2021 Annual Plan

Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey (WMTR)

2021 Annual Plan

Introductıion

2021 Annual Plan for 2021 of Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey (WMTR) is a plan built on 2021-2022 strategic plan of the group. WMTR consist of those active contributors of Wikimedia projects in Turkey who are interested in organizing and participating in outreach activities on a national level in addition to contributing Wikimedia projects by editing.

Below programs are aimed at increasing the volunteer contributions to Wikimedia projects and fostering diversity and friendly colloboration of the contribitors.

Program Overview

WMTR 2021-2022 Strategic Plan defines 4 programs for the group. The Annual Plan includes different sets of activites for making this 4 programs work based on the experiences of the group since 2016.

• Stronger Community. Followint the program
• Effective Outreach & Content Development
• Students Editing Wikimedia Projects
• Synergic Partnership

Stronger Community

This program focuses on establishing a more networked community. The editor community of Wikimedia projects in Turkey consists of dedicated volunteers distributed across the country. The first objective of this program is providing effective communication with the community on the user group works and activities. In addition to increase communication between group members, the program is intended to provide in-group training on topics that the community is interested in developing their capacities. Şablon:Col-beging

Program activities

• Regular community meetings: Regular community meetings are essential for strengthening the ties within the Wikimedia community. Such community meetings were organized during 2020 and there were increasing attendance. Biweekly regular online meetings will continye ib 2021. All meetings will continue to be open for both active community members and newcomers. When possible, an in person meeting will be made in Istanbul, where most of the active members of the group based. We also would like the meetings to serve as an opportunity to bring Movement-wide issues to the attention of the community and encourage members to participate in global discussions.
• Skill development training sessions : In-group training sessions will be organized to develoo the competencies that the editor community needs. Some possible topics might be using tools like PetScan, Wikidata, Wikidata Query, Structured data for Wikimedia Common.

Program Metrics

• Number of regular community meetings: 12-18
• Total participant of the meetings: Average 12 participant per meeting
• Number of trainings:3
• Total participant of the trainings: Average 10 participant per meeting
• Full report for the community members about each meeting and discussion

Effective Outreach & Content Development

This program is focused on increasing the awareness and understanding of the people of Turkey about Wikimedia projects as well as increasing their contributions to the projects. It includes a set of outreach activities to reach potential new contributors with different backgrounds to Wikimedia projects mainly Turkish Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. It’s aimed at effectively communicating those activities in the media and make Wikimedia projects seen more in the media in order to create awareness and understanding of the general public about Wikimedia projects.

Program Activities

Photography contests: We would like to organize the Wiki Loves Earth 2021 contest in Turkey. At the end an award ceremony will be organized to attract more media attention. Smillar local contests will be organised as the demand arises from the community members about those.

Article contests: The group will support the community in taking part international editing contests such as CEE Spring, Turkic Language Edit-a-thons. Smaller local thematic writing competitions will also be organised as the demand arises from the community members. With the increase in the diversity of the contributors, content gaps are being discovered and there are volunteers to work on different content areas. Contests will be organized with partner organisations as new content gaps are detected in the projects..

Thematic Edit-a-thons & Photo Walks:' During the year we will be organizing editing and photography events that do not take the contest form. Those activities involve thematic edit-a-thons and Photo Walks. We experienced in 2020 how the success of such edit-a-thons bring new partners, especially civil society institutions, youth clubs are willing to organize edit-a-thons in collaboration with Wikimedians to learn about editing and start covering topics related to their interest area. The group will reach new partners, get suggestions from the partners and community about the themes to work on and organize edit-a-thons together. Art&Feminism event in İstanbul will supported and continue women edit-a-thons throughout the year as we did previous years.

Wikidata Birthday: Wikidata is a less-well known project of Wikimedia in Turkey. We will be using Wikidata birthday for getting attention and creating awareness on Wikidata project in larger audiences. We are planning to organize an in-person event where presentations and hand-on trainings are carried out. If not possible, we’ll be organizing an online event.

Program Metrics

• Number of participants to photography contests: 200
• Number of uploads to commons at photography contests: 800
• Number of participants to article contests: 100
• Number of articles created at article contests: 300
• Number of thematic edit-a-thon/photo walk organized: Min. 2
• Min. participation to Wikidata Birthday Event: 50
• Media releases about Wikimedia events in Turkish press: 10

Students Editing Wikimedia Projects

In 2021, WMTR will to continue developing Wikipedia Education Program and contact the academicians who worked with us in previous academic years as well as contacting new others who are interested in using Wikip(m)edia assignments in their classes. Group is now much more experienced in offering training modules for students editing Wikipedia for assignments and it’s possible to get even better results based on this experience.

Secondly, secondary schools will be contacted and discuss the ways to expoese students Wikimedia projects before university in order to prepare themselves to become enlightened consumers and also producers of digital content.

Program Metrics

• Min. 160 university students edited Wikimedia projects for their assignments
• Min. 50 new articles edited under Wikimedia at the University program
• Min. 2 presentations at secondary schools about Wikimedia Projects

Synergic Partnerships

The focus of this program is building a strong support network around the activities of the user group. Our goal is reaching out to several institutions including local groups which advocate free knowledge, as well as city governments, embassies and cultural centers, in order to get the purposes of Wikimedia projects better understood by such institutions. A thematic wiki-activity with at least one of the institutions visited will be carried out.

We believe in the importance of civil-society solidarity ties and in order to develop such ties would like to join meetings of other local groups that advocate for open knowledge to understand them and their activities better, as well as making presentations about Wikimedia projects and purposes for their members. We also would like to make presentations and organize workshops at related academic events in order to establish ties with members of academia who strive for open knowledge and support our mission.

Program Activities

• Potential partner meetings: We will continue our partnership talks with metropolitan municipalities and with small touristic city governments with the aim of producing a concrete project they could share their knowledge and digital assets with the public through wiki channels. We will continue our talks with civil society organisations which are interested in increasing awareness and disseminate reliable information about their work area with the help of Wikimedia projects.We will be contacting both government and private cultural centers and archives to search for partnership opportunities.
• Joint free-knowledge meetings: We will contact organizations advocating open culture and organize joint meetings with our community members in order to ensure the members understand the purposes, working methods of each other.
• Academic events: We plan to join and organize a wiki event during the academic conferences such as the national symposium about "Archiving in Turkey" where our members submmitted a paper and organized an edit-a-thon in 2021. During the year we would like to search oppurtunities to participate academic events and use them as an opportunity to establish ties with members of academia who would support our mission.

Program Metrics

• Number of partnership meetings: 10
• Number of joint free-knowledge meetings:2
• Number of academic presentations: 1
• Full report on talks at community channels.

Potential risks

• Video conference fatigue. After March 2020, all activiteies of the group made online. With increasing "video-conference fatigue", the participation to community meetins, university-trainings, online edit-a-thons might drop.
• Economic instability due to the pandemic. Increasing economic instability might drop volunteer efforts.