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Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Activating Botswana 2022/23/Midpoint Report

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Midterm Learning Report

Report Status: Accepted

Due date: 2023-01-15T00:00:00Z

Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund

Report type: Midterm

Application Final Learning Report

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General information

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This form is for organizations receiving Wikimedia Community Funds (General Support) or Wikimedia Alliances Funds to report on their mid-term learning and results. See the Wikimedia Community Fund application if you want to review the initial proposal.

  • Name of Organization: N/A
  • Title of Proposal: Activating Botswana 2022/23
  • Amount awarded: 22750 USD, 20000 BWP
  • Amount spent: 141433.36 BWP

Part 1 Understanding your work

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1. Briefly describe how your strategies and activities proposed were implemented and if any changes to what was proposed are worth highlighting?

Our strategies were implemented through community efforts. We realized what it truly meant to work together as a community and brought all hands on deck to achieve the proposed activities while also supporting members and giving them opportunities where it's required.

2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you feel are being effective in achieving your goals?

- Constant communication with the community through different social media platforms like What's App and Facebook which helped in event helping us to recruit new editors.
  • Identifying experts and collaborating with other user groups such as the Wikimedia Igbo usergroup to help us with carrying out virtual trainings with our community on projects such as Wikidata to understand in greater detail.
  • Creation of tutorial videos/sharing training recordings with the community was a great system to create a point of reference and also help those who may have missed the Live virtual trainings.

3. What challenges or obstacles have you encountered so far?

- IP address block: This is one of the persistent challenges experienced in all of our edit-a-thon which either hinders them from creating their account or editing. As part of our strategies to mitigate this, we engage participants ahead of time to help them create their accounts before the day of the event, although some were successful we realized that the block was still persistent. We also tried to engage some key admins to unblock these users after the event but that also failed as we did not get any feedback.
  • Challenges with a lot of article deletions of articles written in our native language Setswana, a lot of reference were considered unreliable sources.
  • We are more comfortable editing articles in our native language Setswana but would also like to develop our skills to identify experts to assists us in editing English articles and polish our skills.
  • Costly Internet service and poor internet connection.
  • Lack of tools such as laptops
  • Difficulties in proving the notability of our subjects when writing Wikipedia articles

4. Please describe how different communities are participating and being informed about your work.

- We have talked at Wiki Africa Hour on the pros and cons of running as an unrecognised Usergroup link here:

The initiative aims to develop a set of content creation and training activities designed around three African Union holidays (and oriented around the AU’s “Agenda 2063” goals): Africa Youth Day – Nov 1, 2022 Environment/Wangari Maathai Day – Mar 3, 2023 African Day – May 25, 2023

5. Please share reflections on how your efforts are helping to engage participants and/or build content, particularly for underrepresented groups.

We also advertise out events on our Facebook page link here; https://www.facebook.com/ActivatingBotswana and make constant reminder and communication on our WhatsApp group.

6. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What have you learned so far about these areas during this period?

For underrepresented we focussed mostly around content gender gap, communities, linguistic and geography to gain traction of new editors. We did most of our activities in Gaborone 5 training workshops, 1 Setswana Wikipedia Campaign outreach and 1 Librarian workshop all these hosted at the University of Botswana. We also hosted a 2 days training in the second city of Botswana, Francistown, goal being to tap in a different geographic location and draw in editors and grow our community. We have made a campaign awareness educating about 120 people on what our community does and how they can join and be editors. We have about 20 active editors and 4 skilled organisers for our workshops or trainings. We were able to determine this through our dashboards and our correspondence with these participants through our various communication channels. There changing geographic location, engaging more students and community at large to join our community was a great strategy as well as engaging and training librarians.On Setswana Wikipedia we have been able to create 191articles and improve about 234 articles, we have 68 new articles created and 95 articles improved on Wikiquote, 64 new articles and 150 improved on Wikidata and 140 images uploaded about Botswana Culture on Wiki Commons For underrepresented content, we realised that finding sources to use as references was a challenge. In the future we intend to explore other ways of accessing resources for our content.

7. What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your work?

We would focus more on community development. This past half of the year has taught us that when we improve the skillsets of our community members, we achieve more together as the give their best.

Part 2: Metrics

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8a. Open and additional metrics data.

