This project is funded by a Project Grant

Report under review

This Project Grant report has been submitted by the grantee, and is currently being reviewed by WMF staff. You may add comments, responses, or questions to this report's discussion page.

To read the approved grant submission for this project, please visit Grants:Project/CEE Spring User Group/CEE Spring 2020.

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Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the grantee's project.

Part 1: The Project

Summary

In a few short sentences, give the main highlights of what happened with your project. Please include a few key outcomes or learnings from your project in bullet points, for readers who may not make it all the way through your report.

CEE Spring 2020 was conducted between March 21st and May 31st of 2020 - the main focus was on writing articles about the countries and regions of CEE, which took place in 27 languages, writing about 30 countries or regions.
- Maltese took part for the first time
- Previous recent participants Republika Srpska and Georgia did not participate this year
Like last year, we (and in this case especially User:Spiritia) created a side challenge for articles about notable women in the CEE region, that helped created 286 articles in mostly CEE languages.
For the first time this year, we supported an experimental activity that started after the main contest on June 1st called #femWikiRAINBOW #checkInEditON, which aims to close gender and diversity gaps through skillsharing and the gathering of sources in order to be able to write articles that address these gaps, as well as experiment with methods of feminist-queer event organizing
During the contest, every week was dedicated to 2-4 other countries/regions and 1 broad topic (i.e. culture, food, etc.). Contrary to previous years, the social media engagement on an international level was severely limited due to other commitments of the international team. Interestingly enough, this had no effect on the results, making it questionable how effective this was in the first place. Of course, long term effects of this social media absence might not be as beneficial.

Project Goals

Please copy and paste the project goals from your proposal page. Under each goal, write at least three sentences about how you met that goal over the course of the project. Alternatively, if your goals changed, you may describe the change, list your new goals and explain how you met them, instead.

Plan vs. Reality

These goals have been set based on expectations based on quantitative data analysis from the international organising team and last year's results and will be used as a measure of success. An important aspect in 2020 was the global pandemic that started right as CEE Spring started, which probably helped a lot with the larger number of participants. We do not expect this to repeat in 2021 because circumstances will have hopefully changed by then.

Numbers based mainly on Wikimedia CEE Spring 2020/Statistics/Authors list

Total number of participants from CEE: 450 648 (44% over goal)
Total number of female participants from CEE: 20% (90) 65 (28% under goal)
- As a side note (as every year), it is still difficult to discern the female participants because it requires users to change the default setting
Total number of participants worldwide: 550 ~669 (many CEE Women users are also CEE users)
Total number of female participants worldwide: 20% (110) same result as above
40% of all newly created and significantly edited biographies are about women
- 2033 articles about women - which is most likely significantly more than 40% (since it makes up about 17% of all articles)
At least 20 new articles on topics of every CEE community participating
- Achieved by adding international prizes for every editor who manages to write articles on all CEE communities (see Hall of Fame).
- Achieved for all participating and non-participating communities - lowest number was for Sorbia with 101 articles with the language/culture as a topic. (Source)

Have the nice to have goals been achieved?

These goals have been set based on qualitative estimations by the international organising team.

10% of the participants in all countries are new users
- 100 new users, 17% of all users - less than last year, but still shows that some languages can still reach new users fairly easily

Strategic

Closing the content gender gap (correlates with the quantitative goal about biographies about women)
Adding more content on minority groups in the CEE region and expanding the list of topics in order to diversify the content created
Further development of the regional partnership Wikimedia Central and Eastern Europe
- As mentioned above, adding Maltese was an interesting and enlightening move, since it is a very small language Wikipedia with some very active volunteers that made for an exciting exchange.

Qualitative

Results

Unused metrics

See Grants:Evaluation/Program_resources/Writing_competitions#Metrics Metrics from the Program resources.

We would compute these global metrics but will not define goals for them

% increase in contribution rate per participating user as compared to user's contribution rate outside the competition timeframe
# of participants editing X months after the event:
# of participants who are active editors (5 edits/month) X months after an event:

Project Impact

Important: The Wikimedia Foundation is no longer collecting Global Metrics for Project Grants. We are currently updating our pages to remove legacy references, but please ignore any that you encounter until we finish.

The project impact can be viewed in the project goals section and on Wikimedia CEE Spring 2020/Statistics. Because of extraordinary circumstances, a slight increate in participants resulted in a large increase in articles, with a total of 15366 new articles and 733 expanded articles. Having a reliable setup with experienced local organisers definitely helped make this process as smooth as possible, despite the circumstances.

Methods and activities

Please provide a list of the main methods and activities through which you completed your project.

The setup is similar to last year - every participating language/country/region has a local organiser who makes sure that the tasks were completed on time.
The timeline for the project was defined to illustrate the different stages of the project. Every week of the contest was reserved for 2-4 participants to highlight their treasure trove of articles and focus on interesting aspects of their cultures.
Similar to last year, the statistics helped participants judge how well or how badly they were doing or which participating community wasn't doing that well in order to write more articles about the community in question.
In order to work towards specific goals we set for this year, we created a few side challenges mentioned above to help out with those metrics.
Expanding into more diverse areas as happened in femWikiRainbow also helps attract new organisers that want to participate, but who maybe want to focus on specific topics that aren't covered well in the classic project

Project resources

All resources on stats in detail, participants, results, and organisational information can be found at Wikimedia CEE Spring 2020.

