Art+Feminism User Group/Reporting/MidpointReport2017-2018

Welcome to the midpoint report for the Art+Feminism 2017-2018 SAPG grant.

Summary

For it’s fifth-annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Art+Feminism supported over 4,000 people at more than 275 events around the world. This global effort created or improved nearly 22,000 articles on Wikipedia, almost four times the output of the 2017 events. This year also saw significant work towards better understanding our impact via Wikidata and efforts to revitalize our training materials to make them accessible to different types of learners, as well as non-English language speakers.

Methods and activities

Below you will find a list of our work so far, organized by the sections we created during our grant proposal.

Online Community

One of the ways we sustain our growth and lay a foundation for expanding awareness of our campaign and the gender gap on Wikipedia is through our social media platforms. To date, our strongest institutional partnerships have been made with museums, libraries and art galleries. We recognize that in a social media driven climate, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to reach marginalized groups and individuals that are beyond the reach of our institutional partners. This past year, our social platforms have doubled with a combined 200% increase in community across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. We attribute this to a communications strategy driven by continuity and intentional messaging specific to information activism, women's rights, 101 editing tips for new editors, and short but concentrated videos about organizing with A+F.

We started an Instagram page which is now home to 1K+ followers and is an added touchpoint for partnership with social justice organizations, new editors, and activist communities. This Instagram page now exists in addition to our Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.

This year, we implemented a video series on Facebook Live called Office Hours, seven (7) 30 minute live videos created to help organizers and new editors understand the steps to planning and hosting Art+Feminism edit-a-thons, using the Dashboard, and finding funding for events. We presented the series in Spanish and English with our Regional Ambassador for Latin America, Melissa Tamani, leading the Spanish tutorials and our Regional Ambassador for West Africa, Mohammad Abdulai Sadat, leading the tutorials for organizers and editors in West Africa. The series played a vital role in bridging some of the knowledge gaps we observed last year during the fourth cycle of our campaign. The response from our community was extremely positive with organizers noting that they found the videos to be helpful and easily accessible. The total of seven videos in the series were viewed over 2,000 times.

Slack for Organizers: Our use of Slack has continued to be successful. The private channel for organizers was created to offer them shared community and to make troubleshooting more efficient by enabling the community to answers each other's questions and to find the answers to questions previously asked in the channel via search box. We breakdown the channels in the private group in the following ways:

#general channel - troubleshoot on wiki issues with more experienced editors

#firebrigade channel - triage articles put up for deletion and assist editors with harassment (that sometimes originates within those AfD discussions) on an as needed basis during our campaign cycle

#dashboard channel -work through dashboard issues with Sage Ross of Wiki EDU

We have also used a private channel for Regional Ambassadors so they can share notes and get quick answers to their more time sensitive questions.

Updated Training Materials

One of our goals for the 2017-2018 grant cycle was to revamp our training materials to make them more accessible and easily translatable into multiple languages. We reviewed 18 applications and ultimately hired Susana Sevilla Aho to update our training materials. So far, we've updated all of our training videos into easily customizable Google Slides and PDFs which you can find here. We have also worked with one of our Regional Organizers, Melissa Tamani, to translate our slides into Spanish. In the the second half of of our grant, we continue the process of replacing all of our training materials in English and Spanish on our website.

Dashboard update

We found that our second year of using the Dashboard ran smoother than the first year. This was in part due to the organizational capacity built last year (training materials, repeat organizers with experience, etc), and also due to an extensive set of improvements that Sage Ross and Maudite completed. Several key improvements included: the ability to request new accounts via the dashboard interface and automatically add them to that program; both program specific queues and one centralized queue where we could approve accounts that were requested; and a much more sophisticated and publicly accessible alerts queue that was specific to our campaign.

ACTRIAL

We found out about ACTRIAL only a few weeks before the events began. This threw some hiccups in our process, largely because it required some revisions to our training materials, and added one more piece of information/uncertainty we had to communicate to our organizers. Our general advice for the last few years has been to encourage new editors to improve pages, rather than create them, but we find that some people always come with a specific mission. For those people, an experienced editor just had to move the draft into article space.

That said, we found it to be less than ideal for morale. Our organizers and participants took it as a proxy vote-of-no-confidence in outreach work / our work. We understand that is not what was intended, but that was how it came across to many.

Further outreach

We've leveraged the expansion of our digital community to distribute 2018 calls for participation.

• Much of our outreach this year built on our previous year's work
• This year, however, we focused our outreach on Latin America and Africa, leveraging the growing communities built by our Regional Ambassadors.

