Grants talk:PEG/WM AM/2014/Report/Interim

Comments from WMF

Thank you for this report. We were excited to learn about your work this year, and your progress toward your goals. In future reports, please remember to include a total for the actual amount spent in each budget category in your final report.

We very much enjoyed learning more about your collaboration with Wikimedia Eesti. We know other chapters have participated in exchanges as well as content collaborations, but we found the approach of combining an online contest focusing on targeting specific content with the in-person exchange as a reward for participation particularly interesting. Great work in piloting an innovative approach. This might make a really nice learning pattern to share with the community here: Grants:Learning patterns.

We were interested in learning some more details about your digitization work. This is how we see the digitized content spread across different program areas identified in your proposal right now (15 books total):

• Armenian Classical fiction and folklore - 8
• Wiki Loves Science - 2
• Education - 4
• Western Armenian - 1

We understand that you will be doing a lot more work once you actually get your scanner. Can you explain why the focus here has shifted to Armenian Classical fiction rather than the content areas you specifically identified in your proposal? Is this in response to opportunities for digitizing content in this area that you did not expect? Also, when do you expect you will be able to actually purchase the scanner?

Congratulations on already achieving your goals for the Wiki Loves Science work. We are interested to see how you refine this work if you can find partners to sponsor future workshops. Congratulations also on your grant from Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian to work on Western Armenian!

We were also impressed to learn that you are surpassing your goals in terms of newly registered users and groups participating in both your wikiclubs work and your education work. At the same time, we see that output in terms of number of articles is still much lower than expected. Do you expect this to increase as the project moves forward?

Finally, we are sorry to hear that getting appointments to move your GLAM work forward has been such a challenge. Let us know if there is anything we can do to help out. For example, we are happy to connect you with other chapters who are doing GLAM work to see if they can share some ideas with you, or to provide a letter of endorsement from the Wikimedia Foundation if you think it would help you make progress.

Thanks again for this detailed interim report. It is accepted, and we are looking forward to the final report.

Cheers, Winifred Olliff (WMF Program Officer) talk 17:43, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Dear Winifred, great thanks for your comments, questions and the acceptance of the interim grant. As I am the one, who is responsible for the digitization project, I will answer your questions regarding the scanner and digitization. I started digitizing books for Education Project and WLS because of the urgent need of sources in Armenian. Especially in education program, we needed some Armenian sources on the base of which we taught how to edit in Wikipedia and create articles. These books are really thick - 700 - 1000+ pages each, and scanning it with a flatbed scanner was laborious. Now we have changed our approach and are mainly concentrating on the translation from other wikis, so the need of the Armenian books for Education Program is not so urgent.

The reason of scanning fiction books is that we wanted to activate Armenian Wikisource. We organize some events on Facebook, where by the help of Armenian speakers we proofread books which are never digitized. The quality of Armenian OCR and proofread programs are not of the best and people do not like to proofread scientific ("hard") books, and so we needed some fiction. In this way we activate hywikisource and involve new people in the proofreading process. Besides, it's written in our grant as well that we should also digitize fiction books.

As about the scanner, the appointment was made, we are at the top of their priority, pre-ordered list, but we do not know any particular dates. I was answered from DIY Book Scanner Support, that the scanner would be ready in the end of the February but it's already March and I have no information, I just know they are making it. We do not want to buy a flatbed scanner, as I mentioned in the report, and we do not have enough money to buy a professional book scanner. So, I think, we will wait for the end of the March before deciding what to do next in case of unavailability of the scanner, which is unlikely to happen.

Once we get the scanner, we will digitize all the books mentioned in the grant in a short term. Thank you.--David Saroyan (talk) 09:47, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

P.S. Just got an email from DIY scanner support. The scanner is ready!! We'll purchase it ASAP.--David Saroyan (talk) 18:48, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Dear Winifred, thank you very much for the comments and the report acceptance. I'll answer to the remaining comments.

• During this period as you see we have enlarged our Wikipedia Education program. Many workshops are organized through the Wikipedia Education Program in Armenian high schools to involve more students in editing Wikimedia projects, thus the number of new participants is significantly increased. During the program, we noticed that not all of the students easily learn Wikipedia editing techniques or are able to write an article that meets the project's rules (encyclopedic style, etc.). As their wish to edit Wikipedia and its sister projects is enormous, we decided to involve these students in Wiktionary instead, because it's easier to edit it for a newbie. After the students gain enough skills, then they can move on to Wikipedia. In this way we were able to make editing Wikimedia projects available to any Armenian student. The students who edit in Wiktionary now have a great success creating and improving about 1500 articles each month. That's why we created less articles in Wikipedia. Besides, now we have realized that the measure concerning the number of articles written in the grant is too high, however as you have already noticed we have surpassed our measures concerning new schools, maintaining old ones and the number of newly registered editors.
• From beginning this year we began a cooperation with Armenian Medical Museum. More workshops for another museums and libraries are expected. See more details concerning the Medical Museum cooperation in this month GLAM newsletter. Thank you for your wish to assist our GLAM project. --Lilitik22 (talk) 11:08, 4 March 2015 (UTC)