Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia South Africa:supporting the growth of the free knowledge movement in South Africa for 2023/Midpoint Report
Report Status: Accepted
Due date: 2023-03-10T00:00:00Z
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 ZA
- Title of Proposal: Wikimedia South Africa: supporting the growth of the free knowledge movement in South Africa for 2023
- Amount awarded: 84964.07 USD, 85123.33 ZAR
- Amount spent: 609076.88 ZAR
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?
- Please see the activity report at the link below for 2022/23.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WM_ZA/Annual_Report_2022-23
To paraphrase the report. All of our chapter actives adhere to the chapter's 5 year strategy by fulfilling one of two core objectives. Community support or outreach. Community support is the most important goal and is focused on supporting the existing community of Wiki volunteers in the country. Outreach is focused on expanding the Wiki community and raising awareness of the free knowledge movement.
2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you feel are being effective in achieving your goals?
- We have a flexible approach that reflects both the diverse projects we are involved in and the diversity of our community whilst also enabling us to react to opportunities. Overall an effective strategy we have found is to find a partner organisation to co-host events with. We are good at talking and teaching about the Wikis but are bad at filling up spaces with people, partners tend to be much better at doing that for us, especially if the events each have a theme that is relevant to the partner. This is both a good approach to maximizing the number of interested participants and a good way to build partnership relationships.
3. What challenges or obstacles have you encountered so far?
- Community cohesion is always a challenge and requires a great deal of work to overcome. Especially if there are greater needs than their are resources available. Overcoming this requires a great deal of diplomacy, compromise, and listening.
4. Please describe how different communities are participating and being informed about your work.
- For WMZA this starts at the chapter board level. It is important for us that the board is both representative of our community and also representative of where we would like our community to be in the future. It is at the board meetings
A second important avenue for community engagement are the monthly meetups that WMZA hosts for the Wiki community in South Africa. These events allow us to build community health whilst being able to share knowelge and connections. It is also an important way for the chapter to connect with the Wiki editing volunteer community and visa versa. These events are detailed in our the activity report.
Please see the activity report at the link below for 2022/23. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WM_ZA/Annual_Report_2022-23
5. Please share reflections on how your efforts are helping to engage participants and/or build content, particularly for underrepresented groups.
- Please see the activity report at the link below for 2022/23 for more details on this subject.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WM_ZA/Annual_Report_2022-23
Some actives I would like to highlight here are our efforts to support the creation of both San, Khoe, and Kaaps language Wikis in addition to our efforts to grow the Wikis of South Africa's official languages, all of which, with the exception of Afrikaans and English, are small language Wikis. We have had limited success at this with the exception of Afrikaans Wikipedia which is now reaching a rapid growth phase.
6. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What have you learned so far about these areas during this period?
- We have learnt a great deal more about the process of managing interns. Most specifically the need for a streamlined internship training process, the intensity of internship management, and the need to keep interns active for a longer period of time so as to benefit from all the training the chapter invests in them.
7. What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your work?
- In the second half of the 22/23 year the chapter will host:
- Wiki Loves Plants photography competition
- Right to Research in Africa conference
- Chapter 10 year anniversary
- Eswatini outreach project/editathons
- Afrikaans Wiki outreach trainings
- many more
Part 2: Metrics edit
8a. Open and additional metrics data.
| Open Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of Participants | The number of individuals who attend or benefit from our project activities, either in person (offline) or virtually (online). | 100 | 143 | WMZA is many events in the first half of the 22/23 year. On average each event had about 10 participants not including the chapter's volunteer editors hosting the events. This year we exceeded our target. | Analogue participation counts and the Wiki dashboard. |
| Number of new chapter members | Number of new members to the Wikimedia South Africa chapter. | 40 | 14 | We need to get better at reminding and encouraging both existing Wikipedia editor as well as project participants to join the chapter. Once we develop a habit of encouraging membership signups at all of our events it is expected that we will experience better chapter growth. This goal has been made more challenging for the chapter by a recent chapter decision to require that all new members be Wiki editors with at least 5 edits. | N/A |
| Number of new Wikipedia articles | The number of new Wikipedia articles created in any of South Africa's 11 official language Wikipedias. | 4000 | N/A | Currently this number is unknown as the dashboard that is meant to display this number for us was not working at the time of writing this report. | Wiki Projects Dashboard |
| Wikimedia Commons uploads | The number of content items (photographs, videos, etc) uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Most of this content is likely to come from the Wiki Loves events. | 4000 | N/A | Not yet applicable as the projects meant to generate commons uploads were not active in this half of the year. | Wiki Projects Dashboard & iNatratlist |
| Number of new Wikipedia editors | The number of new editors to Wikipedia with a specific focus on new Wikipedia editors on African language Wikipedias. | 10 | N/A | Currently this number is unknown as the dashboard that is meant to display this number for us was not working at the time of writing this report. | Wiki Projects Dashboard |
| Additional Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | 20 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | 9 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | For the long term we intent to continue focusing on the following five partnerships:
The chapter intends to build and grow relationships with many more partners but those are the current five that we are most focused on. |
5 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| 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 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of activities developed | N/A | 4 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of volunteer hours | N/A | 1000 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
8b. Additional core metrics data.
| Core metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 100 | 143 | See previous section | ||
| Number of editors | 10 | Currently this number is unknown as the dashboard that is meant to display this number for us was not working at the time of writing this report. | |||
| Number of organizers | 9 | 11 | We had 7 volunteer organizers, 1 of whom was a first time organizer. An addition three organizers were the administrator and two interns. |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | N/A | 40 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Wikipedia | Number of South African or African media sources reviewed in the compilation of the African reliable citation list. | 100 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Wikipedia | Number of new African language Wikipedia's in incubation. | 1 | 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 |
9. Are you having any difficulties collecting data to measure your results?
- Yes, Projects Dashboard is sometimes unreliable.
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?
- Wikimedia South Africa is the affiliate organisation for Wiki community members in South Africa so by definition we do this. In terms of other affiliates, we
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.
Part 3: Financial reporting and compliance edit
12. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.
- 609076.88
13. Local currency type
- ZAR
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.
- We have underestimated staff costs for hourly work on projects and related administrative actives. Additionally project partners for a number of projects have fallen through meaning that some will not be auctioned. The chapter has also relised on voted on the necessity of having an annual face-to-face board workshop so as to better prepare for our next grant application and the chapter's future activities. This means that we will need to reallocate funding from unused line items to these new actives.
16. We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being a grantee has been so far.
- It has been good, however the period by which we have to apply for funding seems to decrease every year. This year we were expecting to only have to apply in May and organized our year accordingly. Having to apply in mid March will cause significant challenges for us in our next grant application as it gives a less time to coordinate our grant application actives within the chapter. As such we will likely have to ask for extra time to apply for our next grant if we want the process to be as inclusive and rigorous within the chapter as we need it to be.