 Hello everyone and welcome to our talk how we use thematic challenges to cover content gaps and activate the community of Wikimediants. My name is Natalia Schiebolova, I am fundraiser and PR specialist of Wikimedia Czech Republic since September 2021 and with me today there is Klara Yokova, Executive Director of Wikimedia Czech Republic. She's been doing this job since March 2018. Thank you guys for being here with us today. We would like to share with you the topic that has been with us for the last two years. The aim of this was to focus our work more on something that happens in the Czech community. What does these challenges look like, what we are talking about? It's always an editing or photo challenge or a contest that is focused around a specific topic. We will get back to that later. It usually lasts around a month. Last year I think for all of our four challenges we even choose a longer period of time I think around six weeks and it's always a mix of several online and usually on-site events like editor films. These two things are essential especially for which target group we would like to address because these online contests is always better for our long-term Wikimedians, for our long-term members and on-site events usually attract newcomers and that is something we are aiming. The goals of the challenges are mainly to attract new editors to motivate Wikimedians that already create to create more content and even articles or photos on a given subject for Wikimedia projects we will get into the topics later. Also we like to attract attention of media and public to Wikipedia and the given subjects so we send out press releases and do a whole PR stuff and we also ask influencers to help us just to get it out there. The other thing that really helps us focus and cooperate but it's that we link these challenges, these topics of activities to all our programmes. You have three types, three main programme groups which is educational programmes, community programmes and partnership programmes but all these three programmes join the forces for this main topic. And these two last two bullet points that means like attract attention of general public that means attention of media and this linking of activities led to actually choose the right topics for us and hold them in the longer term period that means to have yearly challenges on the same topic. So we are busy all year round and we divided our the thematic challenges into the quarters. The first quarter which peak in March is dedicated to women. So this challenge is called Women's Month on Wikipedia. June the second quarter it's aimed to human rights so that it's a human rights on Wikipedia. August and September the third quarter it's Czech WikiFoto. This is the only and just pure photo contest and we will talk about this later. At the end of the year the fourth quarter it's historical contest Czechoslovakia 1948 to 89 this long communist period in our history. This as well allows us to make the backbone of our annual plan very simple because of course we are doing the other things we organize more than 170 educational activities through demand. We organize different other different community activities we cooperate with our partnership but this backbone of our annual plan it's very simple and it's very understandable to all of our members and partners and it looks actually like this. You can see these main challenges that wrap up each quarter. We would like to talk a little bit more about each of these four topics that we have just quickly to tell you what it's all about Women's Month on Wikipedia. We attract specific target group which are women and newcomers. We all probably know that only like around 10 to 20% of women edit Wikipedia actually so it makes sense. We ask NGOs to help us with promotion and to take part local institution and we like to which like to bring attention to certain issues. For example the underrepresentation of women scientists in the public eye. We cooperate with different ambassadors for example embassies of Sweden, USA, UK, Ireland and it's a mix of several online and on-site events like editathons. We also created Czech women's Vicky Facebook group where members can share their experiences throughout the year which seem to be really helpful. Unlike the Women's Month on Wikipedia that is focused on gaining new cameras and attract women, the human rights or the challenge human rights is focused on completing like the complicated and complex topics that means to cover the content gap. This is the main difference and our tip is always to know what's the main goal of your activities. We as well like the other specifics of the Human Rights Month on Wikipedia on our June challenge it's to go wider like it's like this whole topic it's wider than it seems. It covers topics around minorities, about migrants, about all LGBTQ plus topic, about every historical event that it's attached to human rights, even to climate change. So it's very like now topics that can as well easily attract new cameras but from our experience and what we want really to cover it's to like attract specific partners which is mainly NGOs in our cultural circumstances who could cover this content to get better because this is like their field and they know what they are talking about, they all know all the news and they have all the like they have all the sources that could be used to cover this very important and very deep content gap. Other specifics of this challenge is that we try to attract the students and we always have some kind of student participation last year for example we have like seminars for Roma students in Czech Republic which was the first time we could offer them something like that to be a part of Czech Wikipedia and as all the other challenges it's always a mix of several online and on-site events and we always attach specific training for NGOs because we want to help them how to cover their topics better. One useful tip here, we try always to plan in advance with our partners and we take advantage of their existing activities and we try to join them for example we extend this challenge to be able