Grants:Project/Global Open Initiative/Wikidata GLAMs Campaign Ghana/Final


Report accepted
This report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2020-21 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.



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

Part 1: The Project edit

Summary edit

The GLAMs Campaign Ghana project is one of the most interesting and biggest project undertaken by the Global Open Initiative team. There were four major goals we set out to accomplish with this project and these goals include: creating awareness about Wikidata in Ghana, organising 6 online Parliament of Ghana contest, organising 8 Wikidata workshops, establishing partnership with 5 GLAM institutions and uploading 10,000+ Bibliographic data unto Wikidata.

Of these six goals, we thought that the batch upload aspect of this project will be the easiest but it turned out to be the most difficult to accomplish. And considering the feedback we received, that we did not have enough capacity to embark on this project, we started work on this project with not so much confidence in ourselves that we will be able to achieve all our goals.

Project Goals edit

Project Impact edit

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 edit

  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
We will create awareness about Wikidata for GLAM institutions in Ghana 14 Wikidata workshops( some virtual and some physical) We organised 6 Wikipedia and Wikidata training workshops for the online contest and 8 Wikidata workshops for GLAM institutions
We will enter formal agreements with individual GLAM institutions(we expect the 25% will sign an MOU with us) Out of the 8 GLAM institutions we worked with, we succeeded in signing formal agreements with 6 of them who are interested in working with us on more projects. The Institutions we signed agreements with includes: Nubuke Foundation, Accra Archive, Ghana Library Authority, Dallung Community Library, Jisonayili Community Library and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research – Ghana
Each Ghanaian MP from 1951 will have a Wikidata item with complete Position held (P39) property statement. We succeeded in creating Wikidata items for each Ghanaian MP from 1951 parliamentary term sitting to 2009 It was very challenging getting data about members of the very old parliamentary terms.
Add 10,000+ bibliographic records to Wikidata We uploaded 11.343 bibliographic records to Wikidata This achievement is beyond our expectations considering the number of challenges we encountered using open refine to clean the data.
250 Total participants (Awareness campaigns) 300 Total participants We created registration forms for each event and this helped us track the number of participants
100 Total participants (editing activities) Over 194 Total participants We used the outreach dashboard to track this outcome
50 Number of newly registered users (editing activities) 60 Number of newly registered users This was deduced from the outreach dashboards we created from each event
10,000+ Number of content pages created or improved,

across all Wikimedia projects

15,000+ Number of content pages created or improved 11,343 items were batch uploaded while the remaining were created and edited by editors manually


Story edit

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.

In the process of executing this project we realised that whenever we encountered some setbacks along the way that had the potential to hinder us from achieving our goals, we were able to quickly think of solutions that helped us overcome these setbacks and then achieve our goals.

For instance, when we realised that it was taking quite long to get response from the GLAM institutions we reached out to, we decided to implement a Wikidata ambassadorial program where we opened applications for all employees of GLAM institutions who were interested in serving as Wikidata ambassadors in their institutions to apply. We selected 8 people and trained them so they can be the point of contacts in these institutions whom we worked with to host Wikidata workshops in their institutions.

In addition, to avoid the bureaucracy in these institutions and to gain access to more GLAM institutions, we targeted associations that manage these institutions, like the Ghana Library Authority which is the institution that manages all libraries in Ghana. Through working with the Ghana Library Authority municipal librarian, we have established partnership with all libraries within the Effutu district of the Central region of Ghana. And there is now a possibility to scale to libraries in other regions of Ghana.

Another instance was with the Parliament of Ghana contest series. Our initial plan was to get all the data of all the members of each parliamentary term from the Parliament of Ghana Library. But after visiting the library, we were told that the library did not have the data of all the members of each parliamentary term, we then resorted to using google books to find the data we needed. We trained all our Wikidata-in-Residence personnel on how to search the internet, and use google books to find information about the members of parliament, whose data are missing at the library.

Again, after our first contest, we realised that more males participated in our activities than females. So in order to encourage more female participation in our contests, we included a special award for female editors. And we began to see an increase in female participation.

In addition, to ensure that active volunteers do not give up after the first contest and also to increase the participation of new volunteers, we came up with a recognition strategy where we posted our top performers of the first two contests on our social media pages. We also encouraged participants of the previous contest to share their experiences at the workshop.

Finally, jury work proved more demanding than expected due to the many mistakes participants were making in articles and Wikidata items. In light of this, we implemented a mentoring system during the contest. With this mentoring system, the top and experienced contributors were asked to pick any new participants they wanted to mentor and train. After implementing this mentoring system, we realised that the quality of contributions from participants had improved greatly.

Survey(s) edit

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.

Other edit

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 edit

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

  • Researched and compiled data of members of the Parliament of Ghana.
  • Prepared data which was used by participants to create and improve articles and items on both Wikipedia and Wikidata.
  • Organised 6 online contest.
  • Organised 14 Wikidata and Wikipedia training workshops.
  • Reached out to GLAM institutions and established partnership with 6 of them.
  • Uploaded 11,000+ bibliographic data unto Wikidata using open refine and quick statements.

Project resources edit

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.

  • Links to Data prepared by Wikimedians in Residence for Parliament of Ghana Contest:

Learning edit

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 edit

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.

