Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Documenting DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art archives in commons (ID: 22374601)

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

@SoniaBudini, Kristi Çunga, Irdiism, and Leeturtle: Hello, I'm Chris, a program officer at the Wikimedia Foundation supporting funding needs for the CEE/Central Asia region. Thanks for your proposal to support this partnership with the DebatikCenter aimed at increasing access to contemporary Albanian artwork. I appreciate your efforts to collaborate with the institution to address this knowledge gap. Please see my comments and questions below:

• The proposal mentions that the activities represent a particular User Group, but it is not named in the proposal. Can you confirm what user group is associated with this proposed work?

This project is part of the Wikimedia Community User Group Albania

• In terms of outreach for participants and possible support for this project, have you reached out to the Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group?

Yes, we reached out to WoALUG via email. We always reach out to them with project proposals and ideas and to get feedback.

• I see that your target audience is primarily focused on art practitioners who would be new to Wikimedia projects. I think there are a lot of potential benefits to inviting this kind of audience for training. However, the expected outcomes of the project in terms of content contributons across Commons, Wikidata, and Albanian Wikipedia are closer to what we would expect to see for edit-a-thons where volunteers are primarily experienced editors. Historically, we have seen that it can take sustained training to support newcomers to build important skills related to contribution and community interaction. Furthermore, newcomers do not always have sufficient time to contribute in the way that experienced volunteers do. Given these concerns, do you think that your metrics and evaluation plan for the event should rely heavily on content contribution outcomes, or are there other outcomes or benefits that training may have for this group of practitioners that you could report on?

Indeed this target group is not exposed to the practices of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia related projects, but this is also the reason why their work is not reflected in SQ Wikipedia, which we are aiming to change with this project. The good news is that one of the members of this group has extensive esperience with open access publishing and fully undeerstands the importance of exposing Albanian contemporary art archives in SQ Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. In addition, to make sure that we will not face the challenges mentioned above, we have had many informative sessions with this group during the last two quarters of 2023 before applying for the grant. During these sessions, we explained initially the importance of publishing these materials in digital commons and got confirmation and reasurances about the dedication of this group to move forward with this. We know this team for many years and can confirm that there is dedication to do the preliminary work to organise the materials in a structured way, get all the sources in place and also spend even more energy and time not only during the sessions and gatherngs but also go beyond the metrics.

• Thank you for preparing your event with mentors experienced in the projects this project is aimed at. How do you plan to invite experienced contributors to the events? Will you be using community channels and spaces on Albanian Wikipedia, Commons, or Wikidata, or on relevant social media channels for Albanian Wikimedians?

We'll be using our communication channels, also the channels of Open Labs (mattermost, Telegram, Forum, weekly meetings, our local Hackerspace. Since CEE Hub meeting in Tbilisi, some of our members are part of different telegram chats were we can spread the word for the events we organize. Last but not least a great place to share our workshop schedule is via newsletter of CEE Hub.

• The staffing needs for this events are fairly high relative to other events for a series of edit-a-thons. Furthermore, the total budget for this project is at the maximum permitted for Rapid Funds, which means that this program cannot be scaled within the funding program. If this proposal is funded, how do you hope to sustain the work when the grant period is done?

The reason for this, is due to the efforts needed to coordinate, organise the materials with a group of people that will share their expertise in the field (which we don't have). We had a similar approach in the previous grant project and it seemed to work quite well. The amount of work that needs to be done to organise the materials before adding them to the various Wikimedia projects is a lot and the time neeeded to work on this is considerable. In terms of the work planned to be done after the grant period is over, we have planned to have one person at least from this team to be part of our monthly activities for 2024 and we have reasurances about the participation i the next edit-a-thons we are planning in 2024. We host monthly meetings and edit-a-thons with a specific theme and we have agreed to have Albanian Contemporary Art in the focus throughout 2024. When you're able, please respond to my questions above, and let me know if you need any clarifications. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 17:28, 15 December 2023 (UTC)

Review of Wikidata experience

As this proposal mentions Wikidata, I have performed a review of the team members' experience and record on that project.

• Neutral SoniaBudini: They have no experience on Wikidata
• Neutral Kristi Çunga: They have no experience on Wikidata
• Weak oppose Leeturtle: They have a modest editing history at Wikidata. In particular, every item they have created has been deleted, mostly for being empty. Their non-creation edits seem reasonable. The fact that they have been unable to create an item successfully suggests that they would not be a good choice for a Wikidata trainer at this time.
• ? There is no global account for "Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei".
• Weak oppose Irdiism: The have a modest editing history here at Wikidata. They have created four items, all of which have been deleted as empty. Their non-creation edits seem reasonable, with an odd bias towards unhelpfully vague descriptions (e.g. "cultural heritage monument" replacing "ruined castle"). The fact that they have not yet succeeded in creating an item suggests that they would not be a good candidate for Wikidata trainer at this time.

