Grants talk:PEG/WMPL/Ethnography of the Carpathians

GAC members who support this request

1. This is a trully amazing project. Lots of things to love : cross-country, allowing lot of echanges and keeping motivation fresh; strong core, ensuring the stability of the long run; really serious involvement of a partner, in terms of staff and other ressources; a large yet well-identified scope, that nobody would be able to cover better; huge focus on quality: this is not as common as it should for projects involving Commons. Very impressive job ! Léna (talk) 09:59, 20 May 2016 (UTC)
2. --Violetova (talk) 09:35, 24 May 2016 (UTC)
3. but please add USD amounts to the lines of budget: it is difficult to imagine real expenses for people from other countries rubin16 (talk) 20:20, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
4. Interesting project. --Ilario (talk) 20:09, 3 June 2016 (UTC)

GAC members who abstain from voting/comment

1. I abstain as an applicant. Polimerek (talk) 16:24, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Community comments

I think you underestimated the cost of the meals (for Romania at least). While one can eat with 60 PLN/day, it will be either self-cooked (time consuming and implies special requests for the accommodation) or supermarket food - and supermarkets can be scarce in the countryside. I would go for 70 PLN (~75 RON)/person/day, which should allow for 1 warm meal. 60 PLN could be enough if you have breakfast included in the hosting.--Strainu (talk) 12:17, 21 April 2016 (UTC)

Yes, we underestimated meal costs. We've increased to 80pln/day. --Marta Malina Moraczewska (talk) 18:30, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

WMF comments

Hi Polimerek, This sounds like a well formed plan - it is great to see that you have specific lists of topics to be covered and appropriate institutions involved in each location. We understand that WM PL has lots of experience planning WikiExpeditions, we hope that the regional affiliates you will work with will benefit from learning from your experience. We have posted a few questions about your plans below:

• Can you share more details about the training that you are planning? It would be good to see plans for follow up with workshop participants done by local Wikimedians.
• How will you get editors involved (outside of workshops during the trips) to use the materials that are collected?
• Is it necessary for volunteers from Poland to travel to every location for the project, or are there local volunteers in those areas who can support the project?

Ultimately, we want to ensure that you have a plan for engaging communities in the use of the high quality materials and references gathered during the project. Please let us know if you have any questions or need more clarification about what we have asked. --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 19:16, 25 May 2016 (UTC)

• Regarding the workshops: we added a general description of workshops to the Activities section. The follow-up after local workshops will be based on staying in contact with the newly trained Wikimedians. For each location, one member of the Polish team will be responsible for maintaining regular Wikipedia/mailing list/email contact with the workshop participants. Participants will choose 1-2 article subjects each to translate or expand, and their progress will be monitored in the article table. They will be aided remotely by both the local Wikimedian and the Polish Wikimedian. Where possible, local Wikimedians will organise a follow-up meeting towards the end of the project. However, we cannot guarantee a set number of attendees – this may vary country-to-country; a rough prediction is from a dozen local participants to as few as 5 or 6. We will always make a point of local Museum staff attending the training workshops and supporting them further.

• As for volunteer motivation: a large proportion of the volunteers who already signed up are highly motivated people who previously participated in the 2015 Ritual Year project and/or other Wikitrips. We have experience communicating with the volunteers via the mailing list, via Wikipedia and social media.

We have noticed that long-term projects tend to have more success with training and retaining new editors - thanks to ongoing communication. Also, several people who took part in the 2015 ethnographic project (and in the National Museum in Warsaw project) have volunteered once again for new projects because of wanting to remain involved in the community. (Additionally, volunteers who meet our 'minimum critera', ie edit a minimum amount of material) receive a confirmation of having taken part in the project both from WMPL and from the Museum). The project coordinators will communicate with all participants throughout.

• Local Wikimedians' support will be an important part of it coming together. Where a local Wikipedian is ready to participate and take responsibility, we do not have to send a Polish team member. However, the Museum of Ethnography team (ethnographer team and camera operator) still make the trip, and travel by the Museum car, which lowers the cost of including the Polish Wikimedian who travels together with them.

Another consideration is good coordination: given the several locations and institutions involved, we want the teams responsible for each location to be composed of engaged team members. To achieve timely good results we need a group with a clear set of responsibilities for specific elements of the project. --Marta Malina Moraczewska (talk) 10:31, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi Marta Malina Moraczewska, thank you for responding to our questions. It is great to hear that volunteers from the Ritual Year project have remained engaged in your chapter and are eager to continue the project. Your plans for follow up with participants sound good. We have reviewed the request a bit more closely and have a few concerns about the cost of the project relative to the outcomes you expect. We have made some suggestions below for ways to lower these costs. Given the high cost of the project, we would like to see more specific measures of success that align with your goals around improving article quality and image reuse.