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

Acknowledging our differences

CEE region is all about the differences: in both our languages, writing systems, demographics, religious and historical background, as well in our local Wikip/media performance and community specifics. In the region we have both language versions with more than a million articles (Russian with 1.4 M and Polish with 1.2 M) and versions with less than 10 thousands articles, like Maltese, Crimean Tatar and Erzya Wikipedia. The differences in the size of the local encyclopedia and the internal dynamics of the respective wiki community determine to a great extent the differences in the localization and the stricter or looser implementation of the CEE Spring contest rules. Sharing knowledge across Wikipedias also helps motivate people in smaller communities.

Outside influences

The level of participation in each language is also massively influenced by external events, especially during a timeframe where most people in Europe were told to stay at home. This had an enormous effect on the output of the contest and is definitely not something we would expect again next year.

For example, Armenia did not contribute a lot in 2018 due to the 2018 Armenian revolution, but was back even stronger in 2019 than before. Turkey has the issue of Wikipedia being blocked, although the recent ruling by the Supreme Court of Turkey affected the 2020 version of CEE Spring positively. Some communities have expressed that the contest is too long, so, for example, Macedonian community run CEE Spring only for a month.

What does the international team need to do?

Hosting a blog turned out to be a massive time sink with no real impact. Instead we moved the posts to Facebook, which might also have run it's course as the central platform to distribute news. For 2021 we aim to also communicate via other platforms to promote the weekly focus (as mentioned in the timeline above).

Next steps and opportunities

Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.

See you at Wikimedia CEE Spring 2021!

Part 2: The Grant

Finances

Actual spending

Prizes on local level
	Local usergroup	Amount in EUR	in USD	Transfer/Western Union charge/ conversion fees in EUR	in USD	Total EUR	in USD
Reimbursements	Bulgarian Wikipedia Community	392.19	475.39	–	–	392.19	475.39
	Wikimedia Russia	395.00	478.80	31.67	38.39	426.67	517.18
	Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group	330.67	400.82	9.80	11,88	340.47	412.70
	Wikimedia Community of Tatar language User Group	400.00	484.86	3.90	4.73	403.90	489.58
	Wikimedia Community User Group Malta	135.36	151.95	–	–	135.36	151.95
	Wikimedia Community User Group Greece	395.08	478.89	–	–	395.08	478,89
	Azerbaijani Wikimedians User Group	431.16	522.63	3.90	4.73	435.06	527.35
	Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey	386.92	469.00	31.67	38.42	418.59	507,39
	Wikimedians of Slovakia	270.00	327.28	–	–	270.00	327.28
	Wikimedians of Erzya language User Group	400.00	484.86	1.99	2.41	401.99	487.27
	Esperanto and Free Knowledge	204.00	247.28	–	–	204.00	247.28
Prizes bought by Wikimedia Austria	Wikimedians of Bashkortostan User Group	410.04	497.03	–	–	410.04	497.03
	Wikipedians of Slovenia User Group	136.67	165.66	–	–	136.67	165.66
	Wikimedia Community User Group Belarus	404.99	490.90	–	–	404.99	490.90
	Wikimedians of Latvia User Group	284.20	344.49	–	–	284.20	344.49
Prizes on international level
"CEE-Spring Hall of Fame" package postal rates		–	–	–	–	149.25	180.91
Wikimedia CEE Spring 2020/femWikiRAINBOW		–	–	–	–	112.90	136.85
other
WMAT staff / overhead		–	–	–	–	500	556.30
Total expenditures		4976.28	6019.84	82.93	100.56	5,821.36	6994.40

notes:

For the conversion between EUR and USD we used www.oanda.com/lang/de/currency/converter/ with the conversion rates of 2021-01-21. If the purchases were paid for in other currencies than Euro the respective dates of the original purchases apply.

Remaining funds

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

Yes, there are unspent funds, we can either wire them back or it can be deducted from the next installment of either the next CEE Spring grant or the APG of Wikimedia Austria.

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadminwikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

Yes

Confirmation of project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Please answer yes or no.

Yes

Is your project completed?

Yes

Please answer yes or no.

Yes

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being a grantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the Project Grant experience? Please share it here!

We are slowly getting to the point where more affiliates in CEE are financing their own local contest via their own budgets, which will probably further lower the budget asked for in the coming years. Other than that, we will post here the same thing we wrote last year, in the hope that something might change for next year: It would be great to have a customised approach for recurring projects instead of having to copy and paste most of the text and changing only certain sections. The same should be the case for the application itself. We know this formula works, so why have us jump through all the hoops every year?.

We appreciate everything the grants team is doing - we know how challenging this year has been for everyone and wish everyone reading this all the best for the future!

Expense	Approved amount	Actual funds spent	Difference