User:Papuass/Scholarship application

This is a successful application for a Wikimania 2017 WMF full scholarship. The main part of the application is reproduced here by the scholarship recipient for future Wikimania attendees' interest.

Metadata

Username: Papuass
Primary language: Latvian
Primary Wikimedia project: Wikipedia
Secondary Wikimedia project: Wikidata
sulinfo:Papuass

Tell us about your involvement in your home wiki or the broader Wikimedia movement. What have you built or contributed to in order to improve your wiki or community? Have you led or organized any of these activities?

I joined Wikipedia in 2005 and became active member of community a few years later. Currently I am one of Top10 contributors (by edits) and administrator in Latvian Wikipedia. I have been moderately active in Commons (I can take good quality pictures) and Wikidata (mostly importing facts about my country, additionally being involved in development of some modules that help to use data in Wikipedia). In 2015 I became more involved in off-wiki activities, founding Wikimedians of Latvia User Group and organizing multiple outreach events like WLM, edit-a-thons with National Library of Latvia, Latvian Academy of Culture, organizing Wikpedia article contests with CEE Spring, Europeana 280 challenge. I was also involved in our limited Education program working with teacher from Latvian University, 15 students were involved. I was glad to notice that my wikipedian activity had not suffered from organizing these events and I managed to get minor international prizes from Europeana 280 and TED challenge as well.

What’s something great that happened as a result of these activities? This could be described either quantitatively or qualitatively, and could impact either online or offline. Here are some examples that might help.

After we had been working as a user group for about a year, I assessed metrics like new monthly article count, new users, users involved in more than article writing and felt that there has not been noticeable improvement. However as more time went on and we did more events, it was clear that there is a point to our activities. Right now we are creating more articles, there are new users from our activities and there are more people willing to help organize these events. We are hoping to organize Wiki Loves Earth competition because of interest from a user who has not been involved before.

What collaborations with other Wikimedians or Wikimedia organizations are you most proud of?

As a user group we have worked with several institutions in our country, most of them were one time events, though. Our collaborations with Wikimedia community have been more involved and organizing Wiki Loves Monuments (2015, 2016) and CEE Spring article contest (2015, 2016) has lead to bigger personal involvement in Wikimedia community.

How do you usually share your experiences (or things you’ve learned) with your community? Examples of on-wiki summaries/reports, blog posts, meetup talks, etc. are welcome here.

I am managing community accounts on Twitter [1] and Facebook [2]. While these are not overly popular, these have been a good way to communicate with people outside Wikipedia, providing valuable feedback. While organizing events, like edit-a-thons, meetups and conferences I have tried to establish good practices in documenting it. See for example, report for attending CEE regional conference [3] [1] https://twitter.com/wikipedia_lv [2] https://www.facebook.com/wikipedialv/ [3] https://lv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikip%C4%93dija:Konferences/Wikimedia_CEE_Meeting_2016