Wikimedia Armenia/Reports/2018-03

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2018

February

Annual Plan discussion with the community members and Annual Plan Grant

Prior to development of our 2018-2019 annual plan proposal we have organized a community gathering with active Wikipedians on March and collected their ideas on further expansion of Wikimedia Movement in Armenia, as well as on Wikimedia Armenia projects. It was a facilitated discussion where everyone reflected on the work done by WMAM and made suggestions on future initiatives.

Participants were divided into 3 groups and discussed possibilities of programmatic changes in order to align these activities to WMAM and Wikimedia Movement strategic plans. This resulted in having many new ideas and change proposals wich we analysed and incorporated into our Annual Plan and into the grant proposal to the Wikimedia Foundation for the upcoming year.

Following up the community and staff discussions WMAM has set four major programmatic directions for the upcoming funding period:

Quality Content

In the proposed APG WMAM will concentrate all its efforts on the quality rather than the quantity of the articles. Considering the success of the “I create a vital article” campaign, we will initiate other thematic projects aimed at development of quality articles on different topics: medicine, law, mathematics, physics, art, etc. We will try to establish thematic councils and engage scientists and researchers of the respective fields, experienced wiki editors interested in the topic and thus will ensure the quality of the content.

Community

We will extensively work towards empowerment of our wiki community and engaging them in decision making process. We will encourage them to initiate and run projects in the framework of our current strategy and the annual plan, establish new partnerships and bring new people on board. We will establish a new culture of learning from the community and reporting back.

Education

Education will remain as one of the major programmatic direction of WMAM in this new APG. Lessons learned from our previous experience will help us to revise the teaching methodology and program approaches in general. Meeting with WikiClub coordinators in March 2018 gave us a lot of input on how to revise our strategy in this direction. We will put more stress on using Wikimedia projects as a learning source and will apply diversified approach to different age groups. We will consider each young contributor’s capacity individually, and work towards improvement of their performance. This year we will try to engage more teachers from Yerevan and revisit our approach in working with higher education institutions putting more stress on cooperation on faculty level rather than individual lecturers.

Western Armenian

During 2017 we have continued our cooperation with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (CGF) on Western Armenian Program and succeeded in our joint effort to get separate ISO 639-3 language code for Western Armenian. Based on our joined proposal, SIL International, the ISO 639-3 Registration Authority, decided to create the code element [hyw] for Western Armenian. This achievement will become a base for our Western Armenian program in 2018 and all efforts will be directed towards creation and support of Western Armenian Wikipedia with quality content. Western Armenian Program has all above mentioned programmatic directions in itself, but as it has a special role, different geography, and target group, WMAM decided to put it as a separate programmatic direction.

To bring the organization to another level of development and ensure better implementation of our strategy and programs, we will work on organizational development, which will be done in three main directions: capacity enhancement both in terms of procedures and staff capacity, outreach, financial sustainability.

See more on our Annual Plan.

Partnership with the National Library of Armenia: Meeting with Tigran Zargaryan

On March 5 Wikimedia Armenia staff met Tigran Zargaryan the head of the National Library of Armenia. WMAM had already a successful previous partnership experience with this institution. At the meeting parties discussed the current state of partnership between WMAM and NLA and the possibilities of expanding it. NLA suggested Wikimedia Armenia to get a library subscription in order to have the possibility to request books more effectively.

As always, National Library expressed willingness to share its digitized books database with WMAM. In addition, Wikimedia Armenia can request a book from the Library catalogue which will be digitized earlier than their planned timeline.

Austrian-Armenian contest winner in Armenia

On November 1-30, 2017 Wikimedia Armenia and Wikimedia Austria organized the Austrian-Armenian collaboration month, when many Armenia and Austria related articles were improved on Armenian and German Wikipedias. The winner was selected based on the quantity and quality of written articles. Armenian winner had a chance to visit Austria for 5 days.

