Yoruba Wikimedians User Group/2023-2024 evaluation report

Yoruba Wikimedians User Group 2023-2024 annual activities:

Evaluation Report

This page is part of the Yoruba Wikimedians User Group 2023-2024 annual activities. Important background information can be found on the Summary page page.

Introduction

This is the Yoruba Wikimedians User Group 2022-2023 annual activities evaluation page. The information on this page is based on the data collected from community members, programs leaders and partners. For the activities overview, please see the Yoruba Wikimedians User Group 2023-2024 annual activities. The core team was asked to report on activities they led and managed in the 2023–2024 fiscal year. Surveys were shared with participants who had participated in one or more of our activities, and data were collected for analysis. The activities were grouped into primary categories such as contests, GLAM, capacity building, edit-a-thons, and partnerships. Each program or activity is evaluated independently on its merits, available data, feedback from participants, and core team documentation.

Learnings were documented for each program as they were being designed and implemented, and the following are some of our key learnings for the 2022–2023 fiscal year.

Audiovisual donation: Our learning shows that donating audiovisuals to academic and cultural institutions is an impactful way to connect academic institutions, cultural institutions, and governments to the Wikimedia community and the global Wikimedia movement. This way, partnerships could be established with the institutions, and the community would gain popularity among academic staff and students. This donation had resulted into more productive outcomes and has helped to recruit more volunteers for the Yoruba Wikimedians User Group as many schools that received the donated materials had requested for capacity building for their students and academic staff that are now valuable members of our community.
Priority goals: Participants' priority goals align with some of our community's top priorities. Our community's top priorities were to increase the quality of contents on Yoruba Wikipedia, promote Yoruba Wikipedia, increase contributions to Yoruba Wikipedia, and recruit new volunteers. One or more of our activities supports participants' goals. At least 88% of the 63 members of our community who completed the survey reported that our programs and activities supported their goals.
Internet limitation: The Internet continues to remain a challenge for participants and members of our community. 82.5% of the 63 members of our community who completed the survey reported that access to the internet impacts their contributions. Although internet problems are a long-term issue, our community has designed an internet support program to support our community members.
Opportunity for improvement : Participants reported that the training program should be improved. Improvement could include direct improvement, such as the quality of training and the frequency of training, or indirect improvement, such as the creation of training materials or resources. 71.4% of the 63 members of our community who completed the survey reported that training should be improved.
Support for participants: Participants reported that they need the following support: internet data support, self-paced training materials or resources, capacity building, mentorship, and protection from global IP blocks.
Support for core team members: core team members need internet support, staff support, self-paced training materials or resources to share with participants prior to training, capacity building on tool usage, funding support to attend conferences, devices such as laptops, scanners, etc.
Donation: Our activities were funded by funding support from the Wikimedia Foundation, don't receive donated resources, and are primarily volunteer-driven. A Twitter user, however, donated NGN 10,000 to support our community. That was the only non-WMF support I received. There is also in-kind support, such as a hall for events and training provided by the University of Lagos and the International Centre for Yoruba Arts and Culture.
Communication : The participants reported that our communication was effective but needed improvement. There is a need to invest in tools such as Asana that makes communication and workflow easier to track.

Overview of the 2023-2024 fiscal year

The 2023–2024 fiscal year received funding support from the Wikimedia Foundation and began on the 1st of July 2023 and ends on the 31st of June 2023. The year was supported by experienced members of the community, which forms the core team, and two paid staff, the programs coordinator and bookkeeper. At the time of this evaluation, a total of 30 projects or programs had been implemented and documented.

The programs were hybrid (in-person and online), and the outcomes of each program were shared with community members through various platforms, including social media, newspapers, and the Wikimedia Blog (Wikimedia Diff). The programs implemented range from awareness creation to content creation, contests, capacity building, edit-a-thons, photo hunts, content donations, and partnerships.

For the implementation of these programs and activities, the Yoruba Wikimedians User Group worked with a total of 12 partners, and these activities were reported in at least 7 national newspapers, including the Gurdian Newspaper, one blog, and the Wikimedia Diff. Our community's top priorities for the 2022–2023 fiscal year were to increase the quality of contents on Yoruba Wikipedia, promote Yoruba Wikipedia, increase contributions to Yoruba Wikipedia, and recruit new volunteers.

Data report

Data used for this evaluation were collected from participants, core team members, program results, publicly available information, and through WMF Labs tools such as the hashtag tool, dashboards, Wikimedia Commons campaign, survey, and Excel sheets. We collected the following data: priority goals, donated resources, budgets, staff hours contributed, number of participants, number of new users, user retention, and number of media files used on Wikipedia articles.

Values for a number of the key metrics were only reported for a minority of events, and in the cases of budgets and volunteer and staff hours these values could not be mined from other sources. Furthermore, data for the prograns implementation were not normally distributed; the distributions are, for the most part, skewed. This is partly due to small sample size and partly to natural variation, but does not allow for comparison of means or analyses that require normal distributions. Instead, we present the median and ranges of metrics and use the term average to refer to the median average, since the median is a more statistically robust average than the arithmetic mean.’’ To give a comprehensive picture of the distribution of data, we include the means and standard deviations as references.

Priority goals

The Yoruba Wikimedians User Group had five priority goals in 2022-2023 fiscal year but the top priority goals were to increase the quality of contents on Yoruba Wikipedia, promote Yoruba Wikipedia, increase contributions to Yoruba Wikipedia, and recruit new volunteers. Other priority goals includes recruitment of new editors and mentorship of new editors.

Participants' priority goals align with some of our community's top priorities. One or more of our activities supports participants' goals. At least 88% of the 63 members of our community who completed the survey reported that our programs and activities supported their goals. This is based on the data collected from participants using a survey.

Based on the data collected from participants to respondents, they have four priority goals.

Priority goals	percent selected as priority
Increase the quality of contents on Yoruba Wikipedia	73%
Increase contributions to Yoruba Wikipedia	69%
Promote Yoruba Wikipedia	41.30%
Mentor new editors on Yoruba Wikipedia	23.80%
Recruit new volunteers	17.50%

Resources and donations

The Yoruba Wikimedians User Group activities were funded by funding support from the Wikimedia Foundation, did not receive donated resources, and are primarily volunteer-driven. A Twitter user, however, donated NGN 10,000 to support our community. That was the only non-WMF funding support I received. There is also in-kind support, such as a hall for events and training, provided by the University of Lagos and the International Centre for Yoruba Arts and Culture.

The most commonly donated resources were food and snacks provided by partners during events such as the launching of the partnership with the International Centre for the Yoruba Arts and Culture (although we provided lunch as well) and the University of Ibadan. The lack of donated space reports is likely because many of our partners do not have a space for training and events and possibly believe that we should have an office space with a training hall for the events.

Although the University of Lagos provided a space for the Yoruba Wikimedians User Group fan club to organize their weekly meetups, We only support the students with food and internet.