Grants:Project/Rapid/TUJ • ART+FEMINISM • WIKIPEDIA EDIT-A-THON/Report

Report accepted
This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2017-18 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.


Goals

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

We were very happy with the outcome of the day and received much positive feedback from visitors throughout the day and other faculty from the university.

It was a big learning process to host this event for the first time without being very experienced at Wikipedia ourselves.

The sense of community was quite inspiring and we came away with many ideas for the next event.

Outcome

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Please report on your original project targets.


Target outcome Achieved outcome Explanation
1 Event 1 Event
50+ Participants 60 Participants
30 New Editors 25 New Editors
20-30 articles added or improved 21 confirmed articles added or improved


Learning

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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?

We had a good line up of speakers and managed to publicize the event enough so a good-sized crowd of diverse ages and backgrounds attended. The tech department supported us immensely with guest wifi accounts and publicly available laptops which were used on the day. We had a bunch of helpers in the form of student workers so that informal one-to-one assistance could be provided across the room.

  • What did not work so well?

A lot of participants were confused by the 4-day rule banning new users from publishing articles. When they thought that they would have to submit to a review queue and wait 2 months to put their article online it was demoralizing and unintuitive. The rule does not exist on Japanese Wikipedia and it's not well documented in English so it took quite a lot of one-to-one explaining that if they just waited for 4 days they could move their article into main article space without using the review system.

  • What would you do differently next time?

Regarding the above, I think if the event were to be just a single day, once-per-year event rather than a class project or an ongoing series of educational sessions, I would want to constrain the options for first time editors. It's counter-intuitive even how to save a sandbox into the draft space of Wikipedia when you are experiencing your 4-day newbie block so I would want to prepare public drafts with just the titles of a range of key articles that the organisers had selected to work on and assign people to tables with book resources to actually write them. It's a lot easier to start editing on a page that is already created and builds skills faster. Participants would also feel more gratified that their article appeared online via a supervisor moving it into main article space if they managed to finish to a decent degree. This brings up issues of what gets selected and what doesn't but I think that it might be more beneficial to build confidence with a simple, focussed task like this first so that participants can take the skills back with them and continue on subjects that interest them the most.

Finances

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Grant funds spent

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

We were approved for the full $2000 requested in our original grant proposal and spent the following in JPY:

Water/cups/plates 5655
Laptop security locks 7179
Printing for posters 2408
Printing for flyers 8570
Labels 2472
Colored paper 540
Food from Kinokuniya 19500
Food from Kinokuniya 5600
Tullys Coffee 8700
Ribbon 1,523
Student worker 1 (11 hrs) 10560
Student worker 2 (4 hrs) 3840
Student worker 3 (12 hrs) 11520
Student worker 4 (11.5 hrs) 11040
Student worker 5 (8 hrs) 7680
Speaker fee *6 60000
Translator fee 20000
Moderator fee 10000

=¥196,787

  • Student workers were paid for a two-hour training session and up to one hour self-study to prepare for helping participants at the event.

Remaining funds

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Do you have any remaining grant funds?

No, after bank fees for the international transfer, the amount deposited was between ¥192,000-¥193,000


Anything else

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Anything else you want to share about your project?