From the other side, the Austrian winner - Mathias Sussen - visited Armenia and had an intensive tour to many Armenian cultural and sightseeing places. On March 12, Mathias led a workshop on Mobile journalism in LOFT center, Yerevan, organized by Media Initiatives Center. Many Armenian bloggers, experienced and new journalists attended the workshop. Mathias talked about the rules of mobile journalism, suggested best apps for mobile video editing and advised how to use the final product.

Media links

The Story Is Essential, And Techniques And Applications Are Secondary

Community capacity building

Media literacy workshop at Wikimedia Armenia

In order to support the capacity building of Armenian Wikimedia community, Wikimedia Armenia has decided to organize regular capacity building trainings for the community. The first one, named “Media literacy and wiki” was held at Wikimedia Armenia office, on March 16. This workshop was arranged in collaboration with Media Initiative Center. At the workshop attendees, mostly Wikipedians, learned how to work with information sources, how to check those sources. There was also a discussion how fake news are disseminated in the traditional Armenian media and social media environment and how this process influences Wikipedia.

Copyrights workshop

Copyrights workshop at WMAM

On March 30 Wikimedia Armenia with its legal partner - Legallab, had organized its next capacity building seminar for its editors. The speakers were Narek Ashughatoyan and Tatevik Gharibyan, experienced lawyers in the copyright. The participants had a chance to learn how the copyright law works and what are the most common copyright infringements in Armenia, what kind of exclusive rights have the copywriters, what is their duration in Armenian jurisdiction and when it expires. There were also discussions on fair use, public domain, different licenses and how all these processes are reflected on the Wikipedia environment. The workshop was very case directed, community members had an opportunity to learn and discuss on their own cases and questions.

Meeting with Wikiclub coordinators

For the first time since the operation of WikiClubs Wikimedia Armenia organized a Meeting with all its WikiClubs’ coordinators in March 2018. This meeting gave us a lot of input on how to revise our strategy in the Wikiclub management and Education direction. As the number of Clubs is growing and it has become difficult for Armenian Wikimedia community to follow the quality of the produced content, WMAM, as a result of discussions with the Club Coordinators, introduced some management and teaching methodology changes in WikiClub work, which will be applied from April, 2018.

The schedule was designed in a way that it addressed all issues and questions regarding the Club, Sponsor and Wikimedia Armenia work. Coordinators were introduced to more detailed explanation of how Wikimedia Armenia and Wikimedia Movement worked. After several team building activities we discussed the responsibilities as a coordinator. The outcome was the detailed and revised list of Coordinator Responsibilities. Moreover, we introduced a new system of reporting where storytelling and lessons learned are one of the most important elements.

Another discussion was about the possibility of clubbers diversification and retention and how Wikimedia Armenia other activities can help in increasing these indexes.

We will continue to work tightly with WikiClubs coordinators on increasing the quality of the content produced in the clubs. Later on, we hope that on the base of this Meeting and with the help of WikiClub coordinators we will design “Handbook of a WikiClub coordinator”, thus making it easier for new coordinators to get engaged and consider all challenges that they might face when managing a WikiClub.

As the outcome of this meeting was extremely valuable and it enhanced the collaborative manner of Wikimedia Armenia and coordinators relationships, we decided to continue arranging periodical offline and online meeting with coordinators.

Wiki Loves Science Weekend in Tsaghkadzor

On March 23-25 Wikimedia Armenia organized another Wiki Loves Science Weekend for experienced editors in Tsaghkadzor. At the editathon there were participants who edited one of the 1000 vital articles. The event was also remarkable because of the Western Armenian participants, who were working on the translation of the Western Armenian Wikipedia interface.

Western Armenian Wikipedians

	Wiki Loves Science (March 23 -255)
	Number of participants	Wikipedia
participants	50
created/improved articles/entries		56
edits		1,231
bytes (net sum)		1,480,778

Meeting with GLAM institutions

Wiki Loves Yerevan is a project implemented jointly with Yerevan Municipality with the support of cultural organizations within the framework of Yerevan 2800 anniversary celebrations. The aim of the project is to expand the information about Yerevan currently available on Wikimedia Projects.

