Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Alliances Fund/Tea Knowledge and Culture in Taiwan-Establishing a Shared Platform via Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons
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Applicant information edit
A. Organization type
- Mission-aligned organization
B. Organization name
- Taiwanese Specialty Tea Society in Europe
E. Do you have an account on a Wikimedia project?
- Yes
E1. Please provide the main Wikimedia Username (required) and Usernames of people related to this proposal.
- Hsiaopu.Chen
Angie Yitsu Chen
G. Have you received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation before?
- Applied previously and did receive a grant
H. Have you received grants from any non-wiki organization before?
- Yes
- H1. Which organization(s) did you receive grants from?
- Ministry of Culture of Taiwan
- H2. Please state the size of these grants from the following options.
- Between 5,000-50,000 USD
- H3. What type of organization (s) did you receive grants from?
- Government
- H4. What percentage of your program budget do other funders contribute to?
- Not applicable
1. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?
- No
1a. Fiscal organization name.
- N/A
2. Are you legally registered?
- Yes
3. What type of organization are you?
- Non profit organisation
4. What is your organization or group's mission and how does it align with the Wikimedia movement?
- Taiwanese Specialty Tea Society in Europe aims at facilitating the development of an environment in which tea knowledge and tea culture from Taiwan can be recognized internationally through education, events, and collaborations with relevant stakeholders. As tea is the most consumed beverage next to the water, we believe the proper and systematic knowledge of tea and tea culture should be established and widely propagated for free.
5. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has. (optional)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/251951379989390 https://www.joinclubhouse.com/club/%E8%8D%89%E4%BA%BA%E6%9C%A8x%E6%AD%90%E6%B4%B2%E5%8F%B0%E7%81%A3%E7%B2%BE%E5%93%81%E8%8C%B6%E5%AD%B8%E6%9C%83
Grant proposal edit
6. Please state the title of your proposal.
- Tea Knowledge and Culture in Taiwan: Establishing a Shared Platform via Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons
9. Where will this proposal be implemented?
- Taiwan
10. Indicate if it is a local, international, or regional proposal and if it involves several countries?
- Local
10a. If you have answered international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.
10b. Are there any specific sub-regions or areas where your proposal will be implemented?
- N/A
11. What is the challenge or problem you are addressing and why is this important?
- We try to solve the challenges mainly regarding the lack of accessible information on a wide range of topics fundamental to tea knowledge. The potential viewership of tea articles on Wikipedia is expected to be high. The strong demand for tea knowledge in Taiwan can be illustrated with information on Google Trends, a website that analyzes the popularity of search queries on Google Search. In terms of the number of searches conducted on the Google search engine, the popularity of tea has been slightly below the one of coffee, while tea has been over 50 times more popular than wine since 2017 in Taiwan. The consequences of the lack of this information on the internet include misinformation and the threat of cultural extinction.
We aim to target three forms of fundamental information about tea:
- 1. Basic statistics about tea, such as tea-producing regions and the amount of tea produced in these regions.
Lacking such statistics, even experts can find it hard to tell whether specific yield figures in certain regions are realistic. As a result, tea producers commonly mislabel their products for higher profit while consumers lack the ways to make informed decisions. Mislabeling, practiced by many tea providers locally, has been a major factor inhibiting the development of the tea industry in Taiwan. Besides undermining consumers' trust, mislabeling makes source tracing hard so that people's health is at risk.
- 2. Basic information about tea, such as cultivars, major components, and processing methods.
The extent of misinformation regarding the health benefits of tea is enormous as the fundamental knowledge is not easily accessible for accurate information to base for the public. As tea is commonly associated with health benefits, more reliable information regarding basic information about tea is desirable. More recently, misinformation regarding how tea prevents the spread of the coronavirus has been widely circulated in Taiwan, an arguably undesirable phenomenon that can be addressed with a timely report of the latest scientific findings.
- 3. Tea culture in Taiwan
While having vibrant tea cultures for centuries, documentation of tea culture in Taiwan is scant. Several hidden gems of the culture are under the threat of extinction under the pressure of autocratic government in the latter half of the 20th century and rapid globalization since the 1990s. For example, Sio-Po-Kua, a form of work song/banter poem popular in the tea-producing regions in Taiwan before WWII, can only be performed by a handful of people above 80 years old. Such a phenomenon is generally perceived to be one result of a 38-year martial law, terminated in 1987. The preservation of some tea cultures under threat in Taiwan is still neglected by both the local and central governments partly because of ideological issues. At the same time, non-profit organizations usually lack the capacity to carry the burden of preservation.
