Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikimedia Community Malta Simple Annual Plan 2024

Feedback from the NWE Regional Funds Committee on your proposal

Dear Team at Wikimedia Community Malta,

Thank you very much for your proposal, describing your activities and projects in support of the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement. The Northern and Western European Regional Committee has initially reviewed the proposal, and wishes to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review.

• The committee thanks WM Community Malta for the straightforward application, realistic and modest funding request to maintain the current programs and invest in new areas with your limited capacity. The Committee congratulates WM Malta on your more comprehensive programs, such as the first large-scale Wikimedian in Residency program, and the progress made in the educational sector (e.g. summer school).
• The committee is grateful to see WM Malta stating that it is “particularly active in producing more online text written in the Maltese language”. In this light, the focus on Wikipedia training and translation seems a wise priority.
• Given the size of the Maltese Wikipedia, a focus on community support and recruitment is also welcome.
• In light of the rich cultural heritage of Malta, the focus on GLAM projects you present seems appropriate and relevant.
• The committee appreciates your focus on gender issues, improving the number of biographies of females on the Maltese Wikipedia, as well as improving the gender balance in the organization’s governance team.
• The metrics presented for measuring fulfillment of goals were found instructive.

While elaborating on your proposed plans, the committee members suggested for you to consider the following:

• Providing a more detailed context for the Maltese and the English Wikipedias, and their editing communities in Malta, explaining the strategies and approaches to engage these communities by WM Malta. As it now stands, it is often difficult to know what Wikipedia edition you are writing about.
• At the moment the Maltese Wikipedia Edition has very few articles (< 6000), but the articles are typically far better than the ones in Wikipedia editions with the same number of articles. The committee would like to understand if WM Malta or the Maltese community has a plan of getting a more comprehensive coverage of diverse topics on the Maltese Wikipedia, and if so, how do you plan to measure progress (i.e. the Maltese contributions separately from the EN wiki metrics).
• To explore whether the WiR program currently targeting the English Times of Malta newspaper can be extended later to also include institutions producing text in Maltese.
• The Committee furthermore recommends to make use of the Wikimedia Foundation's leadership development resource pack to identify fields of capacity building training, as well as to benefit from the peer-learning opportunities on strategic planning and Theory of Change development.

It would be supportive of the Committee’s understanding of your plans if you’d be so kind as to elaborate on our following specific few questions:

• How does Wikimedia Community Malta understand growth for the organization, what is the vision for the few years ahead? Does WM Malta or the Maltese-language community have a strategy or priorities for development of the Maltese Wikipedia?
• Noticing that there is a focus on less but longer articles, is this a strategic decision and if so, what led to this?
• Art and feminism-related contests yielded good attendance and contributions in the past in Malta, is WM Malta planning to build on that success?
• How is the community in Malta currently active on EN Wikipedia engaged in volunteer support activities?

In terms of the schedule for our review process, please complete your review and responses to committee feedback by November 15th, 2023. After this time, the Regional Committee will begin a final review of the proposal to make a formal decision. Thanks again for your work on the proposal and supporting our review.

On behalf of the Committee - Trond ABruszik-WMF (talk) 06:14, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

Dear members of the NWE Regional Funds Committee -

Thank you very much for the useful feedback on our Simple Annual Plan and the associated request for funding. We are greatly heartened by your kind comments, which evidently come for your understanding of the relatively unique circumstances in which we operate.

Nevborg and I would first like to address the direct questions you have asked us:

• How does Wikimedia Community Malta understand growth for the organization, what is the vision for the few years ahead? Does WM Malta or the Maltese-language community have a strategy or priorities for development of the Maltese Wikipedia?

We aim to be even more stable by late 2024 to consider proposing a multi-year program and apply for relative multi-year funding. This will likely require a slight increase (approx. an additional 20%) in the time allocated to our part-time program coordinator to ensure we can sustain our ongoing program. Beyond this level of stability, we are also aiming to strengthen our core team, thus ensuring that in the longer term we are also able to grow in capacity, beyond what the slight increase in our employee's time can give us.

In terms of the development of the Maltese Wikipedia, the main priority is to maintain the momentum we have built over the past 3 years or so. Our goal is to reach 10,000 articles by 2030, at the latest. We are planning to explore ways to leverage Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata and Wikifunctions to enable the generation of new Maltese articles and the improvement of existing articles as part of this target for 2030. Part of this strategy also involves further stability, in the first instance, and growth in the longer term, of our Education program.

• Noticing that there is a focus on less but longer articles, is this a strategic decision and if so, what led to this?

