Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Grants:Simple/Applications/Wikimedia Chile/2020

< Grants:Simple | Applications
Application or grant stage: grant in progress
Applicant or grantee: Wikimedia Chile
Amount requested: CL$ 70.000.000 (US$ 96,000)
Amount granted: 90,000 USD
Funding period: 1 January-31 December 2020
Midpoint report due: 15 July 2020
Final report due: 31 January 2021

Application

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Background

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Annual Plan

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Budget Plan

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Staffing Plan

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Strategic plan

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Introduction

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Wikimedia Chile is a private law corporation, non-profit, with legal personality and legally constituted in the Chilean territory since 2011. It is the Chilean chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Currently, Wikimedia Chile defines itself as a community of active Wikimedia volunteers, led by a committed and experienced board and a professional team; they seeks to accomplish the main objective of our organization: support local communities throughout the country, who are interested in creating free and collaborative knowledge using the Wikimedia projects and their philosophy.

In order to do so, Wikimedia Chile has proposed a 3 axis work plan: Community (Comunidad), Free and collaborative knowledge (Conocimiento libre y colaborativo), and Content and local perspectives (Contenido y perspectivas locales). These 3 axis allow us to guide and determinate our objectives, projects and activities, as it has been determined in our Strategic Plan 2019-2022.

These 3 axis they will also guide our work during 2020, as it is propose below.

Programs

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Comunidad (Community)

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    2nd edition of WikiGap Santiago
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    Edition day in the United Nations' ECLAC headquarters
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    3rd Wikicafé 2019

For Wikimedia Chile, it is important to promote the work of new or traditional communities that use and participate in Wikimedia projects. For this, our Outreach work has been fundamental, organizing open activities where we promote the use of our projects towards new editors (through editathons, talks, workshops, activities in universities, etc.), as we engage and promote the transfer of skills between our historical community and members, and new users.

  • Objectives: One of our goals for 2020, which is expressed through this program, is to focus on supporting the creation of new communities, virtually or face-to-face, using Wikimedia projects and its philosophy.
  • How will we do it?: We will not only develop activities for training new users, but we will share and disseminate the global work of Wikimedia with more people, to show how our movement promotes collaborative and citizen work and how this can create and empower communities.
  • How will we measure it?: We will establish 2 indicators for this program: a) The number of new participants in Wikimedia Chile activities, and b) the number of initiatives proposed and/or led by members of the Wikimedia community, whether they are new or historical.

What we will be working on during 2020?

External community engagement

This program sums up the different initiatives that Wikimedia Chile carries out in order to spread the Wikimedia philosophy in our territory, beyond the limits of our historical community of Wikimedians. This includes: a) all actions that seek to train new users for Wikimedia projects; b) public activities that seek to approach the principles of the Wikimedia movement to the general public, in order to expand our "community".

The projects that will help us develop this program are:

  • Outreach: It is about continuing to promote all the massive activities that we do as Wikimedia Chile, where we not only create content but also form new Wikimedia users. We will seek to be systematic (proposing a regularity of activities throughout the year) and diverse regarding the themes we will be working on, to motivate the participation of users and new editors with different interests, always emphasizing the subjects that are a priority for both the Wikimedia movement and for our chapter.
  • Dissemination of the Wikimedia culture on the local stage: With this project we refer to all the activities that allow us to spread the principles of the Wikimedia movement, as well as the work we do through our chapter, beyond the limits of our organization. We will promote our presence in seminars, open talks, expert panels and media, in order to spread the Wiki philosophy in our local context.

Internal community engagement

This program seeks to maintain and even strengthen our ties with the historical community of Wikimedia Chile, the one that has supported us from the beginning. To achieve the objectives of this program, we propose the following projects and their subsequent activities:

  • WikiCafé: we will develop a new cycle of Wikicafé activities, which we have already implemented in 2019. This year, we will increase the number of meetings (one monthly, between March and December), as well as expand the topics to be discussed and the number of guests and participants. We will seek to motivate more members of our historical community to participate, and we will propose new themes and projects to discuss together, in order to give them the space to continue contributing to our local chapter.

See Metrics for this program.

Conocimiento libre y colaborativo (Free and collaborative knowledge)

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    Workshop with high school and primary teachers.
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    Participating image in "Revelando sitios" contest.
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    Editathon about modern architecture in ECLAC.

The Free Knowledge program seeks, primarily, that more users have free access, through different Wikimedia projects, to all kinds of content that are relevant to Chilean society. This requires to work face to face with public and private institutions, who normally own those contents, which in many cases still remains in museum halls or physical archives that very few users can visit.

  • Objectives: In 2020, we will work with these institutions, in order to motivate them to “liberate” the relevant content they own (such as documents, images and information in general), so these could be available to users throughout Chile and the world.
  • How will we do it?: To develop this program, we have proposed two working mechanisms: first, we will look for new institutions to work with (especially in the educational field, where we have more experience), in order to develop new projects and ways of collaboration. Then, we expect to motive the work with “specialized communities” (researchers, institutions, NGOs or professional associations), who have "technical" knowledge in different subjects, so that they could be a part of Wikimedia and its projects. For further information, please see the “Experts in Wikipedia” project.
  • How will we measure it?: We will establish 3 indicators for this program: a) the number of institutions with which we can work with during 2020; b) the number of members of those institutions that we can involve in our projects; c) the number of content items (articles, photos, uploaded documents) that we can create and / or improve during 2020.

What we will be working on during 2020?

Education Program

The Education Program was the main axis of our work in 2019. During the past year, we worked steadily with 8 institutions (including 2 primary schools), we reached more than 130 students, and we created and improved almost 100 Wikipedia articles. In addition, we worked with almost twenty school teachers, both face-to-face and virtually, through the implementation of the second version of our virtual training course for primary teachers.

In 2020, we want to continue developing this program. First, by increasing to 1 FTE the staff assigned to this area, and then through the execution of these 3 projects.

The projects that will help us realize this program are:

  • Wikimedia in the University: It is a project that we have been developing since 2017 and that sums up all our activities in higher education institutions, like universities and institutes. Here we consider: training sessions and edition workshops with students; dissemination talks for professors to discuss the potential uses of Wikipedia in the educational process; and the support we provide to professors who seek to incorporate Wikimedia principles into their courses. In 2020, we want to reach more universities, but also develop new activities in order to show both professors and university students how to use Wikimedia projects in the professional field.
  • Wikimedia in the classroom: this project was born in 2019, after the invitation we received from the University of Chile to participate in an intervention on digital citizenship and adolescent well-being in a semi-public school in Santiago. Because we did not have neither Internet access or computers at this school, our contribution focused on working with teachers and identifying their perceptions (good or bad) on Wikipedia, and then discussing their potentialities to develop concrete educational actions teachers could use in their contexts.
    This whole process (preparing these workshops, researching on the reality of teachers and teaching in the public system, and the good result of our intervention), motivated us to formalize this project as “Wikimedia in the classroom”; with this project, we want to reach more teachers and primary schools in Santiago and throughout the country.
  • “Wikipedia in the classroom” MOOC: This virtual course was originally born in 2018, with the name “Wikipuentes” and the support of Wikimedia Argentina. In 2019, the project was restructured in our Education area according to local reality and re-launched for its 2.0 version, with a new name. By 2020, we propose a new version of this course, as a virtual support for teachers who participate in the “Wikimedia in the classroom” project, and that want to learn more about it. The course will be focused on Wikimedia projects and their potential in the educational process; it will show examples of exercises that teachers can use with their students, with or without Internet, and it will also give participants the possibility of exchanging experiences with other teachers and members of the Wikimedia community.

