Grants:PEG/ARCHÉ/Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 in Romania/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Project and Event grant approved in FY 2014-15 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:PEG/ARCHÉ/Wiki Loves Monuments 2014 in Romania.

You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email grants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Project status

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

Is your project completed?: YES

Activities and lessons learned

Activities

recruit a team of volunteers to help run the project
instruct and manage the volunteers
maintain and update the project website (http://wikilovesmonuments.ro), a Facebook page and a Google Plus page
search for partners to help promote the contest
update and manage the monuments lists
provide support for participants
watch the incoming images and act when needed
plan and organize a field trip
assembly a jury to evaluate the images and determine the winners
help the jury deal with a very large number of images
plan, organize and promote a photo exhibition with the winning images

Lessons learned

What worked well?

The number of images contributed and participating contributors were whithin/beyond expectations.

What didn't work?

Failed to engage young contributors is the dedicated section of the contest. We would have required more expertise from people who worked with young people before.

What would you do differently if you planned a similar project?

It was the 4th time we organized this event, each year we learned a bit and tweaked the process, a new similar project wouldn't be handled in a very different manner. Still, we would need to set a higher main goal, since we are now the site with the best coverage of historic monuments.

Learning patterns

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

Provide the original project goal here.: Make Wikipedia THE place to go when it comes to basic information (name, address, authors, pictures) about historic monuments in Romania and increase the visibility of Romanian Wikipedia's activities at a national level.
Did you achieve your project goal? How do you know your goal was achieved? Please answer in 1 - 2 short paragraphs.: The measurable objectives comparing Wikipedia with the other players in this field show promising results: we have now gone over the 35% of non-archeological monuments with pictures that monumenteromania.ro (our main competitor) advertises. Also, most of their coordinates in rural area correspond to the center of the village, while we have much more relevant information on the subject.; The visibility of our lists and articles in search engines is also much better due to the Wikipedia "network", providing additional value for the visitors.

Progress towards targets and goals

Project metrics

Project metrics	Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
more than 5K new images uploaded covering at least 500 different monuments	8701 images were uploaded in all using the dedicated wizards; they covered 1398 monuments	These figures are just short of the 2012 competition, when we benefited from the publicity brought by winning the international competition. We also had to account for the fact that the "easy" monuments already have hundreds of images, making original images much harder to obtain. However, we also had some valuable buildings and sites that were not historical monuments.
more than 5% of the participants will be involved in other Wikipedia-related activities (like article edits, reporting errors, volunteer for administrative tasks related to the contest)	at least 6%	besides the 3 organizers and the 5 volunteers we recruited [1], we had 2 additional jury members [2] and several other participants involved in the editing of the articles (a quick look in the history of the lists show the following users, in no particular order: Țetcu Mircea Rareș, Andrei Stroe, Miehs, Rsocol, Oneagoe, Mishu57 and probably many others I've skipped)
over 20 high-school level participants in the dedicated section of the contest	only 6 participants registered for the dedicated section	The organizers lacked the experience in working with high school students and ramped-up targetted promotional efforts too late. Also, it disn't help half of September students where in the sumer break, making them even harder to reach.
3 real-life events - Wiki Weekend Expedition, an exhibition presented in 2 different cities in Romania and an awards ceremony	achieved	Wiki Weekend, Awards ceremony and Exhibition in Bucharest, Exhibition in Timișoara
partnerships with other Romanian groups interested in open content	achieved	After our presentation in Timișoara we received a few requests for the data behind the lists, as well as invitations to talk about how to organize such large projects. Hopefully, more of those will become reality during 2015. For now, except the collaboration with geo-spatial.org, which led to 2 presentations about WLM in Cluj and Timișoara, we started a series of hackathons with an NGO called Funky Citizens aimed at visualizing as much data as possible in a more friendly way than Wikipedia.
one presentation about the work behind the monument database to a national symposium	achieved	the presentation was held by Strainu at OSGeo TM 2013 and is available online here (video will be available at the event's page my mid-December); additionally, during the same event we had a small review of the winners in 2011-2014 (available here)
25% of all images used on Wikipedia pages by the end of the year	20,01%	We have not achieved the expected percentage as we had many images from one of the main article writers on ro.wp, which uploaded images for several dozens wooden churches but has not yet created articles for them. We are confident that we will reach the target after the winter holidays.
135 participants (+10% from 2013)	218 participants	These figures are just short of the 2012 competition, when we benefited from the publicity brought by winning the international competition. While most of the images were brought by just 2 uploaders (as in every year), in 2014 we had a larger share of professional photographers, attracted by the larger prizes, social events and more diverse organizing team. On the other hand, the number of professional participants is limited by the free license; this has been discussed extensively during the prize-awarding in Bucharest but we did not seem to be able to make progress on this issue

Global Metrics

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across our 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" where necessary.

