Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Simple Annual Plan Grants of the Wikimedians of United Arab Emirates User Group 2022/Yearly Report (2022)
Report Status: Accepted
Due date: 2023-01-31T00:00:00Z
Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund
Report type: Yearly Learning Report (for multi-year fund recipients) , reporting year: 2022
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General information edit
This form is for organizations, groups, or individuals receiving multi-year Wikimedia Community Funds to report on their yearly results.
- Name of Organization: Wikimedians of United Arab Emirates User Group
- Title of Proposal: Simple Annual Plan Grants of the Wikimedians of United Arab Emirates User Group 2022
Part 1 Understanding your work edit
1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented.
- During the year 2022, we were able to achieve our goals that we set and worked hard to achieve, the most notable of which was our collaboration with universities to educate students, improve their research skills, and equip them with vital skills to contribute on Wikimedia projects. We conducted several workshops, virtual and physical, Edit-a-thons and Competitions.
2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals?
- 1- The main strategy was in focusing more on marketing our activities through the social media accounts and Wikimedia platforms.
2- Issuing press releases to capt the attentions of the potential partner or participants 3- Finding topics like literature, Woman's day or Ramadan to attract people to join our events 4- For Wikidata we have done a lot of work with partners including publishers with creating a database of authors.
3. Would you say that your project had any innovations? Are there things that you did very differently than you have seen them done by others?
- This was our first year organizing edit-a-thons, and our initial goal was to reach our metrics through edit-a-thons to create and edit articles. Therefore, we had already planned for lofty goals. However, after organizing multiple edit-a-thons, we realized that this approach will not work in the interim, especially since we are still establishing a community of editors in the UAE. The majority of our edit-a-thon participants were either newcomers or had limited knowledge of how to contribute to Wikimedia Projects. We worked on only one article to edit/develop in some of the edit-a-thons such as the Ramadan Edit-a-thon and the ADIBF edit-a-thon, and we noticed that it worked well because the participants were able to work together to write on different sections of the article and it was more encouraging for them.
4. Please describe how different communities participated and/or were informed about your work.
- We worked with three communities, the main one is with our UAE-based community, the Saudi Arabia Community (Universities), and the global Arab/English speaking communities such as (Kateb Maktub project)
The UAE-based community and the Saudi Arabia community are informed through our social media accounts as well as we urge our fiscal sponsor to share the content as well.
Also we have a database of our participants that we inform through our internal Mailing list.
The online Wikimedia Community are informed as well through banners and village pump on Wikimedia sister projects
5. Documentation of your impact. Please use the two spaces below to share files and links that help tell your story and impact. This can be documentation that shows your results through testimonies, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, etc.) social media posts, dashboards, etc.
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
https://www.facebook.com/Wikipedia.UAE https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Events_of_the_Wikimedians_of_United_Arab_Emirates_User_Group
6. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.
| A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups | Disagree |
| B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community | Agree |
| C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups | |
| D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives | Agree |
| E. Encourage the retention of editors | |
| F. Encourage the retention of organizers | Agree |
| G. Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement. | Strongly agree |
7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?
- No
Part 2: Your main learning edit
8. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?
- 1-This was our first year organizing edit-a-thons, and our initial goal was to reach our metrics through edit-a-thons to create and edit articles. Therefore, we had already planned for lofty goals. However, after organizing multiple edit-a-thons, we realized that this approach will not work in the interim, especially since we are still establishing a community of editors in the UAE. The majority of our edit-a-thon participants were either newcomers or had limited knowledge of how to contribute to Wikimedia Projects. We worked on only one article to edit/develop in some of the edit-a-thons such as the Ramadan Edit-a-thon and the ADIBF edit-a-thon, and we noticed that it worked well because the participants were able to work together to write on different sections of the article and it was more encouraging for them.
2-We firmly believe that engaging the local community is essential to strengthening our User Group. We did our hardest to connect with as many colleges, teachers, and students as we could in 2022, and it was incredibly beneficial. We added a pre-conference day specifically for youth “students” to introduce to them our User Group, Wikimedia Foundation’s projects and its movement. We had more than 70 students from seven different Universities participate. Some universities attended in order to learn more about Wikipedia and to support their students’ volunteerism and skill development.
9. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?
- - University Timelines were not aligned with ours because we started implantation in January.
- Organizing WikiArabia, which we started preparing for it since February 2022.
10. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?
- For the Next year we will start to work with universities earlier, the same thing with some other of our activities, for example our Commons campaigns. We will change our strategy regarding Wikidata.
- We will focus more on the research part of the user group. Therefore, we will be using the Dashboard to track our stats and monitor our annual metrics.