• The budget for the Ritual Year with Wikipedia project in 2015 was 4700 PLN / $1,200 USD for 7 trips in Poland - with 959 files uploaded to Commons. We understand that this project will involve travel to more distant locations which accounts for some of the increase in cost, however the requested budget for this project is significantly higher than the Ritual Year project without a significant increase in the number of images added or articles improved. and it also exceeds WM PL’s spending on all Wiki Expeditions 2015, which was 54,500 PLN/$13,861 total of 6894 images.
• Are there ways you can lower the cost of each trip? Some ways you could do this is to take fewer people on each trip and rely on local communities to support workshops, or make shorter or fewer trips and focus on high priority topics. We understand that many volunteers may be motivated by the opportunity to travel, however the cost of each trip is currently $65-70 USD per person, per night plus gas. If just 3 people travel from Poland on each trip - $6,100 USD could be saved - bringing the total request to $9,385 USD.
• You have noted that having engaged team members on each trip is important for project coordination, but you have also requested funding for a project coordinator. You might consider whether it is more valuable to put that funding toward volunteer travel. You might consider using expense tracking software to make the reimbursement process easier for volunteers to manage.
• The measures of success need to be refined more:
  • Include plans for how improvements in quality will be monitored. It sounds like you have identified key indicators of article quality in the ‘Fit with strategy’ section - is there a way you plan to monitor or track whether new or improved articles meet these quality standards after the project is complete?
  • Please set a more specific measures of successes for media reuse. For example, 9.4% of the 959 media files from the Ritual Year with Wikipedia have been used on Wikimedia projects. Do you expect to exceed this rate of media in use with this project?
  • You might consider using https://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/glamorgan.html to track the number of times videos created as part of this project are viewed each month. This might help you identify what topics and types of videos to focus on in future projects.
• What made the 2015 Ritual Year with Wikipedia project successful? Were there any challenges or lessons you learned from that project that have influenced your plans for this project?

We are impressed with the level of planning that has gone into this project so far, and would be pleased to support the project with a lower budget and more specific measures of success. Let us know if you have questions or concerns, or if you would like to set up a phone call to talk through options for bringing down the budget or tracking project outcomes. --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 00:25, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi KHarold, thank you for your comments! We needed a few days to think over all the above and reconsider possible adjustments. I will post a longish reply to all the above questions here on Tuesday (Jun 14th). After that, we would also be happy to discuss our proposal in person via skype or hangout. Thank you very much for reviewing so far! --Marta Malina Moraczewska (talk) 13:56, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Hello once again KHarold, please review the following considerations:

Project budget

• The total budget of the Ritual Year with Wikipedia project was 9821 USD, out of which 1200 USD was the Wikimedia Polska contribution and 8621 USD – the State Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw contribution (Museum funds were awarded by the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage).
• In the Ritual Year we documented rituals, which meant field trips built around the duration of rituals – of roughly 2,5 days each. 7 trips * 2,5 = 17,5 days of field work. This equalled: 9821/17,5 = 561,2 USD per team work day (distances of each trip being an average of 320 km one way).
• The total (revised, see below) budget of Carpathian Ethnography project is proposed to be 27502.42 USD, out of which 14,777.42 USD being Wikimedia contribution and 12,725 USD – Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw contribution. The project aims to cover two aspects of Carpathian culture – art and costume. Documenting as much as possible, in terms of unique media (and recording information for proper file descriptions) means a wide scope of work. This (rather than an opportunity to travel) dictates the length of field trips (6 days on location: documentation in nearby locations + 1 local workshop day). The fieldwork comes up to 5 (field trips) x 8 (days) = 40 days. One team fieldwork day thus comes up to 27502 USD/40 = 687 USD.
• Travel distances one-way are as follows: Warsaw - Żywiec = 370 km, Warsaw - Maramures = 723 km, Warsaw - Wallachia = 420 km, Warsaw - Martin = 480 km, Warsaw - Kołomya = 600 km. Average one-way distance will be 494 km – 180 km longer than Ritual Year – approx. 36 percent. One team work day of Carpathian Culture will thus cost approx. 126 USD more than 1 day of Ritual Year. These are only direct costs related to field documentation, and they result from the higher cost of transport (longer distance) and higher costs of fuel and accommodation in Czech Republic and Romania. But if we consider the overall time of work done – before and after the field trips – (work on article creation, detailed media descriptions, categorizing files and articles, promoting the project, stimulating media reuse, etc) – the overall cost of the planned results will in fact be lower than in the previous case.
• In our previous project we wrote around 40 articles and uploaded 970 files, created the project page and the print-standard publication within 10 months (Feb to Nov 2015). Currently, we aim to write 110 articles and upload 1330 media. The minimum proposed number of uploaded media results from the fact that we are committed to making sure of the variety, quality, annotation, and usefulness of the material, rather than uploading a large number of redundant images (the previous project also taught us that describing files well, so they are not lost in Commons, takes time!)
• Regarding higher effectiveness of our standard wikiexpeditions over the ethnographic ones: standard ones had no specific focus, but they were devoted to photographing everything of interest on selected areas. This indeed produced much more pictures per participant and day (around 200) - but many redundant, of minor importance, and quite often uploaded with poor descriptions. The ethnographic expeditions are more narrow, with more focus on quality and uniqueness of pictures and other media, which requires more work per picture and thus lower number of pictures per participant and day of travel.

