Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Chuks Zilo/Nigerian Religious Institutions on Wikidata/Report

Comments from DSaroyan (WMF)

Hello Chuks Zilo, thanks for submitting this final report. I have a few comments and questions after reviewing your grant report:

• How many similar Wikidata projects have you organized in the past?
• What other impact aside from editing Wikidata items are these projects bringing for your community?
• Do you track participant retention? On the Outreach Dashboard, I could see that no one from the participants continued editing. How would you address this issue in your next projects?
• You ran 5 events with 10 participants editing 140 Wikidata items in total. It means that each participant edited 2-3 Wikidata items per event. Do you think this is a sufficient impact?
• In fact, 93 articles have been edited by you and other team members (User:Obihoja and User:Anurikaonu), and only 52 articles have been edited by the participants. I want to highlight that this is a huge concern for me. Does it mean that you run a series of events and edit most of the proposed content?
• In your initial proposal, you mentioned that you would like to run a series of events for 35 participants. You had only 10 participants (including organizers) but you spent all budgeted expenses, rented 35 laptops, ordered the same budgeted food, and spent the same amount for the internet as initially planned. Could you please explain why? This is another major concern that I want to highlight.
• Are you coordinating your work with the Igbo Wikimedians User Group? Would you like to talk to them about how you can include your project into the upcoming budget of the user group?

Looking forward to hearing from you. Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 09:13, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello DSaroyan (WMF), Thanks for reveiwing my report and the several questions on it. These questions has opened my eyes the more in my effort to contribute in WMF. My answers are as follows:

• I have done 2 projects before in wikidata. these projects are titled 'Nigerian Universities and Polytechnics in Wikidata' and 'Wikidata Edit a thon and Training'.
• I believe that other impacts that it brings is increasing information about Nigeria in Wikipedia. It also enables more people to get to know about Wikidata, learn how to edit in wikidata and generally get more interested in contributing to free knowledge.
• On tracking participants retention, I honestly have not thought about this before. I had not tried to check whether participants have continued to contribute. However i am supprised if no one of the participants has been contributing as we have been talking about wikipedia. I thought that some of them were contributing. However, following your observation, I will go back to renew my pressure on some of them and find out what is happening. Going forward, I may have to make it a condition or extract an assurance from every proposed participant before asking for any project.
• Your next 3 questions has confused me the more. It appears that I do not understand what WMF means by the word 'participants' or 'repeat participants' in the grant application form. I ran 5 events. None of the events have up to 10 participants in one event. some times we will be 6 or 7 or 8 persons in an event. There are persons that attended one event while some others attended more that one event. People like (User:Obihoja and User:Anurikaonu) attended all the events and thus edited more. These people are also old editors and have experience. Some people are new so we use almost the whole day to coach them. In the proposal, I stated that there will be 35 participants. what I mean is that the total participation of editors will be not less than 35. That is since there will be 5 events, I expected that at least an average of 7 participants will participate in each event. That is 7 participants multiply by 5 events which is 35 participants. I did not mean that there will be 35 editors that will edit in the project. I arrived at this understanding because the project proposal page also requested that applicants should also state how many repeat participants will participate. With this understand, I believed that what I had was 10 editors but different numbers of participants in different events. I also thought that I fulfilled up to the 140 edits that I proposed in the grant application. On the expenses during the project, the expenses was carried out as proposed. I did not hire 35 Laptops. I hired 2 laptops for each of the 5 events at the cost of $35 each. So i thought i fulfilled my duties. I am sorry for anything I have done wrongly. It must have been out of my misunderstanding. Please, help me to understand this better and if it is possible, I will like to correct any error I have committed. I will be happy to be better enlightened.
• I am not a member of Igbo Wikimedia User Group. Best Regards and thanks for continuous guidance. --Chuks Zilo (talk) 16:38, 23 October 2021 (UTC)