Grants talk:IdeaLab/Encourage academic institutions and museums to contribute Wikipedia content, as part of the process of research, knowledge creation and dissemination.

1. It is already happening – I regularly run into contributions by museum/academic staff.
2. These contributions are not always of the high standard I would hope for – because everybody believes his or her museum, department, laboratory, research project or professor is Very Important. Nobody is free from vanity.
3. Would any of these institutions contribute resources (time) to editing articles on completely unrelated subjects, just to improve WP? I think not. If, say, an art museum would make available a professional writer for a few hours a week to improve articles about villages in India or Swedish garage bands, that could be helpful.
4. In today's world, universities, museums and other cultural institutions are struggling for attention, money and fame. In many ways they are commercial institutions, with P.R. and marketing departments. Science and culture are Big Money. WP is yet another promotional tool.
5. Museums and institutions are often cited as sources for WP articles. If they would directly contribute to WP, would they cite their self-published material, something WP policy opposes for regular volunteer editors?
6. Contributions need to be reviewed and edited. Inviting paid editors who do not have WP as their prime concern puts a big burden on us, volunteer editors. For every "professional" COI editor, you need volunteer editors to patrol their contributions. Exactly the type of volunteer editors we have a shortage of.
7. Some samples conjured up from my own editing history
   1. en:Macdonald Stewart Art Centre
   2. en:Lord Cultural Resources – art is business and Wikipedia a P.R.-platform
   3. more

Superp (talk) 09:57, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

GLAM-Wiki

Hi @MaryHutchison, Harish.pentapalli, Cole128, and Superp: there are already a number of communities which participate in what is called outreach:GLAM-Wiki outreach: outreach to cultural heritage institutions, especially those with interests in open data. We always need more volunteers to engage in these strategies, and help GLAM-Wiki professionals learn best practices for contributing. I would recommend exploring outreach:GLAM for more information about these strategies.

The Wikipedia Library has also created some best practices for libraries and archives, which have a similar research and information dissemination missions as Wikipedia, to participate productively at en:Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library/Research_libraries. I hope that you share and disseminate these materials, and help mentors these knowledge professionals as they participate in the community, Astinson (WMF) (talk) 15:57, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

April 12 Proposal Deadline: Is your project ready for funding?

The deadline for Individual Engagement Grant (IEG) submissions this round is April 12th, 2016. If you’ve developed your idea into a project that would benefit from funding, consider applying!

To apply, you must (1) create a draft request using the “Expand into an Individual Engagement Grant” button on your idea page, (2) complete the proposal entirely, filling in all empty fields, and (3) change the status from "draft" to "proposed." As soon as you’re ready, you should begin to invite any communities affected by your project to provide feedback on your proposal talk page.

If you have any questions about IEG or would like support in developing your proposal, we're hosting a few proposal help sessions this month in Google Hangouts:

• April 5th, 16:00 - 17:00 UTC
• April 8th 1:00 - 2:00 UTC
• April 12th 16:00 - 17:00 UTC

I'm also happy to set up an individual session. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 00:38, 2 April 2016 (UTC)