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Grants:Project/FLG/History of Quebec and French-speaking North America 2020-2021/Final

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Report under review
This Project Grant report has been submitted by the grantee, and is currently being reviewed by WMF staff. If you would like to add comments, responses, or questions about this grant report, you can create a discussion page at this redlink.



Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the grantee's project.

Part 1: The Project

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Summary

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The project "History of Quebec and French-speaking North America 2020-2021" was designed as a continuation of the first grant obtained in March 2019 and completed in March 2020, but with a more important orientation towards the academic community and specialists in the history of Quebec and French-speaking North America.

Thanks to this orientation more focused on academia and that of specialists in history, we exceeded the vast majority of our objectives and practically achieved the others. In addition, we have judiciously reoriented our online educational material production strategy in order to offer quality content to the French-speaking community on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource. Even if this reorientation of certain objectives took us more time, it was worth it since we are convinced of having produced lasting content.

We established several key partnership with organizations such as Fédération histoire Québec, Réseau du patrimoine franco-ontarien (French-speaking North-America aspect), Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Université Laval, Université de Sherbrooke, Université du Québec à Montréal, Éditions du Septentrion, Union des écrivaines et des écrivains québécois, and Rendez-vous d'histoire de Québec.

Here is a list of the most important outcomes and learnings of our project:

  • We provided training with 10 new partner organizations.
  • We trained 167 new Wikimedians who participated to a total of 10 training events.
  • We produced 3 long and 5 short video tutorials on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource.
  • We assisted 4 university-level history teachers.
  • We improved 36 articles, which is close to our projected 40 articles (90%).
  • We created 15 new articles which less than our goal but all of the new articles reached one or two level higher than the stub level.
  • We greatly exceeded our goal of sustaining Wikipedia contributions since 28% of the participants to our events will continue to contribute from time to time.

Regarding our learning, our experience showed us that an effective way to recruit qualified Wikipedia editors is to work with the editor of a a peer-reviewed scientific journal, who is already in contact with a vast network of potential collaborators. Hence, we established a methodology in order to better prepare a majority of our training events, which can be read here.

Finally, thanks to the experiences acquired during the two grants funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, the Fondation Lionel-Groulx will continue its activities in the wikimedias by strengthening its links with academia and specialists in the history of Québec and French-speaking North America. The establishment, with the help of specialists, of a list of about fifty items to be improved as a priority is in line with the desire of the Fondation Lionel-Groulx to continue of being a key player in the improvement of content on the history of Quebec in the wikimedias.


Project Goals

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With a Wikimedian-in-Residence, our organization is able to achieve its main Wikimedia-related goal, which is (as quoted and translated from our 2018-2019-2020 Action Plan): "contribute to the development of high quality contents on the history of Québec and French-speaking North America in Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Commons, and to build a community of institutional partners and individual volunteers willing to work concretely on such an endeavor." Through our action, more individuals and organizations will contribute to Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Commons with the desire and the means to improve and enrich contents concerning the history of Québec and French-speaking North America. Through our work, we will continue to have a strong impact on a) participation to Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Commons and b) the general improvement of content quality.

Despite a very different situation from the first grant due to the pandemic, we managed to continue our activities through online quality trainings with a multitude of partners. We have had a strong impact on both participation and article quality improvement.

  • While our goal was to establish partnerships with at least 7 new institutions, we exceeded our goal by providing training with 10 new partner organizations.
  • Thanks to the significant success of several training events, we have significantly exceeded our goal of training at least 60 new Wikimedians as 167 new Wikimedians have taken our training.
  • Regarding our goal of producing online educational material, we changed our expectations during the grant after concluding, following tests, that the production of video tutorials resulting from the recording of our trainings would not give satisfactory results, particularly on aspects related to pedagogical strategies. Therefore, we decided to produce video tutorials with a level of quality which could not be reached by recording live trainings. Although it took more time, we are completely satisfied with the results as 'we uploaded 3 long videos (one for Wikipédia, one for Wikisource and one for Commons) and 5 brief videos.
  • We improved the quality of some 36 articles and contributed to the creation of 15 new ones. This is slightly below our targets (respectively 90% and 75%), however a huge number of articles are scheduled for improvement or creation in 2021-2022 as a direct result of our planning during the grant period (see the section "Next steps and opportunities").

Project Impact

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Important: The Wikimedia Foundation is no longer collecting Global Metrics for Project Grants. We are currently updating our pages to remove legacy references, but please ignore any that you encounter until we finish.

