5th Waray Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

The Municipal Government of Guiuan and Sinirangan Bisaya Wikimedia Community (SBWC) conducted an edit-a-thon, an event in which people, come together in a place to collaboratively contribute to online projects such as but not limited to Waray Wikipedia at Guiuan, Eastern Samar, Philippines. It was the 5th Waray Wikipedia Edit-a-thon that was held at Casa Nicolas, San Francisco Street, Guiuan on February 24, 2016 from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. This edit-a-thon was funded by generous donors. Two Wikimedia volunteers from Manila served as resource speakers and assisted in the conduct of the wiki editing activity. The Municipality of Guiuan provided the food and venue and mobilized participants of the event.

Activities and lessons learned

Activities

Pre-event preparations

Michael Ong, the coordinator of the SBWC, initiated the search for possible venues for an edit-a-thin at Guiuan, Eastern Samar. He contacted the Municipal Government of Guiuan and after communicating with them for a possible edit-a-thon in Guiuan, the date was set and preparations began immediately.

Actual events

In the morning before the actual event, Jojit Ballesteros and Bel Ballesteros went to Tacloban City and were welcomed by Michael Ong. In the afternoon, they boarded a van going to Guiuan, Eastern Samar and stayed at hotel near the venue of the edit-a-thon.

On morning of February 24, 2016, the project team went straight to the Casa Nicolas, the venue of the event.

Here are the highlights of the event:

9:00 am - Participants started to arrive and register

9:30 am - Bel Ballesteros gave her lecture about the basics of Wikipedia editing and introduced other Wikimedia online projects namely Wikimedia Commons, Waray Wiktionary and Wikivoyage.

10:30 am - Jojit Ballesteros gave a demonstration on how to edit Wikipedia and other wiki projects of Wikimedia. In between Jojit's lecture, Michael Ong answered some of the questions from the audience. (Note: Snacks were served in between Jojit's demonstration.)

12:00 pm - Lunch break

1:00 pm - Edit-a-thon started.

(Note: Snacks were served in between the edit-a-thons and it was a working break. The whole project team assisted and guided participants during the edit-a-thon.)

4:30 pm - Edit-a-thon ended and Jojit began tallying the contributions of the participants

4:55 pm - Jojit announced the top group of editors.

The top group who got the most number of characters contributed won prizes and they composed of employees of Tourism Board of Guiuan. The prizes given were mugs with the event details, Wikipedia logo and Municipality of Guiuan logo printed on it. Key chains and certificates of attendance were given to all participants as tokens.

5:15 pm - Event ended

List of participants of the 4th Waray Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

There are total of forty-three (43) attendees and only ten (10) people created an account. Just like with the 1st, 3rd and 4th Waray edit-a-thons, participants were divided into groups. Only one member of the group created an account and each member of the group contributed to the article that they were editing using that particular account. There were ten groups and it was a group effort because not all participants brought a laptop or other devices. All of them are newbies or people who just created an account.

Group no.	Username	Contributions in characters	Articles added and improved^[1]	Projects contributed^[2]	Notes
1	Guiuan tourism	8,657	42	en.wikivoyage, commons, war.wp	This participant continued editing after the cut-off but within the event. Including these additional edits, his total contributions is 9,558.
2	Jovitaholanda	1,310	9	incubator, commons, en.wp	This participant continued editing after the cut-off but within the event. Including these additional edits, his total contributions is 1,779.
3	Sheila143	1,268	10	incubator
4	ICS Light	3,692	33	incubator, war.wp
5	Jake Morante	681	12	war.wp	This participant continued editing after the cut-off but within the event. Including these additional edits, his total contributions is 850.
6	Brian G. Añano	1,893	5	incubator	This user was able to save his contributions after the 4:30 pm cut-off due to connectivity problems and organising team allowed this and his contributions after the cut-off were counted. Furthermore, he made contributions to the English Wikipedia nearly a month after the edit-a-thon.
7	Taytay integrated	28	2	incubator
8	Jevens tence	608	1	en.wikivoyage
9	Sulangannhs	743	3	incubator, war.wp	This participant continued editing after the cut-off but within the event. Including these additional edits, his total contributions is 787.
10	LGU-Guiuan	370	10	war.wp

Notes

^{^} Essentially the total edit count. The project team did not document the articles contributed or improved.
^{^} Legend: en.wp = English Wikipedia; incubator = Waray Wiktionary; commons = Wikimedia Commons; en.wikivoyage = English Wikivoyage

Lessons learned

What worked well?

Setting up a dialogue first to partners, in this case the Municipality of Guiuan, Eastern Samar, helped establish this collaboration. The series of communications before the event greatly helped in gaining ideas and information on how to conduct this event.
The edit-a-thon was well attended because the partner organization, the Municipality of Guiuan, Northern Samar, was interested in the activity. They were able to invite students and teachers from different schools as well as government employees. Aside from this, due to interested participants, the edit-a-thon was able to achieve its goal by producing more than 19,000 characters of content. This event has been the most attended Waray Wikipedia Edit-a-thon so far with forty-three (43) attendees.
The series of Waray edit-a-thons and fora helped in establishing partnership with the Municipality of Guiuan.
It was good to have helpful and cooperative partners that provided necessary facilities and support. Incidentally, the Municipality of Guiuan invited the participants and provided venue.
There were enough Internet connections provided by the project team.
There is at least one participant who continued to edit Wikipedia after the event.