Bovlb (talk) 00:14, 28 December 2023 (UTC)

Hi Bovlb,

Just to clarify, Wikidata entries are only one of the components of the project. The main component is contributions to Wikimedia Commons. in any case, we have took many steps towards increasing human capacities in this direction. more specifically:

> Previous similar project (CHwB Albania archives):

Our previous project where we teached other people to edit Wikidata was Documenting CHwB Albania archives in commons (CHwB Albania archives). When we submitted our report there were no comments towards this from the WMF staff.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Documenting_CHwB_Albania_archives_in_commons

> Team members participating in Wikidata trainings

Leeturtle, one of our team members, and long time Wikipedian, has participated during the last decade in various Wikimedia meetings in Europe, where Wikidata trainings have happened. In addition, this is not the first time that mentorship about wikidata has happened. In addition, two other members of our use group, Irdi and Sonia, have been in Tbilisi at CEE Hub meeting 2023 which also included wikidata related activities for Wikimedians. Other team members that are part of this project also got training from Marios, member of the Greek User Group, during Open Source Conference Albania, specifically about Wikidata.

Wikidata contibutions vs. Wikidata mentorship

The majority of the events that are done by our user group during the years has been in a volunteer basis, and we have seen in quite a few times that such reviews are focused only on the number of edits. We understand that when it comes to decision making being data driven is important, but hosting events, making sure that everything runs fine and teaching newcommers that participate in these events is a considerable effort and time that it goes without saying that this approach has an impact on the number of edits of each team members. in other words, one can focus its time contributed to the Wikimedia projects in growing the number of individual edits, or facilitate and host events that will teach others to do so. Hopefully the number of edits is not the main criteria of judgement of the contributors of volunteers of our user group.

Different skillsets needed for the project VS. number of edits

Members of this project have various skillsets that are needed for the sucsessful implementation of this project. Given the area we are focusing on this project, which has not been a focus area in Albanian Wikipedia contributors in this structured way and amount of contributions.

Some examples of the skillset needed for the implementation of the project other than just adding only wikidata entries include:

-Sonia: is the main project manager of the project (project manager, responsible for the operational part of the project including, grant application, grant report, documentation )

-Kristi: is the graphic designer that will work on promotional materials, online and offline. Will also handle the printing process.

-Vincent is the co-director of punctum books, which is a well established independent open-access publisher. Vincent is also the director of the Thoth project (https://thoth.pub/about) an open metadata management and dissemination platform mainly focused on books. In other words Vincent has a very good understanding of Wikidata and other Wikimedia related projects. Last but not least, Vincent is the main contact point who will be responsible to organise the materials from the contemporary art project in Albania, a task that would be impossible to achieve without the expertise of a person like Vincent that combines the two worlds, Wikidata and the contemporary art scene know how in Albania.

-Irdiism: although Irdis engagement in this project is focused in financial reporting, Irdi has started contributing to wikidata last year and has already experience with mentoring newcommers to the project. Irdi has been an integral part of the user group including facilitating the presence of Wikidata workshops and presentations during OSCAL conference.

Last but not least, we assume that the wikidata entries mentioined here are only part of our engagement in our projects. An example is Irdiism has more than 450 edits to Wikidata. It is unclear why the focus of the comment is only towards Wikidata when this is only a part of the project we are planning to implement. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by SoniaBudini (talk) 12:49, 25 January 2024 (UTC)

Additional comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hello SoniaBudini, and thanks for your responses here to my own questions and general feedback regarding Wikidata contributions. While I am generally satisfied with your responses, we will not be able to move forward with funding due to limited budget for Rapid Fund proposals through the end of our fiscal year (ending 30 June 2024). Please see my comments below related to this decision and your responses:

• While I appreciate the level of preparation and work you and your team have done with the DebatikCenter, and that your team has sufficient experience around the main Wikimedia projects of focus in this proposal, it is unusual for us to receive Rapid Fund proposals where there is a great deal of staffing required for the proposal to be successful. Proposals including staffing and related compensation are typically much more focused and modest in this funding program, and the level of staffing here (for four different paid roles) for a single program similar to what we would see in a General Support Fund proposal. In the future, I recommend preparing a more modest proposal that is less reliant on staffing to support productive outcomes in this partnership. Of course, this may mean that overall impact and outcomes may be more limited.
• Edit counts are indeed not a complete lens by which to evaluate an individual's experience or skills related to a project, and it is clear to me your team has many important skills supporting this proposal. However, when a proposal is premised on training activities and related outcomes, we do expect trainers to have adequate experience working in and contributing to those projects. Attending trainings at Wikimedia conferences can certainly be beneficial, but outside of explicit Train the Trainers-type sessions, these workshops usually are designed to help people edit and learn particular on-wiki skills or tools, but not necessarily to begin providing formal training to others. Therefore, while I see no issue with generally introducing Wikidata to newcomers, I would request not focusing on any especially complex aspects of Wikidata training until your team has developed more experience than what has been described here. I am noting this because we have observed some cases where grantees with similar backgrounds as described above have conducted trainings, only later to find out that newcomers' contributions have been reverted or deleted (which creates a rather negative experience for them), or that other volunteers in that Wikimedia community have expressed grievances about having to fix contributions from newcomers stemming from a particular event or training.

Regarding Rapid Funds, I expect that our budget to fund new proposals will be more open starting in July 2024. If it is possible for you to consider preparing a proposal related to this partnership at that time, I would invite you to resubmit the proposal at that time. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 26 January 2024 (UTC)