Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Knowledge Equity:Supporting equity on Wikimedia projects/Midpoint Report
Report Status: Accepted
Due date: 2023-01-15T00:00:00Z
Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund
Report type: Midterm
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General information edit
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: Wikimedia Norge
- Title of Proposal: Knowledge Equity: Supporting equity on Wikimedia projects
- Amount awarded: 239925 USD, 2089973 NOK
- Amount spent: 1353444 NOK
Part 1 Understanding your work edit
1. Briefly describe how your strategies and activities proposed were implemented and if any changes to what was proposed are worth highlighting?
- Our work can be divided into three tracks: 1) Supporting the local community of Wikimedians and Wikipedians, 2) Knowledge equity in Norway and 3) Knowledge equity internationally. This autumn we focused mainly on tracks 1) and 3). In addition, our Board of Directors worked on revising our organisational goals and objectives. A Strategic Plan 2023-2028 has been formulated and well anchored amongst our members. Our Executive Director is on leave from May 2022 through March 2023, and having an interim ED gave us the opportunity to let a fresh pair of eyes revise our workflow and staff resource management.
Within track 1) we have opened up more lines of informal communication. Wiki Meetups have been organised regularly for years. We have now introduced an additional monthly Wiki Lunch Break. Either with an announced topic or simply as a social get-together. We have also started a monthly online training session aimed at Wikipedia novices: Wikipedia Kickstart (https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Starthjelp).
Track 2) held two initiatives that weren’t included in our program proposal. With the help of jury members from three non-profits we organised a national Wiki Loves Monuments campaign. Our second «added value» was to ensure project funding to translate MediaWiki and the Wikipedia apps (iOS and Android) into Northern Sámi. The work will be completed in spring 2023.
Track 3), the most staff-intensive track, was our work in the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub and its research project about new Wikipedia editions and their communities. This important work is aligned with our long-standing efforts to support under-represented or indigenous languages, with our main focus of course being the Sámi languages.
Our Annual Report 2022 provides a good snapshot of our status quo halfway through this funding period, and it tells our program stories in more detail than this report would have allowed.
2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you feel are being effective in achieving your goals?
- In our program proposal we stated that we wanted to explore which communication methods or approaches that could work better for us. In the last quarter of 2022 we stepped up our communications work, and as a result our social media reach and our earned media coverage boomed. No magic formula was needed, it was just a matter of devoting staff time to basic, professional PR and communications work. To achieve our goals, particularly within tracks one (Supporting the local community of Wikimedians and Wikipedians) and two (Knowledge Equity in Norway), we need to create enthusiasm and support for our work. A continued focus on communications work is crucial to our success, and we are currently working on how to improve the information architecture of our wiki (https://no.wikimedia.org/wiki/) and our website (https://www.wikimedia.no).
3. What challenges or obstacles have you encountered so far?
- We have the opportunity to work more closely with contributors on national Wikimedia projects. More volunteers can be included in our activities as organisers, mentors or trainers. It is, however, challenging that there has been a certain level of distrust or alienation between part of the volunteer community and the WMNO board and administration. Our efforts this funding period to open up more lines of informal communication seem to have a positive effect on this. It is important to bear in mind that the volunteer contributors are the core of the Wikimedia projects, and not try to oversell the impact our chapter’s professional efforts have on the Norwegian and Sámi Wikimedia projects. Our community outreach efforts need to be positive and engaging, with a humble approach.
Sometimes it's hard to focus our staff time and attention on prioritised tasks and projects, and actively measure and evaluate our performance. In our day-to-day operations we need to encourage each member of staff to monitor their areas of responsibility more closely. This systematic approach should be applied to our training activities and our communications work in particular.
4. Please describe how different communities are participating and being informed about your work.
- In the past, quite a few of our efforts to engage with potential contributors/members, the general public and the national Wiki community have gone unnoticed. The current upscaling of our communications work will improve our reach, and hopefully that will be reflected in our metrics for the second half of this funding period. Community participation is described in our Annual Report 2022, and details about how they're being informed can be found in the section "Day-to-day operations".
5. Please share reflections on how your efforts are helping to engage participants and/or build content, particularly for underrepresented groups.
- In line with our new Strategic Plan 2023-2028, we are taking measures to try to counter the gender gap amongst contributors on the Norwegian and Northern Sámi Wikipedias. Currently, less than 5 % of the administrators on Wikipedia in Bokmål are women, and there are no female mentors. The number of administrators on Nynorsk and Northern Sámi Wikipedias is very low, and only three of them are women. Those two Wikipedias don’t have any mentors, male or female. The last few years our focus has been to bridge the content gender gap. It’s time to also work on how to diversify who contributes to that content. If we can grow the number of female administrators and mentors, they can act as role models that might up the total number of female Wikipedians. The current upscaling of our communications work can help us grow the number of contributors and the content they produce, not least within the Sámi community.
