Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/WikiJournal 2023/Final Report
Report Status: Under review
Due date: 2024-01-30T00:00:00Z
Funding program: Wikimedia Community Fund
Report type: Final
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General information edit
This form is for organizations, groups, or individuals receiving Wikimedia Community Funds or Wikimedia Alliances Funds to report on their final results.
- Name of Organization: WikiJournal
- Title of Proposal: WikiJournal 2023
- Amount awarded: 116900 USD, 116900 USD
- Amount spent: 97356.65 USD
Part 1 Understanding your work edit
1. Briefly describe how your proposed activities and strategies were implemented.
As with previous years, the successful “Technical Editor” role has continued to be utilized with great effect, helping to free time by completing back-dated tasks and labor intensive editorial work. To aid in the efficient disruption of tasks and financial compensation to our Technical Editors, we have recently begun operating with “WorkMarket”. Two new roles within WikiJournal have also been implemented; a CEO and Administrative Assistant. While our CEO has taken several months off due to personal leave, during their time in charge the focus and direction of WikiJournals much improved. The administrative assistant has added much-needed coordination between our busy volunteers, helping to provide a cohesive work environment for all participants involved. 2023 has proved to be an excellent year for streamlining the operations within WikiJournals. We have resumed in-person engagement activities (e.g. EduWiki Conference 2023, Wikimania 2023, Open Access Week in Colombia) which target contributors from higher education, general community and Spanish-speaking chapters. Furthermore, we have participated in policy discussion around open publishing in Canada.
2. Were there any strategies or approaches that you felt were effective in achieving your goals?
Continuing to utilize the paid Technical Editors has contributed significantly to our improved output of research. Our new implementation of “WorkMarket”, while a lengthy initiation process, has helped automate task distribution thereby free-ing up valuable time for other members of the team to focus on growth and development. Our CEO and Administrative Assistant roles have also proved invaluable for progressing WikiJournals mission forward. To further bolster our outreach efforts, the use of WikiJournal branded material at relevant conferences has helped spread awareness of the project. Through our in-person outreach activities, we successfully recruited scholars to join editorial board and submit proposals for publication. We also created an introduction video with Spanish interpretation to further assist promoting our project in Spanish-speaking countries.
3. Would you say that your project had any innovations? Are there things that you did very differently than you have seen them done by others?
WikiJournal uses a new method of academic publishing without any cost for authors or readers, including providing authors with advanced tools to write their articles themselves directly online. This saves a large amount of editorial work. It also provides innovative methods of dissemination of published information, through the integration of published content across Wikimedia sister projects where appropriate. We have continued to be pioneers in transparency and digital readability within the academic space through the use of WikiData. We are continuing our innovation on publishing articles in two or more languages simultaneously. We are exploring with staff from the Wikimedia Colombia chapter to produce a special issue for researchers in Colombia to highlight their expertise.
4. Please describe how different communities participated and/or were informed about your work.
Our pursuit for global representation within our group has once again been advanced, with all 6 continents now represented by members of our team. Further to this, 5 continents are now represented by members of our Editorial Board, aiding in the dissemination of unbiased research across the globe. Through the year members of the team have represented WikiJournals at numerous conferences within North America, South America, Europe and Asia. Again, reinforcing our desire for transparency, our monthly meetings have continued to be documented and published in an open and accessible manner (insert link here) allowing any member of the community to follow and track progress of WikiJournals work.
5. Documentation of your impact. Please use the two spaces below to share files and links that help tell your story and impact. This can be documentation that shows your results through testimonies, videos, sound files, images (photos and infographics, etc.) social media posts, dashboards, etc.
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
6. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.
| A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups | Strongly agree |
| B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community | Strongly agree |
| C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups | Strongly agree |
| D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives | Strongly agree |
| E. Encourage the retention of editors | Agree |
| F. Encourage the retention of organizers | Agree |
| G. Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement. | Strongly agree |
7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?
The ability to publish and read latest advance in science without cost, is a great advantage for scholars of low socioeconomic status. It welcomes people of diverse backgrounds to participate in any of various roles across the project, including editorial board members, reviewers, and technical editors.