March 2018 Edit-a-thons (The Event!)

Programs and Events Goals: goals to expand the 2018 Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon by:

• Continue to organize the international Art+Feminism Editathons
• Continue to build community as we train new editors, facilitators, and event organizers, and to support their increasing independence
• Continue to improve organizational capacity
• Continue to increase participant diversity

Work completed so far

• Quick Guides
  • We made quick guides to organizing and editing in Spanish and English
• Train the Trainers: Facebook Live and JoinMe
  • This year, we decided to move most of our trainings to Facebook Live because we experienced a number of issues with the software we were using previously, JoinMe, and because it would allow for users to view our trainings after they took place. Overall, the Facebook live events were far more successful. Our lowest viewership statistic was 97 views and our highest was 502 views. We used this platform for wiki training, Dashboard training, grant workshops and office hours
    • You can find the Facebook Live trainings in both Spanish and English, here
    • You can find our JoinMe even here
• MoMA Event
  • Panel discussion moderated by design researcher and artist Caroline Sinders, featuring Sydette Harry, Editor, Mozilla Foundation, and Editor-at-Large, Coral Project; Sarah Jaffe, Reporting Fellow, the Nation Institute, and author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt; and Salome Asega, artist
  • There were two very popular break-out sessions in the afternoon, lead by McKensie Mack and Shelly Eversly that touched on implicit bias and teaching with Wikipedia (65% of MoMA's survey respondents claimed they attended one or both of the breakout sessions).
  • This year we also implemented two Gallery Sessions with MoMA educator, Kerry Downey throughout the day, both of which had a large attendance.
  • Dashboard page: 146 registered attendees, and we estimate 200 folks came through the event overall. 20 Articles/drafts created. 172 Articles improved. 24 Commons uploads. Although our participation was lower, double the number of articles were created from last years event.

Midpoint outcomes

Our stated metrics goals for 2018 were made based on predictions from our growth models.

Current growth models for Art+Feminism events, participants, and articles created, based off of 4 years of data. Year 0 is 2014.

Global Metrics

• 4500 participants
• 1200 newly registered users
• 10,000 content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects.

Project Metrics

• 275 Events
• Greater than 50 percent repeat organizers

Preliminary Outcomes

Overall we are on track to meet or exceed all of our metrics predictions with about 275 events, 3500 participants, and 40,000 content pages created or improved across all Wikimedia projects (see note re: Paris below). As collected on our Dashboard campaign and the two Women In Red meetups (March, April), as of May 10th, we have:

• 271 Events on Dashboard + 2 WiR meetups
• 3470 Editors + 77 WiR
• 18.3K Articles Edited + 134 WiR
• 3.04K Articles Created + 376 WiR
• 2.39K Commons uploads + 115 WiR

Additionally, as part of our Wikidata efforts (see below) we edited 16,000 Wikidata items, as logged on Dashboard and on Theredproject's wikidata batch log. We expect this work to continue through the remainder of the grant cycle.

Paris, our largest node was not able to organize an event this year. Last year they had about 1000 people attend over a two day period. Most of these people came for a longtable conversation, and a more modest ~50 people attended with the intent of editing. Adjusted for this loss of 1000 participants, our metrics outcomes are tracking with our predictions.

We will calculate the newly registered users, and the percentage of repeat organizers at the time of the final report, so as to avoid duplicating labor.

Less than 1% of all articles were Deleted

For the first time we can observe the total number and relative percentage of deleted articles, because the dashboard tracked all deletions in a systematic way. You can see from our Dashboard metrics page that we created a little over 3000 articles, plus WiR created an additional 376, which were tracked on their meetup pages. You can see on the alerts page and our spreadsheet analysis that four months into the campaign about 69 articles were flagged for deletion via Speedy, Prod, or AfD. Of those 23 were actually deleted:

• 8 speedy deleted for COPYVIO
• 8 deleted at AfD (the other 10 that went to AfD were kept)
• 2 deleted with expired PRODs
• 5 deleted speedy A7

Additionally, 3 were deleted on procedural grounds which we are not including in this list. So 23/3400 = 0.67%. Less than one percent of all new articles were deleted. We expect that additional articles will be flagged during the second half of the grant period, and will report on that for the final report. That is quite different from the 80% deletion rate that is often discussed as the percentage of new articles deleted in NPP. We shared this information in the Event Coordinator Proposal discussion, which we can confirm resulted in at least one neutral editor supporting the proposal (and by proxy, supporting the work that organizers do.)

