Grants:Project/Magioladitis/Why women don’t edit Wikipedia/Midpoint

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report accepted

This midpoint report for a Project Grant approved in FY 2017-18 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/Magioladitis/Why women don’t edit Wikipedia.
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

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

Organised 8 meetings (1 was online via Skype)
Participated in European Women's Meeting in Athens
Organised 2 workshops
Gave 2 public talks (1 recorded on video and released on YouTube)
Created a small orientation video
1 volunteer participated in one edit-a-thon
Co-organiser in a school project with the participation of 100 students and 20 teachers.
- Organised special meetings for female educators
- Distributed "Wiki Loves Women" leaflets to all female students
- Organised approx. 10 webminars that contained a part for Wikipedia's gender gap

Methods and activities

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.

I had frequent meetings and communication with representatives of the three supporting groups (Telesilla, To Mov, SheSharp)
I created a website that keeps tack of the activities http://gendergap.wikimedia.gr/
- The website contains a blog (10 blog entries so far), a schedule of meetings, the questionnaire online, basic info on the project and a description of the teams supporting it.
All main events were also advertised at Wikimedia User Group Greece blog.
I used my personal blog and my Twitter account to advertise the activities further
Posters and other material was printed and distributed
I tried to move most fo the organisation of the outreach events to the supporting groups themselves.

Midpoint outcomes

Percentage of registered female editors per year increased by 4%

Τalk on gender gap, Athens 2017

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

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

On-wiki statistics:

Among the new editors in Greek Wikipedia, the percentage of female accounts that registered after the project initiated, is 28% which is 4% more than the number of new female registrations before that.
The absolute number of active female accounts increased by 22%.
Small number of articles created via edit-a-thons, workshops or as aftermath to them.

Highlights:

Αχρήστης inactive member of the Wikimedia User Group Greece showed interest to re-activate and helped with the project
Amaliavr, female editor who helps with the project expressed interest to join Wikimedia User Group Greece. The same person helped in coordinating an edit-a-thon who was exclusively consisted of women.
MIliadou, female editor who helps with the project co-author a paper on Content Translator and participated in a Wiki-related event
Annakonta, female editor who helps with the project participated in a Developers Conference (Voxxed Days) as representative of the Wikimedia User Group Greece

Finances

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.

Most of the money till now has been spent to travel expenses. Everything goes according to the plan.

I plan to use a small part of the budget funds to cover transportation expenses that will enable a female Wikipedian (who is a student and has mobility issues) to visit Corfu and meet with educators during a Workshop I will be holding there.

Learning

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

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

Edit-a-thons did not work as I had hoped. Very few articles were created during the events.
Many participants were completely unfamiliar with Wikipedia and Wikimedia Movement.
Most of the participants had the will to discuss issues of how women involve with technology, internet and social media.
Many of the participants have a long history on activism for women's rights.
The workshops should probably transform more into open discussions with less technical content.

What is working well

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.

Next steps and opportunities

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. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this grant at the end of your project, please also mention this here.

Help build trust between Wikipedia and the organisations so that they are more keen to share material from their own archives, and starting uploading it to commons.
Find a female volunteer who would be interested in a "female Wikimedian in residence" position.
Fill out the questionnaires so that we have more info of how women in Greece think about the gender gap problem and how they approach it.
Record interviews of female activists.
Organise a workshop in Thessaloniki where more female university students will hopefully participate.
We will need to postpone the end of the Project to end of December, since no activities can take place in Greece during the summer period (general shut-down during August, students are off for their summer breaks, most people are on holidays at some point between June and mid September). Current finances allow this extension without impacting budget spending.

Grantee reflection

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?

It's an amazing experience. Being a grantee enabled me to do things I wanted and contribute more to the Wikimedia Movement. The help of Marti and Alex was great. Looking forward to see something great coming out of this project.