Targets

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  1. In the first column of the table below, please copy and paste the measures you selected to help you evaluate your project's success (see the Project Impact section of your proposal). Please use one row for each measure. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please include the number.
  2. In the second column, describe your project's actual results. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please report numerically in this column. Otherwise, write a brief sentence summarizing your output or outcome for this measure.
  3. In the third column, you have the option to provide further explanation as needed. You may also add additional explanation below this table.
Planned measure of success
(include numeric target, if applicable) 		Actual result Explanation
produce 6 new short video tutorials and 3 longer video documents, most likely webinars (one for Wikipédia, one for Wikisource and one for Commons) 5 short and 3 long Working on pre-recorded material was time consuming, but the results are very satisfying to us. We chose quality over quantity.
train 60 new wikimedians among professional or amateur historians, history teachers and students, who will be able to continue adding and improving contents later on 167 We considerably overcame our goal due to several major events which implied the attendance of more than 20 people.
organize – in collaboration with our partners – at least 8 training and/or contribution events involving on average 10 or more participants per event (for a total of 80 participants or more) 10 4 events gathered more than 20 participants, 2 almost 20 participants and others smaller groups.
assist at least 3 new history teachers (one per session) in the steps needed to bring student contributions to Wikipedia, Wikisource or Commons in the classroom 4 We reached 4 university-level history teachers who heard about the project because several colleagues worked with us during the 1st grant (Lucia Ferreti from UQTR and Aline Charles from Université Laval).
improve the quality of 40 articles in the French-language version of Wikipedia 36 (see the detailed table) Our training events and the overall project resulted in the improvement of 36 articles, which is close to our projected 40 articles (90%). See the section "Additional explanation" below.
create 20 new articles in the French-language version of Wikipedia 15 (see the detailed table) We came close to achieving our article creation goal (75%). We produced less, but there are no stubs: the majority of articles created were either "Bon début" (Start class) or "Bien construit" (B class) levels. See the section "Additional explanation" below for more.
At least 10 to 15% of the participants to our events will continue to contribute from time to time 28% We greatly exceeded our goal of sustaining Wikipedia contributions for at least 10-15% of our event attendees. The dashboard tool indicates that a total of 47 participants who followed our training events (including students) continued to contribute from time to time.
7 new institutions or associations (public, charity, non-profit) will be inspired by our initiatives and continue to organize on their own (or co-organize with us) other training and contribution events to improve the contents on the history of Québec and French-speaking North America in Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Commons 10 We had no difficulty finding new and interested partners who all wish to continue contributing.


Additional explanation

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If we did not reach 100% of our targets for article improvement and creation between June 2020 and June 2021, it is largely due to the fact that some of our currently ongoing contribution projects have yet to bare fruits. See "Next steps and opportunities" section below.

Story

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Looking back over your whole project, what did you achieve? Tell us the story of your achievements, your results, your outcomes. Focus on inspiring moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes or anything that highlights the outcomes of your project. Imagine that you are sharing with a friend about the achievements that matter most to you in your project.

  • This should not be a list of what you did. You will be asked to provide that later in the Methods and Activities section.
  • Consider your original goals as you write your project's story, but don't let them limit you. Your project may have important outcomes you weren't expecting. Please focus on the impact that you believe matters most.
  • This second grant obtained by the Fondation Lionel-Groulx began when our former CEO, Pierre Graveline, left his post to retire and to be replaced by Myriam D'Arcy, who took office at the end of June 2021. Moreover, our foundation was closed during July. Therefore, we had to start working on the grant project with challenges related to the transition of a new general management and the timeline of our goals to be met. However, we managed to catch up by the Fall of 2020 by organizing quality training events as early as January 2021.
  • Following our online training events with university students, we were pleased to note that several teams of students had written very good articles, both in form and in substance, thus respecting our recommendations and advice on policies in Wikipedia. As an example, we can cite the article Grève des réalisateurs de Radio-Canada (Producers' strike at Radio-Canada) which did not yet exist and which went directly to the "Bien construit" level (B class in English-speaking Wikipedia). We took the time to congratulate this team for their excellent work as well as a few others who produced articles with relevant content while respecting the 5 pillars of Wikipedia.

Survey(s)

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If you used surveys to evaluate the success of your project, please provide a link(s) in this section, then briefly summarize your survey results in your own words. Include three interesting outputs or outcomes that the survey revealed.

As we did during the first grant, we sent a survey to all participants a couple of days after each event in order to collect their opinions and feedback through a scale from 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent). Please note that surveys were not create for training events organized with universities. Here are the links to the results for each survey:

Global results of our surveys

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Pedagogy Online formula Editing training in Wikipedia Continuation of the contribution to Wikipedia after the training event
Overall rating (x/5) 4.1 3.8 4.1 4,25*

* = An average of 85 % of the participants answered "Yes".

Other

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Is there another way you would prefer to communicate the actual results of your project, as you understand them? You can do that here!

Methods and activities

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Please provide a list of the main methods and activities through which you completed your project.


