Grants:Project/Rapid/Semmy1960/WikiLagos Nigeria Ministries and parastatals cleanup/Report

Draft report

This is a draft of a grant report for a grant funded for fiscal year 2017-18. Please do not respond or comment on it just yet: it's not yet ready for review. To read the approved grant submission, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/Semmy1960/WikiLagos Nigeria Ministries and parastatals cleanup.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went? Yes I am happy. We were able to meet our goals. It was far beyond my expectations. The project awakened the need for proper adequate information on Nigeria. Some lecturers walked up to the venue of the event to know more about Wikipedia. They were surprised that Wikipedia is a reliable source. They said they were told Wikipedia is not reliable and should not be used for any academic work but they were surprised that it is actually reliable. This made them call for their training too, that when we come again, they want to be a participant and a contributor to the Wikipedia community. The project was a success

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets. Please be sure to review and provide metrics required for Rapid Grants.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Number of events: 2 events	2 events	We had an edit-a-thon during the Physical training as planned .
Number of participants:30	67	25 participated for the physical training and the remaining joined the online training which we had 4 sessions in four weeks
Number of new editors: 10	23	We exceeded the number of new editors targeted for the training.
Number of items created or improved: 100	495 articles created, 909 articles edited, 2.04k references added	The target was achieved and it was a beautiful outcome. The metrics can be found on the outreach dashboard https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/WikiLagos_Nigeria_Ministries_and_Parastatals_cleanup/WikiLagos_Nigeria_Ministries_and_Parastatals_cleanup?enroll=
Number of repeat participants (for projects that include a series of events) = 20	20	95 per cent of people that attended the training also participated in the 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 desire for the students to learn more about Wikipedia, Wikidata helped us to achieve and exceed our goals. The WhatsApp platform we created was used for mentoring, updates and follow-up of the project. We shared progress on the dashboard on a regular basis and we shared the username of the leading contributors because there was a ten dollar voucher that was won every week. We had new students requesting to join us on the second day of the training. A student by the user name Ebubechukwu1 got the advert of the project from the Ilorin community that was shared with her by her brother and she joined. She said when she heard the project was taken place in LASU (Lagos State University, Ojo Campus), she was very happy because her brother is a Wikimedian and in the Ilorin community. She said she had been yearning to be a part of the community and the training has helped her to improve her content creation skills and research skills. She said she is now addicted to contributing on Wikipedia and she was one of the winners of the competition during the project. She has been contributing and encouraging her friends to join the Wikipedia community. The awareness of the training has created a call for the training of information officers in Lagos state who are 400 in number. The Director of Social Media Lagos State (Dr Atansuyi) made the call after he saw the awareness for the training. I was invited and asked many questions about Wikipedia and he was grateful that some people can actually document Nigeria and the impression they have about Wikipedia not being reliable was cleared. He said how can we join this community as information officers? We need to bridge the knowledge gap and document our history, our culture so that our stories, heritage, culture will not die."We want to contribute as well, he said". The training has helped to create more awareness in the school and this has started the registration process for a Wiki fan club in Lagos State University,Ojo Main Campus. The Dean of Communication is willing to support the students after our registration by giving them the opportunity to use the computer lab for their Wikipedia work anytime the students want to work. Participants were allowed to share their experiences and challenges with the project team at the physical trainings and online via the WhatsApp group and a one-on-one support was provided for those their accounts were blocked indefinitely. We had to prove we were doing a project, so we had a lot of mentoring to do on how to navigate and write on Wikipedia without violating the rules.

What did not work so well?

During the project, many people were blocked which dampened their spirit and affected some of them from participating fully.
Some had issues with network and electricity was a major problem because Nigeria's Electric Power Grid was down, so there was power outage across the country
Some students couldn’t join on time because they were writing exams.

What would you do differently next time?

We will ensure that we train using the article creation wizard to avoid being blocked.
We will ensure that we choose a good timing that would enable every participants to participate.
We will ensure to look for partnerships so that we can provide power banks for students because of the power outage. There is always electricity in school so they can charge their power banks, and if we can speed up our registration, they will be allowed to use the computer room to work as promised by the Dean of communication.

Finances

Grant funds spent

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

Venue= 190,000 for 2 days
Transportation and feeding for 5 Editors taking pictures of the ministries (5 Editors)=6000 x 5 x 2 days =60,000
Food, drinks and snacks during the event = 3300 x 30 x 2 = 198,000
Internet support for the participants during the 4 weeks session for 40 people including all Editors = 143,000
Banner, design and flyers = 40,000
Gift vouchers for top contributors = 42,000 ($50 for the first prize, $30 second, $20 for the third prize)
Transportation for 2 other facilitators within Lagos = NGN 22,000 x2 = 44,000

Total = NGN 717,000 ($1728.54)

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

None remaining

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

Some pictures from the event can be seen here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eIwQRL_y_ayr4b_HGM37ZMNXNAgSTj3V