Institutional Alliances

This program was born in 2019 from our concern to improve the quantity and quality of content related to Chile in Spanish Wikipedia, particularly regarding the work of certain public or political institutions. In a scenario of wide "misinformation" and "fake news" on the Internet, it seems relevant to continue promoting this project, including more "expert" knowledge and users to the Wikimedia projects, as they can contribute to improving relevant articles for our society.

The 2 activities that will give life to this project during 2020 are:

  • Partnership with cultural institutions: we will strengthen our work with cultural, educational and social institutions in Chile, in order to promote their participation in the different Wikimedia projects, especially in the production, "liberation" and circulation of new content. We will seek to approach different institutions and establish alliances that lead to concrete activities (dissemination, information or content creation) during this year.
  • Experts in Wikipedia: as we have done in 2019, in 2020 we will continue to seek that members of the different institutions with which we are involved to become active editors. For this, we will promote insertion, editing and training sessions with specialized teams, so that they could be trained in the use of our projects.

Wiki DDHH (Wiki Human Rights)

Wikimedia Chile has been part of the WikiDDHH project (which is coordinated by Wikimedia Argentina) since 2018, when we signed a collaboration agreement with the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago. This gave place to a series of collaborative activities, such as an editathon in June 2018; joint work with the OHCHR regional office; the launch of the photographic memory contest “Revelando Sitios” with the Museum of Memory and Human Rights; and other editathons with various human rights NGOs.

By 2020, our interest is to continue being a part of this project, in addition to create new actions on the subject. To do this, we propose the following projects and activities:

  • Design of activities to enhance the value of human rights: We will strengthen our alliances with institutions such as the OHCHR regional office, the National Institute of Human Rights and the NGO Amnesty Chile to carry out new initiatives together, such as editathons on human rights.
  • 2nd edition of “Revelando Sitios” contest with the support of the Museum of Memory and Human Rights and / or with more local and regional actors who want to join the initiative

See Metrics for this program.

Contenido y perspectivas locales (Content and local perspectives)

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    Photo tour in the National Heritage Day
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    Women's national football team
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    "Chile protests!" photo campaign

Content gaps and access to content creation are a topic of concern to the Wikimedia movement in general; the foundation itself and chapters around the glove have arranged resources and special projects to reduce some of these gaps, especially regarding the representation of women and LGTBQ communities on Wikipedia.

As Wikimedia Chile, this is a topic that concerns us and that we have already begun to address since 2018. We have work with historically underrepresented communities in our projects, and we have organized specific visibility activities, such as those that enhance the presence of women in arts, architecture, sport, science and technology.

  • Objectives: Continue working to reduce content gaps and access to content creation that persist in Wikimedia projects, emphasizing sexual and gender diversity, territory, and native languages and cultures.
  • How will we do it?: We want to establish ties with historically underrepresented actors and communities in Wikimedia projects. For this, we will develop the “Mind the Gaps” program, as well as the “Chile in images” project; both will be detailed later.
  • How will we measure it?: We will establish 3 indicators for this axis: a) the number of initiatives that we can develop; b) the number of actors and communities that we can involve; and c) the amount of content items (articles, photos, uploaded documents) that we can create and / or improve.

Mind the Gaps program

This program has 2 main objectives: a) reduce the barriers that prevent the so-called "minority communities" from accessing the knowledge within Wikimedia projects; b) promote that these communities participate in Wikimedia projects actively, contributing with their own content and perspectives.

Since 2019, this program has been very important to our chapter. In 2020, we want it to continue growing, through 3 main initiatives:

  • Gender and Diversity: as we have indicated previously, we want to motivate the incorporation of new users into the Wikimedia world, in particular those who are committed to represent "minority groups" based on their gender identity. We will maintain and strengthen certain key alliances in this area, such as the one we have with the Swedish Embassy in Chile for the realization of a third WikiGap, as well as working with new organizations related to the world of sexual and gender diversity in Chile, generating instances of content creation.
  • “Wiki climbs Chile”: this project was born in 2019 as a way to motivate the work between our chapter and communities and institutions throughout Chile. In 2020 we will develop this project once more; we propose to take our work to other regions of the country and concretizing new activities for the creation of decentralized content, as well as for the dissemination of the Wikimedia culture along the national territory.
  • Indigenous languages and cultures: this project seeks to solve a pending task of Wikimedia Chile: the identification of the missing content in Wikipedia about the indigenous cultures of our country. For this, we will work with institutions, communities and actors related to these cultures, in order to identify and complete the missing content, incorporating a local perspective.

Chile in images

This project promotes the creation of visual content for Wikimedia Commons, which represents the cultural and social life of Chile. Wikimedia Chile has been developing this project since 2015, mainly thanks to the work of our member Carlos Figueroa who has contributed with more than 3000 images to Commons; now, we want to motivate the Chilean community to also contribute to this project, through the following activities:

  • Cultural heritage: we will develop activities focused on the recognition and enhancement of the cultural and material heritage of Chile in Wikimedia projects; we will organize dissemination activities and / or creation activities, such as photographic wiki-safaris, editathons, photographic contests, among others.
  • “New looks on my city” contest: In order to update and complete the existing visual content about Chile in Wikimedia Commons, we propose a new photographic contest, whose objective will be the collection and update of photographs of different public places of social and historical relevance for Chile. We will privilege images referring to small communities and towns, in order to expand territorial contents in our projects.
  • Photo coverage: We will continue to develop our photographic coverage activities, whose contributions have been significant during the last two years. During 2020, we will participate in the main social events in the country, providing new high-quality images for Wikimedia Commons.

Bridges between Cultures (PeC)

This year, Wikimedia Chile will launch the 4th version of the contest Bridges between Cultures (Puentes entre Culturas - PeC). Like in its previous versions, the contest will take place in the month of November; during 2020, we hope to exceed the number of editors and articles created in 2019.

See Metrics for this program.

Grant Metrics Reporting

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Metrics, targets and results: grants metrics worksheet here.

Midpoint report

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This is a brief report on the grantee's progress during the midpoint reporting period: 1 January-30 June 2020

Context

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The past nine months have been difficult for Wikimedia Chile and our volunteers. The social revolt that began in October 2019 and continued till the first months of 2020 had a strong impact on our performance.

In late 2019, our chapter had to face multiple changes in its planification due to the rapidly changing situation in the country. The entire functioning of Santiago and most major cities was totally disrupted because of the protests and police repression. Schools and universities (one of our main partners) were suspended and cultural and social impact institutions changed their agendas to adapt to the new context. This meant that many of our activities and collaborations for 2019 were rescheduled or outright cancelled, and that our face-to-face and regional activities had to be postponed for the following year.

For 2020, our objective was ambitious yet very motivating: continue our annual plan, including those activities we could not perform in 2019. To do this, after the summer break in February, we incorporated a third member to our professional team, Carla Toro, who would take over the management of our online and offline communities. With her incorporation, plus the new role of our former General Coordinator as Executive Director, and the work of our Education Manager, we could reach more people and carry out more activities, particularly in projects such as Outreach, Inner community, and the “Mind the Gap” (Brechas) program.[1]

Although we started with various activities, including the visit of Katherine Maher as a speaker at the Congreso Futuro conference, 2020 proved to be even more challenging. Not only the social unrest continued in the first months of the year, but the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic changed once again our plans.

Strategy to face the COVID-19 context

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The decision made by the WMF to suspend all face-to-face activities due to the advance of COVID-19 in the world, was a new challenge to our annual plan and forced us to re-think (once again) how to restructure our agenda in order to reach our general and programmatic goals.

