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Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Yearly grant 2022 (Previously called Simple APG)./Midpoint Report

< Grants:Programs‎ | Wikimedia Community Fund‎ | Yearly grant 2022 (Previously called Simple APG).
Midterm Learning Report

Report Status: Accepted

Due date: 2022-07-15T00:00:00Z

Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund

Report type: Midterm

Application Final Learning Report

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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: Wikmedia Belgium v.z.w.
  • Title of Proposal: Yearly grant 2022 (Previously called Simple APG).
  • Amount awarded: 17988.85 USD, 40000 EUR
  • Amount spent: 1745.88 EUR

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?

We collaborated with multiple museums, heritage institutions, universities, colleges, and secondary schools. We are refining the way of working for project management that we started since the COVID-19 outbreak. This structured process is based on Wikidata, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons (including SDC), and the Outreach Campaign and events tool.

We use other tools like AWB, WDFIST, AC/DC, ISA Tool, ListeriaBot, and Pywikibot.

We prepare in detail our activities together with the institution or the organisation. A detailed project plan is written on a project page of the language Wikipedia, the Wikidata, or the Wikimedia Commons platform. Updates are done during and after the activity takes place.

A link to and from the Outreach events and campaign tool allows participants to subscribe themselves, and obtain detailed information about the project, including technical help. The participants receive a book "Schrijven voor Wikipedia", so they know how to contribute to the platforms.

The project team can follow the progress of the participants, and create activity impact reports from Campaign and events tool. After the activity took place, we evaluate the activity.

We write monthly newsletters to communicate and report about our activities, before and after the activity takes place.

We talk to potential partners in order to present our strengths. We reach out to other parties that can complement our capacity to work with Wikimedia platforms. We collaborate with federal, regional, and local government institutions.We build longterm relations with museums and heritage institutions.

We collaborate with neighbouring affiliates like Wikimedia Nederland and Wikimedia France.

We have an online Wikimedia helpdesk: https://spatial.chat/s/WMBEchat

We answers e-mail at info@wikimedia.be from volunteers, institutions, and the general public.

We collaborate with the King Baudouin Foundation for national fund raising. This allows tax payers to have a tax advantage of 45%.

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

The Wikidata approach to setup edit-a-thons works pretty well, because the participants have potential article names at hand. A Wikipedia project table with links to potential pages and additional information is automatically created into a Wikipedia page in the project namespace with ListeriaBot using a simple SPARQL query based on a WikiProject linked to Wikidata objects using P6104 "maintained by WikiProject".

Read more:

Collaborating with museums and city archives institutes help us to leverage our work. We contribute technical knowledge, the partners offer infrastructure, archive material or library books. They attract participants. We give training and feedback on how to write Wikipedia pages, upload images, and contribute to Wikidata.

We provide micro-grants to volunteers wanting to attend an international Wikimedia conference, refund national travel costs to attend meetings, or contribute to Wikimedia platforms.

We have monthly board meetings. The board consists of multi-disciplinary skills. Some have a lot of experience in GLAM. Others in ICT, database, software development, and another one in community management.

Belgium has 3 official languages and we are also English to communicate internationally. We have a team that is capable to communicate in 4 languages.

Documentation, and communication like websites and the newsletter are translated.

We have a lot of exchange with neighbouring countries sharing the same languages. We are partnering with new regional hubs like Wikimedia Europe and Wiki Franca.

We participate into the "Village pump" of the different Wikimedia platforms. We propose changes and extensions of the different Wikimedia platforms. We write and run Pywikibot scripts to automatically update platform content.

We keep the local press informed about our activities.We answer questions from the general public. We are paing attention to have a professional communication.

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

Finding sufficient volunteers to assist to an edit-a-thon: recrute from education and cultural institutions.

Some participants of writing sessions have problems to start writing an article: training, one-by-one coaching (cold feet).

Finding board members: talk to people. Inform them about our activities and responsibilities.

Finding new cultural institutions: institutions with whom we collaborate stimulate peers to contact us. More and more institutions are voluntary contacting us instead that we go and invite institutions for a talk. When they come to us, they are more motivated to search for collaboration; in a way they are already convinced that Wikimedia Belgium can help them.

It takes time to convince cultural institutions to participate with Wikimedia Belgium: Keep on repeating our strategy message. Do not stop to contact other organisations. Publication and distribution of white papers to targeted communities: libraries, heritage, education, volunteers, fundraising.

Provide documentation: we provide a book "Schrijven voor Wikipedia", we write hands-on material "how to" on the different Wikimedia platforms, publish video's on our YouTube channel.

We can't do everything ourselves. Therefore we claim participation of other institutions to provide us with complimentary support: sending invitations, announcements, providing a room, provide food and drinks.