- We will focus on conducting surveys after each activity or event to help us understand our community and evaluate our performance.
- We will be writing separate reports after each activity which will include our objectives, tools, outcomes and learnings and it will be published on our new Meta page.
- We will engage more with the experienced Arabic community to help us shape our strategies and methods to implement activities in the UAE.
11. If you were sitting with a friend to tell them one thing about your work during this fund, what would it be (think of inspiring or fascinating moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes, or anything that feels important to you)?
- Although we are a young User Group, yet one of the things that we are proud of is organizing one of the successful conferences, WikiArabia. This shows that we are able to overcome challenges and always have room to grow.
12. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedia organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work. For instance, guides, training material, presentations, work processes, or any other material the team has created to document and transfer knowledge about your work and can be useful for others. Please share any specific resources that you are creating, adapting/contextualizing in ways that are unique to your context (i.e. training material).
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
- N/A
Part 3: Metrics for Year 1 edit
13a. Open and additional metrics data
| Open Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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 | 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 | 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 | We hope to have 100 participants after our activities. | 100 | 25 | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | Organizers of events like the WLX and other contests and trainers | 20 | 6 | Teachers and Wikimedians | N/A |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | We hope that we will have partnerships with 3 ministries and 1 library and 1 NGO that will work with us permanently | 5 | 20 | We hope that we will have partnerships with 2 ministries and 1 library and 1 NGO, museum and 11 publishing houses, 5 universities that will work with us permanently | N/A |
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | We will send a survey to all participants of our activities to have more feedbacks | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | will have a marketing target on social media | 10000 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of activities developed | QR Code
Wikipedia Arab month Kateb Maktub project |
3 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of volunteer hours | Program 1: Education and Digital Literacy
Activity 1: Establishment of university roadmap across seven Emirates 3750 min. Activity 2: Training librarians on Wikisource, Wikidata, and other Wiki project 960 min. Activity 3: Roundtable with teachers 1200 min. Activity 4: Partnership with archives 2900 min. Program 2: Community Outreach Activity 1: Edit-a-thons 2400 min. Activity 2: Competitions 48 000 min. Activity 3: Arabic language month 10 000 min. Activity 4: Partnership in the Golf region 5760 min. Activity 5: Wikipedia Arabic World forum 27 000 min. Activity 6: Wiki loves X 960 min. Activity 7: Wiki Club 10 800 min. Program 3: Media Outreach Activity 1: Media gatherings 120 min. Activity 2: Engage journalist students 2400 min. Program 4: Research Programme Activity 1: Specialists Outreach 2400 min. Program 5: Local Identity projects Activity 1: WPWP 960 min. |
N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
13b. Additional core metrics data.
| Core metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | Program 1: Education and Digital Literacy
Activity 1: Establishment of university roadmap across seven Emirates 120 participants Activity 2: Training librarians on Wikisource, Wikidata, and other Wiki projects 16 participants Activity 3: Roundtable with teachers 20 participants Activity 4: Partnership with archives 15 participants Program 2: Community Outreach Activity 1: Edit-a-thons 40 participants Activity 2: Competitions 100 participants Activity 3: Arabic language month 100 participants Activity 4: Partnership in the Golf region 20 participants Activity 5: Wiki loves X 100 participants Activity 6: Wiki Club 180 participants Program 3: Media Outreach Activity 1: Media gatherings 15 participants Activity 2: Engage journalist students 40 participants
Program 5: Local Identity projects Activity 1: Wikimedian-in-residence specialized researchers 20 participants |
829 | 432 | some of the activities was not done and the budget was relocated such as the Wiki Club 180 participants Program or canceled because of the decreasing of the budget by the grant committee such as the Arabic language month 100 participants. | |
| Number of editors | Program 1: Education and Digital Literacy
Activity 1: Establishment of university roadmap across seven Emirates 120 participants Activity 2: Training librarians on Wikisource, Wikidata, and other Wiki projects 16 participants Activity 4: Partnership with archives 15 participants Program 2: Community Outreach Activity 1: Edit-a-thons 40 participants Activity 2: Competitions 100 participants Activity 3: Arabic language month 100 participants Activity 4: Partnership in the Golf region 20 participants Activity 6: Wiki loves X 100 participants Activity 7: Wiki Club 180 participants Program 3: Media Outreach Activity 1: Media gatherings 15 participants Activity 2: Engage journalist students 40 participants