to cover and be part of International Refugee Day. Another challenge is Czech Wikifoto, we try to support quality photograph on Wikimedia comments by that one. We mainly target newcomers, professional or amateur photographers who like to take pictures so we invite them to Wikimedia and all the Wikimedia projects it's a way of bringing attention to comments and free licenses and the challenge ends every year with an exhibition of award-winning photographs in January we have a nice gallery of one of our partners in the center of Prague so it makes sense for the photographs because their photographs, their photos are seen there and also the exhibition or like the first day of exhibition is connected with Poetry Slam event so it's a little tradition that we have established and people look forward to it and I think it's really lovely. We also have some sponsors or partners who gave us something to award the photographers like some kind of editing programs for photographs and stuff and we use an expatriate jury of professional photographers and VK photographers to decide which photos are good and also useful for Wikimedia projects. The last challenge that ends sort of up our whole year it's Contest Czechoslovakia 1948 to 1989 this is our only let's say historical topic and the main focus it's again to cover the content gap of really complicated and complex topics which is as well let's say modern so it's still like in the kind of progress. This is like Czech modern historical theme so you I think can as well think of something similar that's like part of your of your modern history of or some like very complex topic in your own history. What we always are doing here it's to involve the academic partners teachers and students of our universities. In last year we was able to to to offer this this to three different universities in three different cities and it was again like mix of this online contest and editathons but we connect them this time with public lectures by historians so we could as well offer something to the general public and to the local people in these three cities and editathon culminates as well one semester course for students so librarians was part of that and but mostly universities and this academic partners would find what like the last useful tip for you we always are trying to find a Wikipedia ambassadors that means like someone experienced from the community who could cover the whole topic and lead us towards like our goal and be maybe even the face of this challenge and we was very happy because one of our one of our community members helped us last two years to be the ambassador of this contest. So this challenges as we try to explain on the beginning really helped to gain new diverse editors and keep the current one engaged. What's important to mention here is that we know that for like existing community for people who was able to to find their own way to Wikimedia world to editing. This is just like fun we can they can be part of the contest they can win something they could as well get like a wikibatch for this which we prepare every year for for each challenge so this is you can have the nice collection a collection after few years but for a certain type of newcomers and to make our community diverse there are like types of editors who appreciate our support in on their way into the Wikimedia world and who as well appreciate to have some support on their first steps towards editing on their first bumps on their first know that easy experience on the beginning and so we hope that this really helps to make our community more diverse. We only have like three minutes left so I'm going to make this short but I would like to illustrate what can bring these challenges on Wikimedia women's month which is probably the most successful one regarding the attention of public and also the number of written articles as we all know women find it harder than men to find their way to Wikimedia usually that's maybe why they're underrepresented in the community also like only 20% of biographies are about women so there's also there is also an element of the Vicky content gap and we tried to change that by inviting women to Wikimedia we for example had usually have discovered by six newspapers radio stations a year last year in March we almost we created and enlarged almost 400 articles about women and 238 of them were created thanks to the challenge so the number of created articles compared to the usual almost doubled and we also got six females influence female influencers to promote the project under social media this year which was lovely and we get the support from the US Embassy which provides us financially also some important guests from Swedish British Embassy and also the US Embassy come to the event and it's just a lovely thing to do you know we really appreciate all the attention drawn to it if you yeah yeah sorry just for like all the wrapping up because we are we are longer again that you wanted to be here is like the sex steps how to do it we won't go through this I think you can find it if you really want to and we are always here to help you or share our like experiences with whatever you would like to like start or and as well follow our communication channels everything it's on of course on commons we have as well YouTube channel that some like English subtitles for our videos that covered these challenges so you can go through this and if you have any other questions we can be there with you but our colleague Jan Beranek it's there on spot so he's ready to answer all of your questions thank you for listening to us it's been a pleasure to prepare this presentation for you thank you so hello everyone my name is Jan Beranek and I work at Wikimedia Czech Republic as coordinator of programs for editors so basically the stuff you have just seen I'm here for all the questions and we have about three minutes so if anything feel free to ask all right thank you everyone if you have any questions in the future you can always reach to us through our emails through telegram pretty much any channel or you can catch me somewhere later today okay thank you