When this decision was taken, in early March, the COVID-19 epidemic was just beginning in Chile and the local impact of the health crisis was not yet measured.[2] Given the situation, our reaction was to elaborate a strategy to continue executing our program, through an internal analysis that responded to three criteria or approaches:

  • Evaluate the possibility of executing our different programs and projects in the new context.
  • Determine what would be our “voice” or “distinctive mark” as an organization during the crisis, once all other social and cultural organizations began to explore virtual participation.
  • Define what role we could play in this uncertain scenario, and how we could be a contribution or support for the communities that follow us and with whom we interact day by day.

The result of this organizational analysis was translated into an "Action plan to face the crisis":

  • Wikimedia Chile will maintain its 3 working areas: Community, Free Knowledge, and Local Content, and will continue developing activities to enhance them.
  • We will identify which programs and projects can be executed online and which ones should be reformulated; in the first case, we will maintain 2020 goals.
  • Critical projects will be identified within the annual plan, and we will analyze how to modify and adapt them to the context. If necessary, some of them may be postponed for this semester (or even cancelled).
  • We must take advantage of the online context in which we are to promote new methods of communication, execute new activities and projects (even if they were not part of our original plan), and reach new communities.
  • We will be flexible, being aware that we are facing an unstable context; we will review this "Action plan" regularly, to adapt and reschedule our measures if necessary.
  • We will overcome comfort: we will not use adversity as an excuse to not promote our work or not taking new challenges.
  • Distribute our agenda: we do not have to execute everything right now. We can identify the significant activities[3] that should ideally be carried out in person, and schedule them for the last quarter of the year when we expect things will get back to normal.
  • We will document our experiences, especially those of the projects or activities that arise from the crisis, leaving a register of their objectives, difficulties, learning processes and impact.
  • We will take care of the physical and mental health of our team. We will not expose ourselves unnecessarily, and we will try to distribute the workload, when necessary.

Program story

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Please link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements during the reporting period.

The following links show different stories that depict some of the achievements made in our programs and projects during this first semester of 2020.

Progress

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Please add text or a link to a page with details on your program progress. This should including reporting against each of the SMART objectives form your proposal.

Here we will review the three working areas of our strategic plan and the progress made until June 2020. We will also mention the path we followed in each area, as well as which projects we executed and how we did it (including some new projects that were not a part of our 2020 plan but that emerged because of the crisis); we will also show what results in we have obtained so far.


Community (Comunidad)

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    "Human Rights during crisis: the role of media and digital platforms"
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    "Women in Science" editathon in Chile
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    Katherine Maher in the University of Chile

The Community area includes projects and activities that seek to improve the relationship with our current Wikimedia editors, and with those who want to become one in the future. We think about our traditional or historical community, built by Chilean Wikimedians and members of Wikimedia Chile; the institutions and collaborators that had worked with us in the past; and everybody who is interested in joining our projects by editing or developing activities with us.

During the first semester of 2020, the objectives of this area have been: promote the creation of Wikimedia content through activities for the general public; continue spreading the principles of our movement, to reach new users and collaborators; and maintain and enhance contact with communities and people who are interested in free and collaborative knowledge.

Outreach activities project

This project brings together all the massive activities we promote to create or improve Wikimedia content, such as editathons, contests, or campaigns.

Before the pandemic and within the framework of the International Women's Day, we carried out the first Women in Science editathon in Chile. 19 female researchers from Santiago and Concepción participated, and 27 biographies were created. Due to the crisis, it was our only in-site activity. The Community project continues operating online, although we had prioritized editing contests and content donation campaigns, rather than editing activities involving multiple users working simultaneously. This decision was made because we didn't know at first how to use virtual and simultaneous conversation safely for all participants and avoid situations like zoombombing.

The decision to privilege editing contests and campaigns has meant that we already achieved (and exceeded) the goal proposed for this item during 2020 (269% success); however, this strategy has also meant having fewer participants (16% success). For the second semester, our objective is to increase the number of activities of the “Outreach project” (which has a 36% of achievement) and diversify them, developing editathons or other massive activities again.

Dissemination of the Wikimedia culture project

Katherine Maher's visit in January was very positive for our chapter, especially for the diffusion of the Wikimedia culture within our territory. The seminar on Human Rights and Independent Media that we organized with the University of Chile, where she was the main speaker, counted with more than 30 participants. In addition to that, various national media and online platforms covered the event.

The current context and the adoption of the virtual platforms had also been positive in this regard, and it has allowed us to double the number of diffusion activities we originally proposed (250% success). These initiatives have also led us to reach more audiences, including NGOs with whom we have even established new collaborations and projects.

At this point, we highlight two activities: Utopies, a webcast on society and technology that we stream every week in collaboration with researchers from the University of Chile, and which eight chapters have reached more than 360 visits in Youtube; and the participation of our Executive Director in two of the webinars of the Science Communication Center (Centro de Comunicación de las Ciencias) of the Universidad Autónoma, which count more than 240 visits on YouTube.

Although these numbers are very positive, we believe that it is essential to move towards a formal communication plan, which helps us to better disseminate our organizational work and activities. This initiative will be developed in the second semester of 2020.

WikiCafé Cycle 2020

 
Wikicafé Mayo

This cycle of conversations about free and collaborative culture (that supposed to take place in our office around a cup of coffee) was one of the first projects to be re-adapted to the current context, both in terms of format and content. In addition to making it online, it was decided that the topics of each meeting should be related to what is happening around us and its effects on our everyday life. Since March, the topics have been: scientific communication in times of crisis; cybersecurity and telecommuting; digital transformation of cultural institutions; and photojournalism during the mandatory quarantine.

Although participation is still relatively low for the virtual format (with an average of 13 simultaneous viewers per encounter), it has exceeded the expectations we had for the face-to-face "WikiCafé" (133% success). So far, our evaluation of the instance is positive, and we believe that it has great potential to create bonds between our historical or traditional community and other members of the civil society. During the second semester, our objective is to continue developing the meetings in the virtual format, and to improve their diffusion, to reach more audiences.

New projects

 
Sábados de Edición
 
Clubes de Edición

Community projects have been fundamental for our chapter in 2020. This is why such efforts to restructure and re-adapt them to this new context; this is also why we decided to assume new projects that were not part of our original plan, but that could help us to support and accompany our followers and collaborators in these uncertain times.

These new projects were:

  • Webinar #StayHomeEditingWikipedia (#MeQuedoEnCasaYEditoWikipedia): cycle of four online trainings sessions for new editors. Each session provided basic tools for content creation in the Wikimedia projects, in a context where new users cannot participate in or learn from traditional community training activities, such as editathons.
    In terms of its impact, the cycle was well received by its 16 participants; nine of them were new users, and seven of them had already participated in at least one Wikimedia Chile activity. Besides, two of the participants were from cities other than Santiago (Antofagasta and Frutillar), and two others were from Mexico.
    The scheme we created for this project was very useful, as it served us as an example to create a series of institutional training sessions, which we already applied as part of the “Experts in Wikipedia” project.
  • Editing on Saturday (Sábados de Edición): a cycle of small scale editathons on themes of local interest, where the historical community of Chilean editors could participate and gather with other wikimedians while listening a little conversation about the subjects they were editing about.
    The main impact of this project was content creation. During our six encounters, we edited more than 500 articles on Chilean culture and society, such as the national health system and Chilean hospitals, local history of epidemics and disasters, cultural heritage, television, and music. The decreasing participation in the last sessions led us to finish the editathon cycle in June, but with the intention of restarting the project in August, spacing the encounters and inviting editors and Wikipedia enthusiasts who are not necessarily part of our traditional community.
  • Editing clubs (Clubes de edición): Q&A sessions (that started twice a month, and then once a month), where new users could solve their practical editing doubts with our Community Manager. The project was born as a way to guide new editors in the use of Wikipedia and to support content creation; due to the number of participants during the whole cycle, it will be evaluated to better adapt to the needs of our followers.
  • Wikimedia communities facing the crisis meetings: a series of meetings with the regional Wikimedia community, where we shared experiences on how to face the crisis and how to carry out our virtual activities with other Iberocoop chapters and UG representatives.
    We held two meetings during this semester, were we counted with representatives from Wikimedia Argentina (co-organizers of the event), Wikimedistas de Bolivia, Wikimedistas de Ecuador, Wikimedia Colombia, Wikimedia Venezuela, Wikimedia México, Wikimedia España and from the UG Art Feminism and Whose Knowledge?. The third meeting will take place in August.