12. What is the main objective of your proposal? Please state why you think partnering with Wikimedia Movement helps to achieve this objective?
- We would like to achieve the following objectives in our year-long proposal:
Create quality Wikipedia articles about tea knowledge developed in Taiwan, including intros on the cultivars, the crafting techniques of types of teas, statistics info on the tea-producing regions including the social-economic development in such areas. Besides Wikipedia, we believe Wikiversity, Wikispecies, and Wikivoyage can also benefit from the entries.
13. Describe your main strategies to achieve this objective?
- Through this project, we aim at making fundamental tea knowledge accessible through three main approaches:
- 1. Gaps Alleviation Program:
The distribution of information about tea is largely inhibited by geography and age gaps. This program aims to alleviate these gaps by collaborating with two associations, Taiwan Tea Society 台灣茶葉學會 and 昊天嶺文史工作室, dedicated to tea knowledge and Taiwanese literature. While these professional networks hold valuable knowledge and are willing to share, they haven't engaged with Wikimedia communities mainly because they lack a bridge between their networks and the existing Wikimedia community.
Some knowledge stayed in the remote areas because these materials are not digitized. The aging population, which usually lacks the capacity to digitize these materials, is also commonly seen in these regions. To collect these materials, the most effective way is to visit key areas and institutions, such as the local farmer's associations and libraries, and interview or scan the material we need. It has been a proven way to collect these materials, as one of our members Lin JIn-Cheng 林金城 has been conducting these activities for two decades, with good connections, and has published nearly twenty books on folk literature in tea regions in Taiwan.
- 2. Capacity-building Program:
The collected materials from the Gap Alleviation Program will help contribute to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. By building a crew of regular workshop participants, we aim at enhancing their capacity to convert the collected raw materials into quality Wikimedia content. As the demand for quality information about tea is high, we expect to recruit sufficient motivated participants to contribute. In a small-scale recruitment event held by us last December, nearly 80 individuals contacted us expressing their interest in joining our project. With larger pubic recruitment events through social media, we expect to recruit members from various backgrounds capable of taking leadership for different aspects of our project and for developing potential future projects.
- 3. Public Relation Program:
Familiar with tea events in Taiwan, we expect to reach audiences who are not familiar with Wikimedia communities. As tea is one of the essential aspects of people's daily life in Taiwan, there is a great potential to grow the population of the Wikimedia community in Taiwan through various media channels. For example, tea exhibitions are among the most important events for tea enthusiasts every year. By participating in these events, we expect to reach many tea enthusiasts who are likely to contribute their knowledge on Wikimedia and tea producers who commonly stay in remote areas except for events like exhibitions.
14. Are you running any in-person events or activities?
- Yes
15. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified content knowledge gaps?
- Age (regency) , Geography, Language, Socioeconomic Status
16. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or thematic focus.
- Education, Culture, heritage or GLAM , Other, Diversity
- Right to Health
17. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select all categories that apply.
- Geographic , Linguistic / Language, Age
18. Please tell us more about your target participants.
- Ancient-Quan dialect, a dialect that originated in the tea-producing region QuanZhou in south-east China, was brought to Taiwan by immigrants over three hundred years ago. Many of these immigrants settled down as tea producers in several tea-producing regions in Taiwan nowadays. As such, while the dialect has largely disappeared from where it originated, it is preserved in rural Taiwan as the tea-producing areas are not easily accessible from the city.
Due to the aging population of these regions, the dialect is seriously endangered. People living in these areas are underrepresented in several ways. Most of them lack the skill to write the language they speak, so it can be hard for them to participate in the public discourse online in meaningful ways. On top of that, the geographic distance and mobility issues due to their age make it hard for them to interact with people beyond their neighborhood.
19. Do you have plans to work with other Wikimedia communities, groups or affiliates in your country, or in other countries, to implement this proposal?
- Yes
19a. If yes, please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.
- We first launched our idea of forming a series of joint workshops with Wikimedia Taiwan to improve the quality and quantity of Taiwanese tea-related pages on Wikipedia via the following Wikimedia communities on Facebook: Wikimedia Taiwan, Taiwan Wikimedia Community, and A Room of Wikiwomen's Own. On-going, valuable conversations have then taken place between our members and the staff of Wikimedia Taiwan since last August, as we continually learn about the realistic expectation regarding the steep learning curve in the initial capacity building phase, and in what way our project can be challenging, and why it can be important to Wikipedia.