Program 5: Local Identity projects Activity 1: Wikimedian-in-residence specialized researchers 30 participants |
799 | 505 | Our editors was the participant on our event 432 editors, 14 editors comes from Kateb Maktub Competition, 59 editors from Harir Competition | |
| Number of organizers | Program 1: Education and Digital Literacy
Activity 1: Establishment of university roadmap across seven Emirates 4 organizers Activity 2: Training librarians on Wikisource, Wikidata, and other Wiki projects 3 organizers Activity 3: Roundtable with teachers 2 organizers Activity 4: Partnership with archives 2 organizers Program 2: Community Outreach Activity 1: Edit-a-thons 2 organizers Activity 2: Competitions 4 organizers Activity 3: Arabic language month 9 organizers Activity 4: Partnership in the Golf region 4 organizers Activity 5: Wikipedia Arabic World forum 30 organizers Activity 6: Wiki loves X 4 organizers Activity 7: Wiki Club 4 organizers Program 3: Media Outreach Activity 1: Media gatherings 3 organizers Activity 2: Engage journalist students 2 organizers Activity 3: Press releases 1 organizer Program 4: Research Programme Activity 1: Wikimedian-in-residence specialized researchers 3 organizers Activity 2: Specialists Outreach 2 organizers Program 5: Local Identity projects Activity 1: WPWP 1 organizer Activity 2: QR code 5 organizers |
85 | 39 | This number of 39 in because some of the activities was not done and the budget was relocated such as the Wiki Club 4 participants Program or canceled because of the decreasing of the budget by the grant committee such as the Arabic language month 30 participants. |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | Program 1: Education and Digital Literacy
Activity 1: Establishment of university roadmap across seven Emirates 120 articles Activity 2: Training librarians on Wikisource, Wikidata, and other Wiki projects 16 articles Activity 3: Partnership with archives 100 articles Program 2: Community Outreach Activity 1: Edit-a-thons 80 articles Activity 2: Competitions 1600 articles Activity 3: Arabic language month 500 articles Activity 4: Wiki Club 180 articles Program 3: Media Outreach Activity 1: Media gatherings 10 articles Program 4: Research Programme Activity 1: Wikimedian-in-residence specialized researchers 200 articles Activity 2: Specialists Outreach 80 articles |
2886 | 709 | 114 from Kateb Maktub
299 From Hair Competition 151 articles from Training sessions 145 articles from Edit-a-thons |
1 - https://hashtags.wmcloud.org/?query=KMC&project=en.wikipedia.org&startdate=2022-07-18&enddate=2023-08-18&search_type=or&user= |
| Wikimedia Commons | Program 1: Education and Digital Literacy
Activity 1: Partnership with archives 2000 Program 2: Community Outreach Activity 1: Wiki loves X 2500 Program 4: Research Programme Activity 1: Wikimedian-in-residence specialized researchers 3000 Activity 2: Specialists Outreach 400 Program 5: Local Identity projects Activity 1: QR code 500 organizers |
8400 | 487 | 467 from Wiki loves Earth
20 from Wiki Loves Monument |
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Images_from_Wiki_Loves_Earth_2022_in_United_Arab_Emirates |
| Wikidata | Program 1: Education and Digital Literacy
Activity 1: Training librarians on Wikisource, Wikidata, and other Wiki projects 10000 items Activity 2: Partnership with archives 10000 items Program 2: Community Outreach Activity 1: Edit-a-thons 20 items Activity 2: Competitions 200 items Activity 3: Arabic language month 50 items Activity 7: Wiki Club 40 organizers
|
21210 | 100 | We currently have a database of 20,000 authors and book titles from 11 different publishing houses that assisted us in sending their database to us in order for us to filter and add more than 300 articles to Arabic Wikipedia. This data collaboration will help us establish strong relationships with publishers, allowing us to contact them again for future projects. The following publishers provided us the data:
Abjjad – 6572 data items Al Dar Al Masriah – 841 data items Arab Scientific Publishers – 2860 data items Dar Al Ayam – 1014 data items Dar Al Hadyek – 286 data items Dar Al Saqi – 520 data items Dar Molhimon - 350 data items Dar WOW – 67 data items Hachette Antoine – 113 data items Kalimat Group – 295 data items Neel Wa Furat – 20444 data items all this data will be uploaded on Wikidata in the upcoming year |
N/A |
| Wikisource | Program 1: Education and Digital Literacy
Activity 1: Training librarians on Wikisource, Wikidata, and other Wiki projects 8 books |
8 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Wikiversity | Program 4: Research Programme
Activity 1: Wikimedian-in-residence specialized researchers 10 courses |
10 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
14. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?
- No
15. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future.
- One of the learnings is that, we should take into consideration that our community here is still new and most of our contributors are newcomers. Therefore, having such big metrics was a big challenge. And we shifted our focus to community building and introducing the UAE community about our User Group and Wikimedia projects.
