Grants talk:Project/Wiki Loves Monuments international team/2018 coordination/Midpoint

Report accepted

Dear Wiki Loves Monuments international team and Effeietsanders,

Thank you for submitting this report. I am accepting it now with the following comments:

• "56 countries participated in the competition through 52 or 53 'national competitions'. Preliminary numbers suggest that some 255,000 images were submitted by some 14,000 contributors, of which 79% registered after the start of the competition." This is amazing!! Congratulations on getting such large scale participation.
• I'm not sure I understand the significance of 79% registering after the start of the competition. Can you say more? Is this an indication of the success of your publicity campaigns... or...?
• Curious if you have any reflections about which of your publicity strategies were most effective. Did it seem worthwhile to go with paid promotion on Facebook and Instagram, for example?
• In your Final Report, can you provide a more thorough retrospective on how things are going with integration into Wikidata?
• Regarding the challenge of the overhead involved in chasing national teams to deliver on time and in the prescribed format, this is something we've heard from other core organizing teams, like the one for Art+Feminism, for example. Have you considered reaching out to see if there are any best practices that might be transferable between your two efforts? It may be that the problems are too context-specific for this to be useful and this is just a passing thought on my part, so no need to do so if it doesn't seem useful.
• Regarding your comment in "Next steps and opportunities," I want to clarify that there is no need to recount actions that are already planned. This space is intended to support grantees in setting up any new opportunities that have arisen over the course of the project that they might want to incorporate. Your response helps me to see ways that I can make that clearer.
• Let's discuss the challenges with regard to the overhead of the grants process further, either by email or in a call. I am looking for ways to cut back on the overhead involved with Project Grants, and it would be useful to know what seems valuable to you and what just seems like unhelpful busy work. The goal is to cut the latter.

At some point, when things feel calm enough for it to be desirable, I would love to debrief with you in person (on a call, that is) about how things went.

Our grants administrator will be in touch about next steps.

Kind regards,

Marti (WMF) (talk) 23:27, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Hi Marti (WMF), and apologies for only seeing this now.

I can answer on a couple of points

• the significance of 79% registering after the start of the competition. With Wiki Loves Monuments we hope to mobilize people who already contribute to Wikimedia projects ; but mainly to interest newcomers into contributing pictures for the first time (and who hopefully will stick around and continue editing − there is an analysis by Erik Zachte from some years ago that showed that WLM had a pretty good “survival rate”). So, yes, we consider we are doing our job well if we have a high proportion of newcomers (formally defined as “people who register their account after the start of the competition), as it seems WLM keeps appealing to new people.
• can you provide a more thorough retrospective on how things are going with integration into Wikidata? We did expand on this in the final report − I hope this provided the information you were looking for.

Hope that helps, Jean-Fred (talk) 09:31, 17 February 2020 (UTC)