Wikimedia Ukraine lightning talk on webinars during COVID-19 quarantine: transcript

Key points

• Online webinars suit Wikipedia training, but people are overwhelmed by free online content, are busy, and have short attention spans.
• Working with specific partners gives access to an engaged audience, easier promotion and the partner's expertise.
• In June, Wikimedia Ukraine held five joint events with Detector Media: three for Wikimedians by journalists and two for journalists by Wikimedians, plus a joint writing challenge.
• The events ran on Zoom and were streamed to YouTube and Facebook, drawing almost 600 YouTube views, about 3000 Facebook views and dozens of live participants.
• Webinars for two Kharkiv region libraries drew over 60 participants, and some librarians joined a Wikipedia contest.
• Detailed presentations became step-by-step handbooks, but newcomers lacked personal interaction and found it hard to learn encyclopedic style.

Chapters

1. 0:00Introduction to Wikimedia Ukraine's online events
2. 0:44Problems with online webinars and the partner approach
3. 1:58Case study: joint events with Detector Media
4. 3:59Webinars for libraries in the Kharkiv region
5. 5:54Handbooks, lessons learned and closing

Full transcript

0:00Hi, everyone. My name is Anton Kretzyk. I am a project manager at Wikimedia Ukraine and together with Seri, we will talk about Wikimedia Ukraine's experience in conducting webinars, online events during the quarantine. Our talk can last for six or seven minutes. Hope you forgive us. So starting with my part, holding online events, holding webinars is great, don't you think so? During the pandemic webinars instead of offline training is an obvious path for teaching Wikipedia because since contributing to Wikipedia is an online activity by nature, why don't we teach it online?

0:44But at the same time, it's not as easy as we could think, because there are a couple of problems with online webinars. First of all, people are overwhelmed by the amount of great and free stuff online, especially that was the case at the beginning of the quarantine, when a lot of great pay vote stuff was becoming free. Secondly, some people are just too busy to learn new skills without clear benefits for them, especially if they are If they became even more busy, even busier with the beginning of the quarantine.

1:24And the third problem is that attention span is shorter for online events. So most people, including me, can't sit behind a laptop for a couple of hours straight and remain focused. One of the solutions we found is holding events with partners, with specific partners. The benefits are that we get access to a specific engaged audience which understands the benefits of these training events for them and events are easier to promote in this case.

1:58And also we benefit from the partner's expertise and we don't have to do everything by ourselves. So for example we partnered with Creative Commons Ukraine, with the Ministry of Foreign affairs of ukraine with different glam institutions so he will talk a bit more about that and so on and i would like just quickly uh tell about one case study of our events for journalists in june we partnered with a prominent ukrainian media which doc called detector media and we held five joint events With them, three events for Wikimedians by journalists, and conversely, two events for journalists by Wikimedians.

2:41And also, we organized a joint writing challenge on Ukrainian Wikipedia to attract attention to our common project. Here you can see an example of the announcement of the webinar. We have these events on Zoom and streamed them simultaneously on YouTube and Facebook. So what results did we get? Five events received almost 600 views on YouTube and around 3000 views on Facebook, although the number of Facebook views is a bit less reliable metric.

3:25and also dozens of people participated in real time. We don't know exactly how many because it's a bit difficult to track but dozens of people, maybe up to a hundred of people participated in real time. And we also published written notes, written results of these events as articles on the blog of Wikimedia Ukraine and on the side of Detector Media and now I will give the floor to Serhii and he will tell about his experience.

3:59You have one minute left. My name is Sari. I am coordinator of the project Wikimedia Ukraine Haki region. So, next slide, please. We held a series of webinars as a request of two libraries from Haki. And it was our first experience in organizing webinars for libraries in Ukraine.

4:30And on this slide you will see common information about webinars for Korolanka Kharkiv first ATM scientific library. Next slide, please. And this is our results. Some of the librarians are interesting to be active longer.

5:03Next slide. And we... We have held two webinars by Neskif of the Kharkiv Regional Universal Scientific Library, which is the Methodical Centre for Public Libraries of Kharkiv Region. And these webinars were public and open for everyone. Next slide, please. And in total, over 60 participants and some of rivalries from several rivalries were actively participating in WikiLab's monuments contest.

5:54Next slide, please. This is an example of announcements. Next slide. And the Google. The webinars need to have a detailed presentation which become handbooks with step-by-step instructions on article editing and uploading images to comments. These handbooks were very, very useful for the Wikihakushina contest for reverence from Hakif region and the main problems of practical online trainings for newcomers are the lack of personal interaction and it is a difficulty to explain, for example, what is the encyclopedic style in Wikipedia articles.

7:00Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. If you have any questions, get in touch. Yes, I think there might be space after all these lightning talks for some questions.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Webinars with partners for professional groups and communities during COVID-19 quarantine.webm by Kiril Simeonovski (2020-10-04), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.