Shared Knowledge/Annual plan 2021
This is the Annual plan of the activities of Shared Knowledge for 2021. It is a page linked to from the Grants:Simple/Applications/Macedonian User Groups/2021.
Programmes
editEducation & Science
editConsidering that at least the first half of 2021, i.e. the second half of the 2020/2021 school year will be non-physical (online), we could not make cooperation with the elementary or the high schools in Macedonia. On the other hand, the universities and the faculties probably will remain with open doors and we can work with the professors and the students. It could consist mentorship and/or workshops with professors and workshops with the students by creating or editing Wikipedia articles intended for teachers and students who are going to apply this knowledge in further creating or improving Wikipedia articles in the schooling process and possible assignment of the grading process. This year in this programme, the sub-projects will be: Wikiexperiments and Wikidata lectures and European Science Photo Competition within the Science division, and Academic personnel trainings alongside Editing contest for students within the Education division.
Science
edit- Wikiexperiments
Having a success of making a great number of videos of experiments in the last year within the Educational Programme that can be used for better schooling and interpretation, we will use this type of activity to achieve even greater number of experiments accessible to the students, teachers, professors, physics and chemistry enthusiasts. These activities are continuation of the project Wikiexperiments that occured in the years 2015 and 2016. Again, these videos will be taken with help of the university professors of physics and chemistry at the Skopje Faculty of Natural Science and Mathematics.
- European Science Photo Competition
The European Science Photo Competition has a goal to promote the European science, as part of the wider and international Wiki Science Competition, towards the average users on the Wikimedian projects. Hence the scientists are working all the time, the contesters can capture a moment of their effort for better ilustration and understanding of how scientific researches are working. This is our reason to hold a science competition with our country for the second time after the 2015 edition of this contest. The uploaded images will highly improve and enrich the related articles and even 'push us' to create the lacking articles if needed.
Education
edit- Academic personnel trainings
In 2021, we want a direct involvement of the university professors, hence they are the ‘driving force’ of teaching and giving a college level knowledge towards the students. By doing this, the professor, with our help, will learn how to edit, create articles, and in the future he can share his wiki experience with colleagues, students and/or other persons. These activities will include training lectures at start with the professors from different faculties monthly or several times depending on their time in a time frame between 45 minutes to 1 hour with each person. Our goal is to recruit five university or faculty professors.
- Wikidata lectures
Lectures about Wikidata will be helpful for many community members, which have limited knowledge about this project of Wikimedia movement. Additionally, with this lecture we plan to attract new editors, as Wikidata is more user-friendly platform than Wikipedia.
- Editing contest for students
The editing contest for students organised in April-May 2020 was highly successful with over 100 created articles, so it is our agenda again. Intended for persons from age 15 to 18, they are able to participate in a monthly editing contest where they can create articles listed for creation. Just as the previous edition, this will be partnered with the user group of GLAM Macedonia.
| SMART objectives
The SMART objectives of the Education programme are the following:
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Community
editThis programme is the finest when it comes to numbers, quantity and quality, and it is the most stacked. The most asticles are created/improved, most participants and new users. So, concidering this, the projects within this programme are kept from last year, with some extra added. This year in this programme, the sub-projects will be: Editing challenges (within this: regular editing challenges, Global Goals Week edit-a-thon, International Dance Day), Community support (Photohunts, Wiki Monuments Photo Competition, Wikisketch Lessons, Wikistands, International Translation Day workshop, Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos) and Expeditions (Wikiexpeditions, Veloexpeditions, Geoexpeditions, Archaeoexpeditions and Astroexpeditions).
Editing challenges
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The editing challenges are to increase the quantity and quality by filling content gaps on the Wikimedia project but also to reach out to specialist groups of people and boost more productive editing by the experienced editors. The scope of the editing challenges in 2021 will remain unchanged like in the previous years of which are included: edit-a-thons, editing contests, editing days, editing weekends, and the newly added week-a-thons.
The number of edit-a-thons will be maintained to four events during the year organized in collaboration with group comprised of mostly highly skilled and interested, motivated individuals who own a high degree of knowledge on a certain topic which is decided in advance in order to cover the lack of the content on articles on chosen topics on Wikipedia.
The planned number of editing contests that will take place during the year will be three, while like every previous year, the Wikimedia CEE Spring in joint collaboration with the other communities from Central and Eastern Europe will be also a possibility for the users to participate. This 'subgenre' is the most productive editing challenge.
