Grants:Project/Rapid/Wiki Loves Monuments 2020 in Malta/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2020-11 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/Wiki Loves Monuments 2020 in Malta.
• 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? On the whole, we were extremely satisfied with the outcomes of the project. After some years of declining participation, the number of submissions to Wiki Loves Monuments in Malta 2020 exceeded our initial expectations, and was a significant increase over that of the previous year. Even more encouragingly, the number of users participating reached an all-time high for the Maltese competition. This showed that the competition's reach was growing and an increasing number of people are willing to contribute to Wikimedia Commons. It was also of great satisfaction to see that a significant proportion of participants (86%) were newcomers to the platform, and registered a Wiki account after the competition had started. This indicates that the project was successful in reaching new audiences and enticing people to engage more actively with Wikimedia platforms, particularly when documenting their own cultural heritage.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets. Please be sure to review and provide metrics required for Rapid Grants.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
50 participants	79 participants	After some years of declining participation, this grant allowed us to make a concerted effort in promoting the competition and reaching out to potential participants. This resulted in a significant increase in participation, with this year's total marking the highest ever rate of participation in Wiki Loves Monuments in Malta.
1,000	1,103	The target outcome was comfortably exceeded, with a wide range of photos of different monuments and heritage sites across the Maltese islands.
50 photos used in Wikipedia	133 photos used in Wikipedia	The target outcome was far exceeded, with over double the number of photos anticipated currently used in Wikipedia. Nonetheless, this only represents 12% of the total number of photos submitted, so we are hoping for this to increase further over time.

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?

1. Our ongoing relationships with partner organisations and public institutions(such as Spazju Kreattiv, Malta's National Centre for Creativity) has helped us promote the competition over the past years. A new partnership with a similar organisation, namely the Valletta * Design Cluster, was established over the past months and proved to be extremely useful in spreading the word about the competition.
2. We have established a pattern of holding regular online meetups over the past year. These were initially started in response to the pandemic situation, which prevented us from meeting regularly in-person, however, we continued these online meetups once initial lockdown restrictions were eased. These were open to anyone who wished to attend and learn more, and proved to be very useful for the activities that we organised throughout the Spring and Summer months. We continued these meetups throughout September and beyond, linking them to our participation in WLM 2020, encouraging people who wished to learn more about the competition to come meet us virtually. Having this sort of channel through which to establish direct contact with our community is something that we found helpful and plan to continue for future events.

• What did not work so well?

1. The pandemic situation proved to be very challenging, as we could not organise any physical activities throughout the competition. This limited our ability to connect with potential participants who are less present on social media channels and also made it difficult to maintain contact with participants, as we could not hold events such as photowalks on exhibitions throughout the month of September. The pandemic and related restrictions on physical gatherings also made it difficult to hold events such as the award ceremony.
2. We hoped to expand the monument list using a new list of monuments that we got hold of over the past months, however we did not have the required expertise on board to do this (and to create Wikidata items for the new monuments) and did not manage to incorporate these new monuments in our existing list of monuments. We hope to do this for future editions.

• What would you do differently next time?

1. We plan to continue developing our partnerships to further deepen our engagement with their particular audiences.
2. As mentioned above, we plan to broaden our list of monuments and will plan ahead to do so for the next edition of WLM.

Finances

Grant funds spent

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

Items	Sub-items	Amount (in Euro)	Total
Promotion	Printed material	325	349.99
	Online promotion	24.99
Prizes (in the form of books and/or photographic equipment i.e. not cash awards)	First prize	250	1,132
	Second prize	157
	Third prize	100
	4th-10th prize & maximum contribution prize	225
	Printing & framing of top ten entries	400
	Total		€1,481.99

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of 18.01 EUR were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia Community Malta Simple Annual Plan 2022.

• The remaining grant funds amount to €18.01.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

• We would like to thank the Wikimedia Foundation for its support over the years. The rapid grants that we have obtained over the past years have helped us establish a stronger presence and be bolder with our ambition for growing engagement with Wikimedia projects in Malta.