Grants talk:Project/NCTE/CCCC Wikipedia Initiative 2021-22

Eligibility confirmed, Round 1 2021 - Community Organizing proposal

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for review in Round 1 2021 for Community Organizing projects.

This decision is contingent upon compliance with our COVID-19 guidelines. If your proposal includes travel and/or offline events, you must ensure that all of the following are true:

• You have reviewed and can comply with the guidelines linked above.
• If necessary because of COVID-19 safety risks, you can complete the core components of your proposed work plan _without_ offline events or travel.
• You are able to postpone any planned offline events or travel until the Wikimedia Foundation’s guidelines allow for them, without significant harm to the goals of your project.
• You include a COVID-19 planning section in your activities plan. In this section, you should provide a brief summary of how your project plan will meet COVID-19 guidelines, and how it would impact your project if travel and offline events prove unfeasible throughout the entire life of your project. If you have not already included this in your proposal, you have until February 28 to add it.

The Community review period is now underway, from February 20-March 4. We encourage you to make sure that stakeholders, volunteers, and/or communities impacted by your proposed project are aware of your proposal and invite them to give feedback on your talkpage. This is a great way to make sure that you are meeting the needs of the people you plan to work with and it can help you improve your project.

• If you are applying for funds in a region where there is a Wikimedia Affiliate working, we encourage you to let them know about your project, too.
• If you _are_ a Wikimedia Affiliate applying for a Project Grant: A special reminder that our guidelines and criteria require you to announce your Project Grant requests on your official user group page on Meta and a local language forum that is recognized by your group, to allow adequate space for objections and support to be voiced).

Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community review period. By March 4, make sure that your proposal has incorporated any revisions you want to make and complies with all of our guidelines. If you have not already done so, you can make use of our project planning resources to improve your proposal further, too.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for round 1 2020 will occur March 5 through March 20, 2021. We ask that you refrain from making any further changes to your proposal during the committee review period, so we can be sure that all committee members are scoring the same version of the proposal.

Grantees will be announced Friday, April 22, 2021. Sometimes we have to make some changes to the round schedule. If that happens, it will be reflected on the round schedule on the Project Grants start page.

We look forward to engaging with you in this Round!

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 06:21, 21 February 2021 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for NCTE/CCCC Wikipedia Initiative 2021-22

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	4.8
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	5.2
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	4.6
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	4.6
Additional comments from the Committee: The grantee seems to be approaching this work in a considerate and thoughtful way (as far as I can tell from the midpoint reporting of the last grant), but it’s not clear what the long term impact of these activities are. We are not seeing a lot of consideration for sustainability and ensuring outcomes beyond Foundation funding. As this would be the second grant for this initiative, it seems particularly important that this is built into the workplan. Followup of a previous project. There is to check how the previous project has been successful. The dashboard gives small number for a long term project. I am not sure that the project fits with Wikimedia's strategic priorities as it aims mainly at funding and supporting activities and persons outside Wikimedia. Its long term sustainability is questionable. This project will improve the content on Wikipedia and can be sustained as the improved content can be translated to many other languages. The most promising area of potential learning for the movement lies with better understanding and addressing barriers to participation for academics. The project is not innovative (just a WiR and six scholarships for students). The potential impacts are uncertain. There is an evaluation plan. Replicating known solution with long term impact I’m concerned that the graduate fellowship pathway actually undermines what the project is trying to achieve (incentivizing academic contributions by appealing to a sense of professional responsibility rather than monetary reward). The applicant continues to have few edits to be considered expert and able to deliver trainings. The project can probably be executed in 12 months according to the plan. However, neither the budget nor the plan specify how student fellows are going to be selected. It can be accomplished in 12 months, realistic budget and participant have necessary skills. The community engagement is limited. The community engagement is not very clear. I believe in the value of some of this work (particularly the focus on pathways for encouraging/sustaining contributions from the academic community) but am not sure of its potential for achieving meaningful, lasting impact. I am also not sure about the inclusion of graduate fellowships - but more inclined to support funding 2-3 of them. There also needs to be a lot more thought given to sustainability. There is the compare the results of last year. In my opinion the project did not produce a sufficient impact last year compared to the budget. The project in the current form is aimed mainly at supporting organizations and person outside the Wikimedia movement. Its impact on the Wikimedia projects will probably quite limited.

