Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos International Team 2024 coordination

Feedback from the Middle East and Africa Regional Funding Committee on your proposal

Dear Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos International Coordination Team,

Thank you very much for your proposal, describing your activities and projects in support of the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement. The Regional Committee has initially reviewed the proposal, and wishes to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review.

The committee appreciated your commitment to continue the work with this beloved community-based event and is grateful for the clear presentation of the proposal, and its timeline and strategies to implement it. It would improve the Committee’s understanding of your plans if you’d be so kind as to elaborate on our following specific few questions, considering the future and the scalability of this campaign, how do you plan to enlarge the scope of it to:

• Build the capacities of different local communities across different regions to organize this contest themselves and encourage communities to incorporate this campaign into their general community activities?
  • Generally, like other global Wikimedia contests such as WLM, WLE, WLA, participating communities organize the campaign themselves. The Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos only provide central coordination of all local organizers, the same way the WLM,WLF, WLA, WLE International Team provides central coordination for the participating community. That said, this year, we plan to organize at least two capacity building training sessions for local organizers on how to effectively organize the contest to achieve its objectives. We have also designed the best practices in organizing WPWP Campaign in your community that would be shared with all local organizers. We believe that these efforts would help them build capacities to effectively organize the campaign in their various communities. While many communities in countries such as Macedonia, Benin, Belgium, Turkey, Nigeria, Tanzania, Serbia have already incorporated the campaign into their general community activities as evident in their consistency in the campaign organizations annually, we plan to have a separate discussion with other local organizers to incorporate it into their general community activities.

• Introduce innovations in the campaign (new innovative ways of engaging with communities, or innovate e.g. organizing thematic years) to avoid repetitiveness?
  • This campaign, by its nature, does not allow or encourage repetitiveness because images are only added to Wikipedia articles where they are specifically lacking, and there is no way to add the same image to the same articles every year, unlike photography contests such as WLM, WLF where there is a possibility of photographing the same objects are annually. One innovation we will introduce this year is that there will be a special prize category for women. For example, users who add images to a high number of female articles.

• Provide more language support to run the campaigns locally?
  • Historically, the campaign has impacted more than 270 Wikipedia languages. In order to provide more language support for the campaign, this year, we now have regional ambassadors from the 8 regions who will facilitate communication, support implementation of the campaign in these regions. In addition, this tool developed for the campaign by Magnus Manske also supports many languages.

• Extend to other WM platforms apart from Wikipedia, e.g. connect to WikiData, and other language versions of Wikipedia?
  • The campaign is already linked to other language versions of Wikipedia, and the tracking tools can monitor contributions across all language editions of Wikipedia. Connecting to WikiData is a valuable suggestion, and it would require a multi-level technical approach and discussion. We will plan for it and conduct a pilot with WikiData in the 2025 edition to allow ample time to review its technical possibilities. As it stands our tracking tools cannot track contributions made to WikiData. But it is something we would consider trying in 2025.

While elaborating on your proposed plans, the committee members made the following requests:

• Your metrics are set at last year’s proposal’s levels, while the results suggest more ambitious goals could be targeted. Please be so kind as to revise them.
  • This has been fixed.

• Clarification is needed on your staff time: Your staff costs are indicated for 8 months work while last year you clarified they were meant for 8 weeks, please be so kind as to clarify which timeframe is valid for the staff costs this year.
  • We apologize for the error the staff time remains 8 weeks.

• In terms of your overall budget, we would like to see an explanation of the high staff cost for 2 persons, and if it was possible to reduce the cost for staff and add a budget line dedicated to micro-grants to help run a higher number of local events?
  • The role of assistance coordinator has now been removed (and its cost removed from the budget) but we will not be providing micro-grant because of the complexity of sending funds across countries.

• It would be utterly useful if as part of your 2024 planned campaign evaluation, you’d add the evaluation of the regional interest for the campaign, how many people got to learn about it, how many turned to participant, from which communities and regions?

In terms of the schedule for our review process, please complete your review and responses to committee feedback by 01st of May 2024. After this time, the Regional Committee will begin a final review of the proposal to make a formal decision.

Thanks again for your work on the proposal and supporting our review. On behalf of the Regional Committee. Pellagia Njau (talk) 12:46, 10 April 2024 (UTC)

• Pellagia Njau, we have responded and thank you for your patience. Best, Reading Beans (talk) 08:52, 27 April 2024 (UTC)

Additional comment

Pellagia Njau, based on the MEA grant committee recommendations above, we will provide $2500 for micro-grants for local communities that may have challenges accessing the WMF rapid grant. Thanks to the Grant team for the recommendations. Reading Beans (talk) 09:55, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

General Support Fund Approved at Local Currency Equivalent of 11,800 USD

Thank you for submitting your application seeking General Support Funds - Wikimedia Community Fund. The Middle East and Africa Regional Committee and Staff have reviewed your application and recommended partial funding in the amount 11,880 USD for the period of July 1, 2024 - November 30, 2024.

We value that WPWP is a beloved community-based event in the Wikimedia movement and you have provided a clear presentation of the proposal, its timeline and the strategies to implement the campaign.

After a thorough review of your proposal, we see that one of the main issues in this application is related to the scalability of this campaign, in terms of building up the capacities of different local communities across different regions so that they can organize this contest themselves. What are innovative ways that you can consider to engage with different communities to support them in organizing themselves? For example, organizing thematic years and scaling up in terms of involving other Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata. We recommend that you take some time to think about it this year, particularly the regional uptake of the campaign.

We also see that staff costs are considerably high given the timeframe of the campaign. We recommend reducing this compensation considerably.

We wish you the very best in the start of your journey and look forward to learning more about the impact you achieve.

Best regards from the MEA Regional Committee and Staff FElgueretly-WMF (talk) 06:25, 9 June 2024 (UTC)