Reducing the cost

• The success of teams, both on location and afterwards, depends on the project structure: the presence of Wikipedians, museum staff and volunteers; this is one of the ‘things that definitely work’ experience from our previous collaboration. We do need a team of five people for each trip.
• After consultation, the Museum team decided to bring the number of wikiexpeditions in Poland to one instead of two. The Museum will aim to carry out the second trip (to Sanok) on other funds, and still include the resulting images and articles into this project. This means a reduction of 4755,24 PLN = 1170.05 USD
• Project coordination was placed in the budget on the suggestion of some team members who felt that additional funding might be appropriate for the main (Museum) coordinator’s work. After consulting with our Museum partners – and considering the Museum contribution, which includes employee salaries – we are withdrawing this item (7680 PLN = 1889.71 USD) from the budget.
• We may receive additional funding (we have contacted the Polish Institute in Bucharest who may be able to cover costs of local volunteer travel). If that is confirmed, we will not spend the entire grant amount and accordingly report/return unused funds.
• With the above, we are now requesting: 14777.42 USD

Article quality

• To clarify: we intend for our minimum number of 110 new articles to be already written by project participants by the ending of the project in 2017. The articles will gradually be written over a 15-month period. During this time, each group related to one of the visited regions will work on their articles – before and after the wikiexcursion. After the trip, the group’s tasks will include providing descriptions for newly taken images and recordings, and illustrating new (or existing) articles with that material.
• Each new article created (or expanded one) will be required to reach a minimum quality standard by the end of project. The standard: a minimum of a “did-you-know” level article, with proper structure, sections, not a stub, with reliable references, bibliography and external links, aligned with basic rules of Wikipedia (notability, non-OR). This standard will be described on the project page and monitored by Wikipedians in charge of each team.
• We are going to create tables for articles related to each country – the tables will track article progress, whether an article has been edited up to the minimum standard; there will be a field for comments and points of improvement. The table will also link to articles in progress, which will be created in each user’s sandboxes.
• Museum expert team members will review articles every 2 months for the duration of the project, and control the articles’ quality; the Wikipedians will confirm the articles’ quality from the POV of Wikipedia.

Media reuse

• As a note: the amount of images and media given in our ‘measures of success’ section are *minimum* values which may well be exceeded in the project.
• The current project places more stress on article creation. With the minimum number of articles we have set (110 in total) assuming 2 images per article gives 220 illustrations which alone would result in a 16% reuse. We also aim to go through related article categories and thematic templates (example) in order to improve content where possible, and in the process, provide illustrations where they are missing. We will also inform Wikimedia communities (and Museum communities) of the images’ availability. I think it is realistic to expect a minimum 25-30% new image/media reuse (using glamorous stats) by the end of project.
• We have learned from the previous project that categorizing and providing multi-language image descriptions is very important for image reuse. We will therefore tackle image descriptions with more attention to reuse considerations.
• The above planned initial reuse rate is also based on the fact that most articles will be written in English (which makes it more likely for them to be translate into other languages), the project page is in English (which will widen the circle of collaborating Wikimedians) and the scope of subjects of articles is much wider than the ‘Ritual Year’, which again, makes it more likely that images will be distributed across Wikipedia.
• Images taken during each trip will not be limited strictly to the subject matter. Teams will also take the opportunity to photograph local landmarks, locations and notable places/buildings on the way and on location.

