Grants:Project/Rapid/UG LK/Wiki Loves Earth 2019 in Sri Lanka/Report

Report accepted
This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2018-19 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/UG LK/Wiki Loves Earth 2019 in Sri Lanka.
  • 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 edit

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

Overall, the project is a success, and we managed to exceed targets.

Outcome edit

Please report on your original project targets.


Target outcome Achieved outcome Explanation
100 new users 803 new users (852 participants) Achieved 8 times the target.
1,000 uploads 3,945 uploads Achieved nearly 4 times the target. 6th highest number of submissions worldwide.
50 photos in use across projects 75 files used in 92 pages, across 22 wikis This is organic usage. This will be further increased once we intentionally add the files to related pages.
20 natural sites photographed (to be calculated) Looking at the ~4,000 uploads, it is highly likely that we have surpassed the target significantly.


Timeline edit

  • 2019-04-17 - Created UG-LK project page for internal coordination
  • 2019-04-17 - Started grant process
  • 2019-05-30 - WMF grant of LKR 198,250 received
  • 2019-06-01 - Contest officially began
  • 2019-06-30 - Contest officially ended
  • 2019-07-09 - Voting Round 1 (Pre-selection) began
  • 2019-07-15 - Voting Round 1 (Pre-selection) ended
  • 2019-07-16 - Voting Round 2 began
  • 2019-07-24 - Voting Round 2 ended
  • 2019-07-27 - Voting Round 3 began
  • 2019-07-29 - Voting Round 3 ended
  • 2019-07-30 - Finalists announced internally on UG-LK project page
  • 2019-07-31 - Published winners on WLE winners page
  • 2019-08-03 - Sent winning notices to participants
  • 2019-08-13 - Sent all shipments to winners and jury members - 9 local and 3 international
  • 2019-08-14 - Drafting of project report begins
  • 2019-08-16 - Review of report by Grants Team begins
  • 2019-12-03 - Winners of the International Round announced (Sri Lanka: 15th and 27th)

Other information edit

International round winners edit

Finalists edit

Top 30 by points edit

Learning edit

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? edit

  • The sitenotice banner is very effective in getting the attention of potential participants.
  • Facebook ads are also useful to reach non-Wikimedian professional photographers (i.e. using targeted ads).

What did not work so well? edit

  • Importing items to Sri Lanka in particular (i.e. Wikimedia merchandise) is very problematic. To put is bluntly, the local import taxes are absurd, and have significantly impacted our budget. Taxes are often more than the total value of the shipment itself. The grants team (Mariel), as well as the team from Wikimedia Store (Sandra), were very helpful in solving issues here.
  • The jury tool we used is very nice, but have a lot of room for improvement. Apart from bugs (which were solved by the developer), admins do not have much control of the campaigns, such as creating round and modifying content of rounds, using previous round data for the next round, user management, etc. We had to trouble the developer quite a bit, to get things done.

What would you do differently next time? edit

  • For merchandise, we will consider arranging them locally next time. Import charges are far from reasonable, as explained in other parts of this report.
  • Google ads were complicated and never worked for us, hence will be dropped in the future.
  • Clearly set a limit on the number of places a participant can win. We didn't face an issue here, but it would help reach more unique winners. In this contest, one participant earned the top 9 places. After discussing with the international team, we decided to set a maximum limit of 3 places per participant.

Suggestions for WLE international team edit

  • Standardise email templates across participating countries. So that participants and jury members all over, get the same experience.
  • We must have a separate email domain or alias for public correspondence. It does not look professional to send emails from my personal @live.com email address.
  • Standardise certificate designs for all participants/jury. Maybe the international team could provide a rigid template next time, with a certificate ID/number for validation.
  • Jury tool: The Wiki Loves platform must have an officially managed jury tool, with multiple developers. As per my understanding, there is none at present.
  • Jury tool: View the file's Commons description, depicts information, category information, and others, from within the tool, while voting.
  • Jury tool: Have an option from within the jury tool, to tag images for speedy deletion. We may also create a new criteria for requests by event organisers.
  • Jury tool: It would be nice to also have an option to enable editing categories, depicts, description, and other aspects of the file, from within the jury tool. We can enable this for experienced editors who are also jury members.
  • Clarity: Update FAQ to give more information on how to handle participants who earned more than one prize.
  • Clarity: Update FAQ to give more information on how to obtain statistics after a WLE project. Such as unique new users, uploads stats (uploads by user, by date, etc), and so on.

Finances edit

Grant funds spent edit

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

Subject Cost (LKR/රු) [1] Cost (USD/$) [2]
Facebook ads Rs. 13,721.00 $ 78.62
Prize - 1st Place - CameraLK voucher worth LKR 35,000 Rs. 36,050.00 $ 206.57
Prize - 2nd Place - CameraLK voucher worth LKR 25,000 Rs. 25,750.00 $ 147.55
Prize - 3rd Place - CameraLK voucher worth LKR 20,000 Rs. 20,600.00 $ 118.04
Logistics Rs. 3,999.12 $ 22.91
Courier Rs. 17,225.00 $ 98.70
Certificates Rs. 2,000.00 $ 11.46
Import charges [3] Rs. 62,375.86 $ 357,41
Incidental: Internet data charges for 3 months Rs. 12,373.00 $ 70.90
Incidental: Stationary and boxes for courier Rs. 5,550.00 $ 31.80
Total Rs. 199,643.98 $ 1,143.96
  1. 1 USD is approximately 174.5 LKR
  2. 1 LKR is approximately 0.00573 USD
  3. These are unexpected charges we faced when clearing merchandise shipments from Wikimedia.

The above is a summary of expenses. Detailed breakdowns is/will be sent to the Grants team in spreadsheet format.

Remaining funds edit

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

There are no remaining funds. Budget was slightly exceeded, but that was covered with previous account balance, and bank account's accumulated interest.

Anything else edit

Anything else you want to share about your project?

  1. 4th Place winner have not enabled the email feature on their account, and have not responded to their talkpage notice. Hence the certificate/prize is withheld. If/when they respond, User:Rehman will courier the prize at his expense (so that the grant report can be closed without further changes).
  2. None about the project itself. But I would like to suggest a more centralised organising structure for all Wiki Loves events worldwide, maybe sometime in the future. It is better for our global branding, efficiency, financing, as well as technical aspects such as templates and tools. At present, not only is each Wiki Loves Earth different from each country, but we also have other contests such as Wiki Loves Monuments, which is quite isolated with best practices/techniques/infrastructure not easily shareable with other contests and sub-contests by country.