One of the issues mt.wp administrators regularly lamented about before WCM embedded itself in the Maltese Wikipedia was that there were too many stubs and too many attempts to create new articles using only machine translation. They expressed a great desire for longer articles of better quality. When we became admins on mt.wp, we set this as a priority. However, this is not systematic and has only developed thus rather accidentally because we have one or two active editors who are willing and able to produce longer articles.

• Art and feminism-related contests yielded good attendance and contributions in the past in Malta, is WM Malta planning to build on that success?

Absolutely, yes! Addressing the gender gap is one of the main things that attracted our part-time employee to work for us. We will therefore continue to build on the relative success we have managed to achieve since 2018. If/when we are able to grow the appropriate capacity, we would like to engage more systematically with other usergroups such as WikiDonne, and WikiProjects such as Women in Red. For now we will continue to run Art and Feminism-related contests as we have done in previous years.

• How is the community in Malta currently active on EN Wikipedia engaged in volunteer support activities?

This has proved to be a more challenging aspect for WCM. Firstly, the established editors on en.wp have not engaged meaningfully with the User Group. We have attempted to reach out to them both on wiki and through social media, with minimal response in both cases. Perhaps this because these editors, who aren't that many anyway, prefer to work on en.wp without getting involved with a WMF affiliate. Secondly, we have largely focused on photo contests and mt.wp, and with our limited capacity we have therefore not give the English Wikipedia as much attention as we would like to, or that it actually needs from us, simply because things seem to be working fine just as they are, at least for now. We make this final statement in light of the fact that although WikiProject Malta is not necessarily on of the most vibrant similar groups on en.wp there are still a substantial number of Malta-related articles on Wikipedia, which are largely appropriately connected to both the respective Wikidata items, and Wikimedia Commons categories.

If/when we expand the time allocated to our part-time employee, engaging in volunteer support activities for English Wikipedia editors related to Malta and Maltese topics is likely to be a priority within the next few years. For now, we have satisfied this need with the development of the Wikimedian in Residence program at the Times of Malta, which is an English-language newspaper. We are confident that this will provide enhanced opportunities for us to engage Malta-related volunteers on English Wikipedia.

We would also like to make the following points with reference to your suggestions for our consideration.

• Between 2016 and 2019 we focused primarily on English Wikipedia with little attention to Maltese Wikipedia. The Covid lockdown reality helped us change that, to the point that we would now say that we're significantly more focused on the Maltese Wikipedia. However, we are equally engaged with Malta-related content on Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. Thus, we do not see a simple Maltese vs English binary, but rather an opportunity to engage in a bilingual (if not multilingual) way with Malta-related content across Wikimedia projects.
• We would like to employ existing tools for metrics better to distinguish more easily between our community contributions to mt.wp, en.wp and other Wikimedia projects. However, this may be a misguided use of our limited time and capacity and therefore we do not consider this an absolute priority right now.
• The WiR program we're currently running is intended to serve as a model for working with other organizations in the future, particularly ones that can help us develop more content for the Maltese Wikipedia. We are already in the early stages of discussing such an arrangement with the National Book Council, who are keen to see articles on the Maltese Wikipedia about all the Maltese authors and books that have been awarded the National Book Prize over the past fifty years.
• Thank you for pointing us to the Wikimedia Foundation's leadership development resource pack. We will explore the possibility of making use of this in the future.

We hope this satisfies your requirements at this stage of your considerations for our grant application. We look forward to hearing from you again soon.

Thank you! --ToniSant (talk) 00:51, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Round 1 2024 decision

Congratulations! The Northern and Western Europe Regional Funds Committee has recommended your proposal for funding!

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved the committee's recommendation to fund your proposal in full for 42,532.00 EUR for the implementation period of 1st January 2024 - 31st December 2024.

Comments regarding this decision:
We value the new, strategic programs of WMC Malta, such your first ever Wikimedian in Residence program at the Times of Malta newspaper. Recognizing the limitations of your context, we appreciate your promising efforts in education, gender focused programs improving female biographies, and in GLAM reflecting the rich cultural heritage of the country. We welcome your work in promoting activities on the Maltese Wikipedia next to English, and on improving community diversity.

Thank you for your contributions, and we wish you good luck with your activities in 2024!

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement.
2. If you have questions, you can contact the Regional Program Officer for the Northern and Western Europe Region.

Posted on behalf of the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Funding Committee, –ABruszik-WMF (talk) 06:58, 29 November 2023 (UTC)