Free knowledge (Conocimiento libre)

The "Free knowledge" item sums the activities, projects and programs that Wikimedia Chile carries out to promote creation and content release by working with cultural and social institutions, such as universities, museums and other NGOs. It includes our Education Program and projects such as “Institutional Alliances”, “Experts in Wikipedia” and “Wiki Human Rights”.

During this semester, the Free Knowledge area was particularly affected by the pandemic. Although we connected with an important number of institutions (80% success), it has been very difficult to organize activities and engage with new editors (16% success). Moreover, it has been almost impossible to perform content creation activities (1% success), mostly because schools, universities and cultural institutions are still closed.

In the following sections, we will explain the strategies that we developed to execute these programs and projects and their current progress.

Education Program

The pandemic has had important consequences for the Chilean educational system. Since March 15th, at the very beginning of the school year, all institutions were closed, while teachers at all levels have had to implement online education, using digital tools but also traditional methods in the contexts where Internet access is still limited. This has meant that schools have had to reduce contents and activities to the minimum required by the ministry, while universities are facing students strikes that criticize the conditions in which online education is carried out.

As a chapter, we knew from the beginning that this situation would affect the continuity of the projects "Wikimedia in the University” and "Wikimedia in the Classroom”, both characterized by having practical face-to-face workshops and which are usually conceived as a complement to annual contents. Therefore, it became necessary to find another way to reach the general objectives of the Education program (beyond the expected KPIs), using the Wikimedia philosophy to create meaningful activities for teachers.

Knowing that the workload that teachers face is strenuous even in a normal year, we were aware that none of our proposals could translate in an extra “weight” for them. On the contrary, the challenge was to find out how to be useful to them in this adverse context, and how to create supporting spaces where they could socialize their concerns, reflect about distance education challenges, and share strategies to continue the educational process during the crisis.

Finally, the strategy we used for the different projects of this program was:

  • “Wikimedia in the Classroom” project: It was decided to postpone this project, understanding that school communities already had enough work prioritizing mandatory contents and adapting them to their digital possibilities. If health conditions do not improve before October,[6] this project will be officially suspended during 2020.
  • “Wikimedia in the University” project: This project was rapidly transformed to the virtual format that many universities have adopted. In this context, our priority was to reassure this project by promoting encounters with students and talks on how Wikipedia works rather than focusing on content creation activities.[7] Here we highlight the experience of the online talk about “Information and big data during the crisis” where our program manager participated. This talk was recorded and then virtually shared with the 250 students registered in the courses “Workshop on digital projects for journalists” and “Digital tools and design” of the Journalism School of the University of Chile. We also would like to highlight the talk-workshop that our team offered to the community of the Metropolitan Technological University, within the framework of the campaign #lib1ref, which had 35 simultaneous participants.
 
Education webinars
  • Education webinars: The necessity to connect with the community of teachers and professors beyond the classroom led us to create a series of webinars on how to teach during the crisis. The first cycle, composed by four sessions, was dedicated to the challenges of mandatory virtuality, and it counted with 56 teachers and professionals from the educational field. The second cycle, which presented different experiences on how professors and schools can enhance the pedagogical bond during the social distance, had 70 unique participants; we also received many applications from Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. The four sessions of this second cycle are on our YouTube channel and it has reached more than 350 visits to the date.
    This instance was highly appreciated by the participants, as they expressed on the satisfaction survey. They also manifested their interest in learning more about Wikimedia projects and using it in the classroom. Some teachers continued participating in our activities during the semester, such as WikiCafés or the Edition cycle.

During the second semester, the Education program will be dedicated to the adaptation and development of the MOOC "Wikipedia in the classroom", which will incorporate some of the contents we presented in our webinars.

Institutional alliances program

This program, which sums all our efforts to work with local institutions, has had a rough development during 2020. This can be attributed to the uncertainty that the pandemic has brought to institutions, as well as to the difficulties that many of them have had to face while incorporating to the virtual format. Again, as in our other programs and projects, the goals we achieved are mainly related to the development of dissemination activities or training sessions for future editors -something that works relatively well online. On the other hand, we have been unable to achieve goals related to create or release Wikimedia content.

So far, we have developed specific projects with four institutions (80% success): three dissemination projects (talks and a weekly webcast), and only one training-editing project.

The specific development of each project within this program will be detailed below, as well as the activities we have carried out in this period.

  • “Cultural institutions” projects: This project brings together all the actions WMCL promotes within institutions that hold relevant cultural content, either for their release or to create or improve related Wikipedia articles.
    During this year, we have contacted seven institutions in the area, most of them museums (78% success); we held meetings with them to propose concrete projects, but none of these has been performed yet. As we indicated above, we believe that this is mainly due to the context in which we are, where the institutions have faced uncertainty and where many of them have had to reformulate their agendas and reduce resources and working hours, leaving little space for new initiatives.
  • “Experts in Wikipedia”: This project followed an important development due to the collaboration WMCL established with the local team of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), which started in 2019. This year we have completed two different activities with them: an editathon about the history of the Regional Conference on Women, where we had eight gender expert participants, and a virtual training course on how to use Wikipedia to improve specialized articles; in this last activity, we had nine participants from the offices in Santiago, Mexico City, Port of Spain and Brasilia. With those two interventions, we already completed our participation goal in this item (113% success).
    For the second semester, we will start an institutional collaboration with Sernatur (the National Office of Tourism). In this case, we will perform a training course for local agents on the Biobío Region, on how to use Wikipedia to enhance their local history and natural heritage.
  • “Wiki Human Rights”: This project was born in 2019, after the invitation of WMAR to participate in a content creation pilot with the regional office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The social outbreak in October forced us to suspend these activities until January 2020. However, due to the important among of work that Human Rights institutions had during the months that followed the social outbreak, it was very difficult to commit them to relaunch this project, something that later became impossible with the pandemic. Our current objective is to reschedule this project until the last quarter of the year and to take advantage of the context of the International Human Rights Day to arrange some initiatives to create content in this topic.
    In the same line, we reorganized the second version of the Revealing Sites (Revelando Sitios) photo contest, organized with the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, which was scheduled for September 2020. Due to the mandatory quarantine that persists in most of Chile till this day, we think that we need to to reformulate this activity and promote instances of content creation in a virtual format (as using the images from the first version of the contest to improve Wikipedia articles) instead of motivating people to go outside to take pictures of memory sites.

Local content (Contenido y perspectivas locales)

The Local Content area, which sums all actions we develop to promote the underrepresented content on Wikipedia, has had an uneven development during this first semester.

