Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Ukraine/2019
- Application or grant stage: approved
- Applicant or grantee: Wikimedia Ukraine
- Amount requested: 98,500 USD + 10% contingency = 108,400 USD
- Amount granted: 98,500 USD + 10% contingency = 108,400 USD
- Funding period: 1 January 2019 - 31 December 2019
- Application created: September - October 2018
- Recommended application date: 1 November 2018
- Midpoint report due: 15 July 2019
- Final report due: 30 January 2020
Application edit
Please link to or provide your annual program plan and annual budget here, and add your targets to the grants metrics worksheet.
Background edit
In 2019 we intend to focus towards further development of our organisational strategy, developing more extensive partnerships and collaborations around our existing projects, as well as reorganising our staff governance with hiring a project coordinator. As for other movement affiliates, 2019 is intended to be a transitional year where we do not anticipate new big projects and will focus on rethinking our activities and governance in light of the new movement strategy. We will pursue the efforts from 2018 when we worked on increasing content in Ukrainian and minority languages and about Ukraine on Wikimedia projects, recruiting new participants, particularly via education activities, supporting initiatives of community members and working on community development, as well as making outreach about Wikimedia projects.
At the moment of publishing the application all of our 2018 organisation-wide metrics but "Number of media files used" are on track or exceeded (an effort will be done on the latter), and most programme metrics are on track. Our 2019 metrics have the same order of magnitude as in 2018, with minor changes in line with programmatic adjustments.
Application includes four programmes as it was in 2018 with minor shifting within the programs. Some new activities or those we wanted to enhance in the 2018 are not marked as separate tracks for 2019 but still among activities we seek to develop:
- Wikicamp was not held due to joint decision to favour more profound preparation and, more importantly, to get trained at International WikiCamp in Armenia this year. We intend to hold it in 2020.
- Crimean Tatar Wikipedia project has to be rethought given that we did not achieve a living community on this wiki so far. We will still support reasonable community initiatives targeting this project.
- Wikiworkshops on demand were split into more relevant projects: thematic workshops became Editing challenges, those with GLAM or educational institutions were moved to respective programmes, and those serving general promotion of Wikimedia projects are considered in Promotion Activities.
Our 2019 general assembly with a chapter strategy session will be held in the first part of the year, and we also intend to hold a second strategy session (possibly around our chapter’s 10th anniversary in May).
Annual Plan edit
Сommunity discussion on 2019 plan (Ukrainian)
Budget Plan edit
The total budget requested by WMUA for the SAPG 2019 is the same amount as 2018 SAPG.
Wikimedia Ukraine 2019 budget and staffing breakdown
Staffing Plan edit
Programs edit
Content Enrichment
This programme is focused on enriching content on Wikimedia projects through different models, including editing contests and challenges, media contributing contests and campaigns, and outreach to partners. Goals of this programme include bridging knowledge gaps, bringing new content and improving existing content in Ukrainian and minority languages and about Ukraine. We consider contests to be a good model for increasing free and open knowledge in Ukrainian projects and on Wikimedia Commons.
Editing challenges and contests
Why are we doing this?
Article contests are a powerful way to enrich content. Our experience shows that contests motivate users which would not otherwise consistently create articles on a certain topic. For example, in 2018 Wikimedia Ukraine boosted, among others, content on Scandinavia, information security, and local cultural heritage — the subjects which are not particularly popular among editors but are of certain interest to the readers. From this perspective, contests are especially effective for enhancing the development of sister projects. For instance, the articles created during month-long contest in Wikivoyage still account for more than 15 percent of the whole number of articles which exist in Ukrainian Wikivoyage. Apart from the main goal of bridging content gaps, article contests help increase participation through attracting new users to Wikipedia and other wiki-projects.
Background
Wikimedia Ukraine has been organizing article contests for seven years now. Overall, we held 21 article contests since early 2011. 2018 resulted with record number of article contests Wikimedia Ukraine organised in one year. Six article contests lasted for month or more but, as usual, beside contest period itself it took additional month or more before and after to build a team, recruit jury, set contest coordination and promotion and to accomplish with results and to award winners. Without going in detail, contests are demanding and multi-staged projects and each one brings us new lessons and outcomes as organizers and is always rewarding as for content: 4354 new and improved articles to Ukrainian Wikipedia, as well as 155 new and improved articles to Ukrainian Wikivoyage in 2018. We intend to use this experience to expand our work on article contests.
Plans for 2019
In 2019, Wikimedia Ukraine will continue organizing article contests. We already have volunteers who pledged to organise established contests such as CEE Spring or Wiki Loves Earth/Monuments article contests. We plan to develop these existing contests by targeting more specific content gaps and looking for partnerships. We have also other ideas in discussion, including a contest on women biographies, or an article contest on scientific topics to combine with the existing Science Photo Contest.
We will rethink the concept of contests for sister projects. We have organised a contest for Wikivoyage in February 2018 and have an ongoing community contest-like initiative in Wikisource. While contests are efficient for content generation on sister projects, we need to think how to integrate them with development of living project communities. We have a community demand for such contests, particularly on Wikiquote.
We intend to have between 4 and 6 contests in 2019, depending on community interests and partners available. Among new topics for article contests are Wiki Science article contest, WikiKharkivshchyna contest for libraries, Women biographies article contest. In addition, we will run small and short-term thematic editing challenges like WikiGap this year.
Photography Contests
Why are we doing this?
Ukraine has a diverse history, nature and heritage that should be documented on Wikimedia Commons. Photography contests as a form of contribution have a very low barrier of entry and are successful within our community. Over the past years Wikimedia Ukraine supported contests that brought over 750,000 images on Wikimedia Commons, which represents 1.5% of all media on Commons (national projects and international WLE, with a healthy usage rate of around 12%). In addition, our thematic photo contests help us develop valuable partnerships with organisations in these areas. Considering this potential and enthusiasm, we intend to continue organising photography contests in 2019.
Background
Basic goal of Wiki Loves contests is to get photos of all natural and cultural heritage sites under state protection in Ukraine. According to the Law of Ukraine “On protection of the cultural heritage”, cultural heritage must be registered in the State Register of immovable monuments of Ukraine under the categories of national or local significance and according to their archaeological, aesthetic, ethnological, historical, artistic and scientific value. But there is no significant use of modern information technologies in the registration process. Much information on cultural heritage is still kept in hard copy, online lists are not full and are not updated. Thus by this moment the lists that are prepared and updated in Wikipedia for Wikimedia Ukraine contests are more competent, reliable and are linked to galleries if illustrated by contest participants. The number of illustrated sites is not yet the half of what is in the lists that's why we have reason to make new editions.
Plans for 2019
In 2019 Wikimedia Ukraine will continue with long-term photography contests: Wiki Loves Monuments, Wiki Loves Earth and Science photography. Towns and Villages of Ukraine Photography Contest and Wiki Loves People are at discussion stage. Being aware that volunteers and participants may become less interested in Wiki Loves contests for a variety of reasons, 2018 contest teams made some changes based on what we learned from past contests like additional points for unphotographed monuments or special prizes. In 2019 new concepts will be also implemented to recruit more participants and keep existing participants interested in participation.
We intend to continue organising the international stage of Wiki Loves Earth. This contest is important for documenting natural heritage worldwide, and also helps local communities in different countries gain more visibility and experience. Our medium term goal is to make this contest more independent from Wikimedia Ukraine, with more international composition of the organising team. In 2019, together with the international team we will continue to provide support and international promotion to Wiki Loves Earth.
GLAM (БоГеМА)
 Opening of WLE&WLM winning photo exhibition in Kherson |
Why are we doing this?
Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums are powerful potential partners for the Wikimedia community. Libraries and museums professionals are among those who are interested in getting editing skills as a part of the professional development. Our efforts were also directed to encourage GLAM institutions to contribute to the Wikimedia projects as an integral part of their work.
Background
In last three years volunteers have done huge job in making GLAMers aware of the power of Wikiprojects as platforms for sharing knowledge with the world. Dozens of presentations and training events. Especially strong ties were developed with public and university libraries.
Plans for 2019
In 2019 we plan to focus on releasing guides and promotional materials based on other Wikimedia communities examples. And also continue promotional and educational events: participating in professional conferences, educate institutional staff and patrons, organize editing challenges.
This sub-program will also include short-term contest overlapping with GLAM and Education programmes similar to what we had in 2018 (see our Programm story). It is an article and photo contest for librarians and library patrons but in one administrative region.
Content Enrichment: Program Objectives
- to improve Wikipedia's coverage of topics that were identified by the community (target: over 12 months, at least 3000 Wikipedia articles on specific topics identified by the community are created or improved)
- to increase the quality and quantity of photographic content about protected nature sites, cultural heritage sites, photographic and other media content that help to discover science (targets: during the photo contest periods, at least 113,000 images that are photographs of protected nature sites, cultural heritage sites, photographic and other media content that help to discover science, are uploaded; and over 12 months, at least 0.5% of the above-mentioned photographic and other media content receives quality labels)
- to ensure photo contest content is used to illustrate Wikimedia projects through organising an on-wiki collaboration (contests) (target: at the end of 12 months period, at least 12,000 images of the above-mentioned content is used to illustrate Wikimedia projects)
- to improve the content of Wikimedia projects by increasing the participation of the GLAM institutions and the participation of the community in WMUA-GLAM activities (targets: over 12 months, at least 500 content pages created on Wikimedia projects owing to the participation of the GLAM institutions and the participation of the community in WMUA-GLAM activities; and over 12 months, at least 25 institutions are participating in WMUA-GLAM activities related to improvement of the content of Wikimedia projects)
- to improve the content of Wikimedia projects by increasing content on locally-oriented topics (targets: over 12 months, at least 500 content pages on locally-oriented topics are created on Wikimedia projects)
- Activities
- March 21 – May 31: CEE Spring article contest
- May 1 – 31: Wiki Loves Earth Ukraine photo contest
- May 1 – June 30: Wiki Loves Earth international photo contest
- June – August: possible Towns and Villages of Ukraine photo contest
- September 1 – 30: Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine photo contest
- October 1 – 31: Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine article contest
- November 1 – 30: Wiki Science photo (possibly also article) contest
- Autumn: possible women biographies article contest
- November: WikiKharkivshchyna contest for Libraries
Increasing Participation
Sharing the priority that growth is critical to the Wikimedia movement’s future, Wikimedia Ukraine works on expanding pool of editors that get their first or next experience in company of Wikipedians/medians or joining editing challenges. This programme means supporting and organising trainings aimed at increasing participation in the Wikiprojects, as well as explicitly reaching target groups: communities outside big cities (as we are seeking more geographic diversity) and the world of education (as students represent a significant part of Wikipedia readers). These activities have parallel aims of improving content and attracting more participation from the target groups.
Wikimarathon and uk-Wikipedia 15
Why are we doing this?
Anniversaries matter. They offer a moment to examine the circumstances and remind ourselves that what we see in the present has its genesis in the past. Having almost a jubilee (15 years!) is an even better opportunity to attract attention to Wikipedia of the general public. People love birthdays and birthday presents, thus inviting people to write a Wikipedia article to celebrate Wikipedia's birthday is well received by the public.
Background
The idea to encourage as many people as possible to contribute to Wikipedia on a specific day was first mentioned in 2013, and Ihor Kostenko, a Wikipedian killed at Maidan on 20 February 2014, was its early promoter. The first event was scheduled on Wikipedia's 10th birthday on January 2014 but was rescheduled due to national mourning and took place only in April 2014, thus being dedicated to Ihor's memory.
Since 2015 we are organising a Wikimarathon (formerly Wikiflashmob) on the Wikipedia birthday. The project grew from just 3 to over 50 events all over Ukraine and became widely supported both online and offline by the community.
