongly believe that Wikipedia is not a reliable source & they avoid using it academically." As I imagine you are aware, this is a common problem in many parts of the world. There are different ways that Wikimedians have discovered to address this problem, and perhaps it would be of interest to you to explore in a future project how to build more trust among instructors that it is worth the effort to invest in Wikipedia. For example, this proposal completed by OCLC focused entirely on teaching public librarians who were skeptical about Wikipedia about why it is worth their attention. The Wikipedia Education Program staff at the Wikimedia Foundation have a lot of knowledge about this process, and they offer individual consultations to help Wikimedians think through strategies. You can request consultations with that team here:
Thank you for reporting transparently about what did and didn't work in this project, and being willing to keep experimenting with what was successful.
Warm regards,