As part of our efforts to strengthen Sámi language content in the Wikimedia projects we have previously worked mainly on content creation or uploads. Hopefully, our current projects to translate MediaWiki and the Wikipedia apps to Northern Sámi, combined with efforts to recruit contributors, will stimulate long-term growth. The translation projects will make it easier to translate other Sámi language versions, such as Inari Sámi, at a later stage.
6. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What have you learned so far about these areas during this period?
- We wanted to use our work with Sámi content as a model for our international efforts to support small language communities. The Northern Sámi Wikipedia was started as early as 2004, but it's far from a mature project. The editing activity level and the number of contributors is now so low we need to take firm steps and try to make changes. Perhaps we will have to shift our focus in the Language Diversity Hub: How can we learn from small language communities that do better than us in their efforts to recruit, train and retain contributors?
With the Language Diversity Hub we also learned that it was unfortunate to take on the responsibility as fiscal sponsor for a project at a time when we had no Executive Director. Lack of financial management and unclear definitions of volunteers versus contractors caused time-consuming challenges for our accounting and tax responsibilities.
On the positive side, the hub work yet again confirmed the value of joint capacity building for small language communities within the Wikimedia projects.
When it comes to our communications work we have learned that we can easily reach a much wider audience than before. That can help us market our community outreach activities better, and to recruit members. Also, some of our community support schemes, such as micro Wiki grants and the Wiki Library, have failed to benefit more than a handful of Wikimedians. By evaluating and modifying these schemes we can distribute our resources more wisely.
7. What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your work?
- We will step up our efforts to recruit, train and retain contributors to Wikimedia projects and WMNO members, not least within the Sámi community. A more visible public profile can help us find top-level strategic partners within GLAM and the education sector, so that we can set up a Wiki education program with a wide reach. Internationally, we aim to be a facilitator as the Language Diversity Hub starts to implement measures to strengthen underrepresented languages in the Wikimedia projects.
Part 2: Metrics edit
8a. Open and additional metrics data.
| Open Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | We intend to consistently send out standardized surveys to event and course participants on what their experience was like, asking about their motivations to join the event, and how much they got out of it – and how they plan to use what they've learned. Our target is to send out surveys to all participants of such events. | N/A | 0 | Feedback surveys after events and courses have not yet been introduced. | N/A |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | With this metric we want to find out how many language versions of Wikimedia projects we work with through our international and national work. We will only focus on language diversity for this metric, as other diversity markers (such as gender or orientation) are more sensitive to measure. This metric will be very interesting to follow up for the future, to monitor the global reach of the Language Diversity Hub. Our target is to involve speakers of at least 20 different languages in this work. | 20 | 16 | The first half of this funding period the Language Diversity Hub worked with 13 different language versions of Wikipedia. Nationally, we worked with Wikimedia projects in Norwegian (Bokmål and Nynorsk) and Northern Sámi. One of our staff, in his spare-time, was involved in or contributed to additional language versions, particularly in the Wikimedia Incubator. | N/A |
| Number of new WMNO members | It was decided during the general assembly 2022 that we should focus more on getting new members to the organization, in order to have a more solid membership base to draw input and talent from. The board will put together a commitee that will focus on this, with staff support. | 70 | 4 | This autumn and winter our members and board carved out a strategy to recruit and retain more members, but the continuous work on membership follow-up and communications has to be made a higher priority for the administration. We have made a start on improving our administrative systems and routines, as well as our general outreach efforts, but there's still a lot of work to be done. | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Additional Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | Like we said above, we are planning to sustain the existing major partnerships we have nationally, but also to expand internationally with the Language Diversity Hub work. The target of 10 reflects the number of partners we expect to work closely with for various projects, but it may turn out that this number is too low. | 10 | 2 | Strengthening our strategic partnerships is an important part of our Strategic Plan 2023-2028. We want a shift from lower level cooperations on for example content uploads or training activities to long-term strategic partnerships at managerial level, particularly within GLAM and the educational sector. This autumn and winter we have completed an image upload project with one GLAM partner, three non-profits were represented in our Wiki Loves Monuments jury, we organised an activity with a non-profit, and we were awarded grants from one charity and two public institutions. Yet it would be stretching it to name any of these strategic partners.
In our language diversity work we have, however, had two strong strategic partnerships: Wikitongues (https://wikitongues.org) and Giellatekno - the Research Group for Saami Language Technology at The Arctic University of Norway (https://giellatekno.uit.no/index.eng.html). |
N/A |
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | (Used as a main metric) | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | (Used as a main metric) | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | This number includes readers of blog posts, views on Facebook posts, YouTube video views, Instagram likes and Twitter interactions. | 12000 | 30835 | This number is, unfortunately, a messy mix of parameters that aren't comparable. The total sum doesn't say much, but if we break it down it makes slightly more sense: Website visitors ("readers of blog posts") 3,926, Facebook reach ("views") 26,126, YouTube plays (not views) 550, Instagram likes 155, Twitter interactions 78.