Plans for 2019
Activities chained to Wikipedia birthday dates proved to be good to engage a new generation of enthusiasts. The 6th edition of the Wikimarathon dedicated to the 15th anniversary of Ukrainian Wikipedia is planned for January, 26-30. Idea is the same as described in our Program story: Wikimedia Ukraine will ask each and every to contribute to Wikipedia thus to thanks and greet it for knowledge it delivers. We are also planning a series of events all over Ukraine to teach participants to edit, write their first article and share a birthday cake together.
Wikipedia in Education
Why are we doing this?
Engaging schools and universities is a good way to increase the awareness of Wikipedia, help students and teachers understand Wikipedia principles, and, in the long run, boost Wikipedia participation. School teachers and university lecturers are interested in including Wikipedia in study curricula, but the awareness of the opportunities which Wikipedia may provide is still relatively low. Thus our goal is to promote the general idea of Wikipedia's usefulness in education among the faculty and teaching community, and assist them in training students to edit Wikipedia.
Background
Wikimedia Ukraine is running education activities since 2011.
Our first focus was on working with university students, with both top-down approach starting with administration and bottom-up approach starting with already interested lecturers. This usually produced some content, however, plagiarism was a significant issue: Ukrainian students usually come to higher education institutions with no idea of how to write an article without copying someone's work, and many did not even try to avoid plagiarism. We thus focused on working primarily with universities already having interested lecturers by helping them with workshops for students, as this work produced the best results.
Since 2016 we are actively working with high school teachers, and this collaboration brings good results. We trained several dozen teachers from all over the country (with three more trainings in Kyiv and Nizhyn in 2018) who now know about Wikimedia projects, are ready to use them in their classes. We are confident these teachers can explain their young students how to work with sources and be careful about plagiarism before they get used to it. Some of these teachers already organised Wikipedia classes in their schools and trained their students, while others are yet to do it. We now have a network of teachers using Wikipedia who are empowered to spread the word and work on advancing Wikipedia in education.
Plans for 2019
In 2019 Wikimedia Ukraine will continue communicating on value of Wikipedia in Education. 2018 witnessed a boost of EdCamps, professional informal education conferences all over the country. Educators who are chapter members are willing to promote Wikipedia and its sister projects as a teaching and learning tool at these conferences. We also hope to get more expand collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, universities and schools to make our Education Programme more recognised among educators.
In schools, we will continue our focus on training and supporting teachers interested in using Wikipedia in education. We will re-use the current model of two-day workshops for schools teachers that helps them learn about Wikipedia, get first editing experience, and discover ways to use Wikipedia in teaching, as it brings overall good results. The teachers we previously trained intend to work on paedagogical materials that would help their colleagues organise "wiki-lessons" for secondary school subjects. We already have a good experience of teachers training students to edit Wikipedia (particularly successful in Kremenchuk), and we are planning to train more high school students in 2019, possibly with trainings given by teachers together with experienced Wikipedians.
The two new initiatives coming from the teaching community are a contest of articles on topics from school curriculum for teachers (as students look for them on Wikipedia anyway) and a MOOC on editing Wikipedia to improve our presence in online education. There is an interest in organising WikiCamp for high school students in 2020, and thus we are going to hold training sessions for WikiCamp trainers in 2019.
In universities, our goal is to continue partnerships with educational institutions in order to integrate use of Wikipedia and other projects to university courses. We will organise workshops both for professors interested in using Wikipedia in education and students who want to learn to edit. In universities trainings for students are usually done by experienced Wikimedians, but it is rather difficult to train students really well if we have just one class, thus professor’s motivation and involvement is needed for success. We have new institutions interested in introducing article editing as an assignment, with the latest interest coming from Jewish studies program in Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.
Increasing Participation: Program Objectives
- to organise training events for Wikimarathon in the majority of regions of Ukraine (target: over the Wikimarathon period in January-February, at least 14 regions of Ukraine have Wikimarathon training events)
- to encourage people to write articles on Wikipedia birthday by online campaigns (target: over the Wikipedia birthday period in January-February, at least 500 participants write articles in online campaigns)
- to engage more educators by organising at least 5 trainings (target: over 12 months, at least 50 educators are trained)
- to engage more students by organising at least 5 presentations/trainings (target: over 12 months, at least 100 students attend a presentation or a training as a part of Wikipedia in Education activities)
- to continue the particular focus on underrepresented regions, such as Southern and Eastern Ukraine, by organising at least one such training there (target: over 12 months, at least 1 education training is organised in underrepresented regions, such as Southern and Eastern Ukraine)
- to continue promoting Wikipedia in education by giving presentations of innovative uses of Wikipedia and related projects on educational conferences and fairs (target: over 12 months, at least 3 presentations of innovative uses of Wikipedia and related projects are given on educational conferences and airs to promote Wikipedia in education)
- Activities
- January 26 – 30: Wikipedia birthday Wikimarathon, national-level edit-a-thon
- February: article contest for teachers on topics from school curriculum
- Spring: first Wikiseminar for teachers/lecturers from regions
- July: training for WikiCamp 2020 organisers
- Autumn: second Wikiseminar for teachers/lecturers from regions
- All year: collaboration with universities and schools
- All year: preparing paedagogical materials and MOOC
- All year: participation in education events and conferences
Community Support and Development
International participation, sharing and learning makes up an integral part of the activities of chapter. Resources that are directed to support initiatives of individual members help us keep the community participation and broaden it. This program includes logistical, administrative or financial support to community events, providing microgrants and giving supportive gifties such as Wikizghuschivka (condensed milk). Community support also encloses applying for press accreditation, participation of individual members in some events or meet-ups, providing gifts for thematic weeks, helping community members willing to organise wikiexpeditions, and helping community members get support of different institutions and organisations.
Community Events
Why are we doing this?
Organizing face-to-face meet-ups is important for both WMUA members and the whole wikicommunity in Ukraine. They allow to enhance online cooperation, boost useful networking connections among volunteers, and facilitate knowledge sharing in the format of presentations, discussions, and personal meetings. Bringing volunteers together is especially crucial for community development in Ukraine because of the geographical vastness of our country. Organizing conferences and other events in regions also helps boost and increase local communities.
Background
The Ukrainian WikiConference and the Annual General Meeting are two main annual community events. Most recently, WMUA held Ukrainian WikiConference 2018 in Kyiv and the Annual General Meeting in December 2017. Apart from these big events, we organize and/or support various smaller events, such as edit-a-thons and local meetups. About half of WMUA's members have participated or co-organised an activity during 2018.
Plans for 2019
Celebrating Wikimedia Ukraine 10th years anniversary, WikiConference and the Annual General Meeting in 2019 comprise the list of biggest and most demanding community events for 2019. WikiConference is already at the stage of planning and choosing location, and it is likely to be held in Eastern part of Ukraine for the second time only in our history. Besides, we will hold two strategic planning sessions for our local community, one being probably associated with our Annual General Meeting and another possibly on Wikimedia Ukraine's 10th anniversary. We will also keep supporting smaller events.
Trainings for Volunteers
Why are we doing this?
Training sessions for volunteers devoted to certain specific skills, such as technical tools or conflict resolution. Organizing training events or funding volunteers’ participation in training sessions helps to develop community’s skills and, therefore, increase the quality of our contribution and address important issues within the community.
Background
We facilitate training sessions for volunteers by organizing training sessions through WMUA resources (as in 2016, when Asaf Bartov held the training session on conflict resolution) and microgranting trainings which are not organized by WMUA: in 2018 we funded participation in photography training for the volunteer who applies regularly to event accreditation and was seeking to upgrade skills in reportage photography.
Plans for 2019
In 2019, we will keep organizing training sessions for volunteers. Apart from replicating the events we held in the past, we have volunteers interested in organizing technical training sessions (probably with a focus on teaching experienced users to use tools like PetScan or Quarry) and training on public speaking (particularly for those involved in organising events and promoting Wikimedia to the general public) for the Ukrainian community in 2019.
Scholarships
Why are we doing this?
Providing scholarships for international events is an important part of community development and the promotion of knowledge sharing. Attending conferences and other events provides members of the local community with an opportunity to build and strengthen connections, gain new knowledge, and share it through their reports, notes, articles, photos, and social media posts. Since it is difficult for most Ukrainians to afford expensive international travel, WMUA scholarships are especially important to the community.
Background
Similarly to the previous years, in 2018, we provided scholarships for members of the Ukrainian community to attend Wikimedia Conference in Berlin, Wikimania in Cape Town and and CEE Meeting in Lviv, with supporting new events like Wikipedia for Peace Stockholm Europride. As in previous year, we set up a scholarship committee for distributing Wikimania scholarships, strengthening our experience in this field. A Board member responsible for approving other events applications coordinated this process along with Project Manager.
Plans for 2019
In 2019, we will keep providing scholarships for both large international events, such as Wikimania 2019 in Stockholm or CEE Meeting 2019 in Belgrade, and thematic events, such as International WikiCamp in Yerevan, Hackathon, or education and GLAM events. We plan to continue and develop knowledge sharing, keeping it mandatory for all scholarship recipients to outline how their scholarships helped them contribute to the Wikimedia movement better.
Microgrants
Why are we doing this?
Microgrants sub-program is designed to support community initiatives, make volunteers' life easier and provide funding on individual activities and projects that have an impact on Wikimedia projects.
Background
In 2017–18, Wikimedia Ukraine has worked a lot on improving ways of giving community support to contributors to the various Wikimedia projects. To ensure the transparent system of distributing microgrants, we have launched a committee on microgrants, and we aim to shed light on the system of providing grants through boosting the awareness of certain events which can be funded by WMUA and of the general program of microgrants. These are visible on WMUA-Wiki site, along with voting and discussions.
Among microgrants models to members of our community: tickets purchase or organizing a press accreditation for attending events, buying books (volunteers create and expand articles in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects), funding wikiexpeditions (volunteers upload photos, create and expand articles in Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, and other projects). We also support thematic weeks and months providing souvenirs and small gifts for leading contributors.
Plans for 2019
We will continue to work with program model we have been using in the previous years with a special attention to program promotion among members of the Ukrainian wikicommunity. Wikiexpeditions applications, Wikizghuschivka (condensed milk) award to the most active new and existing contributors and themathic week/months support will also be included to microgrant system.
Community Support and Development: Program Objectives
- to increase the community participation by empowering users with the techniques and skills needed for Wikimedia projects (target: over 12 months, at least 50 participants participate in trainings aimed to empower users with the techniques and skills needed for Wikimedia projects)
- to provide incentives to the community, supporting wide range of volunteer initiatives with the financial resources, materials and souvenirs they can use (target: over 12 months, at least 120 community members receive financial support to their volunteer initiatives or souvenirs in recognition of their volunteer engagement)
- to ensure members and volunteers engagement and committing by supporting/organising online and offline events (target: over 12 months, at least 150 participants participate in offline and online events for community members)
- to provide international scholarships for international Wikimedia-related events (target: over 12 months, at least 15 scholarships to international Wikimedia-related events are provided)
- Activities
- TechWorkshop
- WikiConference
- WMUA Annual General Meeting&Strategy Session
- WMUA 10th Anniversary
- All year: participation in international events
- All year: Wikiexpeditions, photo accreditations and other microgrants activities
Awareness for Wikimedia and Free Knowledge
| Representations of female entrepreneurship on Wikipedia: webinar co-organized by WMUA and ShePro |
Our activities in this program aim at shaping a Wikimedia Ukraine's profile as well as informing on Wikimedia projects in public sector and other environments when needed. Success of our work depends a lot on general public awareness about it. Consequently, working with press releases, commentaries, presence on social media is an area of core activities for project managers. The Freedom of Panorama advocacy, as one of the essential objectives of ensuring the open sharing of knowledge in Ukraine, was a part of this activity and has been our stand-alone area of activity for several years.