  • Your learning pattern link goes here
    • Using Google books to find information about the members of parliament was very useful
    • Encouraging experienced editors to mentor new editors
    • Establishing partnerships with associations or institutions that manage GLAM institutions like the Ghana Library Authority
    • Recognising active editors and encouraging participants of the previous contest to share their experiences at workshops
    • Holding periodic meetings as a team to discuss the project and progress so far and what else was left to do. This gave way for adding new members to the team and also encouraging active volunteers who were confident they could introduce new volunteers to Wikipedia and wikidata to lead our online training sessions
    • We curated ListeriaBot lists of the members of parliament for a particular parliamentary sitting we were working on and this helped the jury in monitoring Wikidata items, cleaning up and fixing errors

What didn’t work edit

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.

  • Open Refine Challenges
    • Reconciling columns
      • Reconciling columns with many rows is a challenge. The software is unable to reconcile all rows that have the potential to reconcile at the first attempt. The user will have to reconcile multiple times to be able to reconcile all rows that can be reconciled, or resort to reconciling manually which then becomes an onerous task when working with many rows (500 and above).
      • There may be situations where a column must be reconciled against multiple qualifiers. For instance; to reconcile a column entitled “Educated at”, which has educational institutions of varying levels (eg. primary, secondary and tertiary), to reconcile against the qualifier school alone may not help the situation. If columns could be reconciled against multiple columns at the same time, that would be great.
    • Schema
      • Adding similar columns as values of a statement in the schema is quite challenging when the columns are many, for instance, adding columns for author name string is tough when you have over 100 columns as author. Each column is added one after the other which is exhausting and time consuming. It would be great if these columns could be selected together and dragged to their destination.
    • Columns
      • Deleting multiple columns can be strenuous when there are hundreds of them to be deleted since each column is deleted one after the other. If a feature could be introduced to facilitate deletion of multiple columns like you could do with rows, work could be much easier.

Other recommendations edit

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

  • Searching for information with Google books was difficult since the pages from some of the books we used came in snippets. We recommend that Wikimedia create a book database for books that will be needed for citing, and incorporate a digital lending library system to ensure full legal access to some of these books. This could be a new wiki project where users recommend books to the foundation and provide reasons why the book should be bought and digitized for referencing. These books can be accessed fully for limited periods (digital lending) so editors can easily cite their articles. This could especially help editors like us in the African communities where getting physical sources is hard already and getting them from the internet is even harder. I think this could be a good investment by the foundation. The materials in the Wikipedia library as it turns out, does not have a lot of books/material for Africa or potential African related pages.

Next steps and opportunities edit

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. Most of the institutions we established partnerships with, are looking forward to working with us to organise more Wikidata and Wikipedia training workshops at their institutions. For instance;

  • Accra Archive expressed interest in working with us to upload digital archive of historical records, architectural drawings, images, and artefacts created from as early as 1894.
  • Nubuke Foundation is interested in working with us to create and improve articles about Ghanaian visual artists.
  • To attract more visitors to libraries, the Ghana Library Authority(The Effutu Municipality) is interested in working with us to frequently organise Wikipedia and Wikidata training events.

Part 2: The Grant edit

Finances edit

Actual spending edit

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
Table1 - Six Online Parliament of Ghana Contests: (Data allowance for graphic designing) GH¢900.00 GH¢900.00 0
Table1 - Table1 - Six Online Parliament of Ghana Contests: (Jury Meetings and Review internet data usage) GH¢4,800.00 GH¢4,800.00 0
Table1 - Table1 - Six Online Parliament of Ghana Contests: (Prizes) GH¢28,800.00 GH¢28,800.00 0
Table1 - Table1 - Six Online Parliament of Ghana Contests: (Team Management) GH¢7,200.00 GH¢7,200.00 0
Table1 - Table1 - Six Online Parliament of Ghana Contests: (Social Media Advertising) GH¢1,200.00 GH¢1,200.00 0
Table1 - Table1 - Six Online Parliament of Ghana Contests: (Mobile data allowance for participants) GH¢2,400.00 GH¢2,400.00 0
Table2 - Wikidatians-in-Residence: (WiR at Parliament of Ghana Library) GH¢38,500.00 GH¢38,500.00 0
Table2 - Wikidatians-in-Residence: (WiR at University of Ghana) GH¢10,080.00 GH¢10,080.00 0
Table2 - Quickstatements Batches: (Modelling and running the QuickStatement batches) GH¢4,200.00 GH¢4,200.00 0
Table3 - Training for Six Wikidatain in Residence and team Members: (Internet data for online meetups) GH¢800.00 GH¢800.00 0
Table4 - 8 Virtual Wikidata Workhops for 4 GLAMS: (All Expenses in this table) GH¢20,800.00 GH¢20,800.00 0
Internet usage for compiling Project grant midpoint report and final report Not budgeted for GH¢200.00 N/A
Bank Charges Not budgeted for GH¢200.00 N/A
Hardware(laptops and headsets) GH¢11,070 GH¢11,160.00 GH¢90.00
Total GH¢130,750.00 GH¢131,240.00 GH¢490.00


Remaining funds edit

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 remaining funds

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 edit

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 edit

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 edit

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!

  • I am thankful to have been given the opportunity to lead this project and with this team. Despite the so many challenges outlined above and including some of our team members having dropped off along the way to focus on other projects, we have been able to successfully execute this project. Leading this project taught me the resilience and strengths of our small team. I have learned that the quality of people you have in a team is more important than the size of the team. I am proud of what we have accomplished but I hope the story does not end here, because we need to build on the partnerships we have established.