While several goals have been completed within the “Mind the Gap” (Brechas) program, especially those related to the Gender and Diversities project and the Regionalization project (Wiki trepa por Chile), there are other projects whose execution this year will be very difficult; such is the case of the photographic coverage of massive activities, which will not be executed this year.

In general, however, we have completed the number of activities that we proposed for this axis (113% success). We had a high performance regarding the number of general participants (89% success) and the amount of Wikimedia content created or edited (256% success).

Now we will detail the specific development of each program and project within this axis.

“Mind the gap” (Brechas) program:

This program sums all the activities and alliances we held to identify and promote underrepresent content on the Spanish Wikipedia. We have developed three projects within this program:

  • Gender perspective and diversities: during 2020 we have developed eight activities within this project (160% success): two editathons before the pandemic; an editing contest and a photographic campaign, both within the framework of the 8M; two editing workshops, and two open talks on how Wikimedia fights the gender gaps on the Internet.
    These activities included a total of 86 participants (106% success), and the creation or improvement of 155 content items for the Wikimedia projects. We would like to highlight the “What would become of us without them” contest (¿Qué sería de nosotras sin ellas?) contest, that allow us to create seven biographies (and to improve other six) on women who had a relevant role in the female emancipation during the 20th century, and that did not exist in any Wikipedia until now.
  • Regionalization project (Wiki trepa por Chile): this is an important project for us, especially because we could not perform it properly in 2019. Unfortunately, this semester we only could develop two face-to-face regional activities before the pandemic started. As we knew that we were not going to be able to travel during 2020, we tried to promote virtual activities with regional institutions we already knew, such as Wikimedia dissemination webinars, online training courses on how to use Wikimedia projects, or regional content campaigns or contests. Thanks to this strategy, we had almost fulfilled all our project goals, such as the number of activities (100% success), numbers of participants (90% success), and content creation (80%).
    We would like to highlight that the crisis has had a very positive impact on this particular project, as it has made us rethink how to maximize our efforts and resources to create sustainable regional content, by engaging local editors and institutions, and by developing virtual activities. The example of a local Wikipedia editor we met in March during a workshop in La Serena, who has participated in other three of our activities since then, showed us that her profile could be very positive for us and that we should count on her (and some other regional editors with similar enthusiasm) in the development and/or diffusion of local activities, even when we are not able to be there physically.
 
Indigenous languages
  • Indigenous languages and cultures: Unlike the Regionalization project, WMCL doesn’t have significant contacts with organizations or communities of indigenous language speakers to reach to perform these activities. The inability to travel to the regions where these communities are located made the project even more difficult, especially in terms of content creation, something that requires the participation of a group of interested people. However, and taking advantage of the possibilities that the virtual format has brought, we managed to hold a webinar about “Indigenous cultures and languages on the Internet”, which counted with the experience of the Mapuche organization Mapu Trafü, and the Wikipedia in Aymara. In this activity, we reached 21 participants (84% success) and the video has 100 visits on Youtube.
    For the second semester, in order to achieve the other objectives of this project our strategy will be to develop new virtual meetings on the subject; this will allow us to connect with organizations and communities regardless of their geographical location, and establish meaningful bonds that can lead to other activities, such as content creation initiatives.

“Chile in images” project:

This project has had to be reformulated almost entirely in these six months, assuming from the beginning of the crisis that some of its activities were not going to be carried out, at least until the last quarter of the year. Although there is no clarity on whether massive events will eventually take place in Chile this year, as a chapter we believe that the wisest thing is to not encourage our volunteers and collaborators to expose themselves by taking images for this project. Therefore, the decision was to cancel coverage of events of massive interest (an activity that WMCL has been carrying out since 2015), hoping to come back in 2021 with the corresponding safeguards, and only if health conditions allow it.

On the other hand, we had to modify the photographic contest we proposed for this year,[8] for a photographic initiative people could carry out during quarantine without exposing their health and safety. To do so, on April 18 we launched the contest “6 months that changed Chile” (Los 6 meses que cambiaron Chile), which invited users to upload images about the political and social events that have occurred in Chile since October 2019, as a way to highlight past photographic material. The contest had 33 participants (66% success) and collected 365 photos (122% success). Part of the objectives of this activity was to use at least 30 images of the contest to improve Wikipedia articles, an activity that we will perform during the second semester, as part of our community editing meetings.

Finally, the cultural heritage activity that we had proposed as part of this project was performed as an edition encounter during the Editing on Saturday cycle, where we created and improved 106 articles on Chilean cultural heritage (700% success) and where seven editors participated (35% success).

Institutional development

During this semester, Wikimedia Chile has continued growing as a professional organization. In March, our General Coordinator Patricia Díaz Rubio assumed as our first Executive Director; since then, she has been in direct contact with the WMF staff and with different local institutions as our main representative and spokesperson.

On that same month, we incorporated Carla Toro, a long-time Wikipedian, as our Community Manager (0.5 FTE), in charge of connecting with our online and offline communities. During the crisis, her role suffered from some changes, to cope with this new situation, something that Carla assumed with flexibility and commitment. Since then, she has also assumed a more significant role during our virtual activities, leading some workshops and training sessions, as well as developing new activities in the Community area, such as Editing Clubs or Editing on Saturday encounters.

As the crisis forced us to assume virtually as the new mechanism to connect with our publics, we also need better use of the digital media to communicate our activities. During the second semester, we will engage a new contractor as a Communication Manager (0.5 FTE) during the period July-December 2020; this person will help us with our digital communications, to diffuse what we do and how we do it and to connect with more people.

Regarding our legal commitments with our staff, something we established in our annual plan, in January 2020 we offered work contracts for our two full-time workers (Executive Director and Education Manager). We expect to do the same next year with our Community Manager if she keeps working with us by then.

Spending

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Please report your organization's total spending during the reporting period, or link to a financial document showing your total spending.

CLP 28.886.981 (~ 35,725 USD)
Converted to Chilean pesos using conversion rate for 2020-07-01, at 1 USD = 808,60 CLP.

Final report

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This is the final report for your grant, describing your outcomes from the period 1 January-15 December 2020.

General context

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What we did during 2020: Our journey to adapt to a changing scenario

2020 proved to be one of the most challenging years for Wikimedia Chile since its creation, as well as one of the most productive. Like all Wikimedia chapters and UG, we assume the virtual work and the impossibility of carrying out face-to-face activities with resentment but with the conviction that, in spite of the circumstances, we had to accomplish with our original program.

To this end, we reacted quickly by drawing up a COVID contingency "plan" very early in the crisis, where we proposed different alternatives and evaluated our different projects, in order to determine which would be the priorities for our chapter, which we could modify in order to adapt to the virtual format, and which we should suspend until further notice. This plan was reviewed and updated at three key times during the year: at the end of the first semester, as part of the writing of our midpoint report; in September 2020, before starting the last quarter of the year, and in December 2020, as an evaluation of our annual plan.

The strategic decision to face 2020 using a crisis management plan had a positive impact on our work as a chapter; first, it allowed us to restructure our work in an orderly manner, prioritizing project feasibility over other criteria, helping us to concentrate our energies and efforts on the activities and collaborations that we knew would have a good destiny. In times of uncertainty such as those we experienced during the first half of 2020, this decision ended up being very healthy for our team.

In the second place, the decision to seek to adapt our traditional activities to the virtual format helped us in the realization of several of our annual goals, particularly regarding the number of activities and the number of participants. The possibility of remotely connecting with audiences in different regions and countries allowed us to reach spectators and collaborators that seemed very distant in the past.

