Grants:Project/Rapid/InFormAzionI/Edit-a-thon contemporary history/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid 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/Rapid/InFormAzionI/Edit-a-thon contemporary history.
• You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
• You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

We met our goals of adding and improving content and, through the whole project we were able to explain Wikipedia to a really huge amount of people, most of them students. Some of them will probably continue to be editors.

The other goal was to create a "partnership" with the historical institutes in Milan and Torino, as a "collateral" effect we already have some contacts with teachers who want to do projects with Wikipedia (and Wikivoyage) the next school year.

So yes, we are happy and consider it a success.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
5 events (2 edit-a-thons + 3 training sessions)	3 events (2 edit-a-thons + 1 training sessions)	due to a quite full calendar of spring events for the Milan historical society we postponed the training sessions to a later time in the year
Number of participants: around 180	Number of participants: around 170	Due to a change of program we didn't have the general presentation in Milan which will be held later in the year
Number of new editors: 30	Number of new editors: at least 60/70	This is really difficult to estimate, some classes worked a lot offline and did the real editing with the teacher's account, in some classes we have 4/5 new editors, in some classes one new user account for each student
Number of articles created or improved: at least 50	Number of articles created or improved: 44 (10N+34) in the first editathon + 94 (27N+67) in the second = 138 (37N + 101)	During the school year some kids got passionate about editing on Wikipedia and decided to write some more articles, there are still some articles in sandboxes Dashboard for the first edit-a-thon Dashboard for the second edit-a-thon

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

• What worked well?
  • The two edit-a-thons worked really fine, lots of positive energy and enthusiasm. Best result was teachers telling me that they want to work on Wikipedia with their classes next year too and among the students I'm confident that we will have some really nice editors too. The best success in these events is, imho, not the number of kbytes added but the fact that hundreds of young students now do know what it means to write and article and are able to do it. The Wikipedia volunteers taking part in the events were marvellous, as usual.

• What did not work so well?
  • Venue and logistics in Torino were not in our control and there were some misunderstandings with the institute in Torino about the lunch, in the venue it was not allowed to eat - we discovered it only at the end of march - and so they had to send all participants in nearby snack bars which were obviously cramped and crowded at lunch time. Nobody really complained about it but personally I would have liked a different organization.

• What would you do differently next time?
  • Next time I'm going to add some costs for swag, the stickers coming from US did cost us a horrendous amount of money in VAT and customs duties :-|

Finances

Grant funds spent

Documentation of expenditures has been received by WMF.

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

• Travel expenses for organizers and attending volunteers: € 538,25
• Total lunch costs for Torino edit-a-thon: € 531,30

Total expenses: € 1.076,50

Remaining funds

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of 247.50 EUR were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:Project/Rapid/InFormAzionI/Discovering Vergante.

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of 32.55 EUR were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:Project/Rapid/InFormAzioni/Wiki_Loves_Earth_Italy_2019.

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

• We still have € 323,50
• we would like to use € 43,45 to reimburse VAT and custom duties for the stickers arrived from USA

If this is approved we would have € 280,05 as remaining funds. We would like to retain the unspent amount for a project starting June 11, involving 9 high school kids and three volunteers working on Wikipedia, Wikivoyage and Wikisource on a local history and geography project, the funds would be used to pay for the lunch expenses (€ 4,5 * 11 persons * 5 days)

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?