  • Since we wanted to much more involve specialists in the framework of this grant, we organized online meetings before several training events with the objective of being advised in the choices of essential articles to improve or create, but also in regard to the scientific literature on the theme of each training.
  • We involved the Historians Advisory Committee of the Fondation Lionel-Groulx in order to find specialists in the academic field who could participate to our online training events.
  • With the objective of producing training tutorials with quality content, we revised our methodology, which consisted of recording training sessions and then offering them online in the form of webinars. We have implemented a methodology to facilitate tutorial recordings and create quality content. We took the time to write the scenarios for each tutorial, which involved putting ourselves in the shoes of the people who will watch the video content. Since we want these tutorials to be able to be used throughout the Francophonie, we have taken care to create tutorials that are not focused only on Quebec. In addition, we used free and open-source software during all phases of production of the tutorials.

Also, once our first tutorials were online, we established a strategy to publicize our online contents :

  1. Contacts with our major partners in order to publicize our online educational contents.
  2. At the end of May 2021, we sent out a first newsletter dedicated specifically to promoting our online tutorials. This newsletter was received by the participants of our training courses throughout the grant and by the members and partners of the Fondation Lionel-Groulx.
  3. We have promoted our tutorials on our social networks (Facebook, Twitter). This work will likely continue for many years.
  4. At the end of April, we requested the help of the Wikimedia Foundation to promote our online educational contents. Marti Johnson advised us to contact the WikiFranca community in order to publicize the video tutorial to Wikipedia inside the French-speaking community. We did reach WikiFranca on their mailing list and Telegram discussion group.
  • Following what he used to do during the first grant, we sent a survey a few days after each event in order to collect the comments of the participants and their degree of satisfaction. To generate our surveys, we used Framaform from Framasoft, a free-software based online service (please see the poll results for each event in the section below).
  • In line with our student training experiences during the first grant, we have implemented a methodology to adapt our training events to the online format:
  1. From the start of the session, we organized meetings with professors Ivan Carel, Alain Laberge and Martin Pâquet in order to discuss the subjects on which the students had to work.
  2. Since we uploaded the video tutorials to Wikipedia in March, students were able to improve their drafts after refreshing their memory by viewing the videos online. This advantage over the first grant allowed the students to produce texts with better quality content that better respected Wikipedian policies and guidelines. Moreover, 10% of the marks were dedicated to the respect of 10 essential aspects that we established prior to the correction of the texts.
  • For each training event not involving students, we continued our working method of creating a list of articles to improve relevant to the theme selected with partners. The lists were sent to the registered participants alongside our own suggestions of newbie tasks to improve the said articles. We also continued to prepare bibliographic material to help participants focus on concrete article improvement using sources.

Project resources

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Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Even if you have linked to them elsewhere in this report, this section serves as a centralized archive for everything you created during your project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

Pre-training resources and documents

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Following what we created on june 2019 during the first grant, we continued to use somes useful resources. We still used a dedicated page which centralizes all the information related to the project: past and future events, reports, training offer, useful links before training, lists of suggested articles, lists of suggested bibliography, link to our dashboard. This page helped us to present and share our project to our partners and allowed us to publicize our events. Here is the link of the page: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:FLG/WeR

A couple of days before each event, we sent an email to registered attendants with several useful links, but due the pandemic, the fact that all our trainings were online and the closing of major libraries in Montreal, we did completed lists of suggested resources as often as the first grant :

  1. A list of suggested articles to improve related to the theme: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:FLG/suggest
  2. A list of suggested bibliographic resources: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:FLG/biblio
  3. A link to a subpage with the procedure to be followed to open an account: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:FLG/compte
  4. A link to a subpage with several useful pre-training resources such as two videos created by Wikimédia France in order to present the 5 pillars of Wikipedia, the page which explains why and how to cite sources (WP:CITE), a link which guide new wikipedians regarding their first steps, and finally a text written by Mathieugp which aims to demystify Wikipedia ("Démystifier Wikipédia"): https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:FLG/preformation

Finally, we implemented a new tool in order to help participants with the creation of new articles. It consists of a list of outlines which respect the convention of Wikipedia :

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Fondation_Lionel-Groulx/plans

Post-training resources and documents

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  • In order to get feedback from our participants, we created a model of survey with Framaforms which was sent a couple of days after our training events. The survey consisted of five questions with, for each, an evaluative score ranging from 1 to 5: 1 = bad, 2 = fair, 3 = good, 4 = very good, 5 = excellent.



Wikimedia Commons and Youtube uploaded medias

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We uploaded several video tutorials on Wikimedia Commons and on Fondation Lionel-Groulx's YouTube channel.