Finally, the need to rethink our program, the format of our activities, and how we would connect with our audiences, led us to develop new projects, collaborations, and activities, assuming new challenges for Wikimedia Chile. The crisis became an opportunity to explore and innovate in our work and boosted our creativity in promoting free knowledge and Wikimedia projects in Chile and the region.


What we learned during 2020: find your creative spirit

Although our survival instinct told us to keep things quiet during this year and not to innovate too much in our plan, we decided to fight against that feeling and to take advantage of the possibilities that an uncertain scenario offered us to undertake new projects. That decision was so clear that we put it in our crisis management plan under the phrase: “We will overcome comfort: we will not use adversity as an excuse to not promote our work or not taking new challenges.”

And although at times it was difficult and required a lot of extra work, that innovative spirit brought rewards as our activities began to be recognized in our local but also regional context, among the rest of the chapters in the region. In this way, we believe that giving us the opportunity to be creative in an exceptional year, thinking outside the box of what we normally do (Wikipedia content creation activities, mostly), and see that it brought positive and unexpected results, was one of the main learnings we experienced in 2020; This reinforces the idea that, in order to reach new audiences, motivate new users, and establish new alliances and collaborations, we must think about activities beyond the mere creation and edition of content. Diffusion and outreach activities, photo contests and campaigns, and training sessions on digital practices, for example, worked very well during 2020 and we believe it is important to incorporate them into our regular activities.


What we want to project into 2021: reading our local context

Although we know that strategic planning and creativity were essential for the good development of our work during 2020, We believe that the goals achieved are also due to our ability to "read" our local context. And that reading was done through two questions or reflections that we made at the beginning of the pandemic: what will be our distinctive voice as a structure, since organizations inside and outside the Wikimedia ecosystem are migrating massively to activities in virtual format; and what will be our concrete contribution as a chapter to the needs that the communities and users with whom we interact are beginning to manifest.

These two questions determined not only the development of the new projects and collaborations we undertook this year, but also helped us to execute and redirect many of the activities that were part of our original plan, even if sometimes the results were a little far from the actions of creating or donating content to the Wikimedia projects. In 2020, in a complementary way to those activities that we have traditionally carried out as a chapter, we decided to focus on accompanying and supporting our different communities in their approach to the digital world, using the Open Knowledge and the Wikimedia philosophy. This decision finally led us to develop activities that were very significant for those communities, allowing us to reach new collaborations and develop larger projects, where the use of the Wikimedia projects will be central. The decision to apply these two approaches to our plan was our major challenge and learning, and we will seek to implement it in our future work.

Program story

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Please link to one program story that showcases your organization's achievements during the reporting period.

In Spanish:

Wikimedia Chile newsletter: ¡Revive las actividades 2020 de Wikimedia Chile!

Learning story

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Please link to one learning story that shows how your organization documents lessons learned and adapts its programs accordingly.

In Spanish:

How we coped with COVID-19 crisis: Comunicado oficial por COVID-19 en Chile

Results

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Please add text or a link to a page with details on your program results. You should report on each of the objectives you included in your Simple APG application.

Metrics

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Final metrics for this grant, including Shared metrics and Grantee-defined metrics.

Program outcomes

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After this general review of our development as a chapter during 2020, we will now review the specific results achieved in our three areas of work -Community, Free Knowledge, and Local Content- and the programs and projects within those areas.

Community (Comunidad)

 
Image 1. Edit-a-thon on Women in Sciences, with part of the Female Researchers Network

During this year the "Community" axis had a quite important development. Because of the difficulty we faced in carrying out many of the content creation activities we had proposed for 2020, this axis suffered certain transformations that led us to focus more on the diffusion of the Wikimedia culture on the national scene, as well as on the training and accompaniment of new users.

From this transformation, moreover, new projects were born which, although they were not part of our original plan, ended up being very profitable for our chapter and our goals, both because of the number of activities carried out, the number of simultaneous spectators who participated in those meetings, and the number and diversity of guests and collaborators who joined our activities.

This work was also strongly strengthened by the growth of our professional team, thanks to the incorporation of two new members in the areas of community management and communications management, and who arrived in two significant moments of the year: in March 2020 when the COVID-19 crisis began in Chile, and then at the beginning of the second half of 2020, respectively.


What we did (and we had to adapt) during 2020:

Although one of Wikimedia Chile's maxims for 2020 was to continue with the normal development of our work plan through the adaptation of our activities to the virtual format, there were certain programs and projects whose realization became much more difficult in this new scenario. In the Outreach project, for example, although we were able to carry out the total number of activities proposed (100% success) and greatly exceeded the amount of edited content proposed (1223% success), we reached less than half of the participants (45% success); This is mainly due to the fact that of all these activities (campaigns, editing and photography contests, edit-a-tons) only two were in a face-to-face format, in January and March. Face-to-face activities, particularly the edit-a-tons, are characterized by a good number of participants and their absence had a negative impact on our global metrics. On the contrary, activities such as photo contests and editing campaigns, which worked asynchronously and online, had good results and with them we completed the amount of content proposed.

The Diffusion project, on the other hand, which was developed entirely online, provided us with very significant numbers. During the year we developed and participated in more than 10 activities of massive diffusion in the national context, like seminars, open talks, and panels; in addition, we created a new regular instance of conversation, as it was the cycle “Permanent Seminar” ("Seminario Permanente"), where we tried to relate topics and discussions from the Wikimedia movement with civil society projects in Chile and the LatAm region. We had eight chapters, where we talked about photographic records, editing on gender violence in Wikipedia, cartography and open maps, digital heritage and free access, diverse sources for writing about native cultures, among others. We connected with more than 15 guests and reached more than 600 total views.

On the other hand, the “2020 Wikicafé" project, the second cycle of conversations designed to connect with the inner community of Wikimedia Chile, also had an important development, mainly due to the virtual format. We hosted the nine expected sessions with national and international guests who spoke to us on various topics such as cultural heritage, digital security, human rights, open access, and more. By doing these sessions in an open way through Youtube, we managed to successfully exceed the number of attendees expected, thus having more than 120 people who connected live. Today, the videos of the sessions have more than 50 visits, so the virtuality allowed us to transform this cycle of conversations into a scenario where we can present ideas, discuss contingency issues and continue forming a community.

As for the innovations developed during this year in this area, the virtual format allowed us to experiment with new projects, especially those that could better respond to the needs of our communities and followers. We develop, for example, a series of activities focused on the accompaniment and training of new Wikipedia users, as were the Editing Clubs ("Club de Edición") as Wikipedia workshops in biweekly and then monthly format, and the cycle of four webinars #MeQuedoEnCasaYEditoWikipedia that we launched in May, during the total lockdown in Chile. In addition to these accompaniment activities, we also add the “Editing on Saturday" cycle ("Sábados de Edición”), a series of weekly content creation days designed for the community of Chilean editors on local and contingency issues, and where, in addition to maintaining links with our internal community, we edited more than 300 articles on Chilean culture and society.

Finally, another important project we developed during this year was the launch of the [Survey for Chileans editors]. This information survey had the objective of learning the motivations of the local editor community and their needs, identifying their obstacles to participate in Wikipedia, and knowing their opinion about the work developed by Wikimedia Chile. This work, which had never been done in the country, allowed us to corroborate some problems in our community (concentration in the city of Santiago or the low participation of women), the issues that interest our editors the most, as well as their views on our chapter, to know how to improve and how to focus our work to reach more people.