Media Publicity and Promotion Activities
Background
Since 2011 WMUA's blog is updated regularly with stories from volunteers and work. We manage several pages in social media (focus on Facebook) that proved to be a good platform for getting and providing feedback on different issues, demonstrating notable results of our work and reaching out public personas, serving as liaison between public and Wikimedia community. In 2018 account on Instagram was added into WMUA's social media package driven by volunteers. Account has already reached almost 300 subscribers. In 2018 we obtained new and exciting experience of participating in social fairs and seek to continue attend events where we can promote movement or certain project (like alley of non-governmental organizations at Atlas Weekend, iForum etc.)
Plans for 2019
In 2019 we plan to strengthen visibility on social media, provide easily readable and accurate information about Wikimedia. We will also continue participation in various fairs, forums and conferences to promote Wikimedia projects to the general public or to specialised audiences.
Wikiworkshops for the general public will also be a part of this sub-programme. Every year there is a demand for learning sessions on editing Wikimedia projects, both from partners and volunteers. While we also organise such workshops as a part of thematic (e.g. article contests) or specialised (e.g. GLAM) programmes, we also plan do some wikiworkshops on demand to promote editing Wikipedia (for instance, in cities without active communities) as in previous years.
Free panorama advocacy
Why are we doing this?
Ukraine does not have freedom of panorama at all, not even for limited purposes. This means that a large chunk of Ukrainian heritage, more or less corresponding to all buildings and monuments erected after World War II, including everything build during Ukrainian independence (since 1991), cannot be depicted under a free license. This is a significant obstacle in our work of making knowledge free and information about human heritage free and a major reason of frustration for Ukrainian photographers contributing on Wikimedia Commons. Advocacy for freedom of panorama in Ukraine is thus a major goal for us.
Background
We have launched campaigns for freedom of panorama in Ukraine in 2014. A draft bill supported by Wikimedia Ukraine was introduced to the parliament and passed the committee, but was not voted in parliamentary session. We’ve been working with journalists, politicians, activists and partners by spreading information, designing infographics, organising public events and discussions.
Plans for 2019
As the government is currently starting a large copyright reform, we are looking for joining this discussion. Moreover, Wikimedia Ukraine is currently developing an advocacy plan for freedom of panorama, expected to be ready in November 2018. This plan will include organising events, launching campaign(s) and preparing materials about freedom of panorama and potentially also free licenses. Once this plan is established, we intend to follow it in 2019.
Awareness for Wikimedia and Free Knowledge: Program Objectives
- to encourage regulatory and legislative changes that will benefit the Wikimedia projects, affirming freedom of panorama in Ukraine (target: over 12 months at least 1 press conference, 1 video and 5 round tables or meetings with partners are organised to encourage regulatory and legislative changes that will benefit the Wikimedia projects, affirming freedom of panorama in Ukraine)
- to increase awareness of Wikimedia projects and respect for the licenses (copyright) (target: over 12 months, we organise or participate in at least 5 online or offline events targeting increase in awareness of Wikimedia projects and respect for licenses or copyright)
- to share stories about WMUA's projects and from volunteers (target: over 12 months, at least 50 stories about WMUA's projects and from volunteers are shared on blogs and social media)
- to get national press coverage (target: over 12 months, we get national press coverage in at least 12 distinct news publications)
- to support and advise on re-licensing of content under an open Creative Commons licence (target: over 12 months, we support or advise at least 5 partners who will re-license content under an open Creative Commons licence)
Global Metrics Reporting edit
Please link to or provide your annual program plan and annual budget here, and add your targets to the grants metrics worksheet.
Annual plan: Сommunity discussion on 2019 plan (Ukrainian)
Annual budget: Wikimedia Ukraine 2019 budget and staffing breakdown
Midpoint report edit
This is a brief report on the grantee's progress during the midpoint reporting period: 1 January – 30 June 2019.
Program story edit
Please link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements during the reporting period.
Progress edit
Please add text or a link to a page with details on your program progress. This should including reporting against each of the SMART objectives form your proposal.
Content Enrichment
Article Contests
- In March, we joined the WikiGap initiative. In partnership with the Swedish Embassy in Ukraine and the UNFPA Office in Ukraine, Wikimedia Ukraine held three simultaneous offline events across Ukraine (in the capital city of Kyiv, Lviv in Western Ukraine and Kharkiv in Eastern Ukraine) on March 1st. The online part was running for three days, on March 1st-3rd. As a result, 91 users created or significantly expanded 186 articles, with 86 persons attending the three events.
- We helped promote WikiGap Challenge among Ukrainian Wikipedians. Partly due to Wikimedia Ukraine’s participation in the promotion, Ukrainians showed a strong participation in the challenge: out of ten winners, seven came from Ukrainian Wikipedia, including the 1st place holder Andrii Hrytsenko.
- From March to May we held the fifth edition of the “CEE Spring” article contest. This time it ran under a new name, “Європейська весна” (Ukrainian for “European Spring”), in an attempt to avoid ambiguous abbreviation in the title. The results of the contest (almost two thousand articles were created or expanded, 83 participants made eligible contributions) met our expectations. Article evaluation is still in progress; the project will be concluded later this year.
- In June, Wikimedia Ukraine held the article contest “Women in STEM” devoted to biographies of women in the STEM fields. Organized in partnership with the UNFPA Office in Ukraine, this contest has brought around 500 articles to Ukrainian Wikipedia (exact results are still being counted as the jury evaluates the articles) from more than 40 participants.
As promotional activities, we run a logo challenge for the contest and held one dedicated training session in the UNFPA headquarters in Kyiv (for the training session, 18 people participated and 120 people watched a part of it online). The project got good media attention, with both major Ukrainian media outlets and some local authorities spreading information about the contest. The award ceremony is planned for early September.
Photography Contests
- In May, we held the Ukrainian edition of Wiki Loves Earth 2019. As a result of the contest, 307 participants uploaded 9929 photos of Ukrainian natural heritage sites. 1648 nature objects were pictured; among them, 326 sites did not have photos on Wikimedia Commons before the contest. Overall, this marks a small decrease as compared to the previous year’s contest but is still relatively high given that the contest was held for the seventh time in Ukraine.
As planned, we implemented higher incentives for illustrating underrepresented areas. Besides, the organizational team worked to improve the system of categorization on Wikimedia Commons and update lists of nature protected areas. Apart from that, we relied on the existing patterns of the contest’s design and approaches to its promotion.
We have already announced the results of the “quantitative” nomination, and the jury is currently evaluating photos to choose highest-quality photos. The results will be passed to the international organizing team by the end of July, and the Ukrainian award ceremony is tentatively planned for late September. - As well as in previous years, Wikimedia Ukraine volunteers, along with staff support, played a key role in organizing the international part of Wiki Loves Earth. According to the preliminary statistics, this year’s contest has seen 37 countries participating (the highest number since the contest was founded) and more than 85,000 photos uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by over 8700 participants.
As part of the preparation for the contest, the international organizing team run a feedback form for local organizing teams. The key problem of the previous year’s contest, as identified by local organizers, was insufficient communication from the international team. For this year’s edition, we worked to improve that, keeping in touch with local organizing team through social media, mailing lists, blog posts, updating guides for local organizers, and, of course, through private communication.
Local organizing teams are determining national winners throughout July, and the international jury will start evaluating photos in mid-August. The results of the international part are planned to be announced in September. - We continue to collaborate with GLAMs to host our “traveling photo exhibition” of the best pictures of Wiki Loves Monuments. In January-June the best photos from years 2017 and 2018 were exhibited in libraries and a museum in 6 cities. We see it as an achievement that this exhibition came, in particular, to Luhansk, Kherson, and Mykolaiv Oblasts, these being Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine, that are relatively undercovered by Wikimedia events.
Potential contests “Towns and Villages of Ukraine” and “Wiki Loves People”, which were at the early discussion stage at the time we submitted the grant application, have not been organized and are not likely to be held in the second half of the year due to the lack of devoted volunteers, but we will check the situation at the end of summer/beginning of autumn.
GLAM (БоГеМА)
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- In June, Lviv local government opened the “Wiki Library”, a local library inspired by the ideas of Wikipedia. Its employees attended our previous Wikipedia training events. Wikimedia Ukraine signed a memorandum with the library (see our Facebook post about this) and held two Wikipedia-related events. We are planning to expand this cooperation throughout the following months, making it a hub for the promotion of Wikimedia projects and for Wikimedia-related events in Lviv. For example, our Lviv volunteers continued informal collaboration with First Lviv Media Library, an innovative library in Lviv, and held events there.
- A notable project for our GLAM direction is WikiKharkivshchyna, which is an article and photo contest for libraries in the Kharkiv Oblast (due to its nature, we categorize this project as GLAM rather than a part of the Contests direction). Over the first six months of 2019, we held an award ceremony for WikiKharkivshchyna 2018, and our Kharkiv volunteers started active preparations for this year’s edition, holding training events around the region, particularly in Kharkiv and Krasnohrad. The contest itself will be held in the fall.
- We continue building partnerships with GLAM institutions, with a lot of our events being held in libraries. For example, our Lviv volunteers continued informal collaboration with First Lviv Media Library, an innovative library in Lviv, and held events there. Our photo exhibitions have also been held in libraries and museums.
- As a particular example, GLAM institutions, mostly libraries, showed strong participation in Wikimarathon. Over the five days of Wikimarathon, 32 libraries around Ukraine hosted wikitrainings.
- Our volunteers held several on-demand wikiworkshops for librarians in the Kharkiv Oblast and Vinnytsia.
We have not released new promotional materials or guides for GLAM institutions in the first half of the year.
Increasing Participation
Wikimarathon and uk-Wikipedia 15
- Dedicated to the 15th anniversary of Ukrainian Wikipedia, Wikimarathon 2019 was one of the biggest events we held over the period reported. Wikimedia Ukraine ran an online part of Wikimarathon and coordinated offline events across Ukraine. The design of Wikimarathon 2019 was similar to previous years’ Wikimarathons, including the one discussed in detail in our 2017 program story; the improvements we implemented this year are detailed below.
Overall, 1776 articles were created specifically over five days. Around 650 users created an article during Wikimarathon. In terms of geographical diversity, Wikimarathon 2019 reached 38 cities and villages in 21 regions of Ukraine (84% regions covered) with 60 training events. Around 60 volunteers were involved in planning and executing Wikimarathon online and in the field.
One of the key challenges of the mass events like Wikimarathon, which attracts a high number of new users, is the quality of articles created. Thus, this year, we tried to pay particular attention to the quality of content. We initiated a sub-project on patrolling articles created by inexperienced Wikimarathon participants (those without patroller rights). Over this period, 15 people checked 240 articles, marking them as patrolled and improving some of them, as well as providing feedback to authors of some articles.
Also, in 2019 we emphasized developing the capacity of Wikimarathon events’ trainers. For the first time, we held two training sessions for Wikimarathon trainers. They were held in two major cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, and covered 21 participants, who, according to the feedback forms, were highly satisfied with these sessions. Also, we created a typical presentation for a Wikimarathon events (event organizers could use it as is or employ as a basis for their presentation and adjust for their needs), a detailed guide for event organizers, and some new materials for participants of the events. - For the 15th anniversary of Ukrainian Wikipedia itself, we prepared a number of informational and promotional materials about Wikipedia. Those include a press release, mini-contest for a special logo devoted to the anniversary, a series of infographics with 15 facts about Ukrainian Wikipedia, a new version of Ukrainian Wikipe-tan, and others. Besides, Wikimedia Ukraine organized an offline celebration of the event in Kyiv on January 30th (see also the “Community Events” section of this report).
Wikipedia in Education
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Over the first half of the year, we traditionally focused on developing the capacity of school and university teachers, guiding specific Wikipedia courses, and supporting education program leaders’ participation in thematic events.
- As always, we continued to provide various kinds of support to experienced Education Program activists who actively integrate Wikipedia in their curricula.