Part 2: Your main learning edit
8. In your application, you outlined your learning priorities. What did you learn about these areas during this period?
One of the new learning priorities we had this year was implementing a number of new roles within the organization, in order to optimize the workflow and increase engagement. We have learned that the addition of a CEO and admin assistant to the team has been very helpful in progressing the journal. Since the implementation of the new positions we have been able to create a new payment system that allows for international payments and automatically upload tasks to a server where contractors can apply for tasks - making it more accessible to work with the organization anywhere and in a more timely manner. The additional roles have also allowed a number of backlogged tasks to be completed, such as collation of data. Additionally, the new positions have been instrumental in increasing meaningful engagement in the journal - such as increasing engagement with academics, producing outreach materials, and engaging existing board members. We also sought to increase our engagement globally. During our efforts to increase global engagement we have learned a lot about the best ways to engage. We have found that one of the most effective ways to engage more people is through in person sessions. We were fortunate to have representatives from WikiJournal attend a number of conferences and meetings on our behalf, on 4 different continents. This has resulted in recruitment (and acceptance) of board members from 2 new continents (Asia and South America).
9. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities?
The conversation around the use of machine learning and AI emerged during Wikimania in Singapore. There is a growing concern in the Wikimedia community that chatbots and LLMs may replace Wikipedia as these models have used Wikipedia content to train the machines. It surprised some of us in attendance since some individuals in the movement believe that there is a growing need to generate new, reliable content rather than summarizing existing, published contents that LLMs have already begun to usurp the role of Wikipedia. While not originally planned (due to our team's language abilities), during one of the in-person talks, our presentation was translated into Spanish to help more people understand the presentation, as it was given in Colombia. We now have a translated presentation on YouTube, and by adding an additional language we have added a new group of people that can now engage that previously would not have been able to, massively increasing the potential reach of our project. During the implementation of the new positions, we ran into some unexpected difficulties when the CEO had to take time off. While we had managed prior to the implementation, we found that when we did not have a working CEO, progression on many fronts had slowed, highlighting the importance that role has played in our organization.
We also found that during in person events stickers were a great way to get our name out and using a QR code which could be scanned, brought people to our page.
10. How do you hope to use this learning? For instance, do you have any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future?
Having learned a lot this year regarding both engagement and the benefit of specific roles within the organization, we have a large scope to continue developing and improving. From our findings throughout this year regarding increasing engagement we have identified a few goals going forward, including increasing visibility of WikiJournals through a variety of mediums (one -pagers, posters, stickers, QR codes), attending as many in person events as possible, and trying to engage more academics. We have also seen the benefit of social media from others whilst at various conferences. Our goal for this next year is to increase our social media presence to help increase visibility. We have already begun to think about how this will look. Additionally, through speaking with various people during conferences and outwith. A strong emphasis has been put on the integration of WikiJournals into academics. We have plans to increase academic engagement by incorporating WikiJournals within Universities. We are also considering mechanisms for contents in multilingual WikiJournal articles to be incorporated into their respective Wikipedia languages (both English and non-English).
11. If you were sitting with a friend to tell them one thing about your work during this fund, what would it be (think of inspiring or fascinating moments, tough challenges, interesting anecdotes, or anything that feels important to you)?
What we often found is that reviewers were enthusiastic when they were informed that their reviews will help improve Wikipedia content. Authors and reviewers often agree with open publishing concept because many research libraries are facing budgetary constraints while most publishers are making large amounts of profit. During the pandemic, these publishers offered free access to research around COVID-19 and healthcare. As the pandemic regressed, the accessibility barriers have returned. This demonstrated that having free access to timely research, particularly on medicine and health sciences, benefit everyone as a whole.
12. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedia organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work. For instance, guides, training material, presentations, work processes, or any other material the team has created to document and transfer knowledge about your work and can be useful for others. Please share any specific resources that you are creating, adapting/contextualizing in ways that are unique to your context (i.e. training material).
