Final Report-2020

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

Part 1: The Project

Project Goals

• Increase the number of contributors and contributions of Turkish wikipedia from Turkey.

During the project period, the number of contributors and contributions to Turkish wikipedia increased significantly as can be seen from the statistics of the increase in the number of editors, active editors and the page numbers at tr.wiki.

• Create partnership opportunites with GLAM institutions and municipalities in Turkey.

Very fruitful partnership talks made with 15 nstitutions including Turkish Language Institution, Turksh Librarian Association, Istanbul Culture and Art Foundation, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. See the list at below picture (4).

• Increase communication between local editors living in the same cities and communication with the global community.

Because of the pandemic conditions, instead of in person local meetups, the editors brought together with other Turkish speaking editors -regardless of which city they live in- by regular online meetings held every two weeks. The editors were informed about the global wikimedia movement and global events through presentations and informal chats during the meetings could not be measured whether there was increased communication with the global community.

• 
  1-Number of editors
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  2-Number of active editors
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  3-Number of pages
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  4- Possible GLAM Partners contacted

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.

Targets

1. In the first column of the table below, please copy and paste the measures you selected to help you evaluate your project's success (see the Project Impact section of your proposal). Please use one row for each measure. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please include the number.
2. In the second column, describe your project's actual results. If you set a numeric target for the measure, please report numerically in this column. Otherwise, write a brief sentence summarizing your output or outcome for this measure.
3. In the third column, you have the option to provide further explanation as needed. You may also add additional explanation below this table.

Story

Looking back over your whole project, what did you achieve? Tell us the story of your achievements, your results, your outcomes. Focus on inspiring moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes or anything that highlights the outcomes of your project. Imagine that you are sharing with a friend about the achievements that matter most to you in your project.

• This should not be a list of what you did. You will be asked to provide that later in the Methods and Activities section.
• Consider your original goals as you write your project's story, but don't let them limit you. Your project may have important outcomes you weren't expecting. Please focus on the impact that you believe matters most.

Looking back, the roject Team is proud to see that they reintroduced the Wikipedia to Turkey as promised by the name of the project. It's not possible to claim that Wikipedia was reintroduced to the large section of the general public by this project but it was reintroduced to people from the world of academia, libraries and culture institutions; and encouraged them to consider the ways they could individually or institutionally benefit from and contribute to Wikipedia in new ways.

A summer full of uncertainties

The story started very slow. Our first goal was establishing a non-profit organisation and we were expecting to complete this step very quickly. However, there was a global pandemic in the world that restricted travels, changed the working ways of everyone and the pace of every work. During the summer, as we wait for the procedures get completed, we also tried to concentrate on other parts of the project such as contacting some professors to talk about implementing the Wikipedia Education Program in the fall term but there was too much uncertainty about courses and nobody was open to such suggestions. Libraries and museums were also closed and did not know what kind of activities they will be able to do during the year. Therefore the user group spent the summer focusing on other activities not included in the scope of this project such as organizing online edit-a-thons, Wiki Loves Earth contest, and article writing contests. Later, we saw that every work towards the same goal feeds the success of each other. Our partnership with several organisations for edit-a-thons helped increase our social media followers and brought some education partners, whereas press coverage on WLE attracted the attention of some potential GLAM partners.

Schools are opening!

Finally in September our group had completed all procedures for legally functioning of the non-profit established under Dijital Bilgi Derneği (Digital Knowledge Association), two members could make in-person visits to some GLAM institutions at Istanbul as well as giving half-day training to the personnel of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. In October most universities started online education; some university professors were bold enough to try something new in their classes and accepted our suggestion to teach wikipedia editing in their class. We were excited to see the project activities started slowly.

Adaptation to the pandemic

In November and December all activities went super fast. It seemed that people adapted to work under pandemic conditions, get used to continuously being online and video-conferencing with everyone. One after another we were invited to courses to help students on editing Wikipedia. Geography, Journalism, Environmental Engeineering, Psychology, Media Studies, International Relations are some of the fields the students contributed to Wikipedia. Each course also thought as new things, while students were learning about editing wiki projects, we learned looking at the projects from different perspectives: as a way of voluntarizm, a method of digital activism, a fact-checking tool, a citizen-journalism platform...