- Among other activities, we held an award ceremony for high school graduates in Kremenchuk who have been active participants of a Wikipedia education program for three years.
- As one of the key directions of the Wikipedia Education Program is training school teachers to edit Wikipedia and use it in education, a major event within this programme was a two-day training session for teachers in Kremenchuk, which we held in the middle of May. It was an immersive training session which covered 10 middle and high school teachers, both those who have already been using Wikipedia in class but have wanted to solidify their Wikipedia-related skills and those without prior experience of using Wikipedia in education.
We will be able to fully evaluate the effectiveness of this event once the new academic year starts in September. At the same time, we already have early signs of some participants who had been new to Wikipedia at the time of the event becoming active users of Wikipedia and being interested in spreading the word about Wikipedia in education. - We developed some new partnerships in the field of higher education, with the most notable example being the university course “Introduction to Gender Studies” in the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Over this semester-long course, students had an assignment to write a Wikipedia article as their course paper; our volunteer (Antanana) held a presentation with a Q&A for students, and we provided support to students throughout the assignment process. The students were given materials on how to edit Wikipedia and contact information for asking questions.
Overall, 76 articles were created or significantly expanded, and around 100 students were involved. Notably, the majority of these articles were about famous women in the field of gender studies and feminism, which helped bring further attention to fixing the problem of the gender gap on Wikipedia (see our program story for more details) - Wikimedia Ukraine continued to support the promotion of Wikipedia in education through our activists' participation in conferences, most notably local EdCamps. Over the period reported, five Education Program activists (Андрій Гриценко, Olga Loboda 0806, Педагог Світлана, Еколог Світлана, Ліонкінг) presented Wikipedia at six EdCamps, holding either training sessions or presentations. Particularly, Wikimedia Ukraine was an informational partner of mini-EdCamp Chortkiv, where Педагог Світлана and Еколог Світлана held a wikitraining session for teachers.
Vlasenko D, a university math professor and Wikipedia Education Program activist, presented his experience at the Wikimedia+Education Conference 2019. - Some work was done to help kick off a platform of wikilessons in Wikibooks, but this project has been frozen due to the lack of volunteers devoted to its implementation.
- Wikimarathon 2019 was an indirect opportunity to promote Wikipedia in education. Around 15 events within Wikimarathon were held specifically for school or university students, most of them by teachers, and a few more public events were held in universities.
Community Support and Development
Community Events
The major community event at the beginning of the year was the Ukrainian Wikipedia Birthday. Celebrating with gatherings to taste a cake and join article-writing Wikimarathon already became traditional for this event. We have supported >60 wikimeetups. Metrics-wise, the progress of these events is tracked within Increasing Participation programme as most participants were also involved in an edit-a-thon or online in Wikimarathon 2019 by writing an article; Wikimarathon is discussed in detail in a separate section above.
This year, we managed to make the transition towards Annual General Meeting (AGM) early in the year as opposed to the late-December AGMs we had before. This was a long-discussed and generally approved idea, with the aim to reduce end-year pressure on the members, take AGM out of the holiday season (where tickets are harder to buy etc.), use the opportunity to celebrate Ukrainian Wikipedia’s birthday together and give the board time to finish their work and annual reporting (in the schedule with December meetings the board changed just before annual reporting was due). AGM was held on February 17th with all due procedures, even though it was only a month and a half after the previous general meeting. Therefore the next AGM is planned for the end of January-beginning of February 2020.
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Wikimedia Ukraine kicked off its strategy process in order to create a strategy for the years 2020—2022. We started with an offline one-day strategic session on February 16 which was the opportunity to present the process with our members, perform diagnostics and get inputs on organising our organisation’s work, projects and community. It was followed by online surveying of the WMUA members which had a remarkable response rate of 77%. Finally, we held the second offline strategic session on June 28-29 with a focus on the mission statement, vision, values, strategic goals, and strategic tasks. The strategy process is currently going according to the plan, and the final document is expected to be ready before the WikiConference in October so that an Extraordinary General Meeting can be held during the conference to approve the strategic plan.
Wikimedia Ukraine is 10 in 2019. Offline meeting in late June included a little celebration of the current members with the birthday cake and looking back at the work accomplished in the time since the creation of our chapter. Besides, we have been preparing a series of informational materials dedicated to the organizations’ anniversary.
Ukrainian WikiConference will be the main bigger event of the second half of the year for which the dates and place are chosen and the preparations are in progress.
Trainings for Volunteers
In January, we approved the procedure and criteria to the requests for trainings. Since then several requests for trainings were approved, starting with a scholarship for Ilya and Юрій Булка to attend the “School on facilitation and moderation of strategic sessions” which helped us shape our strategic process. In order to prepare better for Wikimarathon 2019, two training sessions for volunteers involved in teaching/hosting the edit-a-thons were organised in Kyiv and Kharkiv.
Three users (Aced, JTs, Tohaomg) attended “Algorithm of strategy session” training. Aced has received a scholarship to attend “SMM for non-profits” training.
In late March, we held a “Governance in an NGO” training for the most active people at WMUA: members of the board, auditing committee, strategy working group, technical committee, as well as WMUA staff and contractors (total 20 attendees). The trainers were both Wikimedians and invited experts, and the topics of the training included team communication and work, NGO legislature in Ukraine and key legal procedures that an NGO has to abide.
In June, Vlasenko D and Kharkivian held a one-day training session devoted to Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons for members of the Kharkiv Wikimedia community. This training was a first attempt to organise a training like this, so it was supported by a Wikigrant budget. By the way, Vlasenko D was among recipients of a scholarship from Wikimedia Ukraine to attend Wikidata Train the Trainers in Austria last year, so he was already trained how to do it.
Scholarships
In the period covered by this report, we granted 5 scholarships:
- A1 received a scholarship for attending a “Choral art of Ukraine”;
- Olga Loboda 0806, being an Education program leader, was granted with support to visit several regional pedagogical conferences.
- Юрій Булка, Alex Blokha, and Tohaomg attended Wikimedia Hackathon 2019.
We are granting full scholarships to fed4ev, Mcoffsky and Luda.slominska for attending Wikimania 2019 in Stockholm in August, while CEllen and Visem will receive partial scholarships. In total, this exceeds our expectations for the first half of the year, thus there may be fewer scholarships granted in its second half.
We also ran a selection process for two more scholarships (for Wikimedia Summit 2019 and Wikimedia+Education Conference 2019), which were granted not from the WMUA budget.
Microgrants
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This year, the microgrants program covers various smaller sub-programs, namely these four directions:
- Wikigrants, small grants for book purchase, participating in an event, covering entrance tickets to a museum etc.
Over the first half of 2019, we provided three grants for book purchases; all these applications are currently in the process of completion. Besides, the organization supported one volunteer with accreditation and expenses for attending an iForum event, one of the biggest IT conferences in Ukraine. We have also supported a one-day training session devoted to Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons for members of the Kharkiv Wikimedia community, which was mentioned in a section above in more detail. - Thematic months and weeks, providing souvenirs and small prizes for active participants of thematic weeks in Ukrainian Wikipedia.
We helped organize three such thematic months and weeks:- Kharkiv Region month. Organized by our active Kharkiv volunteer community, it led to 216 articles being created and 105 articles expanded.
- Swedish Week. Held in partnership with the Embassy of Sweden in Kyiv, it has been one of the most popular thematic weeks we ever supported as 947 articles were created and 87 expanded over the project’s three-week period.
- Investigative Journalism Week. Held in partnership with the Regional Press Development Institute, it has helped bring around 110 articles on the topic to Ukrainian Wikipedia (exact results might change as the project will run until July 15th). Also, we held a training session for journalists, which was attended by 16 participants.
All three projects have not been fully completed yet, so the results presented here are preliminary.
- Wikiexpeditions, supporting Wikimedians’ trips to visit places and sites to improve their coverage on Wikimedia projects.
Over this period, we supported two wikiexpeditions:
These expeditions helped illustrate nature heritage sites and cultural monuments which were not represented on Wikimedia projects. Since both of them occurred in June, the reporting process is currently underway and is expected to be completed in July.
- Wikizghushchivka, providing small physical gifts (a can of zghushchivka, i.e. condensed milk) to the most active new and existing Wikipedia contributors.
No progress was made in this direction in the first half of 2019.
Awareness for Wikimedia and Free Knowledge
Media Publicity and Promotion Activities
| Press conference devoted to Wikimarathon | |
| TV story on the WikiGap event in Kyiv |
- As usual, media publicity remains an important part of each project we implement. The specific projects which got the highest media attention were Wikimarathon (several dozen publications in nationwide and regional media, including some 20 video and audio stories), Women in STEM (good coverage in nationwide media; see the respective section for more details), and Ukrainian Wiki Loves Earth (several dozen publications, attention from both media outlets and government sources).
- We continued to develop our blog and social media accounts. We try to use the blog to share detailed stories and major announcements, while social media is a more day-to-day tool that provides greater flexibility.
- In January-June, we published 35 stories on the blog; it received 21,675 views from 15,374 unique users.
- By July 14th, the number of our Facebook page followers increased by 13% since the beginning of the year (2,857 -> 3,228). All posts published from January 1st until June 30th received 108,760 views.
- Wikimedia Ukraine’s Instagram page had a 25% increase in followers, and the Twitter account showed a 13% increase (410 and 1305 followers, respectively).
- Besides, we renewed the practice of monthly newsletters with the most important events and announcements. An example of a newsletter is here (in Ukrainian).
- We used paid social media advertising to promote two projects (Wikimarathon and Ukrainian Wiki Loves Earth). Empirical results of these campaigns showed that, while social media ads are not particularly effective in promoting our offline events, they might be useful for spreading the word about online projects.
- In June, the Cabinet of Ministers (Government) of Ukraine issued a resolution, which recommends all local and nationwide agencies of the executive branch to license the content on their sites under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It probably happened at least partly because of the earlier activities of Wikimedia Ukraine and Creative Commons Ukraine which requested the Government to do so and held a few presentations for different branches of the Government. Individual efforts of volunteer editors, who were writing letters and requests to government agencies about switching to free licenses, are also likely to have influenced the decision.
Free panorama advocacy
We have created an advocacy plan to direct our efforts in this field. The plan included: mapping of the stakeholders, decision-makers, and ideas for the information campaign, including publications, video, and events. Unfortunately, our plans were affected by a sudden political change (immediate dissolution of the parliament by the newly elected president), making us put some work on hold.
Mapping. By the end of January, we have finished mapping the members of the Ukrainian Parliament potentially interested in supporting FoP. We either contacted members of Parliament (MPs) or searched for information that would show their interest in copyright regulations and awareness in the “freedom of panorama” (FoP) issue. This information is not public and is only for our internal use. As the political situation in Ukraine has changed dramatically, and we are going to have a new Parliament this summer, we would need to do another mapping at the beginning of Autumn.
Information Campaign. One of the challenges for us is low awareness about the very concept of “freedom of panorama” in Ukraine: both among members of Parliament (MPs) and the general public. We have decided to work on developing good quality materials for publishing (articles, infographics, etc.) to enhance our chances of being published and shared by different media outlets and developing an educational video about freedom of panorama, to be shared via social media.
Video. We have found contractors for video from Severodonetsk, Eastern Ukraine, whose portfolio demonstrated their focus on social projects. The draft of the video had been completed by the end of March, less than a month from the beginning of work. We waited till the end of April for our Canadian volunteer to record audiotape: in the screenplay, the main character was a photographer from Canada. Throughout May and June, we elaborated on sound and slightly changed the video itself. The work on video lasted till the end of June due to the number of people involved (volunteers giving feedback etc). The video can be introduced to the public at any moment from now on. However, due to the drastic political shift, we will wait till new Parliament convenes, given that our main (target) audience is MPs.
