Grants talk:PEG/WM ZA/joburgpedia-2014/Report

Thank you for this grant report and congrats on completing another year of work on Joburgpedia. We're happy to hear you were able to engage new editors (many female), deepen partnerships with key GLAM institutions, and utilize a Wikipedian-in-Residence for more content donations. We have a number of follow-up questions and look forward to your response:

• It's great that you were able to engage so many small language editors and contribute to over 11 language projects! One of your main lessons learned was around follow-up with editathon participants. Did you use Wikimetrics to track their editing behavior during and after the event? In future, how will you follow-up with participants and provide support after the event is over? It would be great not to lose folks that you've gotten interested in editing!

Although we have not been using Wikimetrics at the initial stages of the project, we however realized as the project was drawing to a close that we needed to track the activities of our editathon participants and not only end there but to also find a way of encouraging them to continue editing, so yes we employed wikimetrics for that, and with regards to providing support we have noticed that there is a decline on activities after the editathons and in addition we saw it necessary to not only base our editathons on wikipedia but to extend them to other wiki projects like wikidata, commons, wikibooks and wikiversity since most are students and people have interest on different things.

• What is the partnership you have with Orlando East Library and how do you plan to develop this relationship?

The partnership with the Orlando East Library was formed through Erik Itzkin who works as a Deputy Director of immovable heritage from the city of Johannesburg. We have worked with the Orlando East Library and installed our QR Cream plague there. We are looking to have more editathons at this place as the Joburgpedia projects continue its focus towards townships.

• What was the main role of the Wikipedian-in-Residence? The job description focused on digitization of images from the JHF, but he also did work on articles. Did he provide training to JHF staff as well?

Besides digitization of images and working on articles, one other responsibility was to open accounts and train JHF staff on how to edit. Although most of the staff of JHF are old and didn't really have interest on the internet, we would however like to report that they were trained especially on visual editor and Wikipedia accounts were opened for them.

Thanks for this information. Are any of the trained staff continuing to edit? Since the position of a Wikipedia-in-Residence at JHF is not indefinite, it would be good to have a longer-term idea of how you would like to sustain the work.

Hi Alex, Excuse the late respond, there are 8 full staff at the JHF. Wikipedia Accounts were opened for 7 of them. There are 2 that really showed interest in continuing with editing Wikipedia. After the WiR position came to an end I continued to go to the JHF to oversee their progress until I got fulltime employment myself. As much as they are busy with their daily activities at the JHF, I'm personally in constant communication with them by way of email sometime I call, one other way I do is to create stubs and email the links to them to improve since they have all the information they can reference this to at their disposal.Bobbyshabangu (talk) 04:20, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

• Please note that Glamorous is a good tool to use to understand the usage of photos in a certain category. For example, of the 609 Joburgpedia photos, 87 distinct images are used 115 times. This is a usage rate of 14%, which is relatively high. We are interested in both the number of photos that are uploaded to Commons, but equally important, if they are actually being used on the Wikimedia projects.

Thanks for pointing out on Glamorous. As much as the the aim of this project is around activation of users and content on Joburg, we are also very much into supporting other Wikimedia projects, be it Commons, Wikipedia, Wiki etc and to have a detailed information on the impact of the content gathered from the project, we will be tracking using Glamorous to see how much pictures are being used and on which other Wikipedia articles and project

• It's unfortunate you were not able to get more participants in the writing competition. Are there other factors besides timing that you think contributed to low participation?

We need to improve on the way we package and market the writing competition. The fact that we also encouraged schools to participate might have come across like we were marketing it the competition to schools whilst it was opened to any person of any age. We need to use Wiki banners next time and work more closely with our GLAM partners ( e.g talking to the Orlando East Library as early as “now” to put the competition on their year calender so that it will be easy to market it to the library users as early too)

• Please provide more detail on why the catering costs for the editathons were so varied. It's hard to tell from the photos how many participants were at each one.

The catering was determined by two things, 1. The event itself , 2. The number of people who attended. On the launching and the closing event we had approximately 20 attendees in each event and we had a full meal while on editathons no 2.3.4 we only had snacks and there were about 10 people who attended on average in each event.

• It would be great to have a better tracking system for the articles created under this project. The Joburgpedia Portal does not seem to list all the articles created/improved and the images tab links to the category:Johannesburg instead of category:Joburpedia. It would be helpful to create pages for each editathon to track participants and articles created/improved, like this example.

Thanks for the link to the example. Although we will be updating and improving the Joburgpedia Portal. This gives a much clear sense of what transpired in an editathon. This we are looking to adopt.

What is your timeline for updating the portal? It would be good to have a sense of when we'll be able to have a better organized page summarizing the outcomes of the projects. For example, what are the quality articles that have been written? Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 21:41, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

It's done Joburgpedia Portal Bobbyshabangu (talk) 04:20, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Bobbyshabangu! Great to see the articles listed! For your reference, there are a lot of great resources that could be linked to on the How to Contribute page, including to fill in the red links under "Articles". Here are two great learning patterns you can link to under "Photos": Photographing your local buildings and Improving your building photography. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

once again thanks for the advice, we will be employing this. Alex Wang (WMF)

• The article goal for this project was 20 new quality articles and 1,000 new and translated articles across language projects. Did you reach these goals?

We have surpassed the 20 new quality articles but we have not reached the 1,000 new and translated articles across language projects.

• In terms of new editors, you had hoped to have both new WMZA members and activate 20 active users across the 5 small local language wikis. Great to hear that you recruited 2 new WMZA members! What was your progress towards active editors?

We were able to activate 19 new users across 9 project languages, this includes 8 small local languages with a retention of 3 active users.Bobbyshabangu (talk) 22:06, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

• What is next for Joburgpedia?

The next phase for Joburgpedia will be strengthening the relationships that we have with the GLAM institutions and creating new ties with other mission aligned institutions, we will also focus on increasing coverage on the Joburg skyline and the skyscrapers of Johannesburg, increasing the number of editors especially women, articles written in local languages and then we will move to Johannesburg Townships which will also focus on heritage and historical sites.

Thank you again for all your work on Joburgpedia and this report. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:24, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Questions above answered by Bobby, inserted by --Humetheresa (talk) 08:46, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for the responses. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 21:41, 1 December 2014 (UTC)