Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey/2021/Program story for Midpoint report
Program story edit
Stronger community edit
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Stronger community program involves activities for bringing together the volunteers distributed across the country with the purpose of helping them getting to know each other. Secondly, it aims at welcoming the newcomers who would like to meet the human faces behind the wiki projects. For this purpose, 15 meetings were organized between 1 July 2021 -15 January 2022. The meetings were open to not only the user group members, but anyone from the editor community, and any person who never edited but interested to learn more about the wiki projects. 14 of the meetings were online. The average participation to the meetings were 11 persons. The last meeting on January 4 was a face-to-face meeting at Bilgi University where we also celebrated the 21st birthday of Wikipedia.
We did not have an opportunity to have speakers to give training on some predetermined topics as we planned at the begining, rather than that, at the end of each meeting one of the participants informed others about a tool s/he used while contributing, and/or answered the questions of newcomers.
For those who do not participate all meeting notes were shared here.
Effective Outreach & Content Development edit
This program includes activities designed for increasing awareness on wiki projects in the general public, inviting more people to join and filling the content gaps in wiki projects.
Our user group joined two article editing contests: First was the CEE Spring 2021 contest held between March 21 to May 31, second was the Turkic Vikimaraton held between 1-31 July. In the first, the focus was on Central and Eastern Europe. Our user group has been a part of this international editing contest since 2017. This year 37 participants created 681 articles. The Turkic Marathon on the other hand, is an editing contest organized by Wikimedia Turkic UG in cooperation with local Turkic Wikimedia affiliations. As a result of this contest, 21 participants created 342 articles. The participants of those two contests were active members of the Turkish community and the events served the goal of filling the content gaps about the culture of related countries.
Between the two article editing contests, we had a photo-contest: Wiki Loves Earth 2021- Turkey. It was held between June 1st to 30th, We were happy to see 2414 photos were uploaded by 549 users. Since 93% of those users were registered after the competition started, this contest worked well to serve the aim of increasing awareness on wiki projects and gain new contributors. Turkey was the 6th country in terms of the number of images uploaded. We were proud that one of the participants from Turkey became the the fourth prize winner at the international contest. This took some media attention. Using our connections, we even achived to make this success briefly covered at NTV, one of the largest national news tv channel of Turkey. This was important, because still media has hesitation on covering subjects related to Wikipedia and we consider even the smallest positive news regarding wiki projects on media as very valuable.
For filling content gaps, we organized thematic edit-a-thons with two partners. The first was a group of students and new graduates of psychology led by their instructor. They wanted to learn editing and start improving some articles related to Child and Adolescent psychology. The event produced two articles. In October we approched the organization called Teachers' Network when we saw that Turkish wikipedia article about "teacher" has only 7 sentences. We suggested that a group of teachers could improve the article as a Teachers' Day Gift in November. They answered positively and in October 15th, we met with 25 teachers. The participants created this content for Wikipedia: Öğretmen.
2 weeks after the Teacher Day's event, we had another online event: The Wikidata Birthday. An online training session was organized at October 30th, 2021. A user group member introduced Wikidata with 40 minutes presentation and then we answered the questions of 20 participants of the event.
Students Editing Wikimedia Projects edit
The program included our regular work for organizing Wikipedia assignments at university courses acrros the country and also a plan to start working with high schools. During the first half year of the project, the students were assigned contributing to Wikipedia in 6 university courses in different 6 universities at 3 cities. Additionally we have made Wikipedia presentation in a university club. We reached 217 students but we could not be informed about the articles created in every class. Some assignments did not involve creating/improving articles but just discussing about the articles or making small edits and discussing their experiences of wiki-editing.
A new goal for this year under this program was searching for opportunities to start Wikipedia Program at secondary level. Rather than contacting with the school administrations which tend to be more conservative, we prefer reaching out instructors/teachers who would decide introducing wikiprojects in their class on their own initiative. Upon the invitation by one of the teachers took part at Teachers' Day edit-a-thon, we visited a public science school at the Çan province of Çanakkale. A presentation about Wikipedia was made to 150 students in total, at 4 classes. We were impressed by the good questions and high interest of the students.
Synergic Partnerships edit
This program includes efforts to establish partnerships with local groups which advocate open culture, city governments and culture institutions. It was the program that we focused on more than others and as a result, in terms of the number of partnership talks, we reached far higher than the planned. We did not aim at getting quick tangible results but tried to introduce wiki-editing to as many institutions as possible.
- Potential partner meetings: More than 30 talks are made with potential partners. Those talks include
- talks with sport clubs, sport federations and National Olympic Committee to provide digital donations on sport relation material. Antalyaspor started regular contributions and the National Olympic Committee shared training photos of Olympic award winning Turkish sportspeople.
- talks with libraries like Library Of History, Literature and Art (TESAK), Sinematek/Cinema House Library for proposing joint edit-a-thon events and digital donations.
- talks with associations like Senex Association for Aging Studies to partner on projects for encouraging aged people to contribute wiki projects.
- Joint free-knowledge meetings: Participation to Linked Pasts 7 meeting with British Institute Ankara and Association of Museum Professionals
participation in the Creative Commons 20th birthday event of Creative Commons Turkey.
- Academic events: Presentation at "Archiving in Turkey today and tomorrow- Women in the Archives Symposium", "presentation at t Violence Against Women and Inequality in the Media Conference at Antalya Akdeniz University