State Institutions and Freedom of Panorama Research. We have also conducted research on how central and local executive institutions and a few courts complied with the copyright law with respect to images of the building where they are located. We discovered that none of the institutions, Constitutional Court of Ukraine amidst them, complied with Ukrainian copyright Law in regard to a lack of freedom of panorama. Together with Creative Commons Ukraine, we have prepared an analytical material based on this, and its publication was meant to be one of the steps of our information campaign about freedom of panorama.
Publications on Freedom of Panorama. We also elaborated on several info materials on FoP, ready to be posted on our blog. Their publication is on hold as we want to publish them when we are ready to launch a full-fledged information campaign (Autumn).
Working Directly with the Ukrainian Parliament and MPs. The main achievement of our team and allied MPs’ was the introduction of the draft law #10143 (on copyright law reform, an initiative of MPs of the committee), which has provisions for having freedom of panorama in Ukraine. This would be a great success since sanctions for taking photographs, video footage or creating images of buildings and sculptures would no longer be illegal! We wrote letters on behalf of the MPs supporting our initiative, suggesting corrections to the initial text of the draft law #7539 (government-sponsored bill on copyright law reform, contained only very limited FoP), which evolved into the draft law #10143. We updated our infographics, web site and shared the info via social media in support of having a “real” (commercial) freedom of panorama. As we have mentioned before, this drastic change in our political environment affected us: our supporting MPs informed that the draft law #10143 will not be debated before the snap election, thus we had to postpone all our activities till September/October when the new parliamentary coalition is formed and new MPs are found to support the legislative initiatives providing for freedom of panorama.
We have also started (in parallel) collecting information about potential partners in fighting for freedom of panorama, so as soon as we are ready to launch the campaign, we can invite them to our events and share information.
Spending edit
Please report your organization's total spending during the reporting period, or link to a financial document showing your total spending.
- 30739.37 USD, detailed expenses here
- The weighted average exchange rate for the period January 1—June 30, 2019 was used
Final report edit
Program story edit
Please tell or link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements during the reporting period.
Learning story edit
Please link to one learning story that shows how your organization documents lessons learned and adapts its programs accordingly.
Results edit
Metrics edit
| Metric | Achieved outcome | Explanation |
| 1. Number of participants | 11,852 / 5,000 | (Including 8,431 non-Ukrainian participants of Wiki Loves Earth) Target significantly exceeded primarily because of the strong numbers of international Wiki Loves Earth, which attracted more countries and individual participants than in the previous year. Other reasons include more participants of thematic weeks than we expected, as well as a higher number of people who visited our promotional events, most notably Atlas Weekend. |
| 2. Number of of newly registered users | 8,391 / 2,800 | (Including 7,332 non-Ukrainian participants of Wiki Loves Earth) Target significantly exceeded primarily because of the strong numbers of international Wiki Loves Earth, which attracted more countries and individual participants than in the previous year. Other projects and programs proved mostly in line with targets. |
| 3. Number of content pages | 135,380 / 121,320 | (Including 84,694 non-Ukrainian photos of Wiki Loves Earth) The results are generally in line with the predictions, but slightly exceed them because of the strong numbers of international Wiki Loves Earth. The numbers for national projects have largely met expectations, though the numbers for national photography contests are a bit lower than expected. |
| 4. Number of volunteers involved | 182 / 90 | Target considerably exceeded because of the higher volunteer involvement in the Content Enrichment projects, which was driven mainly by our large and diverse jury and organizing teams for article & photo contests. |
| 5. Number of media files used | 9,845 / 12,660 | (Including 6,553 non-Ukrainian photos of Wiki Loves Earth) Target missed mainly because of the insufficient efforts to promote media usage for national photo contests. Since we had to postpone the Wiki Loves Monuments article challenge to February, its results will not be reflected here. (Media usage for non-Ukrainian WLE is also lower than expected, but the deviation is less than 10%). |
Content Enrichment
Editing challenges and contests
In 2019, we continued to use article contests and challenges as a powerful way to enrich content on Wikimedia projects and work on bridging gaps. Contests we organized include:
- “CEE Spring” article contest (March 21st — May 31st)
Traditionally, CEE Spring proved to be the biggest article contest of the year in Ukrainian Wikipedia. This year, it brought 1772 articles on Central and Eastern Europe from 81 participants. Ukrainian edition gained first place by the number of articles among 25 Wikipedias which participated in the international contest.
Some of the new developments in 2019 included paying more attention to the gender gap (particularly, we held one training session in Kryvyi Rih devoted to CEE women) and integration with sister projects (see below). The high number of articles was also the biggest challenge as it required a lot of input from volunteer jury members who checked articles and slowed the process of determining winners.
Detailed results are available here (in Ukrainian).
- “Women in STEM” article contest (June 1st—30th)
Articles about women, particularly women in science, is a significant content gap on Wikipedia, and that is why it was important for us to hold a separate full-fledged article contest on this topic. In 2019, we developed strong partnerships on this topic; this particular project was organized jointly with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Office in Ukraine. As a result, we brought in 48 participants who created and expanded 500 articles on STEM women biographies; particularly, 140 articles about Ukrainian women in STEM were created or improved.
As promotional activities, we ran a logo challenge for the contest and held one dedicated training session in the UNFPA headquarters in Kyiv (for the training session, 18 people participated and 150 people watched a part of it online). We also recruited a few prominent Ukrainian female scientists in the jury of the contest. The project received good media attention, with both major Ukrainian media outlets and local authorities spreading information about the contest.
Detailed results are available here (in Ukrainian).
- WikiScience Contest (November 1st—30th)
Wikimedia Ukraine has been organizing scientific photography contests for several years (see below for more details). This year we decided to pair it with an article contest that would help both to promote scientific content on Ukrainian Wikipedia (which is typically underrepresented) and to increase usage of scientific photos uploaded due to the photography contests.
The contest ran in three different categories (Archeology, Biology, Physics) with separate expert jury teams. As a result, around 15 participants submitted 40 articles (the numbers are much lower than for other contests because of the different contest design: WikiScience Contest rewarded best individual articles, as opposed to other contests which typically determine winners by the participants’ overall contribution).
Apart from article contests, we ran several editing challenges centered on women (see our midpoint program story for more information on gender gap projects). They include WikiGap and the “She Did It” marathon (the latter is described in the “Microgrants” subsection)
- WikiGap (March 1st—3rd)
Within the framework of the international WikiGap initiative, we organized an online marathon devoted to articles on women in Ukrainian Wikipedia. On March 1st, we held three simultaneous offline events across Ukraine (in the capital city of Kyiv, Lviv in Western Ukraine and Kharkiv in Eastern Ukraine) together with the Swedish Embassy in Ukraine and the UNFPA office in Ukraine. The marathon brought 186 articles from 91 participants; 86 people attended offline events.
According to the Swedish Embassy in Ukraine, Ukraine was featured by the Swedish government as one of the examples of the most successful WikiGap editions.
We also helped promote the international WikiGap Challenge in Ukraine (though the challenge itself was not organized by Wikimedia Ukraine). Partly due to these efforts, Ukrainian Wikipedians created over 600 additional articles on women within WikiGap Challenge, and Wikimedia Ukraine member Andrii Hrytsenko gained the first place.
We also organized two other contests, which are covered by other directions and thus are described in detail in other sections (WikiKharkivshchyna within GLAM, “Wikipedia for School” within the Education Program)
As planned, we did some work on contests for sister Wikimedia projects. As outlined in our 2019 grant application, holding contests for sister projects is great, but it requires more work with these projects’ communities to bring about more long-term development. We took that into account and, rather than organizing standalone contests, tried to support initiatives coming from the communities. In 2019, it was reflected in the CEE Spring contest. Apart from the “main” contest on Ukrainian Wikipedia, it was also held on Ukrainian Wikiquote and Ukrainian Wikivoyage; participants created and improved 39 content pages (30 in Wikiquote and 9 in Wikivoyage).
Due to the high number of projects which we had to implement by the end of the year, we had to postpone the “Wikipedia Loves Monuments” article contest, which had earlier been planned for the end of 2019. We rescheduled it to February 2020, so it is running now until the end of February.
Photography Contests
Traditionally, photography contests are what we are good at, they constitute a considerable part of Wikimedia Ukraine’s activity. In 2019, we held three photography contests in Ukraine and supported international Wiki Loves Earth.
- Wiki Loves Earth in Ukraine (May 1st—May 31st).
In 2019, Wiki Loves Earth was held in Ukraine for the seventh time. This contest has amassed a significant audience of participants and volunteers since 2013. Thanks to it, the number of photos uploaded throughout the contest remained high, though slightly lower than in the previous years, and we continued getting coverage of hundreds of sites that had no pictures yet (9929 photos of Ukrainian natural heritage sites from 307 participants; 1648 nature objects were pictured, including 326 sites not present on Wikimedia Commons before).
The developments of 2019 included:
- putting more attention to illustrating underrepresented areas through changing the contest’s rules so they incentivize picturing areas not present on Wikimedia Commons (by the end of the 2019 contest, 48.3% Ukrainian nature heritage sites are present on Commons, which is good but still way to go):
- working to improve the system of categorization on Wikimedia Commons and update lists of nature protected areas, which were created in previous years;
- developing a special nomination for aerial photos, with a separate jury team to check them;
- improving communication support (in 2019, Ukrainian WLE received twice as much mentions in Ukrainian media outlets than in 2018; the contest's announcement and results were covered in 41 media stories).
Apart from that, we relied on the existing patterns of the contest’s design and approaches to its promotion. As always, we determined best photos for each Ukrainian region and on the national level, as well as the winners of the “quantitative” nomination for each region and nationally (users who pictures most nature monuments).
A detailed project report is available here (in Ukrainian)
- Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine (September 1st—September 30th)
Held since 2012, Wiki Loves Monuments is the biggest national-level contest we organize. In 2019, we continued systematic work to sustain and develop this project. This year, 330 Ukrainian participants uploaded almost 32 thousand photos of 11 thousand Ukrainian cultural heritage monuments. Nearly 3,000 monuments first appeared under free licenses on Wikimedia Commons. Ukraine came first among 48 countries within the international contest by the number of photos uploaded.
Some of the highlights of 2019 include:
- We improved communications for the project and paid more attention to media coverage. In 2019, more than 200 stories about the contest were published in national and regional media, as well as on the websites of local authorities. Particularly, we systematically worked with regional authorities asking them to share information about the project.
- We continued to organize a special nomination for Jewish heritage (this year, it brought 1200 photos, which is four times higher than in 2018) and for the first time organized special nominations for mills and for video files. All special nominations had separate jury teams; “Jewish heritage” and “Mills” nominations were organized with partners, which allowed us to draw additional attention to the contest.
- We organized a traveling photo exhibition across Ukraine. In 2019, the exhibition of WLM 2017 and WLM 2018 winners visited 11 locations in 8 regions of Ukraine. One of its achievements is that it helped attract more attention to Wikimedia projects in Eastern and Southern regions of Ukraine, such as Luhansk, Kherson, and Mykolaiv Oblasts, which are relatively undercovered by Wikimedia events.
See the winning photos on the contest’s website (in Ukrainian)
- Wiki Science Competition (November 1st—30th)
Traditionally, Wiki Science Competition in Ukraine was a part of the international competition, which we first joined in 2015. This year, the contest brought around 300 scientific photos in seven different categories. Wikimedia Ukraine organized the photo contest in partnership with My Science portal and popular science event Days of Science, which helped to reach academic audiences and scientists. The contest jury was comprised of five experts in their fields.
As detailed above, in 2019 we combined this contest with an article contest, which was a good way to increase media usage and to promote the photo contest among the Wikipedia community. At the same time, the number of photos uploaded proved considerably lower than in the previous contest. The likely reason is the lack of volunteers devoted to promoting the contest within the academic community; we relied on the existing community of scientists interested in the contest but did not bring a lot of new ones.
