Wikimedia Armenia/Reports/2018-04

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2018

February

Establishment of New Wikiclubs

Wikimedia Armenia with the grant received from AGBU Bridge for CSOs program (funded by the European Union) will establish and run five new Wikiclubs in Armenia. The new Wikiclubs will be opened in Ararat, Koghb, Vardenik, Goris and Spitak. The main aim of the program is to help children and adults to be self educated, to create, and share knowledge.

Children and adults in rural communities have poor access to quality, alternative education and knowledge, little opportunities for self development. Due to the establishment of the Wikiclubs, these communities will be involved in creating of free and usable content and will be part of the Wikimedia Movement. The Wikiclubs will help to expand non-formal education and solve certain social problems, such as quality education, employment, and management of free time.

During the program, in the Wikiclubs many contests, national editathons, meetings with other editors will be held. The Wikiclubers will attend Wikicamps, which will be organized by Wikimedia Armenia. After the end of the program, the Wikiclub participants will gain a lot of skills, be active members of Armenian Wikimedia community, feel the joy of volunteering and creating of free content with their own experience․

GLAM program and GLAM forum in Yerevan

In April, Wikimedia Armenian initiated the GLAM program during which Wikimedia Armenia will host a GLAM forum in the framework of celebrations of 2800 anniversary of Yerevan This program was supported by the Yerevan Foundation. The GLAM-Wiki initiative (galleries, libraries, archives, museums with Wikipedia) helps cultural institutions share their resources with the world through high-impact collaboration alongside experienced Wikipedia editors.

It is an unparalleled opportunity for the custodians of our cultural heritage to present their collections to new audiences. The GLAM forum is a part of Wiki Loves Yerevan project, which is aimed at expanding currently available information of Wikimedia projects about Yerevan by creating new articles and editing the existing ones, translating them into several languages. The GLAM forum will bring together GLAM experts and representatives from the Wikimedia Movement and Armenia.

This will be a great venue of learning and exchange, which will empower local GLAM institutions to go online and utilize diverse opportunities of Wikimedia Projects. The GLAM forum will be followed by Wiki Loves Yerevan international edit-a-thon month, also a part of Wiki Loves Yerevan project, during which representatives of various Wikimedia communities will edit articles about Yerevan and topics related to the capital city.

Workshop with GLAM representatives

Wikimedia Armenia initiated a project "Wiki loves Yerevan" funded by Yerevan foundation and aimed creating rich content on Yerevan, capital of Armenia in the framework of Yerevan 2800 anniversary. As Yerevan GLAM institutions hold most of information and resources about Yerevan, WMAM invited representatives of 11 museums for a meeting on April 4 in Wikimedia Armenia office. The aim of the meeting was to introduce the idea of GLAM, Wikipedia and to teach them how to use Wikimedia projects.

Participants learned Wikipedia's key principles and rules, how to edit articles and upload files to Wikimedia Commons. Special reference was made to which files can be uploaded to Commons and which cannot. Copyright issues and other legal aspects were also discussed. The participants got acquainted with the structure of Wikipedia article and Wikipedia tools. Some of the participants uploaded files and edited at the workshop.

At the end of the meeting it was decided to open a working group on Facebook to discuss ongoing questions and handle communication more efficiently.

Those participants who did not attend this meeting, later participated in Saturday workshops and learned everything covered during the April 4 workshop.

Workshop with KASA

On April 4, 2018 Wikimedia Armenia organized a workshop with “Yerevan-Aleppo transit” youth group of «KASA» Fondation Humanitaire Suisse of Yerevan. The workshop was aimed to activate Western Armenian youth living in Yerevan, engage them in Wikimedia project and to support the development and dissemination of Western Armenian Wikipedia.

The participants were introduced to Wikimedia Movement, Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Armenia’s activities and programs. After the introduction part, participants tried to make edits in selected Wikipedia article. This was the first try to engage local Western Armenians, which was not successful enough, as the participants didn't show enough enthusiasm. Now WMAM discussed other ways of engagement of these people with KASA and other organizations working with Diaspora Armenians in Armenia.

"Girls in ICT" international event at Wikimedia Armenia

Wikimedia Armenia is always looking for cooperation opportunities and is positioning itself as an organization open to various partnerships. This is the second year we are cooperating with the Internet Society NGO, which is aimed at developing Internet and its use in Armenia. On April 14 2018, in the frames of "Girls in ICT" international day, Wikimedia Armenia have conducted a workshop for teenage girls, who learned wiki ideology and basic tools for editing in Wikimedia projects. They also created their first wiki articles and understood how they can have their input and influence in the field of information and education.