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    Monthly invitation to the Wikicafé 2020 cycle
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    August "Seminario Permanente" episode on collective records
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    "Editing on Saturday" invitation
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    "Editing Club" October session


What we learned:

One of the greatest learnings we had in the Community area has to do with the focus of actions and activities; rather than focusing on recruiting new users, which became difficult in the context of social isolation resulting from the pandemic, the challenge this year and the following ones is to ensure that these users endure in time. The first survey of editors in Chile showed us the difficulties they have in editing Wikipedia or relating to the community and gave us ideas on how to support its development and encourage its continuity.

On the other hand, our work in diffusion and the interest shown in the activities of the area helped us to identify a new community, beyond the editors and content creators: people who adhere to the Wikimedia movement and open knowledge projects, without being Wikipedians. That community is very important to us and part of our project for 2021 will be to maintain the link with it.

The virtual format proved to be a challenge for our chapter, especially when adapting activities that gain a lot from the face-to-face format, such as the edit-a-thons. But at the same time, virtuality helped us understand that frontiers are not an obstacle anymore and that we can work more and better with the other chapters in the LatAm region, especially at a time of global challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The meetings and activities we carried out together, such as the training meeting for women editors Nunca Más Wikipedia Sin Nosotras developed with WMAR and WMMX and which had more than 60 participants, showed us that there are common topics to the different chapters and that the joint efforts we make to strengthen the community and the contents of the Spanish Wikipedia bear fruit.


What we project for 2021:

Among the projects we have for the area of Community in the near future, is to adopt a role of support and identification of public interested in our work, whether they edit Wikipedia or not. The idea of working with a broader notion of Community (thinking of editors, viewers, or bare open culture enthusiasts) during 2020 gave very good results and we will apply it during our work in 2021. Our focus will be on people rather than content.

In addition, we will seek to do this work together with the regional community, fostering collaboration between chapters by learning from the more advanced chapters and contributing our resources and experience to the growing structures.


Community metrics:

Free knowledge (Conocimiento libre)

 
Image 2. Edit-a-thon on gender and development in the Eclac library

The Free Knowledge axis had a complex development during 2020, mainly because it involves working with institutions such as universities, museums, research centers and the public sector, many of whom were closed for the entire year because of the pandemic. Therefore, during the first semester, we focused mainly on training and diffusion, creating instances to connect with the digital learning needs that institutions and teachers, one of our main stakeholders, seemed to have.

During the second semester, however, different institutions relaunched their agendas, which allowed us to develop some of our projects in the area and propose new activities in the virtual format, mainly the projects like Wiki in the University and Cultural Institutions.


What we did (and we had to adapt) during 2020:

The Education program, which during 2020 was part of this axis of work, was one of the programs that suffered more modifications this year, in order to adapt to the changes and difficulties that pandemic brought to schools and teachers. With de eagerness to be a contribution and not a burden to these communities, our team focused on initiatives that would contribute to facilitating pedagogical practices in a context of mandatory virtuality, through two new guidelines:

  • Collaborative teacher training, launching webinars and courses where they could find spaces to socialize common problems and discuss pedagogical strategies according to the current challenges of teaching in a digital context.
  • Media and information literacy for students, where we address the Wikimedia philosophy and the perspective of open and collaborative knowledge as fundamental axes to promote critical digital citizenship.

This approach allowed us to give continuity to the Wikimedia in the University project through activities such as talks and workshops that could be carried out in a distance format (163% success) and that were privileged by the educational institutions we work with; As result, we significantly decreased our editing initiatives with students, which reflected negatively on our goals (17% success). Something similar happened with the Wikimedia in the Classroom project, which sought to develop face-to-face activities with school teachers and which simply could not be carried out due to the total closure of all educational establishments in the country. However, and despite these difficulties, the program reached more than 500 students, with whom we addressed aspects of Wikimedia philosophy, open knowledge, critical citizenship, among others.

As for the work with teachers, where we focused on training and accompaniment, this was extremely fruitful. In addition to the webinars of the first semester, where we reached more than 100 school teachers in the LatAm region, during the month of November 2020 we launched the second version of the virtual course Collaborative Education: creating tools for the formation of critical citizenship. Alternating expository sessions with meetings in a workshop format, we worked for a month with 30 teachers from Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador, who co-produced 18 pedagogical resources where they connected Wikimedia projects to the objectives of the subjects they teach and we incorporated as tools into our educational project.

In the case of the Alliances program, although it had a slow start during the first semester due to the change in the agendas of most institutions, the second semester was very positive for the development of activities in the area. Like we did within our other work axes, we promoted professional and specialized teams training sessions on how to use Wikipedia as part of our Experts for Wikipedia projects; In our collaboration with the National Tourism Service (Sernatur) alone, we trained more than 30 local tourism and cultural officials throughout the Biobío region. This project is also being evaluated so that it can be reproduced in other regions of the country, with more local teams.

In terms of content creation and as part of the Cultural Institutions project, In August we made an important donation of bibliographic content for Wikisource from the Center for Science Communication of the Universidad Autónoma de Chile, in a collaboration that had been forged since the first semester of 2020. This work resulted in more than 900 new pages for the project, all related to science publications produced by the same center.

Finally, the Wiki Humans Rights project (WikiDD.HH) suffered several modifications during the year due both to the pandemic and the political context Chile has been facing since October 2019, where human rights institutions that we wanted to collaborate with changed their agendas to focus on reports of human rights violations. The lockdown also made us change the Revealing Sites II (Revelando Sitios II) photo contest for an editing campaign. Even though this activity had some interesting results, it did not measure up to our original objectives regarding the number of participants and the number of content creation.


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    Virtual course for teachers invitation
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    Universidad Autónoma de Chile books donation
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    Reveling Sites II edition campaing


What we learned during 2020:

This program left us with important lessons, especially in the Education program, where we were able to transform the limitations of the pandemic (such as school closures and the inability to work with students) into opportunities to focus on the teaching community, identify with them their needs and generating more horizontal activities of dialogue and joint learning, beyond the mere transfer of technical skills. With the students, we were also able to explore other types of activities, such as training in digital citizenship and critical media literacy, and not just editing on Wikipedia; this was highly appreciated by students and teachers.

On the other hand, the constant changes in COVID-19 policies in Chile reminded us of the importance of our chapter being able to develop an agenda that is more independent of the institutions with which we collaborate. This notion, which had already become patent in 2019 when we lost many projects due to the change of priorities of our collaborators, tells us that while forming links with institutions is essential both for the training of new users and for the release of content, we have to take the initiative in this line and focus on the type of content we want to promote, rather than on specific institutions or teams to work with.

In this same sense, we learned the importance of designing or deciding in advance the services or accompaniments that we can provide as an organization to the different institutions, something that helps us standardize our work and focus our efforts instead of developing activities from scratch every time a different institution contacts us.


What we will project for 2021:

As in the Community area, we want to strengthen the regional work, especially in the Education Program. Knowing that our continent shares similar educational scenarios, we want to strengthen the instances of exchange to identify shared problems and contexts, and thus plan educational initiatives together that respond to the needs of our region.

Besides, we want to promote training and support for institutions in their transfer to digital format, especially those working with cultural assets, such as museums, archives, and libraries. Seeing how the 2020 crisis revealed the difficulties and inequalities faced by small regional communities in their access to the Internet and digital tools, we want to continue to be a contribution in that sense, developing projects to strengthen the digital practices of those teams, from an open culture perspective.