On March 28 Wikimedia Armenia organized a meeting in Wikimedia Armenia office with the representatives of GLAM structures. The aim of the meeting was to discuss further cooperation with Yerevan museums within the framework of Wiki Loves Yerevan project. Representatives of 23 Yerevan museums were invited out of which 16 could attend the meeting.

Museum representatives got acquainted with the goals and objectives of Wiki Loves Yerevan project, as well as Wikimedia projects and principles. Special reference was made to GLAM. Examples of fruitful GLAM collaborations both in Armenia and other countries were presented.

At the meeting it was decided to hold a workshop on April 4 in Wikimedia Armenia office to teach the representatives of GLAM institutions how to use Wikimedia platforms and tools.

Newsletter submissions

This month Wikimedia Armenia has submissions in 2 newsletters: CEE Newsletter and Wikimedia Foundation Education Newsletter. In the CEE Newsletter we have represented stories about visit of Armenian-Austrian collaboration winner, Armenian wikicommunity capacity building, WMAM annual plan discussions with the community, partnership with the National Library, WLS weekend and the meeting with GLAM institutions. Continuing the series of stories about WMAM WikiClubs, this month we have represented the story of Beirut WikiClub in the WMF Education Newsletter.

WikiClubs statistics

	Community population (1)	Active users (2)	Active users index (3)	New users	New users index (4)	Female/male ratio	Bytes NET sum (5)	Bytes index (6)
Arevatsag WikiClub	821	13	1.583%	0	0.000%	56/47	621992	47845.5
Gyumri WikiClub*	121976	5	0.004%	0	0.000%	17/16	433615	86723.0
Ddmashen WikiClub	2806	24	0.855%	0	0.000%	31/23	918184	38257.7
Lernapat WikiClub	1661	44	2.649%	4	0.241%	116/111	3066158	69685.4
Mrgavan WikiClub	1606	15	0.934%	0	0.000%	30/23	507195	33813.0
Charentsavan WikiClub*	20363	2	0.010%	0	0.000%	18/3	202933	101466.5
Stepanakert WikiClub*	55309	19	0.034%	3	0.005%	131/49	226511	11921.6
Vanashen WikiClub	2364	13	0.550%	0	0.000%	33/10	239805	18446.5
Togh WikiClub	700	28	4.000%	2	0.286%	38/25	211902	7567.9
Karvachar WikiClub	500	26	5.200%	1	0.200%	41/26	610384	23476.3
Yeghvard WikiGroup	11900	13	0.109%	2	0.017%	18/3	416582	32044.8
NET sum	208106	202	0.097%	12	0.006%		7455261	36907.2

General statistics of the Education program (7)		258					10659865
How many % of the Education program participants are comprised from Wikiclubbers		78.29%					69.94%

1 - Permanent population according to the population census (RA - 2011, NKR -2015)։
2 - Users who has done 1 edit during the month.
3 - Active users/population ratio expressed in %.
4 - New users/population ratio expressed in %.
5 - NET sum bytes added in Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikisource.
6 - NET sum bytes/active users ratio.
7 - Includes also Education program other users.
* - WikiClub established in a city.

Saturday workshops

Every Saturday Wikimedia Armenia organizes open workshops edit-a-thons at the WM AM office where new editors are taught how to edit different wiki projects and the experienced editors participate in edit-a-thons dedicated to different themes. Anyone interested in wiki projects, Wikipedia, wiki editing and needing assistance, as well as wiki editors, who want to edit in pleasant atmosphere participate in these workshops. We have about 15-20 participants in each workshop. Among them there are also active wiki editors of hywiki, hywiktionary, hywikisource, Wikidata who help to conduct the workshops.

March 3, 2018
March 10, 2018
March 17, 2018
March 31, 2018

This month in numbers


3	15169	2269	113	21
articles recorded for the Spoken Wikipedia project	pages digitized for the Digitization project	words pronounced for the Wiktionary project	vital articles improved for the I create a vital article campaign	new editors involved in all projects