Grants:Project/Rapid/Krishna Chaitanya Velaga/VIVA-VVIT Edit-a-thon/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2017-18 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/Krishna Chaitanya Velaga/VIVA-VVIT Edit-a-thon.
You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

About

This edit-a-thon was primarily conducted to recruit editors from the two educational institutions under Social Education Trust i.e. Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of Technology and VIVA (The School), located in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India. It served as the boot camp to form the VVIT WikiConnect which is in incubation. The edit-a-thon has been conducted for Telugu and English Wikipedias along with introduction to Wikimedia Commons. The edit-a-thon was conducted in two phases i.e. on 23 August 2017 and 1 September 2017. The session(s) were mentored me (Krishna Chaitanya Velaga), Suyash Dwivedi, Rahamanuddin and Pavan Santosh.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

Yes, the project did meet its goals, detailed comparison between the target and achieved outcomes is explained in the following sections. Yes, I'm happy with the way the project progressed.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Source(s):

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
50 articles	261 articles	Though I initially planned to stress the participants on creating articles, I later realized that improving articles makes the participants more comfortable at initial stages. As I encouraged them to edit articles, more numbers of articles have been improved.
1000 edits	1236 edits	On an average if we consider 10 edits per articles, for 50 articles, the average edit count is to 500 edits, but we've achieved around 1200 edits.
60 editors	80 editors	The students were more enthusiastic to know that Wikipedia can be edited. So this made easy for us to pitch them in.
120 images	49 images	Though I planned to make them upload photographs by informing them prior to bring some photographs from their individual collections, the communication lapse between the organizers and participants failed to achieve this target. However, they were trained to upload media to Commons, both as well as from PC and Flickr.

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

What worked well?

One of the major learning is interaction with the student communities, and knowing their perspectives regarding Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement.

The both the sessions of English and Telugu during the both the phases went well.
One of the major success was that I made the students to update the articles by referring to various news websites. Initially the participants of en Wikipedia Training were not sure about what to edit. So I suggested them to go to a news website, as they post a lot of updates regarding the latest happenings, so the same may used to update Wikipedia and at the same time as a citation. This helped us to improve a lot of articles.
Formation of a WikiClub in the college, VVIT WikiConnect, went well. We're having meets in the college regularly.
With the help of this learning pattern, I took care that the participants created their accounts on prior hand, so account related issue went hassle-free.

What did not work so well?

During a session at English Wikipedia, one of the participant's article was nominated for deletion. Unaware of the guidelines, on request of the participant, a co-participant who is working on the same Public IP, removed the deletion tag. This led the en Wikipedia CheckUsers to consider it as a Sock-puppetry case, and the Public was blocked for 24 hrs. This prevented all other participants from editing, but with the help IRC node for help of English Wikipedians (#wikipedia-en-help^connect), we were able to undo the block.
The Outreach and Events Dashboard is a very useful tool, but it'll be good if it can integrated to track contributions across multiple Wikipedias and other projects as well. I know that there is a configuration to set to track across Wikis, but it is quite complicated and also it doesn't function well. That is the reason why I had to create two different programs for English and Telugu sessions, as one can see in the earlier sections.

What would you do differently next time?

With this experience, I would like to plan better and improve the participant experience by making the sessions more interactive.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

S.No	Type	Details	Amount
1	Swag	Customs duty paid for Swag shipment from WMF	₹1,632.47
2	Logistics	Poster, Certificates, Gift vouchers etc.	₹3,810
3	Travel	Travel expenses of resource persons and organizer	₹26,202.65
4	Accommodation	Accommodation for resource persons	₹11,322
5	Food	Food expenses of resources persons and organizer	₹3,096
6	Misc	Unaccounted expenses (no bills available)	₹1,200
Total expenditure			₹47,263.12

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of 10,698.88 INR were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:Project/Rapid/Krishna Chaitanya Velaga/OpenCon 2018 New Delhi.

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of 32,000 INR were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:Project/Rapid/Krishna Chaitanya Velaga/VVIT Edit-a-thon 2017 Part 2.

The funds remaining from this grant in the amount of 7,125 INR were deducted from another grant payment for Grants:Project/Rapid/Krishna Chaitanya Velaga/Portable WiFi Hotspot.

S.No	Details	Amount
1	Approved grant	₹97,500
2	Amount received from WMF	₹97,087.00
3	Total expenditure	₹47,263.12
4	Remainder funds	₹49,823.88

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

Here are a few suggestions from my experience

It is better to integrate the Public IP ban lift facility to the Outreach and Events Dashboard to create accounts.
It'll good if WMF conducts some training events exclusively to train the various outreach activity coordinators of specific communities about latest tools, analytics etc. and also improve the quality of training given by us (the trainers).

I have collected inputs from a few participants regarding their views for Wikipedia, they are as follows

Wikipedia, as an organization holds integrity and stands as a platform for knowledge sharers. As a non-profit, Wikipedia gives scope for volunteers to share knowledge, and I consider it as the most unbiased platform to share knowledge.
—User:Bhavana Tadiboina

I prefer to Wikipedia's read experience to be more attractive with developments to the visual aspects of MediaWiki.
—User:Sai Sumanth Javvaji

It would be good if some kind of inline script or bot is developed to track user inputs on real-time basis. For example, it must detect the words or sentence that may violate the NPOV, not grammatically correct. This would be something like this platform.
—User:Greeshma sai

Gallery

User:AshLin addressing a session remotely
Organizers at work
Felicitation of Pavan Santosh
Felicitation of Rahmanuddin
Felicitation of Suyash Dwivedi
VIVA-VVIT Edit a thon, Group photo of organizer and resource persons with Heads from Social Education Trust
Lead coordinator Krishna Chaitanya Velaga

Lead coordinator Krishna Chaitanya Velaga
Group Photograph
Participants overview
Suyash Dwivedi during a session on Commons
Certificate presentation
Certificate presentation
Certificate presentation
Certificate presentation