Grants:Project/Rapid/TUJ • ART+FEMINISM • WIKIPEDIA EDIT-A-THON/Report
- Report accepted
- To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/TUJ • ART+FEMINISM • WIKIPEDIA EDIT-A-THON.
- 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
editDid 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
editPlease 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
editProjects 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
editGrant funds spent
editPlease 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
editDo 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
editAnything else you want to share about your project?