Lessons learned from Ritual Year

• Ritual Year was an experimental pioneer project which generally went well with logistics and coordination; all trips were carried out, all locations visited, photographs taken, films recorded. We carried out the WMPL side of planned article editing and upload. Because it was a first attempt, we could indeed have planned ahead for on-wiki media reuse to a larger extent: something we definitely aim to address in the current project.
• We successfully trained student newcomers to Wikipedia and through training sessions, managed to acquaint the staff and volunteers with the “how-to” of Wikimedia projects. This will enable us to be more effective currently within a team which includes previously trained Museum staff. Museum staff are also actively advocating collaboration with Wikipedia to other Museums, most recently at the "We are Museums" conference in Bucharest.
• Apart from Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, images and articles were reused in the print publication, in several magazines and websites (including print), in an exhibition at the Museum; audio recordings were used in the Polish Radio programmes.
• We created a lasting relationship with the largest Museum of ethnography in Poland.
• It was a new type of project for WMPL which resulted in learning several key lessons for future:
• The importance of media descriptions for Wikimedia reuse: ensuring all volunteers properly edit file descriptions, categorise files and illustrate articles – and including the on-Wiki reuse of media as a key part of the project from its beginning.
• The availability of source / reference material – we are already contacting a number of museums to inform them in advance of the necessity to collect reliable (print, academic journals) sources for future articles
• What worked was having each thematic subgroup of volunteers monitored by one expert on the subject matter, and one experienced Wikipedia editor for two-sided quality control (this works well in our other projects such as the National Museum in Warsaw collaboration).
• Finally, allowing the entire team enough time to process and upload media and edit the articles so the resulting article and media set is a high-quality resource.

I am sorry for the lengthy response :-) We are very keen to discuss the above in person over Skype or hangout. Please let us know what times / dates would be possible so that we can describe the project plan and hopefully discuss its final shape directly. Thank you very much for your help! --Marta Malina Moraczewska (talk) 12:05, 14 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi Marta Malina Moraczewska, thank you so much for taking time to respond so thoroughly to our questions, and for gathering members of your team for our phone call this week. It is very helpful to get so much additional context for the project through both of these communications. We understand that the cost of the project is higher due to traveling further distances, and that the outcomes of the Ritual Year project were focused more on creating a publication than on creating content on Wikimedia projects. It sounds you have incredible resources available, both in terms of enthusiastic volunteers and knowledgeable professional ethnographers that can lead to the creation of high quality articles on Wikipedia. I'd like to document some of the topics that we discussed on the call:

• The cost of traveling to different communities is high, however, we understand that having professional ethnographers and experienced Wikimedians on each trip is important for gathering high quality materials for other editors to use. We have discussed hosting workshops as part of each trip, however, participants who attend just one workshop without any follow up do not generally continue to edit after the workshop has ended. For that reason, we suggest that you only host workshops in areas where there are experience Wikimedians who are committed to follow up with participants and build relationships with the local GLAMs who will be involved in the project. This may help lower costs by eliminating travel days related to workshops.
• We understand that creating videos can be time consuming, both to engage people to appear in the videos, and to edit and subtitle them so that they can be used on different language projects. We encourage you to review the locations you are visiting and identify the highest priority subjects to capture on video. Once you have identified priority subjects for videos, we'd like to set up a time to talk with VGrigas (WMF), who produces many videos for WMF, to talk about what you can do to ensure that the videos are the highest quality possible.
• It is really wonderful to see how many people are committed to the success of this project, however because of the high cost of the project and the high quality of materials and resources that will come from the project, your proposal should include more plans for how you will engage editors from outside of the organizing team. You might consider hosting local events and workshops, writing contests in partnership with other Affiliates in the region or by doing outreach to relevant Wiki projects.

Once again, thank you for all of the hard work you have put into planning this project, and all of the thoughtful responses you have given to our questions. It sounds like a fascinating opportunity to document the history and culture of the Carpathian region. Please let us know if you have questions or would like additional information or support to develop some of the plans we have suggested in the comments. --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 05:24, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

Hello Kacie KHarold (WMF),

1. After discussing with you – and considering lowering the costs – we have cut 1 workshop day out of 3 visited locations. That way, we can organize a full-length workshop in two locations (Ukraine and Romania), and still cover the basics in the other 3, thus reducing the field days by 3, and lower the total cost. I have detailed this difference in the workshops section.

With this, we have achieved a reduction of approximately 2000 USD.

• The total budget is now as follows: 13,319.21 USD (Museum contribution) + 11,334.59 USD (requested funding).

2. I have added a section in the Grant detailing our plans for community engagement and file reuse which includes the CEE Spring competition and involvement in shorter contests. Thank you for that excellent suggestion! Please find details in this section.

3. We also added a section on file quality, example file descriptions, and a list of some topics for short video clips as you suggested. We will of course happily talk to VGrigas (WMF) and follow his guidance.

4. The most important 'lessons learned' I added below the heading of Previous project experience in the Grant proposal.

Please look over our proposal revisions. We hope for the opportunity to demonstrate in practice that this project is worthwhile – the best way – by carrying it out. I am confident that the team can deliver the results we detailed in the proposal very well, as well as generate more energy and collaboration with Wikimedia projects in several countries. We hope for your support and are ready to get to work! --Marta Malina Moraczewska (talk) 10:10, 21 June 2016 (UTC)