Grants:Project/Rapid/thekidpossum/Femmes de sciences/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2017-18 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/thekidpossum/Femmes de sciences.
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?

Acfas - Association francophone pour le savoir focus on science subjects and the idea was to train people to edit Wikipedia and concentrate on two examples of biographies of scientific women. We met our goals, we had 19 persons attending, 9 of them were new editors and 5 of the new editors were women. Librarians of Bibliothèque and Archives nationales du Québec made it easier by selecting a series of reference. We could explain how sourcing is fundamental.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
20 persons attending Mardi c'est Wiki Femmes de sciences	19 persons, with 9 new editors (5 of them were women) - 50% women in the room! Goal achieved.	NA
Work on 2 bio of scientific women (Livia Thür and Marcelle Gauvreau)	we did a bit of editing, but not that much	not enough time to train people + edit (they now know how to edit correctly, but did not contribute a lot this time) we also worked on related subjects (other women bio like Louise Marcil, or ACFAS)

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? We have been giving workshops like this for 4 years now. We are still learning. The promotion campaign went well on Facebook : the event reached 3K people. On Twitter, we had some retweets and likes from the ACFAS partners. Receiving help from librarians with the references is very appreciated. It is important to have "experts" who are also good communicators. We can keep in touch with all the people that attended a Mardi c'est Wiki by collecting emails or user names.
What did not work so well? We really need more time to edit. A 3 hours workshop is too short to make a real difference. But we count on the recurrence of the event Mardi c'est Wiki to gather people and edit on longer periods of time. We will still use the event page if people want to contribute on women bios. We tried the jitsi meeting to get people online, but the jitsi platform did not work at all, and I could not share my screen. Total fail!
What would you do differently next time? We may try a shorter version of the training. Or just tell people to click on the "edit" tab and start working! I'd also like to be more disciplined/have more time to enroll people on the dashboard.

Finances

Grant funds spent

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

138$CAN (remaining from a former grant) were spent on food and beverage for the participants.

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

No

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

Offline events are quite successful in attracting a large number of new editors; however, retention of these new editors remains a big challenge. That is why I think that regular events such as the Mardi c'est Wiki, organized by local institutions like the ACFAS, BAnQ, WMCA and Fondation Lionel-Groulx is fundamental to gather and educate the community and thus, replace the famous turnover.