On the other hand, we were invited to talk about GLAM opportunities. Turkish Language Insttitions and Association of Turkish Libraries were particularly important. Our regular contact with other open culture institutions such as Creative Commons and OpenStreetMap volunteers helped us growing our network. As the activities of the user group increased and diversified, the attendance to the community meetings also increased. We made community meetings twice a month on Tuesdays nights. At the begining we were making the meetings with 8-10 persons, the avarage number of participants increased to 20. In meetings community did not only talk about Wikipedia but also other wiki projects and at the end we saw that a new wiki project (tr.wikivoyage) came out of incubator!

A hopeful end

The story of this project ended full of hope, since the community was ready to celebrate the birthday of Wikipedia and removal of the block at January 15 by talking about many achivements of the year in a virtual birthday party where all contributors and partners were invited.

Survey(s)

If you used surveys to evaluate the success of your project, please provide a link(s) in this section, then briefly summarize your survey results in your own words. Include three interesting outputs or outcomes that the survey revealed.

Other

Is there another way you would prefer to communicate the actual results of your project, as you understand them? You can do that here!

Methods and activities

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

Project resources

Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Even if you have linked to them elsewhere in this report, this section serves as a centralized archive for everything you created during your project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

• Notes of regular communiy meetings (in Turkish): Vikisalı 1, Vikisalı 2, Vikisalı 3, Vikisalı 4, Vikisalı 5, Vikisalı 6, Vikisalı 7, Vikisalı 8, Vikisalı 9, Vikisalı 10, Vikisalı 11, Vikisalı 12,
• Wikidata presentation in one of our community meetings (in Turkish)
• Interview with M. Erturac (instructor highlihtened at Wikipedia Education Bulletin) - in English, Interview with M. Erturac (instructor implemented Wikipedia Education Program in his courses) - in Turkish,

PROJECT PHOTO ALBUM

• Some Education Program Course pages at tr.wiki: CEV 6221, Bursa Uludag University, PSI 5117, Bursa Uludag University, PSI 6107, Bursa Uludag University

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.

What worked well

What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

• Three Different Models of Wikipedia Assignments

What didn’t work

What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

Other recommendations

If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

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.

• About Education Program

• • There are many more universities and departments that could beneficial to work with. Some education institutions were very interested in implementing Wikipedia but did not want to start it in this term because they were trying to adopt online education and was not feeling ready; some wanted to start in only one small class but they were interested to cover wiki-projects in a more systematic way in the classes later. The education program should continue in next term to include those institutions.
  • We saw that some universities are starting a program for freshmen students in which they focus on their general competencies. It might be good to work with such universities about making wiki projects a part of the program where students could develop their writing, translating skills, acquired the culture of contributing open culture.
  • Some universities put a course on "voluntarism" in their curriculum. We believe we must work on make editing wiki projects a part of such courses and show how it's a good way to start dijital voluntarism. Şasly, we worked with a high schoold group (HeforShe Team of Bahcesehir College, Istanbul). This was a first experience for us in editing with such young group. We believe we should continue introduce wikipedia as a way of learing critical reading in high schools.

• About GLAM partnerships

Partnership talks grow like snowballing. When an institutions starts an initiative others are more willing to follow. Therefore it's important to keep talks, increase awareness on how contributing to open culture would be beneficial for those institutions and start realizing small project. There were many project ideas that was talked during the talk but not could turn into a concrete project until the end of December. Once concrete projects are produced, the GLAM institutions would understand the value of collaboration with Wikipedia projects better. One example is our talks with Pera Museum. We'd like to collaborate them in increasing the contenf of Turkish wikipedia in topics related to the temporary exhibitions of the museum. The museum will be getting permissions from the related artists for uploading their works on Wikipedia with appropriate licences and we are willing to make edit-a-thons with the help of the curator of the exhibitions and participation of some experts invited by the museum to ensure that the topic covered well in the museum.

Part 2: The Grant

Finances

Actual spending

Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Remaining funds

Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

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:

Documentation

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

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

Confirmation of project status

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

Please answer yes or no.

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

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!