We also begin to gather partners from the former corporations and interest them with the proposal. Our press releasing partners such as "僑委會全球資訊網", "歐台聲", "台灣光華雜誌與中央廣播電台/光華在線", "台灣茶葉學會" and so, in which a several have already joined the discussion or reported the proposal, and others have shown their attentiveness to participate.
19b. If no, please tell us the reasons why it has not been possible to make these connections.
- N/A
20. Will you be working with other external non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?
- Yes
20a. If yes, please describe these partnerships.
- With the establishment of our organization, we aim to create a clear identity for Taiwanese tea and tea culture through assembling, examining, studying, and recording the local shreds of evidence of the tea history and the building process of tea culture and tea-related aesthetics in Taiwan. The following mentioned partners are those who have cooperated with us in the past year; our overlapped goals show a high possibility of us working accordantly on our proposal to Wikimedia.
D-School of National Taiwan University 台大創新設計學院, 昊天嶺文史工作室, and the Ministry of Culture Taiwan had strongly involved in the cultural project we built to collect and introduce the knowledge of Sio-Po-Kua 相褒歌, the assemblage of banter poems in Taiwan's tea fields, to the audiences in Germany (https://www.lkee.de/Unser-Landkreis/PressPI-Landrat-er%C3%B6ffnete-mit-Repr%C3%A4sentant-von-Taiwan-Ausstellung.php?object=tx,2112.1&ModID=7&FID=2112.4614.1&NavID=2112.7&La=1). Prof. Chia-Fen Tsai and Jin-Cheng Lin have been dedicated to preserving and creating a database for the almost forgotten Sio-Po-Kuan materials for over a decade, and even Sio-Po-Kua has been recognized as the embryonic form of the famous Taiwanese Opera 歌仔戲, but until today, many Taiwaners have never heard of it and there is no related page about Sio-Po-Kua on Wikipedia.
農委會茶業改良場 and 台灣茶葉學會 are two of the most credible organizations that focus on collecting and researching the local tea knowledge in Taiwan. 農委會茶業改良場 is a national level tea research center that specializes in tea cultivar breeding, technical development in tea cultivation, tea processing, and tea crafting machinery. 台灣茶葉學會 is a group composed of tea academics who study either from tea science, agriculture, to the art history of tea. These two institutes probably hold up the richest Taiwanese tea-related knowledge database throughout their periodicals, papers, and book collections. We have signed a cooperation agreement with 台灣茶葉學會 in March 2021 and gradually started to assist them to digitalize their database, and we also have begun to involve in a few projects that is originally initiated by 農委會茶業改良場 via 台灣茶葉學會.
In each project, we tried to connect a few organizations that have never worked together before. For instance, one current project we work on is introducing the flavors and the notes of Taiwanese tea in artistic ways to the audiences of Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Germany from October 28 to 30, 2022, which we invite governmental units like the Ministry of Culture Taiwan to fund partially the project, museums like Museums für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg and 坪林茶葉博物館 to provide insight of curation, local tea farmers associations and academic institutes like 台灣茶葉學會, 鹿野紅烏龍合作社 and 中興大學產學研鏈結中心 to participate as curators. Through such an example, we have shown the ability of how our organization can reach out and find the connections between potential collaborators, thus organizing a strong network to benefit all our partners.
20a. If yes, indicate sharing of resources from these partners (in kind support, grants, donations, payments).
- We only receive in-kind support from all the partner mentioned here.
21. Please tell us how your organization is structured.
- Taiwanese Specialty Tea Society in Europe consist of five core members: one president, Angie Chen, one vice president, Hsiao-Pu Chen, two directors Dr. Yu-Wen Hsieh and Wesley Charles Fu, and a supervisor Su Hui-Hsin. All of the core members will be involved in the work.
22. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?
- The volunteered planners in the organization Taiwanese Specialty Tea Society in Europe will become the team to initiate and executive this proposal, which includes 4 core members. The responsibility for the development of the project plan will be shared by Chen Hsiao-Pu, Angie Yitsu Chen, Hsieh Yu-Wen, and Fu Yu. Chen Hsiao-Pu, the current vice president of the organization will be responsible for managing deliverables according to the plan; Angie Yitsu Chen, the president of the organization, will be in charge of establishing a project schedule and determining each phase; Hsieh Yu-Wen, the HR Director of the organization, will recruit project volunteers and assign key tasks to project team members; Fu Yu, the media manager of the organization, will arrange thus release the press materials and document the process of the project. Till today, the Taiwanese Specialty Tea Society in Europe is an organization that runs on the donation and the time dedication of its members.
