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

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2019-20 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Global Open Initiative/Wikidata GLAMs Campaign Ghana.
You may still review or add to the discussion about this report on its talk page.
You are welcome to email projectgrantswikimedia.org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the grantee's first 3 months.

Summary edit

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

WiR's gathered data for all 11 parliamentary sittings
Organised four online Wikipedia and Wikidata Workshops
Contracted someone to develop a python script which was used to scrape about 10,000+ bibliographic data off UG Digital Space website
Preparing to uploaded 10,000+ University of Ghana bibliographic records to Wikidata
Preparing to organise one Wikidata Workshop for ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge

Methods and activities edit

How have you setup your project, and what work has been completed so far?

Describe how you've setup your experiment or pilot, sharing your key focuses so far and including links to any background research or past learning that has guided your decisions. List and describe the activities you've undertaken as part of your project to this point.

Wikidatians-in-Residence at at Parliament of Ghana Library: Table 2

We visited the Parliament of Ghana several times seeking for access which was finally granted but with restrictions of one person at a time due to COVID-19
We contracted 11 Wikidata-in-Residence(WiR) and assigned them each a parliamentary sitting to gather data about the members of parliament for that particular parliamentary sitting.
The data gathered by the WiR were stored in an excel sheet and then transferred to a Wikipedia talk page which was used by participants of the online contest in creating articles and Wikidata items.Below are links to the database of information gathered by WiR's for the four contests we have run so far:

Six Online Parliament of Ghana Contests: Table 1

In running the online contests, we developed landing pages for each contest where the list of members of parliament for each particular parliamentary sitting we were working on was made available for participant to work and sign their names by them. Below are links to the landing pages of the contest we have run so far:

One of our advisors 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.

Wikidatians-in-Residence at at University of Ghana: Table 2

We contracted someone to develop a python scrapper which was used in scraping bibliographic data from the University of Ghana Digital Library. The data was stored in a CSV file

We will use open refine to clean the data and upload them unto Wikidata

8 Virtual Wikidata Workhops for 4 GLAMS: Table 4

We reached out to 7 GLAM institutions on linkedin and facebook and so far only one has responded to us and so we are currently preparing to organise a Wikidata workshop for employees at ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge

Midpoint outcomes edit

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

A total of 147 people have participated in the contest so far, 95 editors made contributions on both Wikipedia and Wikidata. Out of the 95, 17 were newly registered participants and about 20 were repeat participants. 643 articles were created and 2068 articles were edited on English Wikipedia. And for Wikidata, 512 items were created and 1646 items were edited.

No articles Deleted edit

10 articles were flagged for deletion via Speedy, Prod, or AfD; of those only 3 were actually deleted. And these 3 were recreated by other users.

Detailed Outcome On Wikipedia


Contest	Number of registered participants	Number of Editors	Number of Newly registered users	Number of Articles Created	Number of Articles Edited	Dashboard link
5th Parliament of the 4th Republic Contest	50	28	11	127	559	[1]
4th Parliament of the 4th Republic Contest	40	22	3	224	698	[2]
3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic Contest	30	24	3	200	540	[3]
2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic Contest	26	21	0	92	271	[4]
Total Outcome	146	95	17	643	2068

Detailed Outcome on Wikidata


Contest	Number of registered participants	Number of Editors	Number of Newly registered users	Number of Items Created	Number of Items Edited	Dashboard link
5th Parliament of the 4th Republic Contest	50	28	11	153	625	[5]
4th Parliament of the 4th Republic Contest	40	22	3	103	369	[6]
3rd Parliament of the 4th Republic Contest	30	24	3	112	320	[7]
2nd Parliament of the 4th Republic Contest	26	20	0	144	332	[8]
Total Outcome	146	94	17	512	1646

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

Finances edit

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

We have tried to spend funds according to plan but we ended up making some transportation expenses to deliver shopping vouchers to participants in Accra and those outside Accra which was not budgeted for. We also made some additional not budgeted for transportation expenses in submitting a letter at the Parliament of Ghana library and following up till our request was approved. In addition, we incurred some bank charges and spent GHS 200 on internet usage for putting together the midpoint report.However, we have not yet started spending the amount budgeted for social media advertising and Mobile data allowance for participants, so we hope to use part of the amount budgeted for in this category to cover for the expenses made which was not budgeted for.

For the second half of our project, we anticipate organising offline Wikidata workshops for some institutions so we will have to use the amount budgeted as data allowance to cover the cost of feeding participants

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 are taking enough risks to learn something really interesting! Please use the below sections to describe what is working and what you plan to change for the second half of your project.

What are the challenges edit

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

Due to COVID-19 there were restrictions on access to certain public facilities including the libraries. When we finally got access to the libraries, we could not get all the resources which contained information about all the members of parliament for all 11 parliamentary sittings. As a result, even though all Wikidataian-in-Residence did their very best searching online and in books found at the libraries, it was impossible for them to find information about all the members of parliament, especially for the old parliamentary sitings.
Our facilitators have been using faulty laptops and headsets during the virtual trainings and workshops. There have been situations where our facilitators either drop off the calls unexpectedly, or they either have to readjust their earphones several times before participants can hear them.
Poor internet connectivity has hindered smooth organisation of virtual meetups
Delays in seeking for response from Galleries, Archives, Museums and Libraries.
Quite impossible to find information for all members of parliament of all the 11 parliamentary sittings.
A lot of participants refuse to watch the video tutorials we make and put on our youtube channels or any of the resource links we provide on the contest landing page. Most prefer live participation and an opportunity to ask questions.

What is working well edit

What have you found works best so far? 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.

Promotion for the first online contest was a success considering the number of people that participated and the number of newly registered users
In general, we seem to have a good number of editors participating in the online contests, although the number of editors seem to be dropping as the number of items we have to work on also decreases.
Your learning pattern link goes here

Next steps and opportunities edit

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points.

We have two more online contests to organise
We also have 8 Wikidata workshops to organise of which we are currently preparing to organise one this November.
We will also be seeking to establish partnerships with at least 5 GLAM institutions
We have 10,000+ Wikidata items to upload unto Wikidata

Grantee reflection edit

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

Unlike our first contest which was dominated by a lot of males who also won in that regard, there has been a lot of female participation in our subsequent contests. Seems now the female editors are winning more than the male participants.
Looking at the progress of most of the participants including User:Naa2Darkoa, User:Amoaniwaa, User:Hannah Nyame, User:Dhee jah , User:Rosy86 We are really proud to see that with continues participation in the Parliament of Ghana contest series, some participants are getting really good at creating Wikidata items and writing quality articles on English Wikipedia