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
Part 3: Metrics edit
13a. Open and additional metrics data
| Open Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Board members | # of board members across all journals of the project. | 80 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Authors | Editors who submit articles to journals of the project | 40 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Peer reviewers | Number of people who review articles. Each article submission requires at least two invited external peer reviewers. | 80 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Associate editors | Associate editors across all journals. | 30 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Additional Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Diversity of participants brought in by grantees | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of people reached through social media publications | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of activities developed | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Number of volunteer hours | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
13b. Additional core metrics data.
| Core metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | READERS
Readers of WikiJournal content is complicated to estimate, especially as content is integrated into Wikimedia projects where appropriate. A notable example is an article of reference ranges for several hormones (https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Reference_ranges_for_estradiol,_progesterone,_luteinizing_hormone_and_follicle-stimulating_hormone_during_the_menstrual_cycle), whose diagrams have been integrated into multiple Wikipedia articles, together amounting to a readership of over 250,000 per month. |
This has been a very complicated metric to estimate due to the nature of our work. We have some works that get over 2,000,000 views/year. Additionally some of the figures that are original to a WikiJournal but are uploaded to commons have been used on more than 6 wiki platforms (i.e. wikipedia usa, wikiversity, wikidata, etc.) .
Within the Academic publishing context: WikiJournal of Medicine and WikiJournal of Science are Scopus-indexed. In 2022, WikiJournal of Medicine has a CiteScore of 1.4 and ranked in the 42nd percentile of journals in its discipline. WikiJournal of Science has a CiteScore of 0.5 and ranked in the 13th percentile of journals in its category. The CiteScore for both journals are projected to rise for 2023 (not yet released). |
For the academic publishing, as we are indexed in SCOPUS, the journals are given a CiteScore which is available to everyone. This however grossly underrepresented the reach of our articles, as it does not account for readership, or use within Wiki spaces. Other methods of data collection have included techniques such as tracking page views. | ||
| Number of editors | Sum of editorial board members and associate editors. | 110 | 90 | We currently have 90 editorial board members and associate editors. We have had a few people resign in the past year, but this also includes the addition of some new board members. In 2024 we will be restructuring our editorial boards. | Internal list of board members |
| Number of organizers | This roughly corresponds to the number of members of the Administrative board, and will extend to a CEO and administrative assistant when hired. | 18 | 21 | This includes our administrative board, technical editors whom are essential to our work, our CEO, and our Administrative assistant. | Internal list of admin board and staff |
| Wikimedia Project | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikiversity | The contribution to Wikiversity equals the number of article submissions, as WikiJournal is currently hosted in Wikiversity. | 40 | 39 | During 2023 we received 39 article submissions. | This was collected by the authorship declaration forms that are submitted with each article. |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
14. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?
No
15. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future.
N/A
16. Use this space to link or upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your data collection (e.g., dashboards, surveys you have carried out, communications material, training material, etc).
- Upload Documents and Files
- Here is an additional field to type in URLs.
- N/A
Part 4: Organizational capacities & partnerships edit
17. Organizational Capacity
| A. Financial capacity and management | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| B. Conflict management or transformation | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| C. Leadership (i.e growing in potential leaders, leadership that fit organizational needs and values) | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| D. Partnership building | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| E. Strategic planning | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| F. Program design, implementation, and management | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| G. Scoping and testing new approaches, innovation | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| H. Recruiting new contributors (volunteer) | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| I. Support and growth path for different types of contributors (volunteers) | This has grown over the last year, the capacity is high |
| J. Governance | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| K. Communications, marketing, and social media | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| L. Staffing - hiring, monitoring, supporting in the areas needed for program implementation and sustainability | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| M. On-wiki technical skills | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| N. Accessing and using data | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| O. Evaluating and learning from our work | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| P. Communicating and sharing what we learn with our peers and other stakeholders | This capacity has grown but it should be further developed |
| N/A | |
| N/A |
17a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
Other
17b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build capacities? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
Lack of staff time to participate in capacity building/training, Lack of volunteer time to participate in capacity building/training, Lack of financial resources
18. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your organizational capacity has grown, and areas where you require support?
Even with the existence of paid administrative roles, the project’s main strength is the participation of approximately 100 volunteers who drive the project forward.
19. Partnerships over the funding period.
| A. We built strategic partnerships with other institutions or groups that will help us grow in the medium term (3 year time frame) | Strongly agree |
| B. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to bring in more contributors from underrepresented groups | Strongly agree |
| C. The partnerships we built with other institutions or groups helped to build out more content on underrepresented topics/groups | Strongly agree |
19a. Which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
Board members’ outreach, Staff hired through the fund, Volunteers from our communities
19b. Which of the following factors hindered your ability to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors.