Learning

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The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well

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What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

As already mentioned in our midpoint report, we wanted to focus more on specialists during the second grand. Hence, we developed several strategies to better involved specialist of the history of Québec and French North-America. Part of the strategies was to create groups of specialists who helped us to prepare our training events : by drawing up lists of essential subjects (notable people, events and institutions) and by providing relevant and reliable sources in order to improve articles or create new ones.

What didn’t work

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What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • Despite our continued efforts and determination, we were unable to organize a training event with the community in French-speaking Louisiana. Our contacts both at Codofil in Louisiana and within the Centre de la francophonie des Amériques have been overwhelmed since the start of the pandemic and it has been difficult for them to find participants for the training event scheduled for May 18, 2021. Fortunately, we have produced training video tutorials at Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource and we hope that this online training contents can be of use to the French speaking community in Louisiana. More importantly, we were able to organize a training session for members of RPFO (located in French-speaking Ontario), so in the end we did reach out to a large group of French speakers outside Québec.

Other recommendations

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If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

Next steps and opportunities

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Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.

  • The 2nd grant from the Wikimedia Foundation enabled us to work on important contribution projects connected to the mission of Fondation Lionel-Groulx.
  • We have applied for public grants and we are expecting answers in the coming months.
  • These projects will be realized in collaboration with academics specialized in history and civil society organizations.
  • The Fondation Lionel-Groulx will unveil more details about these projects at the appropriate time.
  • Thanks to the experiences acquired during the two grants funded by the Wikimedia Foundation, the Fondation Lionel-Groulx will continue its activities in the wikimedias by strengthening its links with academia and specialists in the history of Québec and French-speaking North America. The establishment, with the help of specialists, of a list of about fifty items to be improved as a priority is in line with the desire of the Fondation Lionel-Groulx to continue of being a key player in the improvement of content on the history of Quebec in the wikimedias.
  • Online video tutorials will considerably help the large number of participants or our training events, both face-to-face and online, to perpetuate their participation in improving contents in wikimedia while offering quality educational online content to the entire French-speaking community. We are confident that it will help people to start improving the content on Wikipedia and to feed the free media repository Wikimedia Commons and the free-content digital library Wikisource.

Part 2: The Grant

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Finances

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Actual spending

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Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Expense Approved amount Actual funds spent Difference
Contract revenue of the Wikimedian-in-Residence (32 hours per week, 8AM to 5PM, Monday through Thursday) $32,266.63 USD
($43,560.00 CAD) 		$35,129.98 USD
($47,425.52 CAD) 		$2,863.35 USD
($3,865.52 CAD)
Salary of the Digital projects manager (187 hours from 8th June 2020 to 8th June 2021) $7,733.33 USD
($10,440.00 CAD) 		$4,870.02 USD
($6,574.52 CAD) 		-$2,863.31 USD
(-$3,865.48 CAD)
Total $40,000.00 USD
($54,000.00 CAD) 		$40,000 USD
($54,000.04 CAD) 		$0 USD
($0 CAD)


Remaining funds

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Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

  • No.

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

Documentation

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Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadmin wikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

Confirmation of project status

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Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Please answer yes or no.

  • Yes

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

  • Yes

Grantee reflection

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We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being a grantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the Project Grant experience? Please share it here!

Maybe it had never been done, but we did it: a full year of offering training, producing online educational material, helping people work on article improvement, etc., all of it 100% online nearly 100% of the time. While this is a success, a proof of resilience and dedication, we sure miss the not online part, like everyone else probably! We will not miss the global pandemic! Our team kept its momentum despite the circumstances and we are very proud of that.

We expected that producing online educational video tutorials was going to be of great use to us and others, but we underestimated how much. We had in mind helping people who could not attend our training sessions, people who are self-taught and largely autonomous, but in the end it was just good for all our trainees to be able to point to online tutorials that are an easy way to refresh your memory days or weeks after training.

In last year's "Grantee reflection", we wrote that "what we want to achieve is ultimately a long-term effort". This surely remains true today, and in the years to come, Fondation Lionel-Groulx will be at work building a community of Wikimedians who are passionate about the history and the culture of Québec and French-speaking North America.

JBouchez: Personally, as a Wikimedian in residence, I retain a very great experience of this ambitious project which, in view of the good results concerning the achievement of the initial objectives, clearly answered a need in the community of enthusiasts of the history of Quebec and of French-speaking North America. The many thanks and enthusiastic messages in the survey comments sent to participants bode well for the future. I am therefore proud to have had the chance to participate in an original project concerning wikimedia in North America. In addition, I would like to add that being trained in wikimedia as part of this project with the Lionel-Groulx Foundation, allows me to be an active contributor to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons in fields other than history. Indeed, I have created articles on fields as broad as photography, active transport or geography (see my user page in French here for Wikipedia and here for my list of contributions in Commons). The scope of this grant therefore goes far beyond the realm of history in my case.


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