Grants talk:Project/Rapid/UG MAI/Wiki Loves Earth 2017 in Nepal

Hi PANKAJ DEO. Thank you and the team for submitting this request and organizing Wiki Loves Earth 2017 in Nepal! The beautiful, high quality photographs that come from Nepal are always a joy to see. We have a few questions about this year's request below and look forward to your responses.

1. We reviewed your lessons learned from last year and what you would want to do differently for future events. Specifically, you talked about adding new local Wikipedians to the team, organizing a photo-a-thon to increase usage on Wikimedia projects, doing more outreach events, and collaborating with photography associates and the tourism ministry of Nepal. Please let us know if you have considered these learnings when organizing this year's events.
2. Can you please provide more details about the outcomes from last year's outreach events, especially in Pokhara and Ilam? Those trips were a combination of photography walks and outreach events to new contributors. Have people you met during those events continued to engage in the Wikimedia projects? Will they participate in this year's contest? What do you consider a successful outreach event to be?
3. The number of outreach events this year is the same as last year (3), but the budget is double, from $300 to $600. Can you please explain what the difference is?
4. Last year, one of the main problems you highlighted was the "low percentage of images used from the competition uploads in various Wikimedia projects". Currently, out of the 2,233 photos uploaded for WLE 2016, only 86 have been used (3.85%), and a large number of those instances are on Meta. Considering the high quality of many of the photos, it would be wonderful to see more in use! We would recommend using some of the outreach budget to do a photo-a-thon event like you suggested last year to integrate photos into articles, and create/improve articles. We would also suggest a special prize in this category to motivate people!

Best, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 16:51, 19 April 2017 (UTC)
Thanks @AWang (WMF): for your questions regarding this proposal.

1. Yes we have considered the lesson learned from the last year Wiki Loves Earth events. We have engaged new local wikipedians to our team from different parts of nepal to take part to this event as well as promote this event to their locality, colleges and schools. We are in touch with a photography group from Illam to organize a photo walk event in eastern part of Nepal. We will let you know if tourism ministry of Nepal (Local election is going to happen on May 14, 2017) would consider anything for this event.
2. Sorry for not providing the detail report. Yes people from Pokhara and Illam are contributing to the Wikimedia Commons and they are going to participate this year too. We always try our best to deliver the quality image to commons and engage contributors from our outreach events. Last year we came at 3rd place over all and we are hoping to do the best this year too.
3. This year outreach event is focus on Eastern Nepal, Central Nepal and far Western Nepal so we need extra budget for the event.
4. You are absolutely right, we are also worried about the low percentage of images used in WM projects. Thanks for the suggestion, we will definatiley talk on this but I would like to request you to see our strategy to how to get images used on WM projects. We are hopeful about the strategy(proposed on grant proposal page). We will keep track the stats to reach the target.

Thanks. -- Pankaj Deo (Talk) 11:35, 21 April 2017 (UTC)