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

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

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

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

Our public landing page: WLE-LK
Our internal project page: WLE2019
Grant request page: Grants:Project/Rapid/UG LK/Wiki Loves Earth 2019 in Sri Lanka
Organiser and grantee: User:Rehman
Graphics and media: User:Azeez
Jury members: Rehman (LK), Azeez (HK), Sivakosaran (LK), Sandaru (LK), Nandana (LK), Dan Arndt (AU).
Winning users (Commons links): Senthiaathavan (Int-15th, Int-27th, 1st, 2nd, 3rd), Sujeewa nishantha mallawaarachchi (4th), AntanO (5th), Nisal Senanayaka (6th), Sachinthawije (7th), Kody8958 (8th), Sameeramhb (9th), Elisolidum (10th).

International round winners

15th Place:
Mother toque macaque and child, at the Katagamuwa Sanctuary.
27th Place:
Mother toque macaque and child, at the Katagamuwa Sanctuary.

See also: WLE 2019 - International Jury Report
Announcement: http://wikilovesearth.org/2019-winners/

Finalists

Crested serpent eagle at Yala National Park.
Mother toque macaque and child, at the Katagamuwa Sanctuary.
Mother toque macaque and child, at the Katagamuwa Sanctuary.
A lizard in the Makandawa Rain Forest Reserve.
Calotes calotes.
Kalatuwawa Lake, Labugama Kalatuwawa Forest Reserve.
Jumping spider.
Migrant bird at Yala National Park.
Baker's Falls.
A colourful bird at Yala National Park.

Top 30 by points

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 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?

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?

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

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

Grant funds spent

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 USD is approximately 174.5 LKR
↑ 1 LKR is approximately 0.00573 USD
↑ 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

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

Anything else you want to share about your project?

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).
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.

[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.

[1]

[2]

[3]