Open Metrics
Open Metrics Description Target Results Comments Methodology
' N/A N/A
' N/A N/A
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' N/A N/A N/A N/A
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Additional Metrics
Additional Metrics Description Target Results Comments Methodology
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities N/A N/A 20 Due to limited resources we are unable to support our participants with data which is the major source of their struggle leading to lower participation or no participation at all.

Majority of our participants do not own laptops some rely so much in our in-person sessions but due to a limited budget we are forced to cut the number of our in-person sessions. Transport fares is also a challenging factor since we work so much with tertiary student, their budget is always confined to school days only. Participants who have registered to attend events needs to be reminded of that every now and then so they get motivated but due to to limited resource sometimes we are unable to.

See the outreach community dashboard here https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Activating_Botswana_2022/Activating_Botswana
Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities N/A N/A 4 People still lack the spirit of volunteerism, people who are doing this because they are passionate and ambitious about it are rare to find. This makes it difficult to identify people e can add to the team.

Lack of resources like internet and laptops which are a necessity for organisers are also a stumbling block in our community.

This was determined during events planning and during events where some participants volunteered to assist organising an event and help other participants during the session
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability N/A N/A N/A We have managed to sustain our relationship with the University of Botswana Computer Science Department who are always welcoming us into their Labs to host the in-person events

We have also partnered with Africa Knowledge Initiative who sponsored our community outreach in Francistown and the Wiki Commons challenge.

Almost all of our in-person events were hosted at the University of Botswana, Computer Science Department
Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees N/A N/A 51 This shows the Number of female editors who attended all our events This shows the Number of female editors who attended all our events
Number of people reached through social media publications N/A N/A N/A Minimum number of engagement reached through Facebook Ads on posts and the lowest 7415 while the highest engagement post was seen by 34504 people. Advertising our events has been so resourceful as most of the students and youth are Facebook active. Our posts have managed to reach a large number of people. link here; https://www.facebook.com/ActivatingBotswana
Number of activities developed N/A N/A N/A 579 articles created 1180 thousands improved articles and we have 244 uploads in commons at the moment, This is the overall performance of the community in this quarter from Wikipedia English, Wikipedia Setswana, Wikiquote, Wikidata and Wiki commons during competitions and outside competition periods but this is an overall overview of stats for ever since we kickstarted carrying out activities through the APG. This is determined by the community outreach dashboard here https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Activating_Botswana_2022/Activating_Botswana/home
Number of volunteer hours N/A N/A N/A We do not have any defined hours of volunteer as long as you are available when needed N/A

8b. Additional core metrics data.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics Description Target Results Comments Methodology
Number of participants Number of participants 60 64 We have managed to reach the target of participants through in-person trainings that we hosted through out this quarter. Despite having challenges of the venue due to limited resources forcing us to have 1 in-person training session per project which reduces the chances for us to do outreach to other parts of of the city to reach more people.

Due to limited resources we have been stuck to a single University as the host of our activities which gives students from other Universities a perception that maybe this project if for that particular University despite our efforts to advertise through our social media pages.

Outreach dashboard here and the project page which leads to each project's project page here: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Activating_Botswana_2022/Activating_Botswana
Number of editors Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities 40 20 Due to limited resources we are unable to support our participants with data which is the major source of their struggle leading to lower participation or no participation at all.

Majority of our participants do not own laptops some rely so much in our in-person sessions but due to a limited budget we are forced to cut the number of our in-person sessions. Transport fares is also a challenging factor since we work so much with tertiary student, their budget is always confined to school days only. Participants who have registered to attend events needs to be reminded of that every now and then so they get motivated but due to to limited resource sometimes we are unable to.

See the outreach community dashboard here; https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Activating_Botswana_2022/Activating_Botswana
Number of organizers Number of new organisers 5 4 People still lack the spirit of volunteerism, people who are doing this because they are passionate and ambitious about it are rare to find. This makes it difficult to identify people e can add to the team.

Lack of resources like internet and laptops which are a necessity for organisers are also a stumbling block in our community.