This proposal has been recommended for due diligence review.

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal and recommended it for due diligence review. This means that a majority of the committee reviewers favorably assessed this proposal and have requested further investigation by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Next steps:

1. Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page.
2. Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on Friday, April 22, 2021.

Questions? Contact us.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 17:38, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

CCCC Wikipedia Initiative response to committee feedback

Long term impact

Our long-term goal is nothing less than to make space on Wikipedia for a new content contributor community of academic editors in the humanities. We are working to create pathways and establish collaborations within Wikipedia that recognize and support the needs of academic contributors. And we are working to cultivate a sense of responsibility for public scholarship and public knowledge in the academic culture of writing studies and related fields. We represent an ideal academic community to lead this work because:

1. Many of us are already Wikipedians. We don’t see ourselves as outside the Wikimedia movement. We are academic Wikimedians.
2. The teaching and scholarship of our fields are deeply invested in pedagogy, social justice, and civic engagement and so align clearly with the strategic direction of the Wikimedia movement.
3. We see subject matter experts as having an important role to play in addressing barriers to knowledge equity on Wikipedia.
4. Our work has potential to change attitudes toward Wikipedia far beyond our own scholarly community.
   • Initiative participants have far-reaching potential to bring new editors to Wikipedia because we teach and direct the ways writing is taught on most college campuses in the US and many other countries. By getting even just one writing program administrator comfortable editing Wikipedia, we open up the possibility of a Wikipedia assignment being added to a required writing course. To take the University of Maryland as an example, in a single year this would translate to 40-50 instructors (with or pursuing PhDs in English) trained to edit in order to introduce more than 5,000 students (across all departments in the university) to Wikipedia editing.
   • We see our initiative as creating a blueprint for the whole of the academic humanities. Our scholarship, research methods, and public value are less well understood than that of STEM fields, but we aren’t waiting for someone else to explain the humanities to the global public—we are working to do it ourselves as part of the Wikimedia movement. We are showing others how this can be done.

What success looks like in a pandemic

Like many others living through this global pandemic, academics have experienced dramatically increased workloads (e.g., course and curriculum redesigns, support for students in crisis, new service roles around online and anti-racist pedagogy) along with dramatically increased caregiving responsibilities (e.g., full-time childcare, elder care, illness). While this has reduced both our numbers of participants and their editing activity in 2020-2021, we have demonstrated our resilience by slowing our pace, stretching our budget, refocusing on what we can do now, and extending the timeframe of our activities.

In 2020-21, with the guidance and support of our current WiR, we have made significant progress in:

1. Understanding and documenting the specific barriers faced by humanities scholars on Wikipedia—both the things that keep them from starting and keep them from sustaining activity on Wikipedia.
2. Training and engaging new participants. Although our numbers are small, those who are showing up are staying in touch and taking on responsibility, not just for individual pages but for organizing and coordinating work in their subfield and/or at their university.
3. Creating resources and collaborative spaces—both synchronous and asynchronous—to support sustained editing activity. For example:
   • WikiProject Writing
   • CCCC Wikipedia Initiative meetup page
   • CCCC Wikipedia Initiative website (coming in April 2021)
4. Establishing content development collaborations with groups of underrepresented scholars within the CCCC. For example:
   • American Indian Caucus
   • Asian/Asian American Caucus
   • Black Caucus
   • Feminist Caucus
   • Global & Non-Western Rhetorics (GNWR) Standing Group
   • Latinx Caucus
   • Queer Caucus
   • Standing Group for Disability Studies
   • Transnational Composition Standing Group
5. Establishing content development and translation collaborations with international professional associations of writing studies scholars. For example:
   • Association for Writing Across the Curriculum (AWAC)
   • European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW)
   • International Society for the Advancement of Writing Research (ISAWR)
6. Identifying additional layers of work needed to support WikiProject Writing and our knowledge equity goals. For example:
   • Categorization of many rhetoric, composition, technical communication, literacy, and language studies topics remain disorganized or more often unrecognized altogether. We have been building that structure ourselves in Wikidata so that we more clearly see and address knowledge gaps.
   • The current notability guideline for academics risks reproducing the structural inequities found in academic systems of citation, promotion, award, etc. We are working to understand, document, and explore ways of addressing the impacts of these guidelines on the underrepresentation of women and minoritized scholars and their scholarship.

