Wikimedians of Latvia User Group/2016

This is a report for activities performed by Wikimedians of Latvia User Group in 2016.

Wikipedian meetings

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Meeting Estonian wikipedians in Valga
  • During 2016 6 meetings involving local wikipedians were arranged, biggest of them involved 10 participants.
  • Additionally a meeting with Estonian (neighboring country) wikipedians was arranged in Valga. 7 people from Latvia and 3 from Estonia attended. It was first such meeting and it was discussed what works and what does not in our projects.

Outreach events

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Education program

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  • Course "Information technologies in education" at University of Latvia, one public lecture (September 14), students needed to create two articles as course assignment, taught by Viesturs Vēzis.
  • There are at least two university teachers who work with student assignments in Wikipedia, but we have not been able to contact them.

Community engagement

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Contests
  • CEE Spring 2016 article contest was biggest article contest in our community. We participated for the second time in this international region-wide article contest an it resulted is 272 new articles (72 from proposed topic lists). Our user group was part of common grant and it allowed to give prizes to best contributors who received various valuable books.
  • Europeana Art History Challenge was also a part of CEE Spring contest. We arranged edit-a-thon with Academy of culture, introducing new users to Wikipedia and creating articles about multiple paintings.
  • TED speakers challenge was promoted to the community; Papuass won one of minor prizes from TED.
Microgrants project
  • Before the start of Wiki Loves Monuments we prepared a proposal for microgrants project to fund smaller ideas by community members. Funding was received together with WLM grant. In the autumn one microgrant project (viki-expedition) was successfully completed.

Wiki Loves Monuments

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Wiki Loves Monuments Latvia was organized for the second time. It was done by the same team (Papuass, Voll). We applied for a microgrant from WMF to provide prizes and arrange awards ceremony. During the time of contest we worked with Valsts kultūras pieminekļu aizsardzības inspekcija (Government Cultural Heritage Protection Agency) to promote the contest and included them in jury work.

As a result 47 users uploaded 2180 images and 10 best images advanced to the international round. The awards ceremony was held in National history museum which was a great and affordable location which we will consider similar events in future. Contest managed to get mentioned in 3 important media outlets (2 news sites + radio).

Grants

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Participation in regional and global Wikimedia events

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Media mentions

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Latvian Wikipedia media mentions are collected in a dedicated page. Mostly mentions were about our outreach activities. There was a mention of Wikipedia 15 even though we did not organize any events. There was a drop in number of mentions as we lost our "Vikipēdijas maratons" partner which was a important source for media publications.

Social networks

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  • Twitter has been main means of spreading information about groups activities and receiving some feedback.
  • Facebook account has been used alongside Twitter account and slowly gaining followers.

These social media accounts are promoted during our events.

AffCom Resolutions

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