Wikimedia Community User Group Albania/2019 Report
Activities for 2019
edit
WikiFilmat SQ Projekt
editOur Usergroup has been working on the WikiFilmat SQ project for which we received support from Wikimedia through this grant: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/WCUGA/WikiFilmat-SQ-edithathons. The main goal of this project was to improve information about the Albanian film industry on Wikipedia, Wiki Commons, Wikidata. In this page which shows the progress that we have had with the project: https://sq.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiFilmat_SQ/Dokumentimi Unfortunately, due to a lack of material resources which we would use to for all of the articles, we weren't able to finish the project by the end of 2019. In 2020 due to the pandemic we weren't able to host physical meeting which were quite important for us to work hands on on the project and working remotely didn't result very effective at the time, especially for new contributors. As we really wanted this project to also be an opportunity for new editors to be able to learn and improve their knowledge on contributing to wikipedia, we kept the project on hold and decided to wait for the physical meeting to be allowed again. We have made a new work plan a new realistic deadline for us to be able to finalize this project is March 2021. Here you can find the new planned dates for the activities: https://sq.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiFilmat_SQ/Aktivitetet#Edit-a-thons
QR pedia Activity Korçë (23.06.2019 )
editAnother project on which we worked during 2019 was the "QR-pedia at Korça museum" project. Our main goals for this project were to:
- raise collaboration of our User Group with GLAM institutions in Albania - we managed to have a signed Memorandum of Understanding with the Museum of Korça which was the second established partnership with a GLAM institution in our country.
- improve the articles related to the National Archaeological Museum of Korçë in different languages - as a result of this project we managed to have this list of articles created which were also linked with the QR codes.
Here you can find the report of the project and the achieved outcomes: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/WCUGA/_QR-pedia_at_Kor%C3%A7a_museum/Report The main results include 25 new or improved articles and their respective QR-codes, 25 photos were uploaded in wikimedia commons, and we also created a map for all the archeological sites of the city of Korca.
Editathon on reviewing Wikipedia articles with 'pending' review status (February 8 2020).
We organized an editathon for the SQ Wikipedia articles which were on pending review status. At the time on the SQ Wikipedia were a lot of articles that needed review, so we decided to organize an event to review some of these articles and to help with decreasing the number of articles with a 'pending review' status . We reviewed some of the articles and explained the Wikipedia rules for creating and improving articles to the participants that did not have a lot of experience on Wikipedia. The event went quite well and the people were very interested in continuing these initiative on a series of events. We plan to continue this when the situation with the pandemic feels more safe.
Social media coverage on this event: https://twitter.com/WikiUG_Albania/status/1226176816639074304
Wikimedia Hackathon 2020
editOur Usergroup was involved with organizing the Wikimedia Hackathon 2020, an event which was planned to be held on May 2020, but unfortunately due to the pandemic it was cancelled. Page and documentation of the event in Meta: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Hackathon_2020 We started the discussions with the 'Events program team' of the Wikimedia Foundation in June 2019, a time during which we committed to get engaged with the organization of the Hackathon. In July 2019 we started planning the event and the members of our User Group as well as two volunteers took different responsibilities. From this time, most of our efforts as a Usergroup were dedicated to this event. Through bi-weekly calls with the Wikimedia staff and other offline meetings with the local organizing team, we managed to have a lot of progress, to mention a few: we worked with the announcement and promotion of the event, we opened the registrations, scholarships, decided on the main theme of the event, produced a visual identity of the event, we made contracts with a hotel, venue, a video-grapher and other suppliers. We also worked on building a 'mentoring a new comers onboarding program' which would be useful to the newcommers of the event for them to get support from the mentors and the main goal of this program was to make the onboarding process as smooth as possible. We started our efforts for the offline promotion of the event since we wanted to increase as much as possible local participation. In March 2020, as COVID19 was considered a pandemic by WHO, which imposed the Wikimedia foundation and us to follow the proposed guidance and avoid physical gatherings, we had to announce the cancellation of the event. After this, we worked on all the remaining logistics such as contacting the suppliers and contractors, communicating the next steps related to the event etc.