Free knowledge metrics:

Local content (Contenido y perspectivas locales)

 
Image 3. Results of Wikimedia Chile's Projects in the Biobío Region, Chile

Of all our work this past year, this area had the most uneven development during 2020, with projects that exceeded our expectations, such as the creation of content with a local perspective where we edited over 1000 items (513% success), and projects that simply could not be executed due to the pandemic.

One of the projects that was most affected by the impossibility of traveling within the country and carrying out face-to-face activities was Indigenous languages and cultures (Culturas y lenguas originarias), which had been proposed as a priority for Wikimedia Chile during 2020. Understanding that the proper development of this project requires the support and participation of the native communities in southern Chile, we decided to suspend the project, which had a negative impact on our goals. A similar decision was taken with the Brigdes across cultures contest, understanding that it did not make sense to launch a large international editing contest knowing the difficulties that the different Wikimedia communities have faced this year in convening editors and editing activities in general.

However, our work in this area had interesting achievements, such as the “Gender and Diversities” project, and the Regionalization project, both from the Mind the gap program (Brechas), where we significantly exceeded the number of activities, participants and content items proposed.


What we did (and we had to adapt) during 2020:

While we had difficulties creating content with new users during this year, our historic community of wikipedians remained as active as ever, allowing us to far exceed the number of editions originally proposed. We also added the results of the contests and editing campaigns we carried out at the local level, which worked to motivate the creation of content in a difficult year.

As a strategy to address the creation of content, we highlight the reconversion of this year's photo contest, originally intended to portray urban spaces and update the images of the different localities of Chile in Wikipedia; due to lockdown and the impossibility of leaving home, we modified and called it The months that changed Chile (Los meses que cambiaron Chile); the invitation was to donate images taken before the COVID-19 crisis to depict all the changes our country was facing since October 2019. The contest gave us 365 new photographs (122% success rate), with which we illustrated more than 30 articles (100% success rate) on the Spanish and English Wikipedias.

Within the Mind the Gap program, the Gender and Diversities and the Regionalization projects also had important developments. Although we suspended the third version of Wikigap, we developed 11 other activities in this area (220% success rate) both in Chile and abroad, creating or editing almost 200 items (394% success rate) on gender and diversity issues. The Regionalization project focused mostly on training new users (190% success rate) and local content creation (140% success rate), establishing partnerships with local institutions in the regions of Coquimbo, Biobío and Magallanes through talks and open editing campaigns, and the training of municipal officials in 30 cities and towns (including rural areas, as shown in Imagen 3).


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    Regional training session for female editors organized with WMMX and WMAR
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    Editing campaing on cultural heritage for the Magallanes Region
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    Awared photo in the Los meses que cambiaron Chile contest


What lessons we have learned:

Here again, virtuality also proved to be a positive element at the end of the day, especially in the work with other regions of the country and with communities in other countries of the region. To be able to develop a whole cycle of Wikipedia training for municipal officials in rural areas as we did together with the National Tourism Service would have been a very difficult project to accomplish in a face-to-face format, or at least it would have taken us a lot of time and resources. A similar thing happens with working with cultural institutions in the Region of Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica, with which we contact 100% remotely.

In terms of content creation, although the active participation of the community of Wikipedia editors in Chile was constant and helped us to meet our objectives, we were not able to summon more editors, having a very high number of edits (513% success rate) but not necessarily a large number of participants in those editing activities. In the survey to Wikipedia editors in Chile, some questions aimed to know which are the topics, projects and schedules in which our "historical" editors usually participate, in order to adapt and improve the offer of editing activities during 2021 and invite more people from our community.


What we will project for 2021:

While the overall numbers for our Local Content axis are positive, we believe that the impossibility of implementing some of the proposed projects is due to the COVID-19 crisis, and the dependence they had on other actors external to our team. The proposal to carry out the third version of Wikigap, for example, depended heavily on the support of the Swedish Embassy in Chile and when they changed their agenda due to the crisis, the project was lost.

For 2021, and thanks to the learnings we experienced in 2020, we will seek to propose content creation projects that depend mostly on our team and our priorities, such as editatones, campaigns and contests: projects that allow us to achieve our goals, but that we can freely mold and adapt to the country context we are living in.


Local content metrics:


Institutional development

 
Part of our staff with the former President of Wikimedia Chile

How our structure faced COVID-19

During 2020, the safety and wellbeing of our board, staff, and volunteers were crucial. Along with canceling all our face-to-face activities in March, we rapidly installed a home-office system, where every meeting and activity was executed from home, and we invested in different resources to facilitate the coordination of that online work, like a pro Zoom account, Google Drive accounts to share files and documents, etc. That system worked very well and we kept it during the whole year, knowing that the health conditions haven't changed that much in Chile and that the COVID crisis is far from been over.

Our staff during this year

During 2020 our team members and their roles have had also to adapt to the healthcare context and virtuality. Although our original idea was to hire a Community Manager in March to create bonds with our internal and external communities, being totally online and having social media as an exclusive communication channel, led us to modify that plan and incorporate a new member for the Communications area. Thus, Carla Toro, our Community Manager, continued to be in charge of liaison activities with editors, both old and new, and in the second half of the year Daniela Aranguren, a journalist with experience in digital media, joined our team to take charge of communications and liaison with communities outside our chapter. Thus, during 2020 our staff had been composed of four members: our Executive Director, our Education Manager, our Community Manager, and our Communication Manager. This structure will persist during 2021.

Visual design support

In addition, to reinforce the digital communication area, during the second half of the year Wikimedia Chile had a Design intern, Diego Vega, who was in charge of creating the graphic identities of all the new projects we were developing, as well as supporting the visual requirements of other Wikimedia Chile programs, such as Education.

Diego's work was highly valued by the chapter and the regional community, and he will continue to collaborate with us as a contractor during 2021.

Spending

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Please link to a detailed financial report for your spending during the grant period. This should be in the same format as your detailed budget from your Simple APG application.

Final spending report

Please include the total amount of Simple APG funds you spent during the grant period.

CLP 62,857,178 (~ USD 88,469)
Converted to Chilean pesos using conversion rate for 2020-12-30, at 1 USD = 710,5 CLP.

Notes and references

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  1. ↑ These were the projects and programs where we proposed the most dramatic improvement (number of activities and number of participants) according to the 2019 plan.
  2. ↑ The first case of coronavirus was registered in Chile on March 3, 2020. The first death caused by the disease occurred on March 21, 2020. Currently, Chile has the seventh largest outbreak in the world and has one of the highest rate of deaths per capita.
  3. ↑ By significant, we mean those that are already part of our 2020 program, or those new activities that we think that could be relevant to our organization.
  4. ↑ For the virtual activities we consider all viewers that follow the webinar in real time.
  5. ↑ When streaming by Youtube or other platforms, is difficult or even impossible to know who is watching from the other side of the screen. By the number of comments during the meetings and by the previous inscriptions forms, we calculate that we have had at least 22 different participants within this project this semester, but we know it is not a precise number.
  6. ↑ Before entering the last quarter of the year.
  7. ↑ This without prejudice of participating in such activities if we had the chance, as it happened with the Metropolitan Technological University before the students began their strike.
  8. ↑ The photographic contest originally invited to photograph public urban spaces, to update the visual content referring to Chilean cities and towns.
  9. ↑ For the virtual activities we consider all viewers that follow the webinar in real time.
  10. ↑ When streaming by Youtube or other platforms, is difficult or even impossible to know who is watching from the other side of the screen. By the number of comments during the meetings and by the previous inscriptions forms, we calculate that we have had at least 22 different participants within this project this semester, but we know it is not a precise number.
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