For the upcoming year we adapt more tools to measure and evaluate our metrics. Therefore, we will use the dashboards for our programs and commons uploading Campaign, and we will write the report of each program that will include the metrics.
16. Use this space to link or upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., dashboards, surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, etc).
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
Part 4: Organizational capacities & partnerships edit
17. Organizational Capacity
| A. Financial capacity and management | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| B. Conflict management or transformation | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| C. Leadership (i.e growing in potential leaders, leadership that fit organizational needs and values) | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| D. Partnership building | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| E. Strategic planning | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| F. Program design, implementation, and management | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| G. Scoping and testing new approaches, innovation | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| H. Recruiting new contributors (volunteer) | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| I. Support and growth path for different types of contributors (volunteers) | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| J. Governance | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| K. Communications, marketing, and social media | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| L. Staffing - hiring, monitoring, supporting in the areas needed for program implementation and sustainability | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| M. On-wiki technical skills | This capacity is low, and we should prioritise developing it |
| N. Accessing and using data | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| O. Evaluating and learning from our work | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| P. Communicating and sharing what we learn with our peers and other stakeholders | |
| N/A | |
| N/A |
17a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Formal training provided by the Wikimedia Foundation, Peer to peer learning with other community members in conferences/events, Formal training provided by a Wikimedia Movement organizing group (i.e., Affiliates, Grantees, Regional or Thematic Hub, etc.)
17b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Lack of awareness of capacity building needs, Lack of volunteer time to participate in capacity building/training, Lack of training that fits contextual needs and interests
18. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your organizational capacity has grown, and areas where you require support?
- N/A
19. Partnerships over the funding period.
| A. We built strategic partnerships with other institutions or groups that will help us grow in the medium term (3 year time frame) | Strongly agree |
| B. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to bring in more contributors from underrepresented groups | Neither agree nor disagree |
| C. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to build out more content on underrepresented topics/groups | Agree |
19a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Permanent staff outreach, Board members’ outreach, Partners proactive interest
19b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
- Lack of institutional support from the Wikimedia Foundation, Lack of staff to conduct outreach to new strategic partners
20. Please share your learning about strategies to build partnerships with other institutions and groups and any other learning about working with partners?
- Our strategy:
- 1.First, identify potential partners that share your organization's mission and values.
- 2. Reach out and make connections
- 3. Start with a small project that you can work on together. This allows you to build trust and rapport with your potential partner, and gives you both a chance to see if the collaboration will be successful.
- 4. Clearly define the roles and responsibilities of each partner in the collaboration. This helps to avoid misunderstandings or conflicts that can arise when expectations are not clear.
- 6. Establish goals and objectives
- 7. Regularly evaluate the partnership to ensure that it is meeting the needs of both organizations. This can help to identify areas for improvement and strengthen the partnership over time.
Part 5: Sense of belonging and collaboration edit
21. What would it mean for your organization to feel a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement?
- The feeling of belonging to a movement such as Wikimedia was already part of our personality. Moreover, we’re always aware that we’re part of the movement and Wikimedia is always supporting our vision.
22. How has your (for individual grantees) or your group/organization’s (for organizational grantees) sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?
- Somewhat increased
23. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.
- The User Group has learnt a lot after just a year of fund period through the feedback of the grant committee and their monitor. This allows us to have a deep structure of thinking on how we can always improve our performance and grow more.
24. How has your group/organization’s sense of personal investment in the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?
- Somewhat increased
25. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.
- N/A
26. Are there other movements besides the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement that play a central role in your motivation to contribute to Wikimedia projects? (for example, Black Lives Matter, Feminist movement, Climate Justice, or other activism spaces) If so, please describe it below.
- Yes as we have our fiscal Spencer working in Literature we always have proposals to increase the content about this topic. and because of the connections of this NGO we can access to a lot of resources
Supporting Peer Learning and Collaboration edit
We are interested in better supporting peer learning and collaboration in the movement.
27. Have you shared these results with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?
- Yes
27a. Please describe how you have already shared them. Would you like to do more sharing, and if so how?
- through our activities annual report Meta Page, sometime on Diff
28. How often do you currently share what you have learned with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees, and learn from them?
- We do this rarely (less than twice a year)
29. How does your organization currently share mutual learning with other grantees?
- through our activities annual report Meta Page, sometime on Diff
Part 6: Financial reporting and compliance edit
30. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.
- 398324.3
31. Local currency type
- AED
32. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
33. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.
- N/A
34. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?
34a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.
- N/A
34b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?
- N/A
34c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.
- N/A
35. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?
As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.
36. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
- Yes
37. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
38. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.