See the detailed results in our blog (in Ukrainian).
- We also traditionally coordinated the international round of Wiki Loves Earth
In 2019, 37 countries participated in Wiki Loves Earth (the highest number ever), bringing almost 95,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons from almost 10,000 participants (8400 of them being newbies)
Overall, we improved the communications part of the project in 2019. We communicated more frequently with local organizers and provided greater support to them, paid more attention to social media and writing stories for the blog etc.
At the same time, we did not fix the problem of human resources, and the announcement of international results was once again delayed, largely because of the lack of devoted volunteers and the staff’s overload by other major projects in the fall. We intend to fix it in 2020 through hiring a dedicated project manager specifically for international Wiki Loves Earth.
See more analysis of international Wiki Loves Earth in our learning story.
- Photography contests' winners
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Wiki Loves Earth in Ukraine -
Wiki Loves Monuments -
International Wiki Loves Earth -
Wiki Science Competition (one of the categories)
GLAM
While we did not have much cooperation on content in the GLAM field in 2019, cooperation with GLAM institutions ran through a lot of our projects, and we implemented several interesting projects related to libraries.
Wikimedia Ukraine’s GLAM work in 2019 includes:
- Cooperation with the “Wiki Library”, a local library inspired by the ideas of Wikipedia, in Lviv. We had signed a memorandum for cooperation with the library just before its opening in June 2019. Since that time, we held a series of training events for the library’s employees, and our Lviv volunteers founded a monthly wiki-event there called “Writing Wikipedia” (“Пишу Вікіпедію” in Ukrainian). We are working on transforming this library into a hub for the promotion of Wikimedia projects and for Wikimedia-related events in Lviv. Major Wikimedia events, such as Wikimarathon 2020, are already being held there.
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- The GLAM program is a good way to promote local content, which is one of Wikimedia Ukraine’s strategic tasks. In 2019, it manifested itself in WikiKharkivshchyna (can be translated as “Wiki Kharkiv Region”).
- WikiKharkivshchyna is primarily an article and photo contest for libraries in the Kharkiv Oblast. In 2019, it was held for the second time, on November 4th—24th. Within this timeframe, 20 libraries participated; they submitted 35 articles and facilitated uploading 150 photos.
- At the same time, WikiKharkivshchyna has evolved far beyond the scope of a time-bound contest. Wikimedia Ukraine’s Kharkiv-region volunteers were maintaining communication with local libraries for almost the whole year, holding numerous training events for them throughout the year. It is particularly important that a lot of these libraries are located in smaller cities outside of the regional center, which helps attract content that would otherwise be underrepresented on Wikimedia projects.
- Our volunteers organized a number of standalone training sessions for librarians in the Kharkiv Oblast, Vinnytsia, and Mykolaiv.
- We continue building partnerships with GLAM institutions within our other projects and programs; a lot of our events are held in libraries and, to a lesser extent, museums. For example, GLAM institutions, mostly libraries, showed strong participation in Wikimarathon 2019, with 32 libraries having hosted wiki-events in five days. Wiki Loves Monuments traveling exhibition was hosted exclusively by GLAM institutions (9 libraries and 2 museums).
Content Enrichment: Program Objectives
- to improve Wikipedia's coverage of topics that were identified by the community (target: over 12 months, at least 3000 Wikipedia articles on specific topics identified by the community are created or improved)
Partly done. We did work on improving Wikipedia's coverage of underrepresented topics. If counted with thematic weeks and challenges, the number of articles created/improved well exceeds 3000; yet, for article contests only it is at 2500.
- to increase the quality and quantity of photographic content about protected nature sites, cultural heritage sites, photographic and other media content that help to discover science (targets: during the photo contest periods, at least 113,000 images that are photographs of protected nature sites, cultural heritage sites, photographic and other media content that help to discover science, are uploaded; and over 12 months, at least 0.5% of the above-mentioned photographic and other media content receives quality labels)
Done. Our photography contests in 2019, including international Wiki Loves Earth yielded around 126 thousand photos; 620 of them received quality labels (572 in Wiki Loves Earth international, 48 in Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine), which is 0.49% of the whole number.
- to ensure photo contest content is used to illustrate Wikimedia projects through organising an on-wiki collaboration (contests) (target: at the end of 12 months period, at least 12,000 images of the above-mentioned content is used to illustrate Wikimedia projects)
- Partly done. We did work to increase media usage (particularly, through spreading the word about its importance among Wiki Loves Earth local teams), but the number of images used ended up at 82% of what we targeted.
- to improve the content of Wikimedia projects by increasing the participation of the GLAM institutions and the participation of the community in WMUA-GLAM activities (targets: over 12 months, at least 500 content pages created on Wikimedia projects owing to the participation of the GLAM institutions and the participation of the community in WMUA-GLAM activities; and over 12 months, at least 25 institutions are participating in WMUA-GLAM activities related to improvement of the content of Wikimedia projects)
Not done. Although we widely cooperated with GLAM institutions for other purposes, no consistent work was done in GLAM activities related specifically to the improvement of the content outside of other projects, such as WikiKharkivshchyna.
- to improve the content of Wikimedia projects by increasing content on locally-oriented topics (targets: over 12 months, at least 500 content pages on locally-oriented topics are created on Wikimedia projects)
- Partly done. We organized WikiKharkivshchyna, a contest directed at local content. Although it widened its reach as compared with the previous year, the number of content pages created is less a half of what we targeted (205, including 185 for the contest itself and 20 for training events before the contest). This number would be much higher with Wikiexpeditions, but the expeditions were covered by a different direction in 2019.
Program Metrics:
- Shared metrics
- Total participants: 9,952 \ 3,800
- Number of newly registered users: 7,898 \ 2,355
- Number of content pages created or improved: 129,556 \ 116,500
- Grantee-defined metrics
- Number of volunteers involved: 116 \ 60
- Number of media files used: 9,548 \ 12,150
Explanation: Targets for shared metrics were considerably exceeded primarily because of the strong numbers of international Wiki Loves Earth, which attracted more countries and individual participants than in the previous year. For the number of volunteers involved, the main reason for exceeding the target was attracting large and diverse jury and organizing teams for article & photo contests. We are behind in media usage, mainly because of the insufficient efforts to promote media usage for national photo contests. Since we had to postpone the Wiki Loves Monuments article challenge to February, its results will not be reflected here.
Increasing Participation
Wikimarathon and uk-Wikipedia 15
Dedicated to the 15th anniversary of Ukrainian Wikipedia, Wikimarathon 2019 was the biggest editing challenge in Ukrainian Wikipedia in 2019. Wikimedia Ukraine ran an online part of Wikimarathon and coordinated offline events across Ukraine.
Overall, 1776 articles were created over the five days of Wikimarathon, with around 650 users having created an article. Wikimarathon 2019 reached 38 cities and villages in 21 regions of Ukraine (which is 84% of regions except Crimea) with 60 events. Around 60 volunteers were involved in planning and conducting Wikimarathon online and in the field.
The mechanics of Wikimarathon 2019 was similar to previous years’ Wikimarathons, including the one discussed in detail in our 2017 program story. The improvements, which we implemented in 2019, are detailed in the midpoint report. Brief recap: 1) we paid more attention to the quality of content, having initiated a sub-project on patrolling and improving articles created by newbies (15 people participated, 240 articles were checked); 2) we worked on developing the capacity of the community, having for the first time organized two training sessions for Wikimarathon trainers in two major cities (Kyiv and Kharkiv), as well as having prepared detailed instruction materials for the trainers.
We also organized a celebration of Ukrainian Wikipedia’s 15th anniversary (Wikimarathon was the biggest project for the anniversary, but not the only one). Particularly, Wikimedia Ukraine prepared a number of informational and promotional materials about Wikipedia (a press release, mini-contest for a special logo devoted to the anniversary, a series of infographics with 15 facts about Ukrainian Wikipedia, a new version of Ukrainian Wikipe-tan etc.) and held an offline celebration in Kyiv on the date of the birthday. Overall, we saw a good boost of publicity and a spark of media attention devoted to Wikipedia in the wake of the anniversary.
Wikipedia in Education
As planned, we worked with both schools and universities in 2019 to promote the integration of Wikipedia in the educational process. Our work includes:
- One of our biggest education activities has been the article contest “Wikipedia for School”, which is devoted to topics included in Ukrainian secondary education curricula. The contest ran from November 20th to January 20th. This project borders with the direction of Content Enrichment, but it was primarily an education activity because it was aimed to increase participation among educators and improve their knowledge of Wikimedia projects (importantly, all participants had to use the Outreach Dashboard so they could familiarize themselves with its functionality for future educational activities).
- The contest was held in seven categories, which is for seven school subjects. It is now at the stage of the jury reviewing the articles; the preliminary results show that 75 educators participated, having created or expanded 230 articles.
- We held training sessions for teachers and presentations for educators. The biggest training event was a two-day session at Kremenchuk, to which we invited teachers from across the country (it was described in detail in the midpoint report). Our volunteers also held numerous presentations of Wikipedia opportunities for teachers (examples: Antanana in Berdychiv, Анна Холодняк in Kremenchuk, Нестеренко Оля in Mykolayiv)
- We continued to develop cooperation with universities, supporting the integration of Wikipedia in university curricula. The midpoint report highlighted the example of the university course “Introduction to Gender Studies” at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. Examples of other integrations by our volunteers include supporting the course on Jewish studies in the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (Anntinomy) or integrating Wikipedia in two history courses at the Hlukhiv National Pedagogical University of Oleksandr Dovzhenko (Андрій Гриценко).
- Wikimedia Ukraine supported the promotion of Wikipedia in education through our activists' participation in conferences, most notably local EdCamps. Five WMUA’s Education Program activists (Андрій Гриценко, Olga Loboda 0806, Педагог Світлана, Еколог Світлана, Ліонкінг) presented Wikipedia at six EdCamps, holding training sessions and presentations. Wikimedia Ukraine was a partner of mini-EdCamp Chortkiv, where Педагог Світлана and Еколог Світлана held a wikitraining for teachers.
- Vlasenko D, a university maths professor and Wikipedia Education Program activist, presented his experience at the Wikimedia+Education Conference 2019.
- As always, we continued to provide other various kinds of support to Education Program activists who actively integrate Wikipedia in their curricula. For example, we organized an award ceremony for high school graduates in Kremenchuk, who have been active participants of a Wikipedia education program for three years. As another example, we supported the creation of “Educational Club WikiBar”, a group of educators in a town in Vinnytsia Oblast who consistently work on the Education Program.
- Education Program has been benefiting from other programs and projects by Wikimedia Ukraine, most notably Wikimarathon. During Wikimarathon 2019, 18 events were held for school and university students, not counting events hosted by educational institutions but aimed at a general audience.
In 2019, we did not develop a MOOC on Wikipedia because of the lack of volunteers ready to develop course materials; we intend to do it in 2020, with more learning from online Wikipedia courses abroad. The possibilities of preparing potential WikiCamp 2020 also were not developed in 2019, and we currently do not have it in our plans.
Increasing Participation: Program Objectives
- to organise training events for Wikimarathon in the majority of regions of Ukraine (target: over the Wikimarathon period in January-February, at least 14 regions of Ukraine have Wikimarathon training events)
- Done. We organized training events in the vast majority of Ukrainian regions; 21 regions were covered.
- to encourage people to write articles on Wikipedia birthday by online campaigns (target: over the Wikipedia birthday period in January-February, at least 500 participants write articles in online campaigns)
- Done. We organized Wikimarathon for Ukrainian Wikipedia's birthday, and 650 users created an article.
- to engage more educators by organising at least 5 trainings (target: over 12 months, at least 50 educators are trained)
- Partly done. We did organize and support training sessions for educators in Kremenchuk and Mykolaiv, but the number of their participants (specifically training sessions, specifically for educators) is around 30.