23. Please state if your organization or group has a Strategic Plan that can help us further understand your proposal. You can also upload it here.
- No
Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation edit
24. What do you hope to learn from this proposal?
- 1. Are people living in remote regions more aware of Wikipedia and the value of knowledge sharing in general? Do they know how to share their knowledge and culture with others, either through Wikimedia or other channels?
- 2. What factors motivated participants in our regular workshop to continue to connect and maybe contribute more actively? What factors act as barriers?
- 3. What types of support and activities are most interesting to participants who want to learn more about the Wikimedia community?
- 4. How was our new approach/strategy effective in bringing in communities we hadn’t worked with before? What didn’t work out as expected?
Core Metrics edit
25. Enter a description of the metric and a number in the target field. If the metric does not apply to you, enter N/A for not applicable.
| Core metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | New participant: 150
Returning participant: 10 For Gaps Alleviation Program, we will approach individuals in tea producing regions who may not be aware of wikiprojects. They can participate by contributing valuable pictures of tea cultivars, pests, processing methods for Wikimedia Commons. For senior individuals, they can contribute by performing the endangered folk songs in the area for Wikimedia Commons. For Capacity-building Program, we will recruit workshop participants who will mainly contribute to Wikipedia. For Public Relation Program, we will meet potential stakeholders who are likely to collaborate with us for potential Wikimedia project in the future. |
160 |
| Number of editors | New participant: 8
Returning participant: 2 |
10 |
| Number of organizers | For Capacity-building Program, we plan to recruit at least two experienced Wikipedian who can help us build a crew of competent Wikipedia editors. We will also have advisors and coordinators for our general operation and public events. | 6 |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | Created fundamental tea articles (主要品種、主要產區、製茶工藝、文化、重要人物、重要出版品) | 150 |
| Wikipedia | Improved Wikipedia articles about tea in Taiwan （台灣茶、台灣茶藝、文山包種茶、臺灣高山茶、台茶八號、台茶十八號、台茶12號、東方美人茶、梨山茶） | 9 |
| Wikimedia Commons | Images of cultivars, processing methods and equipments, evaluation methods and equipments. | 800 |
| Wikimedia Commons | Videos of folk music performances and interviews in tea producing regions which can contribute to our understanding of the context of the wikipedia articles we produce. | 30 |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
25a. If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation. (optional)
- We expect a high number of people reached through social media publications and offline events such as participating in the Taiwan International Tea Expo 2022 or Global Tea Expo 2022, the largest two tea exhibitions in Taiwan. These reaches will not directly reflect on the core metrics, but we believe they will encourage more people to contribute to the Wikimedia movement.
26. What other information will you be collecting to learn about the impact of your work? (optional)
- N/A
27. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?
- For online events, we will mainly use the four measurment tools: Wikimedia hashtag search, Wiki Loves Competitions Tools, Event Metrics, Programs & Events Dashboard.
For offline events, we will use photos, videos and paper-based records.
28. How do you hope to share these results so that others can learn from them?
- Create a video of our experience, Create a training workshop to show others what we learned, Share results on social media, Share results with our communities, I would like to receive support from the Foundation to discover how I can share my learning
Financial Proposal edit
29. What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency.
- 366664 TWD
30. What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?
- 12222.13 USD
31. & 32. Please provide a budget for the amount of funding requested.
- Please visit the following link:
33. What do you do to make sure there is a good management of funds?
- We will use professional accounting service to make sure that the fund is well-managed.
34. How will you contribute towards creating a supportive environment for participants using the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy?
- To be our workshop participants, they will have to sign a code of conduct regarding anit-harassment and anti-prejudice policy. Events coordinators and recruiters will provide detailed explanations regarding the policy to avoid any misunderstanding. The degree of sanctions against the violators of the policy will be proportionate to the degree of harm caused by the violation to deter potential violations. We will also offer necessary assistance to anyone who suffers from any breach of the policy.
35. Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.
- Other public document(s):
Final message edit
By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.
36. We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
- Yes
Feedback edit
- Please add any feedback to the grant discussion page only. Any feedback added here will be removed.