Wikimedia Armenia/Reports/2019-03

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2019

March

Engagement with the Armenian community in Athens

Over the past few months, the engagement with the diaspora communities and their collaboration in Western Armenian Wikipedia activities gained momentum.

In March a regular communication and support to the Western Armenian wikicommunity in Athens was maintained. In result, a new WikiClub was formed at the Armenian Zavarian School in Kokkino, Athens. The WikiClub members - 6 grade students and their teacher - are already working hard to enrich the Western Armenian Wikisource. They have already digitized “Honorable Beggars” by 19^th century Armenian writer and satirist Hagop Baronian.

Collaboration with INALCO

In March, a collaboration was initiated between the Western Armenian Wikipedia program coordinator and INALCO (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilization, Paris, France). INALCO team members expressed their interest to take part in Western Armenian wiki projects and to form a WikiClub with the students of the Armenian Studies section at INALCO. Moreover, they suggested to organize a Wikipedia training in fall 2019, in Paris, to train new editors.

Community Weekend 1-3 March, 2019

On March 1-3, Wikimedia Armenia organized the regular Community Ediatathon in Tsaghkadzor, with 31 active and experienced Armenian Wikipedia editors. Event participants were the "I create the vital article" campaign participants, who edit their articles from the 1000 vital articles’ list. In total, 66 articles have been created during the event.

Wikimedia Armenia will continue its series of community events, contributing to the enrichment of the Armenian language on Wikimedia projects.

	Community Weekend (March 1-3)
	Number of participants	Wikipedia
participants	31
created/improved articles/entries		66
edits		798
bytes (net sum)		1 073 909

Group photo
WIkimedia Armenia Annual plan discussion with the community

Talk at Indian Women's Train the Trainer program

On March 9, the coordinator of the Karvachar WikiClub - Tamara Grigoryan - had an opportunity to participate in an online discussion organized by Indian women based in Delhi about the non-conventional methods of knowledge expansion by Education Programs. The organizers aimed to hear about the Wikimedia Armenia experience about using Wiki different projects in students’ educational process.

Tamara shared their WikiClub experience of involving wiki projects in the educational process. Among such initiatives is the cooperation with the teachers by involving them to give tasks to edit some definite article on Wikipedia. Another one is the Wikisource which is used as a platform of reading books and the Wikctionary as a way to study new words.

The participants of the meeting were interested in WikiCamps as a project. They were also impressed with the fact that the WikiClubs are open every day and the students go there to edit every day. The participants were eager to learn more details on Wikimedia Armenia's experience in involving school teachers in Wikimedia Movement.

Medical WLS

On March 7-10 Wikimedia Armenia organized Wiki Loves Science event with the experienced editors from “I create an important medical article” campaign. On the base of the last discussions with the community we have scheduled two capacity building trainings. Very often, experienced editors are not familiar with different wiki tools, discussions, tracking others' activities and etc. The scheduled capacity building trainings had the goal to encourage those users to participate in on wiki discussions, as well as use advanced tools in editing process. We also discussed with the Medical council members the ways we can involve more members and make the work more efficient.

	Medical WLS (March 7-10)
	Number of participants	Wikipedia
participants	27
created/improved articles/entries		21/63
edits		-

Armenian State Pedagogical University

On March 13^th, Wikimedia Armenia hosted 8^th grade students of ASPU Basic School. Staff members Davit Sargsyan and Stepanyan Azniv presented to them the Wikimedia Movement, Wikimedia affiliates, Wikipedia, Wikisource and other Wikimedia projects. They also talked about the activities and projects of Wikimedia Armenia. The students asked questions about voluntary work, creation of open knowledge, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Armenia. 22 students and 2 teachers took part in the event.

Mandatory internship at Wikimedia Armenia

As a result of the close cooperation between Wikimedia Armenia and Yerevan Brusov State University of Languages and Social Sciences, 35 students of the Faculty of Translation and Intercultural Communication and the Faculty of Russian and Foreign Languages and International Communications had a mandatory internship at Wikimedia Armenia translating a number of vital articles for Armenian Wikipedia. The students were first introduced our organization and Wikimedia Movement, how the Wikimedia projects work. For making the teaching process more effective the students were divided into groups of 10-15 which was followed by a number of workshops during which WMAM staff taught the students the editing tools.

The condition of the mandatory internship assigned by the University for each student was translating 30 pages information during 40 days. The students successfully completed their assignments on time and after checking the quality of the translations they were given marks by WMAM Education Program Coordinator.

At the end of the internship WMAM created a survey for the students to evaluate their internship at our organization. The survey showed that the students were mostly happy about their internship and marks. Some of them expressed willingness to continue translating articles for Armenian Wikipedia. WMAM is going to give a feedback to the University on the students’ internship and performance. We will also continue our collaboration with the University to include the wikiediting in other educational processes of the University.