- to engage more students by organising at least 5 presentations/trainings (target: over 12 months, at least 100 students attend a presentation or a training as a part of Wikipedia in Education activities)
- Done. We do not have the ultimate number of students who attended Wikipedia presentations/lectures since we do not have all the data; yet, this number for university and school students is well above the 100 threshold.
- to continue the particular focus on underrepresented regions, such as Southern and Eastern Ukraine, by organising at least one such training there (target: over 12 months, at least 1 education training is organised in underrepresented regions, such as Southern and Eastern Ukraine)
- Done. At least 1 training specifically for educators was organized in Mykolayiv, a center of an underrepresented region in Southern Ukraine.
- to continue promoting Wikipedia in education by giving presentations of innovative uses of Wikipedia and related projects on educational conferences and fairs (target: over 12 months, at least 3 presentations of innovative uses of Wikipedia and related projects are given on educational conferences and airs to promote Wikipedia in education)
- Done. We did provide support in promoting Wikipedia in education; at least 6 such presentations were given.
Program Metrics:
- Shared metrics
- Total participants: 945 \ 1000
- Number of newly registered users: 453 \ 500
- Number of content pages created or improved: 2477 \ 2500
- Grantee-defined metrics
- Number of volunteers involved: 62 \ 65
- Number of media files used: NA
Explanation: Even though Wikimarathon showed a strong performance, which was higher than expected, the numbers are a bit lower on the Educational Program side. The key reason is that we did not develop a MOOC on Wikipedia, which was in our plans in 2019.
Community Support and Development
Community Events
In 2019, we continued the practice of organizing big events for the community to mark important milestones and advance community development.
An important part of this program was the strategy process, which ran through the most part of the year (since January until mid-October) and took a lot of resources for both online facilitation and three offline events (two strategy sessions, one in February and one in June, as well as the Extraordinary General Assembly which approved the strategic direction). A detailed description of the strategy process can be found in the program story.
Other community events we organized include:
- Celebration of Ukrainian Wikipedia’s 15th Anniversary (late January)
Celebrating Ukrainian Wikipedia's birthday with editathons and gatherings to taste a cake have already become traditional. In 2019, we have supported >60 wikimeetups. Metrics-wise, the progress of these events is tracked within the “Increasing Participation” program as most participants were also involved in an edit-a-thon or online in Wikimarathon 2019 by writing an article; Wikimarathon is discussed in detail in a separate section above.
- Annual General Meeting (February 16th)
Holding an Annual General Meeting (GM) for Wikimedia Ukraine’s members is one of the organization’s responsibilities. As usual, the General Meeting elected the Board and the Audit Committee, as well as reviewed the organization’s activity and approved the plan for the next year. 2019’s development was holding the General Meeting just 1.5 months after the previous one; the goal was to make a transition of the GM’s timing towards early in the year as opposed to late December (the reasoning for that was described in the midpoint report). 29 Wikimedia Ukraine’s members participated in the GM in person, while others could join the preparatory process online.
- Celebration of Wikimedia Ukraine’s 10th Anniversary (June 29th)
To celebrate the organization’s anniversary, we organized a small party with a cake for its members. It was also an opportunity to look back on Wikimedia Ukraine’s history (which was useful for the strategy process). For that and for logistical reasons, we combined the celebration with the second strategy session.
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- WikiConference (October 12th—13th)
It is important for Wikimedia Ukraine to gather the Wikimedia community from all over the country once a year for the Wikiconference — a conference about Wikipedia, wikiprojects and free knowledge; we do it every year since 2011. This year this event was held in Kharkiv, Eastern Ukraine.
The conference featured 22 sessions within three tracks. In 2019, we paid more attention to training sessions for specific technical skills, such as Wikipedia bots, Wikidata, or SQL (there was a separate track for training events). The conference’s program was also formed by the strategy process (and the draft of the strategic plan 2020–2022, which had been prepared before the event).
The conference was attended by 60 people (except external speakers), 58 of whom received a scholarship to attend. 100% of those who received scholarships filled two post-conference surveys. 90% of respondents said the program of the conference was “useful” or “very useful”, while 93% evaluated the general organization as “good” or “very good”.
For higher participation, we streamed as many sessions as possible to a Facebook page, which allows to automatically save recording after the streaming; the recordings received 720 views in total. Also, most sessions had slides available online. As mentioned above, during the conference, we also held the Extraordinary General Meeting of Wikimedia Ukraine to approve the strategic direction.
Also, in 2019 we organized six award ceremonies for article & photography contests and thematic weeks (WikiKharkivshchyna 2018, Wiki Loves Earth in Ukraine, Wiki Loves Monuments, WikiScience Contest, CEE Spring, Swedish Week). While they were also in fact events for the community, they are covered by their respective projects and programs.
Trainings for Volunteers
It is important for us to invest organizational and financial resources into developing capacity of the community through training its members. Our work in this direction can be divided into two parts: 1) holding training sessions ourselves and 2) supporting our volunteers’ participation in external training events.
Training sessions organized and supported by Wikimedia Ukraine include:
- Training on NGO governance (March 23th—24th). It was a major two-day training session for some of the most active Wikimedia Ukraine members (invitations were extended to Board & Audit Committee members, the strategy team, members of the technical committee, and staff members; 20 people attended in total). The trainers were both Wikimedians and invited experts, and the topics of the training included team communication and work, NGO legislature in Ukraine and key legal procedures that an NGO has to abide.
- Training sessions on Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata for the Kharkiv Wikimedia community. Wikimedia Ukraine’s volunteers Vlasenko D and Kharkivian organized two such events, in June and in December; around 15 people attended one of the sessions or both. Budget-wise, it was supported by Wikigrants.
Training events organized by Wikimedia Ukraine but tracked in different programs/projects:
- Two training sessions for Wikimarathon trainers in Kyiv and Kharkiv (January 19th). 21 people attended these simultaneous events.
- Workshops during the Wikiconference. This year, Wikiconference organizers paid more attention to sessions on technical skills, so a separate track was organized; it included 7 sessions on technical skills.
Secondly, we supported Wikimedians’ participation in external training sessions. In January, we approved the procedure and criteria for the requests for training scholarships. We did not put a lot of resources into promoting this program pending outcomes of the strategy discussions but had a few approved requests, mostly connected with the strategy process that was underway.
The list of supported requests include:
- A scholarship for Ilya and Юрій Булка to attend the “School on facilitation and moderation of strategic sessions” which helped us shape our strategic process
- A scholarship for three users (Aced, JTs, Tohaomg) to visit “Algorithm of strategy session” training.
- A scholarship for Aced to attend “SMM for non-profits” training
Scholarships
Supporting Wikimedians’ participation in international Wikimedia events is a good way to support both community motivation and general community capacity. Our requirements for scholarship reporting include both providing onwiki notes from the event and writing a blog post as a result; some scholars also typically share their experience at Ukrainian Wikiconference.
In 2019, we granted scholarships to the following international events:
- Wiki Techstorm 2019 — JTs
- Affiliate Chairpersons meeting 2019 — NickK
- Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2019 — NickK
- Вікіманія 2019 — fed4ev, Mcoffsky and Luda.slominska (full scholarship); CEllen та Visem (partial scholarship).
- Wikimedia Hackathon 2019 — Юрій Булка, Alex Blokha, Tohaomg
We also ran the selection process for scholarships to three international Wikimedia events, which were not funded by WMUA:
- Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2019 — Friend, Visem
- Wikimedia Summit 2019 — Юрій Булка
- Wikimedia+Education Conference 2019 — Vlasenko D
Also covered by the scholarship program were smaller scholarships for trips within Ukraine:
- Olga Loboda 0806, being an Education program leader, was granted with support to visit several regional pedagogical conferences.
- A1, a composer and musicologist, received a scholarship to attend the conference “Choral Arts of Ukraine” to deliver a presentation on Wikipedia as an educational resource for musicians.
Microgrants
In 2019, microgrants was a big program, which served as an “umbrella” for four different sub-programs (for 2020, we moved two of them — Wikiexpeditions and Thematic weeks — to the direction of Content Enrichment, which better reflects their nature).
1) Wikigrants — small grants for book purchase, participating in an event, covering entrance tickets to a museum etc. In 2019, we supported five microgrants for book purchases. Out of those, three are already completed; in total, they helped create or improve 427 content pages in Wikipedia, Wikiquote, and Wikidata. The reporting process for the other two grants is still underway.
2) Thematic months and weeks — providing souvenirs and small prizes for active participants of thematic weeks in Ukrainian Wikipedia (as well as promotional and informational support).
In 2019, we helped organize four such thematic months and weeks:
- Kharkiv Region month. Organized by our active Kharkiv volunteer community, it led to 216 articles being created and 105 articles expanded.
- Swedish Week. Held in partnership with the Embassy of Sweden in Kyiv, it has been one of the most prolific thematic weeks we ever supported as 947 articles were created and 87 expanded over the project’s three-week period.
- Investigative Journalism Week. Held in partnership with the Regional Press Development Institute, it has helped bring 131 articles on the topic to Ukrainian Wikipedia. Also, we held a training session for journalists, which was attended by 16 participants.
- Contemporary European Literature Week. It was held in partnership with the 26th Book Forum in Lviv, one of the biggest cultural events in Ukraine. The thematic week helped bring 187 articles to Ukrainian Wikipedia by 16 participants. Within this partnership, we also held two presentation events during the forum in September, which were attended by approximately 50 people in total.
Within this program, we also organized the “She Did It” challenge. In cooperation with the Swedish Embassy in Ukraine and the National Democratic Institute, we held an online marathon both in Ukrainian Wikipedia and internationally; it was centered specifically on Ukrainian women. With this project, we got the experience of organizing an international marathon, which was challenging but proved rewarding.
As a result, 55 people created and expanded 180 articles in Ukrainian Wikipedia. Additionally, 10 participants created or improved 180 content pages on other Wikimedia projects within the international marathon. The languages covered include English, Russian, Japanese, Bengali, Hindi, Bashkir, and Yakut.
As a promotional event for the marathon, we held a training session / editathon in Kyiv, which was visited by 35 participants.
3) Wikiexpeditions — supporting Wikimedians’ trips to visit places and sites to improve their coverage on Wikimedia projects.
In 2019, we supported three Wikiexpeditions:
- Wikiexpedition to the Marmaros Mountain range
- Wikiexpedition to Velykyi Burluk Municipality in Kharkiv Oblast (we provided organizational support but did not compensate expenses for this expedition because of the applicants’ failure to submit a report)
- Wikiexpedition to the North of Odesa Region
Combined, these expeditions brought 786 new photos for Wikimedia Commons and 87 created or improved content pages on Wikipedia and Wikivoyage.
- Photos from Wikiexpeditions
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Wikiexpedition to the Marmaros Mountain range -
Wikiexpedition to Velykyi Burluk Municipality -
Wikiexpedition to the North of Odesa Region
4) Wikizghushchivka — providing small physical gifts (a can of condensed milk) to the most active new and existing Wikipedia contributors.
No work was done in this direction in 2019 because of the lack of volunteers devoted to the project. We are currently reflecting on how we can rethink this project so as to revive it.
Community Support and Development: Program Objectives
- to increase the community participation by empowering users with the techniques and skills needed for Wikimedia projects (target: over 12 months, at least 50 participants participate in trainings aimed to empower users with the techniques and skills needed for Wikimedia projects)
- Partly done. Around 40-45 unique participants were present at the training on NGO governance, training for Wikimarathon trainers, and two training sessions for the Kharkiv community.
- to provide incentives to the community, supporting a wide range of volunteer initiatives with the financial resources, materials, and souvenirs they can use (target: over 12 months, at least 120 community members receive financial support to their volunteer initiatives or souvenirs in recognition of their volunteer engagement)
- Done. This was mostly achieved through supporting thematic weeks (67 unique participants received souvenirs), celebrating Wikimedia Ukraine's birthday (most organization's members received small souvenirs) and supporting wikigrants and wikiexpeditions.
