Grants:IEG/Increase Awareness of and participation in Indic language Wikipedias in Colorado/Final

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's 6-month project.

Part 1: The Project

Summary

In a few short sentences, give the main highlights of what happened with your project. Please include a few key outcomes or learnings from your project in bullet points, for readers who may not make it all the way through your report.

• Community with roots in South Asia came together to understand -

• the Wikimedia movement
• File Pillars of Wikipedia

• Workshops to demonstrate basic working of Wikipedia including how knowledge is organized, how to edit, who can edit, etc.
• Workshops to help configure users' computers and devices to edit in Indic languages
• Editathons to edit in multiple Indic languages

Methods and activities

• Canvassed the community about this project and its aim and advantages
• Organized Workshops to familiarize community with Wikimedia, Wikipedia and an overview of How Wikipedia Works
• Organized Editathons to edit articles in multiple Indic languages
• Midpoint report
• Since the midpoint, I reduced the number of weekly meetups to 2-3 a month and focused on individual followup with still-active editors.
• Rethought the value of a competition, given low participation rates.
• Continued canvassing at the same rate as before.

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

Conducting this project made the community aware of Wikimedia movement and its mission. It also created an awareness that Wikipedia exists in languages other than English, including their own native language. It resulted in edits on Wikipedia during editathons. While the stickiness of these sessions was limited, it did motivate a handful of users to contribute. While the stated goal of this project was to have new editors on Indic language Wikipedias, it also resulted in contributions to English Wikipedia.

Progress towards stated goals

Please use the below table to:

1. List each of your original measures of success (your targets) from your project plan.
2. List the actual outcome that was achieved.
3. Explain how your outcome compares with the original target. Did you reach your targets? Why or why not?

Planned measure of success (include numeric target, if applicable)	Actual result	Explanation

Think back to your overall project goals. Do you feel you achieved your goals? Why or why not? I feel that I partially achieved my goals in that I was able to create awareness about Indic language Wikipedias in Colorado and able to rally editors to perform some edits. I had hoped for a much greater level of editor stickiness than was achieved. Overall, I feel that the time and effort I spent on this project was worthwhile both in terms of contribution to various wikipedias as well as lessons learnt.

Global Metrics

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across all grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the "Global Metrics." We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" as often as necessary.

1. Next to each metric, list the actual numerical outcome achieved through this project.
2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for a research project which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. Number of active editors involved	3/No	While editors dabbled in editing here and there, very few actually stuck to editing consistentely
2. Number of new editors	12+/no
3. Number of individuals involved	60+/yes
4. Number of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	0/no	Editors were hesitant to create new content, satisfied with minor edits
5. Number of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	20+	Mostly minor edits and translations
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	N.A.	Difficult to measure as editors may have edited later under IP

Learning question

Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

• Maybe. While there was much enthusiasm about the wikemedia movement and the concept of crowd-sourced knowledge accumulation, it did not translate into action as much as I had hoped.

Indicators of impact

Do you see any indication that your project has had impact towards Wikimedia's strategic priorities? We've provided 3 options below for the strategic priorities that IEG projects are mostly likely to impact. Select one or more that you think are relevant and share any measures of success you have that point to this impact. You might also consider any other kinds of impact you had not anticipated when you planned this project.

How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects?

The community edited several Wikipedias during editathons and later.

How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

A majority of my audience had no idea or a vague idea that Indic language Wikipedias were a "thing" and some of them are actually thriving. After the project, they are much more likely to consult an Indic language Wikipedia for information on topics related to a region or culture within India.

Project resources

Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

Learning

What worked well

• Grants:Learning patterns/Repeat events - Holding a meetup every Thursday helped bring predictability to attendees. There was always the flexibility to hold an off-cycle event.
• Grants:Learning patterns/Number of individuals involved - By keeping track of people contacted/seen/attended, it became easier to gauge level of interest and need for followup

Canvassing the project ahead of time generated interest and participation during early phases of the project. Both informal and formal communication(e.g., flyers in community gathering places, a note in community newsletters) worked equally well.

What didn’t work

• Need to find champions/agents. I could have enlisted some trusted cohorts to carry the word of mouth about my project early on. My talking about this project over and over again may have become tiresome. Had other people joined, it would have brought fresh voice, perspective and a perception of progress.
• Lack of early motivators - I held back competitions and giveaways until the later part of the project. This may have contributed to sagging interest levels.

Other recommendations

• Do your legwork to understand your audience. Relying on verbal promises and commitments is not enough :)
• Conduct a 'mini-project' on your own before jumping in to request WMF to fund your project.

Next steps and opportunities

Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.

Think your project needs renewed funding for another 6 months?

Part 2: The Grant

Finances

Actual spending

Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Remaining funds

Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

• Community provided food for almost every meetup.
• Yes. Did not end up buying prizes for competitions.

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

• In progress

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadminwikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

Confirmation of project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

• Yes

• Delayed midpoint reporting

Is your project completed?

• Yes

Grantee reflection

Working on this project was a great experience for me. The Grant process was straightforward. The Grand Administrators were helpful and understanding. If I have an opportunity for another project in the future, I'd do more legwork and analysis of the (human) audience, where applicable. While I assumed that everyone will be as excited to work on Wikipedia as I have been, I would take a hard-nosed look at the audience involved (if/where applicable) and their interest levels.

Working as an IEGrantee made me understand that the Foundation does care about grassroots efforts and is committed to fostering projects to that end.