The positive evaluation of our highly productive editing days and editing weekends in 2020, especially when the projects were in ‘full throttle’ since the COVID lockout and when the editions tripled and doubled respectively, as zero-budget projects that encourages participation of the community members in writing articles on a pre-selected underrepresented topics during a one day and two day timelapse, respectively, was convincing enough to include these two successful projects again in 2021. Thus for this year we decided to have thirty editing days and weekends each during the year.
Week-a-thons or editing weeks is a edit-a-thon on a seven days period. This is a project that is highly productive when it comes to created and/or improved articles, judging by the last year’s weekly edition.
Community support
editWikimedia depends and it’s built by the solid relation with the community so the outcome to be successful. This year we will continue giving micro grants for Photohunts. Also, providing courses by engaging highly educated and skilled persons through personal sketch lessons and building up the community through frequent gatherings and meet-ups so the community could grow through as well as increased participation in international events and conferences.
Photohunts is a project that is highly productive but is very low cost in terms of money. It’s a project that motivates community members to get financial support for conducting hunts for images taken in some place of event or create their own projects. With our largely broadened offered list as ‘go to place’, the point is about taking images that have encyclopedic value, which is a good opportunity to attract interest not only from the experienced editors but also from the totally new users engaged who participated in the other programmes.
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Wikisketch Lessons as a kind of activity intended to enlarge the knowledge about Wikipedia by providing quick and fast training for working on Wikipedia by creating and/or improving articles, uploading images, doing research on highly skilled and interested individuals who have not yet contributed and are not users on Wikipedia. The participants who have been instructed for editing and working on Wikipedia are carefully chosen primarily from the acquaintances known to have a higher degree of knowledge on certain topics which lack or are scarcely covered with articles on Macedonian Wikipedia or to edit article at topic of their interest. The instructions are given directly and individually with a person in a time span between 30 minutes and hour where the participants are given a sketch of a Wikipedia articles which they follow as a pattern in creating and editing new articles by their own choice with the support of skilled editors who show them editing with the three main tool editors: coded, visual and the translation tool with mandatory embedding image, hyperlink and references. For 2021, we plan to extend and implement Wikisketch lessons throughout the entire year, just like 2020 which had many productive results via online due to COVID restrictions, every month during a week we will conduct fast Wikisketch lessons to individuals having experience and expertise in a field about which Wikipedia lacks content or by their own wish.
Wikistands will be a new type of project similar to Wikisketch lessons but will be in an open area. At designated places we will hold a stand and every interested person can join and edit an article. This will promote Wikipedia significantly just by people looking, getting curious, and holding their attention. Our plan is to hold 4 stand events at various frequent places during late spring/summer/ early autumn. This period is preferred not just because of the mild weather, but because hopefully COVID pandemics will ‘loosen up’ so we can have relaxed mentorship. The goal is to have 30 new Wikipedians out of this project.
International Translation Day workshop will be an event organised for the respect of the international day with the previously mentioned name, that is celebrated on September 30. Hence translation as process is very general and we don’t need specific group of experts in that field, we can invite the active and productive members of the Macedonian Wikipedia and that group will use the WikiTranslate tool in order to achieve the themed event. That way the Macedonian Wiki community will bond even further.
The frequency of community gatherings and meet-ups has sharply decreased in the past years, whereas the Wikipedia Day celebrations remain the only formal events that socialize number of community members becoming a tradition. For that purpose, apart from the Wikipedia Day celebration, we also plan to revive the meet-ups that took place on a regular basis in the past.
Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos is another successful project from 2020 that will be integrated this year. This international initiative, created for inserting images at their respective articles if they are lacking images, was for the first time joined by us Macedonian user group because we saw a great potential and the participants covered more than 1800 articles. To be noted, this is in collaboration with GLAM Macedonia user group.
Expeditions
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The expeditions are great because they provide media such as images/videos at Wikimedia Commons, experience for the participants, enrichment at Wikipedia and better visualisation for Wikipedia readers. With this project many local regions have been visited throughout the years and we are closing the gap between the places itself that were visited and regular readers/visitors at Wikipedia. This year we will reintegrate the Astroexpeditions which were organised in 2015.
Our plans for 2021 encompass having four generic Wikiexpeditions, one Geoexpedition, two Veloexpeditions, one Archaeoexpedition, and one Astroexpedition, totalling to 9 expeditions overall.
The expeditionary projects have had enormous impact on the field research capabilities of our members over the last couple of years and have contributed to the creation of local content from multiple sources that had not been used for editing before as well as high-quality images of different places in Macedonia on Wikimedia Commons.