Wikidata Work

Art+Feminism is working on using Wikidata to link a collection of items from which to generate task lists. These lists will be used to improve Wikipedia articles as part of our outreach efforts. They will also be used to improve the Wikidata items themselves. In this regard, we are following the models of Women In Red and Black Lunch Table, though we have a specific set of challenges to make this work. This started out as something that appeared to be a modest task, but as we discovered holes in the data on Wikidata, it became a bigger and bigger task, for which we had to build a fairly substantial set of tools, and improve thousands of wikidata items. We have written a full Wikidata Work Plan, which is summarized below:

Over the past 4 years Art+Feminism participants have created/edited over 10,000 articles, and we have created/edited over 22,000 more this March/April. These articles include artists, artworks, writers, filmmakers and other articles that clearly fall in the rubric of Art+Feminism, as well as a smaller subset of articles that fall outside that rubric: doctors, scientists, politicians, etc; we welcome people at our events to edit all articles about women and gender but we seek to narrow our focus for the items/articles we seek to improve long term. In order to do so, our first task is to add profession data to each item, so we can filter our items by profession.

To do so, we have written a set of python scripts called Wikidata QuickSheets that queries the Wikipedia and WIkidata APIs to return QIDs, and then queries Wikidata for P21 (Gender) and P106 (Occupation). Code is available on GitHub here: https://github.com/danaras/wikidata-quicksheets It turned out that only half of these items have P106 data, so we have written code to semi-automate the process of adding P106 data to items missing it. Only data verified by a human is converted by the script into Quick Statements ready tuplets.

Current status: we are most of the way through the process for the 10k articles from pre 2018. All 10k articles about humans are tagged with P106 data, and we are in the process of sorting the ~1500 non-human articles for inclusion/exclusion. We have one proof of concept article that has been tagged with P5008 (on focus list).[1] We need to filter by profession, and then add P5008 to the rest of the items. We will then move on to the 22k items from this year.

501c3 Transition

We are working towards our goal of establishing Art+Feminism as a standalone 501c3 non-profit organization. We have taken the following steps so far:

• We completed our filing with the state for Art+Feminism, Inc
• We have completed registration with Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and have just learned that our case has been selected by a lawyer who should be contacting us within 2 weeks
• We have secured the services of Creative Business Inc, an accounting firm that works with artists and cultural non-profits. CBI will be establishing and managing our accounting for this year and will be helping us transition accounting, payments, and contractor/payroll reporting once we are standalone.

Finances

Please find the full midpoint report of our spending here.

Next steps and opportunities

• Sustaining our flourishing growth in Latin America and West Africa through new and improved communications and editorial strategies.
• Developing an implementation plan for growth in Asia with a focus specifically on Taiwan, China, and Korea.
• Exploring opportunities to use video as a medium to furthering education within our community about the intersections of gender, gender identity, race, and accessibility on Wikipedia.
• Developing and implementing strategic iterations for investing in intersectional communities of new and experienced editors.
• Continuing our translation of our training materials, presentations, and templated organizer communications for the 2019 A+F cycle.
• Developing an updated plan for handling all node event reimbursement processes (as that process will no longer be handled in partnership with the Rapid Grants team).
• Continuing on the path to becoming a non-profit organization.
• Authoring an updated Brave Space Policy to be used by organizers world-wide as a model for disrupting gender inequity and harassment online and during in-person events.

Grantee reflection

We were really excited about our output this year. Five years in, we are still able to bring thousands of people to edit-a-thons around the world and we created or improved nearly 22,000 articles, which is four times the output of the 2017 events. We are thrilled that we were able to update our training materials to make them more usable and are making it easier for us to move forward with the translation of our materials into multiple languages. We are also particularly excited about the Wikidata work that Michael and Danara have taken on. This should give us a bigger picture of Art+Feminism's broad impact going forward.

McKensie's responsibilities have continued to expand. They have already worked through nearly two-thirds of their allocated hours for the entire year. As we discuss strategies for continuing to lay a foundation for sustainable growth globally, we are currently working through planning that would enable us to bring more organizers onboard so that McKensie can focus more on higher level responsibilities.

The growth of our community and the increased editing outcomes, has strained all of the lead organizers capacities and has pushed us further into fear (and/or the reality) of burnout. We are working to build a structure for longevity, which requires bringing new organizers and cultivating new leaders. This includes bringing in an existing regional organizer to the core leadership team, and bringing on another 10 regional organizers to handle the steep growth year over year. We didn't grow our regional organizer capacity between the 2016-2017 grant period and the 2017-2018 period, during which time the workload continued to grow, so these increases we hope to see next year is really our effort to cover two years of workload growth in one year of leadership expansion.