For a better understanding of our communications efforts, please refer to our Annual Report 2022. |
N/A |
| Number of activities developed | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of volunteer hours | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
8b. Additional core metrics data.
| Core metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 1000 | 151 | The number of participants includes only those that took part in activities hosted or organised by Wikimedia Norge (staff and volunteers), and not by independent volunteers from the Norwegian Wiki community in general. The activities were: 3 Wiki Lunch Breaks, WikiNobel, 1 Wiki Meetup, 2 Wikidata workshops, 1 lecture and panel discussion, 1 Wikipedia Kickstart session, Wiki Loves Monuments: National photo and editing competition on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, Women in Red editing competition on Wikipedia. | Manual counting, various edit counters, dashboards and the UKBot tool. | |
| Number of editors | 250 | 102 | Most were returning editors. There were only two that we know for sure were newly registered users due to our efforts. | Manual counting, various edit counters, dashboards and the UKBot tool. | |
| Number of organizers | 20 | 14 | We have counted the number of individuals involved. Some of them organised or contributed to more than one activity. | Manual counting. |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | N/A | 7000 | 565 | July-December 2022 we generated 565 article edits or new articles on the two Norwegian, the Northern Sámi or the Inari Sámi Wikipedias. The content was generated as part of two editing competitions. | The UKBot tool. |
| Wikimedia Commons | N/A | 5000 | 556 | Images were uploaded as part of Wiki Loves Monuments and our project to add images from The National Archives' collection "The Reindeer Pastures Commission of 1913". | N/A |
| Wikidata | N/A | 7000 | 0 | Although Wikimedia Norge organised two workshops to celebrate the Wikidata 10th anniversary, Wikidata content generation after the events was not measured. | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
9. Are you having any difficulties collecting data to measure your results?
- Our difficulties have more to do with how we organise our work, rather than the tools available to collect data. We need to turn data collection and analysis into an ongoing process. Currently, some of our results are measured only twice a year. The data is used to file reports, but not sufficiently to help us understand the impact, or lack of impact, that our work has on the Wikimedia projects.
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 try to learn and share whenever we interact with Wikimedia affiliates and community members, whether as part of our work in the Wikimedia Language Diversity Hub, in Wikimedia Europe or in the affiliates' regular Executive Directors' video call. Also, our staff and volunteers have a wide network in Norway and abroad, where experiences and results are openly shared. We communicate on our website, in our social media channels, in newsletters, at events and in the national news media. Occasionally we publish blog posts on the Wikimedia Diff.
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.
- Our Annual Report 2022 gives a good overview of our activities, general operations and results: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/no/9/92/Annual_Report_2022.pdf
Our new Strategic Plan 2023-2028 shows our priorities moving forward: https://no.wikimedia.org/wiki/Årsmøte_2023/Strategiplan_2023–2028/en
Part 3: Financial reporting and compliance edit
12. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.
- 1353444
13. Local currency type
- NOK
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.
15. Based on your implementation and learning to date, do you have any plans to make changes to the budget spending?
- Yes
15a. Please provide an explanation on how you hope to adjust this.
- Our biggest cost is payroll expenses, and the 2.8 positions in our administration constituted 72 % of our total operating expenses July-December 2022. Page 2 of our financial report shows that 73 % of our payroll expenses were tied to the three thematic tracks of our work. In order to qualify for larger-scale national funding we would have to gain traction as a free knowledge organisation with a highly professional administration and a more visible public profile. Our short-term payroll expenses are likely to stay on budget, but we may need to shift some of our staff resources from the three tracks to general admin and communications work.
We moved office in December 2022, which means that our rent and cleaning expenses for this funding period will be about NOK 100,000 lower than budgeted. Unfortunately, these savings will probably not be enough to counter galloping inflation and long-term wage growth.
16. We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being a grantee has been so far.
- As a Norwegian members' organisation a lot of our planning and reporting has to follow the fiscal year (January-December). This, of course, is out of synch with the grant proposal and reporting workflow. So, in some respects, our admin workload is double. That said, the Wikimedia Foundation Program Officer has been very supportive of our needs and challenges, particularly now that we have an interim Executive Director.
For the future, if we structure our proposals better, reporting would probably be easier. Also, we need to work on which metrics we collect and analyse. We want to make learning and sharing more of an on-going process.
Predictable application and reporting requirements are important to us. Also, it would be helpful to have a more flexible and intuitive tool than Fluxx. On the positive side, the questions asked in the midterm report invite grantees to share their unique experiences. Thank you for the opportunity to share, as we do our best to implement our plans and reach our goals for this funding period.