We assist heritage institutions to build CMS content plugins to show content from Wikipedia, like Google does within its search engine "read more from Wikipedia". This way it motivates writing Wikipedia pages and reuse its content, rather then writing "duplicate" documents themselves.

The period of video conferencing since CORONA-19 is due. People love to have physical presence again. They are bored with on-line activities. The prefer physical contact.

Contacting the French speaking part of Belgium is more difficult, because we lack volunteers and contacts. Still we performed 3 successful projects.

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

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

Frequently we are contacted by institutions with a request to organise an edit-a-thon about a specific subject. This is very good because institutions have infrastructure available like a meeting room, Wi-Fi and often they are linked to a specific content. With some of these organizations we have monthly or yearly activities.

We engage with museums that intend to publish their collection on Wikidata.

  • Industriemuseum Gent is uploading part or their collection data to Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons
  • Museum van Busleyden, Mechelen will upload part or their collection data to Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons
  • Jenevermuseum Hasselts will upload part or their collection data to Wikidata.
  • Plantentuin Meise
  • Stadsarchief Leuven will upload (historical) place names and (current) street names to Wikidata
  • KOERS. Museum van de Wielersport (Roeselare). This institute will have a Wikimedian in Residence internship for 6 months starting from October 2022 to document the Flemish bicycle heritage in Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia. Bicycle statistics and collections will be uploaded to Wikidata, historical photo negatives will be digitized and upload to Wikimedia Commons, and with all this information Wikipedia articles will be written making use ot the collection of the museum.

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

It helps to combine with skills or capacities of other institutions. We have planning and survey meetings to discuss how we can collaborate. Frequently this produces results, sometimes it does not fit. It is very important to have active contact persons in each of the institution that collaborate.

For most museums this perfectly works.

For libraries the success is varying, depending on the subject or the writing sessions and the availability of the librarians. Also libraries are still considered to be passive reading archives, and are not being felt as a place of collaboration, thinking, doing research, and writing articles. Libraries that are very succesfull are universities, colleges, and faculty libraries where students are writing articles in the domain of their curriculum, and are actively being coached by their professors and coordinators.

With larger institutions the collaboration is more difficult. Large institutions have problems to liaison with a small chapter like Wikimedia Belgium, that currently has only volunteers and no staff. They do not see advantages of collaborating; maybe they are considering WMBE to be a nuisance for their work and activities. They do not see advantages in spending their time to see how collaboration can be activated.

Local small organisations are missing technical skills to understand how a project can be setup.

With 3 secondary schools, age 16-18, we have setup a thematic project to write Wikipedia articles.

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

We have launched the Wiki Loves Heritage photo contest, an extension of Wiki Loves Monuments.

We plan to have a video production of a photography training about "taking photographs for Wikipedia".

We have signed a contract to have a Wikimedian in Residence from October 2022-March 2023 in KOERS. Museum van de Wielersport (Roeselare) to document the rich historical bicycle racing in Flanders.

We continue to collaborate with other organisations and institutions, large and small.

Part 2: Metrics edit

8a. Open and additional metrics data.

Open Metrics
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
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 N/A N/A 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 N/A N/A https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Activities N/A
Number of volunteer hours N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

8b. Additional core metrics data.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics Description Target Results Comments Methodology
Number of participants See attached spreadheet
Number of editors See attached spreadheet
Number of organizers See attached spreadheet
Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project
Wikimedia Project Description Target Results Comments Methodology
N/A See attached spreadheet 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

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

It is not easy to obtain an aggregate reporting from the campaigns and events tool for related to courses. Need to generate a separate report for each of the campaigns.

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 give presentations at conferences:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Organise_a_WikiProject_with_Wikimedia_tools_at_WikiconNL_2021.pdf

We have a monthly national newsletter in 3 languages (potential for other translations): https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Newsletter/2022-06

We contribute to monthly international news letters: https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:This_Month_in_GLAM_Belgium_reports

We keep continuous statistics about our activities: https://be.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Belgium_Projects/ListeriaBot/Query. Maybe we could build an integrated activity reporting, with user statistics, from the Wikidata platform? Then we could see the impact of all the volunteers; also those that were only active online... It would not be required that people are registered at the Outreachdashboard...

We document the projects on Wikipedia project pages: (example) https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Q106927465

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.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Educatieprogramma/Erasmushogeschool_Brussel https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q106927465

Part 3: Financial reporting and compliance edit

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

1745.88

13. Local currency type

EUR

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?

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.

We are doing quite well. We manage multiple activities with a broad participation with GLAM and education institutions.

We are being contacted by several institutions for collaboration to start shared activities.

We will establish some longterm partnerships as of the second half of the year.

In addition to that we implement financial support for our volunteers, to assist them to return valuable platform results.

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