Limited funding period, Other
20. Please share your learning about strategies to build partnerships with other institutions and groups and any other learning about working with partners?
The ability to have WikiJournal representatives participating in conferences or other events is a major driver to form partnerships with other institutions and groups. WikiJournal has a major need for peer reviewers of submitted articles, and partnerships with academic institutions has a lot of potential to attract more reviewers.
Part 5: Sense of belonging and collaboration edit
21. What would it mean for your organization to feel a sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement?
WikiJournal publishes scholarly articles at no cost for authors or readers, and article content is integrated into Wikimedia projects where appropriate, and therefore, it is already making all participants belong to Wikimedia and the free knowledge movement. It means a greater contribution to the world of knowledge, and therefore also a greater impact, as compared to conventional journals that require payment for viewing content. With our global reach, we feel the need to support knowledge dissemination in non-English speaking countries in their native languages.
22. How has your (for individual grantees) or your group/organization’s (for organizational grantees) sense of belonging to the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?
Increased significantly
23. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.
The fund has been integral not only to our daily operations, but also our ability to meet, network and collaborate with the wonderful members who make up this vibrant and diverse community. We have had the opportunity to meet many members of the Wikimedia community this year at conferences around the globe, putting faces to all the hard work which goes on in the background. This has greatly improved our sense of belonging to the Wikimedia movement, and something we cherish and hope to continue moving forward.
Through work, an editorial board member also participated in policy discussion in a conference around the open publishing movement. This raised the profile of WikiJournal and Wikimedia, and made conference attendees aware of a new open publishing opportunity.
24. How has your group/organization’s sense of personal investment in the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement changed over the fund period?
Increased significantly
25. If you would like to, please share why it has changed in this way.
The continual expansion of the WikiJournals movement is beginning to bring to fruition the real-world impact that we can have by doing the work that we are doing. Being able to see the tangible output from our countless hours of work brings a great deal of personal satisfaction to our members, and helps to motivate the team to continue their significant personal contributions to the free knowledge movement. The personal investment of our team continues to grow as we see the impact of our work reaching further afield.
26. Are there other movements besides the Wikimedia or free knowledge movement that play a central role in your motivation to contribute to Wikimedia projects? (for example, Black Lives Matter, Feminist movement, Climate Justice, or other activism spaces) If so, please describe it below.
Examples of organizations that inspire to contribute to open access research and publishing thereof include the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and WikiJournal is a member of those organizations.
Supporting Peer Learning and Collaboration edit
We are interested in better supporting peer learning and collaboration in the movement.
27. Have you shared these results with Wikimedia affiliates or community members?
Yes
27a. Please describe how you have already shared them. Would you like to do more sharing, and if so how?
The outcome for the majority of our fund goes into the background logistics and operations of processing research articles for suitable diamond open-access level publication. The result of our funding is therefore the physical processing and production of articles which are open for everyone to access. We also spend a significant amount of the fund getting team members to conferences around the world, where they can connect and collaborate with members of the Wikimedia community.
28. How often do you currently share what you have learned with other Wikimedia Foundation grantees, and learn from them?
We do this occasionally (less than once a month)
29. How does your organization currently share mutual learning with other grantees?
We try to attend as many conferences as possible to network with other Wikimedia Foundation outfits, and therefore share our work and learn from them. This has been increasingly important to us at WikiJournals, and we therefore attended EduWiki Conference in Serbia, Wikimania in Singapore, Open Access Week in Colombia and WikiConference North America in Toronto. These activities spreaded across 4 continents this year.
Part 6: Financial reporting and compliance edit
30. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.
97356.65
31. Local currency type
USD
32. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
- The financial report is currently undergoing board review and will be submitted as soon as it has been reviewed. The final total amount may change after board review.
33. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.
N/A
34. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?
34a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.
19,544. We did not have staff on during the whole period as the new positions were not initiated until May and one of the staff members went on unpaid leave.
34b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?
A. Propose to use the underspent funds within this Fund period with PO approval
34c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.
We have been approved to use these funds whilst awaiting review of another grant application.
35. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?
As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.
36. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
Yes
37. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
Yes
38. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.