Community capacity building

Common mistakes in Armenian and Wikipedia

Wikimedia Armenia continuing the capacity building of its editors and volunteers has organized a meeting with a well known linguist, lecturer of Yerevan State Linguistic University after V. Bryusov and Gevorkian Theological Seminary Davit Gyurjinyan. The discussion was arranged around common linguistic mistakes in Armenian Wikipedia. The speaker presented the main mistakes, explained the linguistic rules, after which the participants addressed their questions and dispelled their doubts. WMAM constantly talks to its editors to find out their capacity building needs to organize interventions that will be beneficial for our community.

Wikimedia Conference 2018

Three representatives of Wikimedia Armenia joined the Wikimedia Community in Berlin to participate in the Learning days and WMCON 2018 on April 18-22, 2018.

Many tools, such as Program and event Dashboard, Wikimedia Resource Center, Community Capacity Map, Event planning tool set, Structured Data on Commons and etc presented during the events will be soon applied by WMAM in our daily work.

The strategy session of conference was very helpful in terms of understanding the next steps in the strategy process. Colleagues from all over the world shared their partnership approaches, use of Wikimedia projects for various purposes. WMAM will organize a Learning days and the WMCON brief presentation for its community by the end of May, 2018 to share the learning and discuss the ways we can utilize the new knowledge in our community.

Conference was a great opportunity for networking and establishing new partnerships. Thanks to these connections WMAM will engage in Lexicographical data project on WikiData and hopefully will expand its Western Armenian project to Israel, Palestine, Egypt. Ways of engagement of Armenian community of Iran in Wikimedia projects were discussed with the representative of Iranian Wikimedians’ User group.

Newsletter submissions

This month Wikimedia Armenia had submissions in 2 Wikimedia Newsletters: CEE Newsletter and Education Newsletter. In the CEE Newsletter we have told about the workshop organized at WMAM office for GLAM representatives which was aimed at their engagement in Wikimedia activities. We were happy to share our story about Togh village WikiClub in the Wikimedia Foundation's Education Newsletter.

WikiClubs statistics

	Community population (1)	Active users (2)	Active users index (3)	New users	New users index (4)	Female/male ratio	Bytes NET sum (5)	Bytes index (6)
Arevatsag WikiClub	821	18	2.192%	0	0.000%	56/47	232696	12927.6
Gyumri WikiClub*	121976	5	0.004%	0	0.000%	17/16	127703	25540.6
Ddmashen WikiClub	2806	20	0.713%	2	0.071%	31/23	404171	20208.6
Lernapat WikiClub	1661	35	2.107%	4	0.241%	116/111	2476350	70752.9
Mrgavan WikiClub	1606	5	0.311%	0	0.000%	30/23	371633	74326.6
Charentsavan WikiClub*	20363	0	0.000%	0	0.000%	-	0	0.0
Stepanakert WikiClub*	55309	25	0.045%	9	0.016%	131/49	294432	11777.3
Vanashen WikiClub	2364	14	0.592%	0	0.000%	33/10	307586	21970.4
Togh WikiClub	700	27	3.857%	3	0.429%	38/25	333087	12336.6
Karvachar WikiClub	500	21	4.200%	1	0.200%	41/26	363346	17302.2
Yeghvard WikiGroup	11900	3	0.025%	0	0.000%	18/3	186650	62216.7
NET sum	208106	173	0.083%	19	0.009%		5097654	29466.2

General statistics of the Education program (7)		216					7095782
How many % of the Education program participants are comprised from Wikiclubbers		80.09%					71.84%

1 - Permanent population according to the population census (RA - 2011, NKR -2015)։
2 - Users who has done 1 edit during the month.
3 - Active users/population ratio expressed in %.
4 - New users/population ratio expressed in %.
5 - NET sum bytes added in Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikisource.
6 - NET sum bytes/active users ratio.
7 - Includes also Education program other users.
* - WikiClub established in a city.

Saturday workshops

We have decided to change the approach to our Saturday workshops, thus since April they differed from the previous ones. Wikimedia Armenia aimed at the improvement of Armenian Wikipedia quality decided to encourage the editors to improve articles of different fields in each Saturday workshop organized in WMAM office. For this purpose WMAM has provided sources based on which the editors have improved 59 articles. Those articles were about Nakhichevan residencies, decorative plants and Armenian writers.

7 April, 2018
11 April, 2018
28 April, 2018

	Saturday workshops
	April 7 (Nakhichevan)	April 14 (plants)	April 21 (Armenian writers)	April 28 (Nakhichevan)
participants	14	12	3	21
improved articles	19	21	3	16
created articles	2	8	0	3
edits	24	35	3	34
bytes (net sum)	25183	61051	10046	31371

This month in numbers


1	8054	2127	120	25
articles recorded for the Spoken Wikipedia project	pages digitized for the Digitization project	words pronounced for the Wiktionary project	vital articles improved for the I create a vital article campaign	new editors involved in all projects