What didn't work?

Just like with the Calbayog Edit-a-thon, Catbalogan Edit-a-thon and Catarman Edit-a-thon not all participants brought a laptop or similar gadgets that resulted to groupings of participants. The project team hoped that the event should have been one-to-one where all attendees participated in the actual editing of Wikimedia online projects.
There were a number of participants that arrived on the afternoon and the project team members had to explain to them quickly about Wikipedia before they can join a team for the edit-a-thon.
The venue did not have Internet connection.

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

The main goal of this project is to increase contributions to the Waray Wikipedia and Waray Wiktionary (currently in Incubator), which includes creating and editing articles. Aside from writing articles in Waray Wikimedia projects, the participants may also add content to other Wikimedia projects such as, but not limited to, uploading pictures to Wikimedia Commons and enhancing Waray-related articles in other language versions of Wikipedia. Participants were able to contribute to the Waray Wikipedia, the Waray Wiktionary in Incubator, and the Guiuan entry in Wikivoyage among others.

The first goal is to have at least fifteen (15) participants attending the event. This was achieved because there were forty-three (43) persons who attended the event. The most attended Waray Wikipedia edit-a-thon so far. Only ten (10) people actually created accounts but all of them participated in the edit-a-thon through team effort. The second goal is to have at least 18,000 characters contributed in the Wikimedia online projects. This was achieved because participants contributed a total of 19,250 characters.

To determine the number of characters contributed: Jojit Ballesteros, the facilitator of the event, took note of the usernames used by the participating groups. After the actual edit-a-thon, he counted all the characters contributed by each group through the features of MediaWiki, the software behind Wikimedia online projects. He made use of the "global edit summary" and the "recent changes" features of each project that the participants have been editing.

Progress towards targets and goals

Project metrics

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
There should be 18,000 characters or equivalent to approximately 12 pages of printed text added in the Waray Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.	There are 19,250 characters added within the cut-off and additional 1,583 characters after the cut-off but within the event for a total of 20,833 characters contributed in various Wikimedia projects.	The participants were actively participating in the edit-a-thon. They were encouraged to promote their place and greatly contributed to entry of Guiuan in English Wikivoyage.
There should be at least 15 participants attended the event.	Forty-three (43) participants attended the event excluding the project team.	The Municipality of Guiuan helped in bringing in participants for the edit-a-thon.

Global Metrics

For more information, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. # of active editors involved	0	All the participants were first time to be familiar with the wiki editing process. There were two active Wikipedians present during the event but they are part of the organizing team.
2. # of new editors	10	Only ten (10) people registered an account because not all participants brought laptops or other similar gadgets. Thus, it became a group effort.
3. # of individuals involved	43	This excludes the project team. Including them will increase the number of individual involved to 46.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	6	Two (2) users uploaded pictures in Wikimedia Commons.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	127	This figure is essentially the total edit count. The project did not document the number articles added or improved.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	approximately 20,833 bytes	This was tallied during the event. This does not include deleted content because the organizing team did not tallied it during the event.

Impact

In this edit-a-thon, eighteen (18) words were added in the Waray Wiktionary, which is currently hosted in Incubator. A Wikimedia online project currently in Incubator means that the project is in the test phase and does not yet have its own subdomain unlike the Tagalog Wiktionary, which has its own subdomain (i.e. http://tl.wikitionary.org). This may seem not significant contributions and the edit-a-thon provided a very minimal impact on taking the Waray Wiktionary out of the Incubator but this edit-a-thon helped in adding Waray words in the Waray Wiktionary as it spoken in other variants, like the Guiuan Waray. The Waray Wikipedia currently leans towards the variant spoken in Tacloban and the learning from this edit-a-thon will help on balancing the words used in Waray Wikipedia and Waray Wiktionary.

The most significant contribution of this edit-a-thon is the expansion of the Guiuan Wikivoyage article. Participants collaboratively contributed information about Guiuan in the English Wikivoyage. At the start of the edit-a-thon, the Guiuan Wikivoyage entry was merely 575 bytes and basically an outline only. After the edit-a-thon, the entry was expanded to 7,837 bytes full of information. They were encouraged to edit the entry of their place because they are the ones who know Guiuan more than anyone else. This is the reason why participants contributed greatly in the Wikivoyage entry of Guiuan.

Aside from Wiktionary and Wikivoyage, participants also contributed to the English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Counting 127 edits and 19,250 characters contributed, the total is below the average contributions for an edit-a-thon. According the Evaluation Report on Edit-a-thons by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2013, the average contributions of all participants in an edit-a-thon is almost 24,000 characters. Considering that expenses were shouldered by donors outside the Wikimedia movement, the content provided by the attendees are valuable and significant to the online projects of Wikimedia even if the outcome is below average.