Executive Directors Meeting and the Wikimedia Summit 2019

WMAM Executive Director participated in Wikimedia Affiliates Executive Directors meeting in Berlin prior the Wikimedia Summit on March 27-28, 2019. Representatives shared programmatic and organizational updates from their chapters, brainstormed on the Movement Strategy process, discussed the WMF Mid-Term planning process. WMF CEO and Executive Director Katherine Maher, Chief Operating officer Janeen Uzzel, Chief of Community engagement Valerie D’Costa, Program Officer (APG) Delphine Menard joined the EDs to discuss further ways of work of Affiliates and the WMF.

This year Wikimedia Conference was converted to Wikimedia Summit and fully devoted to Wikimedia Movement Strategy process. President and Executive Director of Wikimedia Armenia participated in the Summit on March 29-31, 2019. The Executive Director Gayane Vardanyan is a member of Movement Strategy Revenue Streams working group and during the whole Summit she was engaged in group discussions involving representatives of Wikimedia Affiliates aimed at finalization of scoping questions of the field. Gayane also shared Movement Strategy Development experience with more than 60 representatives of the Wikimedia Movement during the Monthly Activity Call asking the participants to actively contribute to the Strategy process.

During the Summit, WMAM representatives participated in various thematic and regional Metups such as CEE regional meetup.

Teachers’ Wikiseminar

On March 25-30 Wikimedia Armenia organized a seminar for teachers of different villages and cities of Armenia (51 participants out of which 36 were newbies) in Tsakhkadzor. This seminar was distinguished by a number of participants from Tavush Province. Which is a result of a memorandum signed between Wikimedia Armenia and the Governor of Tavush Province according to which both parties will open WikiClubs in the schools of the region. As a start point Wikimedia Armenia decided to involve mainly teachers from this region in the upcoming seminar.

During the event besides teaching the editing tools, and the policies of Armenian Wikipedia, the participants were introduced Wikimedia Armenia, its projects and Wikimedia Movement in general, as well as the work of the WikiClubs. The Mrgavan and Karvajar WikiClubs coordinators who were also present at the seminar as mentors, introduced the work done at the WikiClubs, events organized and the impact of the WikiClubs on students. The participants were impressed by the amount of work done by the coordinators to support the self-development of the students.

	Teachers' Wikiseminar (March 25 -30)
	Number of participants	Wikipedia
participants	51
created/improved articles/entries		196/41
edits		1300
bytes (net sum)		2 200 000

Newsletters

In March we had two submissions in WMF Education Newsletter. In "Edit-a-thons give us opportunity to distract from common interests" The club members write articles about New Year" article, Karvajar and Lernapat WikiClub coordinators tell about the edit-a-thon organized in their WikiClubs on New Year's Eve. The second article - WikiClub as a non-formal educational centre in rural communities - Tamara Grigoryan, the coordinator of Karvajar WikiClub, tells how the WikiClubs support the students' self education in the villages and cities of Armenia.

WikiClubs Statistics

New participants, March
Active participants, March

	Community population	Active users	New users	male/female ratio	Edits on Wikipedia and Wiktionary	Proofread pages in Wikisource	Uploaded files	Average daily views of created and improved pages
Alaverdi WikiClub	13100	31	1	45/21	587	n/a	4	2467
Arevatsag WikiClub	821	39	1	70/53	719	n/a	0	2129
Gyumri WikiClub (KASA)	121976				14	n/a	0	359
Goris WikiClub	20300	20	4	44/10	706	n/a	0	4400
Ddmashen WikiClub	2806	36	5	42/35	1691	n/a	0	6665
Lernapat WikiClub	1661	44	6	132/145	1727	n/a	15	6268
Koghb WikiClub	4530	17	3	45/21	476	n/a	0	547
Hatsik WikiClub	1044	15	2	22/13	642	n/a	0	2801
Mrgavan WikiClub	1606			30/28	1000	n/a	7	3521
Spitak WikiClub	13100	47	8	45/38	301	n/a	1	499
Stepanakert WikiClub	55309			165/58	124	n/a	1	1013
Vanashen WikiClub	2364	20	0	38/10	1248	n/a	0	1692
Vardenik WikiClub	9880	31	1	42/21	1065	n/a	0	2572
Togh WikiClub	700	20	0	45/29	29	n/a	0	166
Karvachar WikiClub	500	36	1	51/46	162	n/a	0	416
NET sum	249697	356	32		10491	0	28	35515

Saturday workshops

Every Saturday Wikimedia Armenia organizes open workshops-edit-a-thons at the WMAM office where new editors are taught how to edit different wiki projects. Anyone interested in wiki projects, Wikipedia, wiki editing and needed assistance, as well as wiki editors, who want to edit in pleasant atmosphere participate in these workshops-edit-a-thons.

	Saturday workshops
	March 2	March 9	March 16	March 23	March 30
participants	8	6	8	7	7
created/improved articles	0/4	1/2	1	11/26	1/1
edits	4	10	6	110	3
bytes (net sum)	27200	13900	23481	99900	18200

2 March 2019
9 March 2019
16 March 2019
30 March 2019

This month in numbers


0	7461	3168	250	40	306
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	I create a medical article campaign