IEG round 2 funding rewards diverse ambitions

A significant move by the Wikimedia Foundation has been the broadening of the types of activities it funds. To this end, the Foundation has developed several quite different forums for allocating that funding, setting up volunteer committees that conduct initial assessments of competitive applications. The most recent of these programs was the individual engagement grants (IEG) scheme, launched last January. The scheme awards funds to individuals or teams of up to four people to produce high-impact outcomes for the WMF's online projects. The IEG scheme favours innovative approaches to solving critical issues in the movement. This arm of WMF grantmaking is different from the Funds Dissemination Committee, which started more than a year ago and judges applications for annual operating grants by eligible afilliated organisations.

The IEG committee has just announced the results of its second twice-yearly round. There are seven successful applications for projects that are striking for their reach and diversity, underlining the complex and multidimensional nature of the Wikimedia movement. The allocations—some of them based on applications of impressive quality—involve on-the-ground social, cultural, and technical innovations. Individuals from Cameroon, Uganda, India, Israel, France, Italy, Germany, and the US will begin their projects in the new year, most of which will run from January to June.

Keilana (Emilie Temple-Wood), an undergraduate student in Chicago studying molecular biology, Arabic, and Islamic studies, will lead a Women Scientists Workshop Development project, funded at more than US$9K. The project will encourage college-aged women to become part of the editing community and to use high-quality content to combat systemic bias. Temple-Wood wrote: "One-time edit-a-thons have a very low retention rate for creating new editors and may not be worth the time and effort it takes to put them on." Instead, her model will involve regular edit-a-thon sessions supported by outreach and the creation of a new kit; this is likely to be the basis of a kit for other groups to use.

A surprisingly large proportion of our editors are under 18, according to Temple-Wood. She and Jake Orlowitz (Ocaasi) have also been provisionally funded to pilot a week-long summer conference, Generation Wikipedia, for young Wikipedians and Wikimedians from around the globe to connect, share skills and build leadership and community capacity among the youngest generation of editors. The conference, for which $20K may be allocated, would stress the particular needs of minors for safety, privacy, and liability protection in such an environment.

The Mbazzi Village writes Wikipedia has its origins in the meeting of two people from very different countries who crossed paths in an exchange program for their students: Paul Kiguba, deputy head at a primary school on a small peninsula that juts into the massive Lake Victoria in Uganda; and Dan Frendin, a teacher in Sweden. Together, they founded the Luganda Wikipedia to serve the local language. An empty house owned by Paul Kiguba in the village of Mbazzi will become a new Wikipedia centre, emphasising the writing of articles on health and agriculture. The project, funded at nearly $3K, will be assisted by Sophie Österberg, who was the WMF's Global Education Manager.

A pilot project in the west African nation of Cameroon will be conducted to develop novel communication tools to promote an international conversation on WMF projects and the sharing of free knowledge. This will follow on from WikiAfrica Cameroon, supported by several institutions, and the French chapter's dynamic Afripédia program, which promotes French-language initiatives in the African WMF world. The centrepieces of the pilot project will be the production of a video and a series of comics, by video-makers, designers, writers, and artists in Cameroon. It will be led by Marilyn Douala Bell and Iolanda Pensa with collaboration from Michael Epacka, with funding of €15K.

A further three projects involve technical innovations. Wikimaps Atlas is designed to address a problem many editors are aware of: creating maps for WMF online projects is a labour-intensive process that fails to meet the demand for accuracy and updating. The current system has left us with a large messy pool of locator and other base maps with varying styles, accuracy, and formats. The project will automate the creation of SVG base maps in a well-researched cartographic style using the latest and most accurate open geographic data. Put simply, it will systematically generate a free atlas of the world with well coded SVG files. Arun Ganesh, Hugo Lopez and collaborators will receive $12.5K to achieve this.

VisualEditor, the system of WYSIWYG editing in display mode, has had a controversial start, but will be an inevitable feature of editing on WMF projects. A key challenge is to create a centralised register of all gadgets, with a programmatic understanding of how each relates to editing and an assessment of its popularity across projects. Grantees Eran Roz and Ravid Ziv, have received $4.5K to accomplish this preparatory task and on that basis to integrate high-priority gadgets into VisEd.

Wikidata Toolkit, proposed by Markus Krötzsch, a researcher at the University of Oxford and data architect for the Wikidata project, has been awarded $30K, the highest amount in this round. He will lead a small team of researchers and students at Dresden University of Technology to address a key problem surrounding Wikidata. Wikidata, a relatively new project largely supported by Wikimedia Germany, aims to create a free knowledge base about the world—names, dates, coordinates, relationships, URLs, and references—that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. However, in Krötzsch's words, "understanding this data requires technical means for querying and analysis that are not currently available. Even skilled developers have hardly any basis for working with Wikidata." The goal is to develop technical components to simplify "query answering" of Wikidata data; in technical terms, a robust and flexible query backend will be created to provide an API for running a variety of queries. The two main outcomes will be a Wikidata toolkit and a query web service.

The next round of IEG proposals will open on 1 March 2014.

• British Library follow-up: With the British Library's release of over one million digitized, free images, the Wikimedia Commons community is spearheading an effort to create an index of the full collection.
  

  

• Virtual internship openings: The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), with its Wikipedian in Residence and Digital Content Specialist Dominic McDevitt-Parks, has created a new virtual internship for Wikipedians. Two tracks are available—technical and community. Being a technical intern could include scripting an upload bot for the Wikimedia Commons or analyzing NARA's Wikimedia-related activities, while community interns would coordinate WikiProjects, act as NARA's point of contact, and communicating NARA initiatives to the relevant Wikimedia communities. Requirements for these positions are available on NARA's website.
• In the media
  • FDC chair endorses paid editing: Dariusz Jemielniak (Pundit), the chair of the Funds Dissemination Committee, has authored an article in the Daily Dot arguing that paid editing is something that cannot be controlled. Jemielniak continued, "Paid edits do and will take place on Wikipedia. Just ignoring this phenomenon will not make it go away. ... Wikipedia is too important and too valuable to let this threat grow."
  • Indian languages receive attention: The Indian broadsheet Daily News and Analysis published a short article on the 20 Indian-language Wikipedias.
• English Wikipedia Portal drive: An effort to bring all of the Main Page's portals, which are intended to serve as landing pages for specific topics but tend to be rarely edited, to featured portal status has been completed. The biography, mathematics, science, arts, geography, history, society, and technology portals are now featured.
• Commons video deleted: The acrimonious saga of a video which documented the making of a penis-drawn portrait of Jimmy Wales has come to a close with its deletion. The video and accompanying portrait laid bare a sharp divide in the greater Wikimedia community over the Wikimedia Commons' policies in regard to explicit or pornographic media, going so far as to be part of the impetus for a new resolution from the Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees. The six administrators closing this deletion discussion—the unusual number due to the oddly high-profile page—declined to publish their votes, saying only that "The principal determining factor in our choice was that the video can be reasonably interpreted as (sexual) harassment of an editor. Files which have the implication of attack (of which harassment is a form) are outside of Commons' scope."
• Ombudsman Commission applications due: Those wishing to apply for the Ombudsman Commission, which investigates complaints about violations of the Wikimedia privacy policy, must do so by 1 January of any timezone.
• Arbitration report: The "Ottoman Empire–Turkey naming dispute" case was closed. The evidence phase for both the Kafziel case and the Nightscream case will close on 29 December 2013.