- to ensure members and volunteers engagement and committing by supporting/organizing online and offline events (target: over 12 months, at least 150 participants participate in offline and online events for community members)
- Partly done We did organize events for community members: two General Meetings, two strategy sessions, one Wikiconference, and two anniversary celebration. Yet, since a lot of people attended several or most of these events, the number of unique participants is closer to 100 (not counting participants of celebration with Wikimarathon meetups in Ukrainian regions).
- to provide international scholarships for international Wikimedia-related events (target: over 12 months, at least 15 scholarships to international Wikimedia-related events are provided)
- Done. We did provide scholarships for all major internal Wikimedia-related events in 2019. The number of scholarships granted from our budget was 11, and we ran the selection process for 4 other scholarships.
Program Metrics:
- Shared metrics
- Total participants: 444 \ 242
- Number of newly registered users: 41 \ 30
- Number of content pages created or improved: 3320 \ 2300
- Grantee-defined metrics
- Number of volunteers involved: 23 \ 20
- Number of media files used: 282 \ 500
Explanation: The targets are mostly exceeded, and the primary reason is the activeness of thematic weeks and editing challenges, which brought a lot of participants and content pages. The target is missed on the number of media files used because we did not have big photogrants in 2019.
Awareness for Wikimedia and Free Knowledge
Media Publicity and Promotion Activities
Throughout the year, media publicity played a major part in the realization of the projects. The ones that got the highest media attention were the Ukrainian part of Wiki Loves Monuments (more than a hundred publications in regional and nationwide media and approximately 80 publications in governmental media channels), Wikimarathon (several dozen publications, including some 20 video and audio stories), Women in STEM and She Did It (both of which got wide coverage in nationwide media). Good media coverage was also received by Ukrainian parts of Wiki Loves Earth (several dozen publications, attention from both media outlets and government sources).
As in the first half of the year, we continued to develop our blog and social media accounts to keep our audiences up to date with all the contests and events.
- In 2019, we published 72 stories on the blog; it received 40,953 views from 27,532 unique users.
- By December 31st, the number of our Facebook page followers increased by 24% since the beginning of the year (2,857 -> 3,542), with a total reach of 116,619 people.
- Other Wikimedia Ukraine’s social media channels showed audience growth as well: in the beginning of 2020 WMUA Instagram account had 490 followers, and 1,432 people followed Wikimedia Ukraine on Twitter.
- As mentioned in the midpoint report, we renewed the practice of monthly newsletters with the most important events and announcements. An example of a newsletter is here (in Ukrainian), as well as experimented with paid social media advertising.
- In June, the Cabinet of Ministers (Government) of Ukraine issued a resolution that recommends all local and nationwide agencies of the executive branch to license the content on their sites under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. It happened at least partly because of the earlier activities of Wikimedia Ukraine and Creative Commons Ukraine which requested the Government to do so and held a few presentations for different branches of the Government. Individual efforts of volunteer editors, who wrote letters and requests to government agencies about switching to free licenses, are also likely to have influenced the decision. As a result, the number of free license websites increased, and now we can use thousands of free images to illustrate articles, as well as texts (such as biographies of government officials or reference information on populated places) on Ukrainian Wikipedia.
- In July, we participated in the NGO planet at Atlas Weekend, Ukraine’s biggest musical festival. It was a great way to reach a large audience, particularly those who typically do not attend our events (the panel of several dozens different NGOs was open for all festival participants). We offered a souvenir for interacting with Wikipedia in some way (participants could pass a test on Wikipedia, download a Wikipedia app, post a photo with Wikipedia banner, listen to a mini-lecture on Wikimedia projects etc.). Overall, these interactions covered 500 people in 6 days.
- Wikimedia Ukraine at Atlas Weekend
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- In September, we held a press breakfast devoted to the freedom of panorama, copyright, and free licenses. It was attended by almost 15 people and generated good coverage for the topics discussed. For this event, we prepared a brochure for journalists on Wikipedia, copyright, free licenses, and freedom of panorama.
- Our volunteers on multiple occasions participated in external events with presentations and lectures on Wikipedia. For example, Aced presented Wikipedia at the Live Histories Festival in Kyiv, while Perohanych did a presentation at the festival Reformation-Fest in Western Ukraine.
Free panorama advocacy
At the beginning of 2019, we took a more serious approach to advocacy, with a goal to prepare a big advocacy campaign.
We prepared for the first stage of the campaign by creating an advocacy plan to direct our efforts in this field. The plan included: mapping of the stakeholders, decision-makers, and ideas for the information campaign, including publications, videos, and events.
Unfortunately, our plans were affected by a major political change in Ukraine (immediate dissolution of the parliament by the newly elected president), which made create a new outline. We have completed it by the end of October. The second plan, even though similar to the first one, had numerous adjustments to the current situation. It provided for rearrangement of our contact base, a relaunch of the info-campaign, as well as the provision of new info materials.
Most important aspects of our work in 2019 include:
- Mapping
By the end of January, we had finished mapping the members of the Ukrainian Parliament potentially interested in supporting the freedom of panorama (FoP). We either contacted members of Parliament (MPs) or searched for information that would show their interest in copyright regulations and awareness in the FoP issue. This information is not public and is only for our internal use.
As the political situation in Ukraine had changed dramatically after the snap election in July, we considered the option of conducting another mapping. After completion of the initial stage of mapping by the end of September, we regularly revise information about MPs due to the constantly changing state of affairs in our Parliament, as well as MP’s opinions. By the beginning of the year 2020, this work has proven its usefulness by helping us to establish connections with MPs.
- Information Campaign
One of the challenges is low awareness about the very concept of freedom of panorama in Ukraine: both among members of Parliament (MPs) and the general public. We have decided to work on developing good quality materials for publishing (articles, infographics, etc.) to enhance our chances of being published and shared by different media outlets, as well as developing an educational video about freedom of panorama, to be shared via social media.
- Cooperation with the Media. We enhanced our cooperation with the media by holding a press breakfast mentioned in the previous sub-section. After the event, several media outlets published materials which specifically addressed FoP in Ukraine and what could potentially be done in order to solve the existing problem. The brochure developed for the event contains an overview of the FoP issue and a QR code for our Freedom of Panorama site.
We also elaborated on several information materials on FoP, which have not been published yet. We arranged a partnership with Detector.Media, a renowned analytical media outlet, which agreed to provide us with the platform where we can publish these materials throughout 2020.
After our participation in 26 Book Forum in Lviv, where we discussed Freedom of Panorama among other topics, we started negotiating our participation in other book festivals, where we could deliver lectures and spread info materials. Amongst our top priorities are two biggest book festivals in Ukraine, The International Book Arsenal Festival in Kyiv and Bookforum, however, we are not limited to these options.
- Video. We have found contractors for video from Severodonetsk, Eastern Ukraine, whose portfolio demonstrated their focus on social projects. The draft of the video has been completed by the end of March, less than a month from the beginning of our work. We waited till the end of April for our Canadian volunteer to record audiotape: in the screenplay, the main character was a photographer from Canada (Canada, unlike Ukraine, has Freedom of Panorama). Throughout May and June, we elaborated on sound and slightly changed the video itself. The work on video lasted till the end of June due to the number of people involved (volunteers giving feedback etc). The video can be introduced to the public at any moment from now on, although we postponed the public presentation planned for autumn due to the abovementioned political changes. Detector.Media agreed to spread this video upon our request.
- State Institutions and Freedom of Panorama Research. We have also conducted research on how central and local executive institutions and a few courts complied with the copyright law with respect to images of the building where they are located. We discovered that none of the institutions, Constitutional Court of Ukraine amidst them, complied with Ukrainian copyright law in regard to a lack of freedom of panorama. Together with Creative Commons Ukraine, we prepared an analytical material based on the topic. This material was published by Detector.Media at the end of December.
- Working Directly with the Ukrainian Parliament and MPs
In early 2019, the main achievement of our team and allied MPs was the introduction of the draft law #10143 (on copyright law reform, an initiative of MPs of the committee), which had provisions for having freedom of panorama in Ukraine. This would be a great success in advancing Freedom of Panorama. We wrote letters on behalf of the MPs supporting our initiative, suggesting corrections to the initial text of the draft law #7539 (government-sponsored bill on copyright law reform, contained only very limited FoP), which evolved into the draft law #10143. We updated our infographics, website and shared the info via social media in support of having a “real” freedom of panorama (which also allows commercial use).
However, the political shift in Ukraine negatively affected the bill. Because of the snap election and the subsequent considerable changes in the constitution of the parliament, the bill was postponed. Now that the situation is more stable, we are starting to successfully establish new connections with MPs.
As we have mentioned before, this drastic change in our political environment affected us: our supporting MPs informed that the draft law #10143 would not be debated before the snap election, thus we had to postpone all our activities till September/October when the new parliamentary coalition is formed and new MPs are found to support the legislative initiatives providing for freedom of panorama. However, we had not managed to get in touch with MPs who are able to contribute to our cause till the end of the year, being able to successfully establish connexions with MPs only in January 2020.
Awareness for Wikimedia and Free Knowledge: Program Objectives
- to encourage regulatory and legislative changes that will benefit the Wikimedia projects, affirming freedom of panorama in Ukraine (target: over 12 months at least 1 press conference, 1 video and 5 round tables or meetings with partners are organised to encourage regulatory and legislative changes that will benefit the Wikimedia projects, affirming freedom of panorama in Ukraine)
- Done. We continued to work on the freedom of panorama. Particularly, we held one press conference, prepared one video (which is yet to be released), and held several meetings with stakeholders, such as MPs.
- to increase awareness of Wikimedia projects and respect for the licenses (copyright) (target: over 12 months, we organise or participate in at least 5 online or offline events targeting increase in awareness of Wikimedia projects and respect for licenses or copyright)
- Done. We organized only one event targeted specifically for the awareness of Wikimedia projects and free licenses, but we participated in numerous other events (such as Atlas Weekend, Book Forum in Lviv, and presentation by our individual volunteers).
- to share stories about WMUA's projects and from volunteers (target: over 12 months, at least 50 stories about WMUA's projects and from volunteers are shared on blogs and social media)
- Done. In 2019, we shared 72 stories on our blog and several hundred on social media. While the communication channels are typically overseen by WMUA staff, stories from volunteers constitute a big part of what we share.
- to get national press coverage (target: over 12 months, we get national press coverage in at least 12 distinct news publications)
- Done. As shown at the beginning of the section, in 2019 Wikimedia Ukraine's projects were featured in at least several dozens of publications by national news outlets.
- to support and advise on re-licensing of content under an open Creative Commons licence (target: over 12 months, we support or advise at least 5 partners who will re-license content under an open Creative Commons licence)
- Done. With the new government recommendation which promotes local licenses, our volunteers (such as Visem and Kharkivian) have been advising local government entities on re-licensing their content; these efforts were combined with typical work in this direction.
Program Metrics:
- Shared metrics
- Total participants: 100 \ 525
- Number of newly registered users: NA
- Number of content pages created or improved: 27 \ 20
- Grantee-defined metrics
- Number of volunteers involved: 21 \ 15
- Number of media files used: 15 \ 10
Explanation: The numbers mostly correspond to the targets, with the only exception of the number of participants. It is significantly higher because of our successful participation in Atlas Weekend, the biggest music festival in Ukraine.
Spending edit
Please link to a detailed financial report for your spending during the grant period. This should be in the same format as your detailed budget from your Simple APG application.
- Report can be found here (see also a copy in Google Sheets)
Please include the total amount of Simple APG funds you spent during the grant period.
- 98,549.87 USD (2,489,599.76 UAH according to the weighted average exchange rate)
Grant Metrics Reporting edit
Metrics, targets and results: grants metrics worksheet here.