The local content creation following our expeditionary projects regularly includes editing of highly informative items on Wikidata, so the territory of Macedonia is noticeably among the lightest ones.
| SMART objectives
The SMART objectives of the Community support programme are the following:
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Partnerships
editPartnership are great because we make the local institutions, NGOs, interest groups to be on the spotlight, so everybody can notice their achievements as their pinnacle of effort, whether they were made solely by them or in cooperation with us, or other party.
Cultural heritage
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Cultural heritage is a topic which has always been suitable to provide significant content on Wikimedia projects not only Wikipedia but Commons, Wikibooks, Wikidata and other projects by the partnership collaboration of including and engaging different specialized institutions and organizations, such as the Museum of Tobacco in 2020, working and dealing with matters regarding the broad scope of the Cultural Heritage. Thus this year we are planning to run a project in partnership with the local zoo.
Visiting museums or libraries will make members of Shared Knowledge to go local or regional museums and city libraries outside of Skopje, and with the help of interested locals who can edit from the books, encyclopedia, literature, or other written material that the certain institution has and whom will give them to edit. Our plan is to make two visiting/editing event, and it could happen to visit solely museums, or solely libraries, or combination of the both types of institutions, depending which certain institution will want cooperation with us.
Continuing the subproject like the last years visis at the Museum of tobacco in the city of Prilep, in 2021 we will visit the town of Resen where are located the Memorial House of Tatarchev Family, and the Saray of Resen which nowadays is the House of Culture “Dragi Tozija”, permanent exhibition of the late painter Keraca Visulkova, and a gallery of the works of the Resen Ceramic Colony. Our goal is to photograph, document and digitize thus to provide content on Wikipedia from the permanent exhibitions and collections of the memorial museum, gallery and the exhibition that portray the culture of Resen.
Wiki Loves Monuments is a photographic contest that we intend to organize in 2021, as part of the international Wiki Loves Monuments. In the past years, Shared Knowledge organized many different photographic contests, but this year we would like to organize another edition for WLM with aim to take an images from every object designated as cultural heritage throughout the country. Our community has covered part of the list, but with 1,345 designated objects across the country, these efforts will be insignificant, so contest will be solution for this problem. So that is why we will revive this competition to enlarge our cultural heritage in the Wikipedian projects and to close the gap even further of missing articles of the respective monuments.
QR-pedia
editThe Skopje Zoo QR-pedia project aims to introduce QR-codes for all the species represented in the Skopje Zoo, which would lead to corresponding Wikipedia articles. Previously, this project was made in the autumn of 2014 or the spring of 2015, covering about 50 animals. Considering the weather effects throughout this five year span, many QR plaques got damaged. So again, we will organise the design, assembly and placement of the plates with the QR-codes. We will also coordinate writing and improving the existing articles on Wikipedia for the additional animals brought in the meanwhile. The writing and improving of the articles will be done by consulting the zoo staff, thus ensuring that the articles meet both Wikipedia standards and the zoo staff's professional standards. Each corresponding article needs to have the following: physical characteristics, geographic dispersion, taxobox template, illustrations, precise category. Skopje Zoo currently has about 200 species, so the aim of this project will be to provide articles about all of the species. Hence that the Skopje Zoo has Dino park, we will also cover the exhibited dinosaur species with proper QR codes. This will be a sub project of the Skopje Zoo QR coding.
Exhibitions
editExhibitions are a successful photographic collaboration between us and other Wikimedians (so far with Brazil and Poland) throughout the World and the exhibitions held have motivated us to introduce a separate sub-programme on organizing exhibitions. The concept of the photographic collaboration that we have worked out helps to promote the cultural and natural heritage in the respective countries of the partnered Wikimedia branches through images displayed at exhibitions but it also attracts community members to edit content on topics related to the collaborating country. In this way, the exhibitions can be easily connected to the editing challenges within our general plan. Moreover these exhibitions can also be used to show and connect our work and content on the Macedonian cultural heritage on Wikipedia so far. In 2021 we plan to continue with the photographic collaboration that will result in having one exhibition.
The Wikistreets project will be conducted in partnership with the municipalities and their bodies and agencies of the local self-government. Within this project we plan to make and set up special plates with QR-codes leading to Wikipedia Articles on streets in the cities or towns in Macedonia which are remarkable and have special historic and cultural significance. Note, this project was scheduled in 2020 but due to COVID-19 restrictions we weren’t able to complete, but is in our agenda this year.
| SMART objectives
The SMART objectives of the Partnership sub-programme are the following:
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Metrics
editPriority levels
editThe following table grades the total sub-programmes of the three programmes on a priority scale with high, medium or low priority. The grading is mainly based on the metrics derived from the SMART objectives for each programme.
| Level | Sub-programme |
|---|---|
| High |
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| Medium |
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| Low |
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