Next to each required metric, list the actual outcome achieved through this project.
Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for an edit-a-thon 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. # of active editors involved	39
2. # of new editors	151
3. # of individuals involved	around 220-230	It is hard to count the number of people editing articles without uploading pictures, but considering the size of the editing community, I suspect there are under 10 people in that situation.
4. # of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	1197	This does not include the images uploaded to ro.wp (another 102 used images); also, my own calculation lead to 1636 used images. It is unclear why this difference appears.
5. # of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	369 articles created [3]	I preferred to use the source I provided because the results from the metrics tool did not seem reliable (3480 pages created is way to much to include only historical monuments). This does not include the monument lists (183 articles in all) which are continuously improved with new data, nor the articles in languages other than Romanian (which are not tracked) or any other articles which were only changed.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	-	Some of the content was reused from lists to articles, making this metric less relevant

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

I would say that at least some of the usual contributors to monument articles felt organizing WLM brought some order in the development of the domain, encouraging them to contribute further. This can be seen from these discussions: 1, 2

Impact

What impact did this project have on WMF's mission and the strategic priorities?

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects? Directly:

from the thousands of pictures uploaded during the project, there are a few dozens images that are really catchy and can be used to promoted the associated articles; the winners are already used in other projects except ro.wp
the writing contest which took place at the same time with WLM generated a few original and well documented articles.

Indirectly:

increased coverage of the monuments allowed ro.wp to become the place to go when it comes to historic monuments (see above)
the amount of data gathered allows for extremely interesting future uses, from error corrections to arguments for influencing policy makers (we can find out which monument has the most pictures/views/edits based on a number of criteria such as location, importance, category etc.)

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

This section describes the grant's use of funds

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grants at wikimedia dot org, according to the guidelines here? Answer "Yes" or "No".: Yes

Expenses

Please list all project expenses in a table here, with descriptions and dates. Review the instructions here.

Number	Category	Item description	Unit	Number of units	Actual cost per unit	Actual total	Budgeted total	Currency	Notes
1	Contest organization	Prize money (main category)	total	1	3777.60	3777.60	3756	RON
2	Contest organization	Prize money (youth)	total	1	855	855	850	RON
3	Contest organization	Banking fees	transaction	24	4	96	80	RON
4	Contest organization	Promotional packages	piece	200 pins, 200 stickers, ~60 T-shirts		2929.43	3000	RON
5	Outreach	Wiki Weekend	person	30	216.66	6500	6500	RON
6	Outreach	Talk @ OSGEO	conference	1	1615.70	1615.70	1600	RON
7	Exhibition	Prints	picture	25	41.72	1043	1000	RON
8	Exhibition	Transport to/from Timișoara	total	1	995.50	995.50	1000	RON

Total project budget (from your approved grant submission): 22486 RON

Total amount requested from WMF (from your approved grant submission, this total will be the same as the total project budget if PEG is your only funding source): 17786 RON

Total amount spent on this project: 22512.23 RON

Total amount of Project and Event grant funds spent on this project: 17812.23 RON

Are there additional sources that funded any part of this project? List them here.

sponsorship from Ixia Romania - 700 USD (2260 RON)
TINACT grant - 2228 RON (do note that this is smaller that the budgeted 2440 RON)

Remaining funds

Are there any grant funds remaining?: Answer YES or NO.; NO

Please list the total amount (specify currency) remaining here. (This is the amount you did not use, or the amount you still have after completing your grant.)

0

If funds are remaining they must be returned to WMF, reallocated to mission-aligned activities, or applied to another approved grant.

Please state here if you intend to return unused funds to WMF, submit a request for reallocation, or submit a new grant request, and then follow the instructions on your approved grant submission.

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