This was determined during events planning and during events where some participants volunteered to assist organising an event and help other participants during the session
Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project
Wikimedia Project Description Target Results Comments Methodology
Wikiquote Number of articles and number of articles created - 100 100 163 On Wiki Loves Women we have had a lot of new articles being deleted due to lack of notability of the subject. This narrowed our target because one of the requirement of notability is that the subject must have a Wikipedia articles and most of our notable, business women do not have Wikipedia articles. Outreach dashboard here https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Wikimedia_BW/Wiki_Loves_Women_SheSaid_2022
N/A N/A N/A 425 Setswana Wikipedia competition was a new and exciting project. Batswana were excited to translate articles into their native language. Outreach dashboard here https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Wikimedia_BW/Setswana_Wikipedia_Challenge_BW_2022
N/A N/A N/A 196 Wikidata training was a short term project meant to equip editors with new skills and to keep the community active Outreach dashboard here https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Wikidata_BW_2022/Wikidata_BW_2022
N/A N/A N/A 139 This was done as an outreach project at the city of Francistown in partnership with Africa Knowledge initiate. It was a good start from a new base. We hope to keep the Community in Francistown active. Outreach dashboard here; https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Wikimedia_BW/Setswana_Wikipedia_BW_Round_2
N/A N/A N/A 139 Still ongoing- to end on January 30 2023, There is an ongoing Wiki Commons challenge about Botswana Culture images. Link here;https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:AKI_Botswana

9. Are you having any difficulties collecting data to measure your results?

We used Google forms to collect participants contact information to easily invite them on next upcoming events. We also used the dashboard which was an amazing tool we used to track everyone's edits. The issue we experienced would be on how we can have our community respond to our feedback surveys on how we can improve and or what to continue doing in our community to grow and develop our skills.

10. Are you collaborating and sharing learning with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?

Yes

10a. Please describe how you have already shared them and if you would like to do more sharing, and if so how?

We working in collaboration with the Wiki Vibrance learning how to edit effectively on Wikipedia and Wikidata from difference Wiki experts. As well as experts from the Igbo User group community to train our community mostly on Wikidata. Having one of our coordinators Candy Khohliwe as a former Wiki Loves Women project facilitator we were able to share our skills on how to edit on Wikiquote with other communities from the Wiki Vibrance User group.Here is a link to a recording on the Wikiquote training which Candy facilitated https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Africa_Youth_Day_2022/Resources . We will continue to engage with other communities and at least once in a month virtual training scouting different Wiki experts from different communities such as Wiki Vibrance , Uganda community user group or the Igbo community user group. And we will also be open to train their communities in areas of our expertise such as Wikiquote trainings.

11. Documentation of your work process, story, and impact.

  • Below there is a section to upload files, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, e.g. communications materials, blog posts, compelling quotes, social media posts, etc.). This can be anything that would be useful to understand and show your learning and results to date (e.g., training material, dashboards, presentations, communications material, training material, etc).
  • Below is an additional field to type in link URLs.
Here are links of dashboards used to compile stats for all activities carried out thus far;
1. Setswana Wikipedia Challenge dashboard - https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Wikimedia_BW/Setswana_Wikipedia_Challenge_BW_2022
2. Wikidata training dashboard - https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Wikidata_BW_2022/Wikidata_BW_2022
3. AKI Botswana Culture Images - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:AKI_Botswana
4. Wiki Loves Women dashboard - https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Wikimedia_BW/Wiki_Loves_Women_SheSaid_2022
5. Wikimedia Botswana Community Usergroup page to track all event we do; https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Community_User_Group_Botswana

To share more on the insight on activities we have carried out and the presentation slides see the following links;

Instagram ; https://www.instagram.com/wikimediabw/

Part 3: Financial reporting and compliance

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12. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.

141433.36

13. Local currency type

BWP

14. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.

  • Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
  • Provide links to your financial reporting documents.
File here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15YJONpMQnsM-j8iZi1a7TkSvWC2fR2S1rpVHwbGad9U/edit?usp=sharing

15. Based on your implementation and learning to date, do you have any plans to make changes to the budget spending?

No

15a. Please provide an explanation on how you hope to adjust this.

N/A

16. We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being a grantee has been so far.

It has be challenging journey but educative as the first ever grantee in Botswana for the Annual grant. It was challenging to work with the funds we received as we did not have much flexibility to encompass and support active volunteer with data or internet bundles to continue editing especially for students. Transport was also a challenging factor for our editors to commute from and to the event which leads to events having low attendance. On the other hand we are excited to have had this opportunity to lead such a community and build one and we have learnt a lot of things such as accountability, team work, honesty and respect.
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