Grants:Project/Rapid/WMROMD/Wiki Loves Monuments 2018 in Romania/Report

Report accepted
This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2018-19 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.


Goals edit

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went? This was the smallest WLM RO to date, mostly because we concentrated on people already familiar with the contest and/or Wikipedia. Even if we did not reach some of our numerical targets, we have been able to have better-quality pictures in our top 10, as well as some very interesting films. Also, we reached our target for image usage in Wikipedia, which means, in the end, Wikipedia has gained.

Outcome edit

Please report on your original project targets.


Target outcome Achieved outcome Explanation
100 participants 82 our communication was targeted towards people already linking our FB page or familiar with Wikipedia, which reduced the potential pool of participants. More importantly, 66% of participants joined after the competition started. We did see a late surge in numbers due to a sponsored FB post which also went a bit viral, which suggests that might be a good way to promote future contests
5000 images 3482 We had 3 heavy users this year, with the rest uploading a very low number of pictures (distribution here)
250 pictures used in Wikimedia projects 389 The percentage (11% of the total number of images) is about the same as in 2015, which surprised us, as we expected it to drop as most of the "easy" monuments are already covered.
10 movies 14 we had 2 participants, in line with what we expected


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?
    • The whole wiki-part of the contest (uploader, list, robot, judging tool) worked perfectly, which saved a lot of organizer time.
    • We are also happy with the number of movies as well as the percentage of new monuments.
    • The FB promotion experiment worked pretty well, it allowed us to have a post that went viral and brought a significant influx of late-entrants (impossible to count precisely, but the link is clear based on a few usernames corroborated with the people who interacted with our post)
    • We were able to start a discussion with the National Heritage Institute regarding future collaborations
  • What did not work so well?
    • We did not reach our targets with regards to the number of pictures and participants
    • postage fees were higher than expected, since we had to use a courier firm instead of the postal service due to bad experiences in formar projects
    • the edit-a-thon with the National Heritage Institute did not have the expected results by far
  • What would you do differently next time?
    • We are facing a choice for future editions: either commit to a more open contest, collaboration with entities interested in monuments and allocating significantly more resources (which we might not have) or scale down and concentrate on experienced wikipedians, which would allow better returns on the time invested. The current mix works too, but it leaves us somewhat in the middle ground, which might alienate both experienced Wikipedians and experienced photographers.

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.

  • Prizes = 500 USD
  • Internet domain renewal = 10.45 USD
  • Promotional materials = 107.75 USD
  • Postal taxes = 37.5 USD
  • TOTAL SPENT = 655.7 USD

Remaining funds edit

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

  • Remaining funds = 168,8 USD

We request that the remaining amount of money (169,8 USD) to be deducted from the allocation of the Grants:Project/Rapid/WMROMD/1lib1ref 2019 in Romania and Moldova.

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of US$169.80 were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:Project/Rapid/WMROMD/1lib1ref 2019 in Romania and Moldova.


Anything else edit

Anything else you want to share about your project?

Winning pictures edit

Winning film edit

The winner of the video competition in Romania