Sustainability: We understand barriers to academic editors

This initiative is run by an all-volunteer committee of ten academics (currently in the first year of a three year, renewable term). We are committed to figuring out how to do this work with lasting impact on Wikipedia and our academic culture. Our 2021-22 activities focus on refining and scaling new approaches to both training and sustaining participant engagement to reach an international scholarly community as we work to establish pathways for academic contributors into the larger Wikipedia community.

1. At the core of all our training and outreach efforts is a qualitative gathering of information that allows us to understand the barriers to editing that academic editors face on and off of Wikipedia. We ourselves face barriers to editing Wikipedia as academics and we are reaching out to diverse groups of scholars who are in turn reaching out to understand the needs, goals, and questions of their members. We are listening carefully to people’s stories and concerns and using that information to design and iterate solutions that can be shared out broadly, maintained, and adapted long after the end of the grant period.
2. We are exploring lots of ways to counter disincentives to academic editing and foster intrinsic motivation. For example:
   • To reduce the insider/outsider dynamic many academic Wikipedians feel, we have focused on building an academic editing community on Wikipedia with a WikiProject, a meetup page, and a WiR to act as a liaison with the larger Wikimedian community as we bring in new contributors and help them get comfortable. We are asking for six months more WiR funding to continue this support for greater numbers of new participants in the coming year and to have a Wikimedian advising our first cohort of CCCC Wikipedia Graduate Fellows.
   • We are seeking WMF project grant funding to set up a support system for capacity building among academic editors rather than to incentivise their editing. The role of the grad fellows will be similar to that of our WiR—not focused on direct editing but on training, mentoring, and coordinating academic editors. The key difference is that the grad fellows will be an international cohort of six (ideally two native speakers of each language) able to support editing and translation across Spanish, French, and English Wikipedias. Our selection criteria will prioritize Wikimedia experience. We see the fellowships as acknowledging and valuing Wikipedian expertise among emerging academics. Graduate students are in an ideal position to make the most lasting and sustainable change to academic cultures of editing Wikipedia insofar as they have long careers ahead of them and a broad base of expertise to bear.
   • While we understand and participate in the Wikimedia movement’s volunteer culture, we also recognize that not everyone has the privilege to work without compensation. Graduate students, especially now, live in highly precarious financial circumstances—in the US many live below the poverty line. We hope to attract a diverse cohort of graduate fellows in line with our commitment to cultivate inclusive community. We hope that the gesture of a stipend might make a year-long commitment to a leadership role possible for people who might otherwise be excluded by financial need and/or care responsibilities.
   • We are working on a range of non-monetary reward structures to recognize Wikipedian expertise and accomplishments in ways that are valued in academic hiring, tenure, and promotion. 1) Our proposal for a CCCC Wikipedia Scholar award is currently under review by the CCCC Executive Committee. 2) As director of the initiative, I have begun to provide letters detailing the contributions and accomplishments of academic Wikipedians going up for tenure or promotion. 3) We are developing plans (for 2022-23) to motivate content development by circulating themed, time-bound “calls for contribution” to coordinate collaborations among new and existing WikiProject Writing editors with the aim of bringing articles to good or featured status and republishing them in an online journal so that they can be listed on CVs as publications.
3. As a volunteer-run initiative we do hope that a 2021-22 WiR and an international cohort of Wikipedian graduate students will help us grow to the point where we have a reliable core of active academic contributors who can voluntarily sustain ongoing training and editing. Nevertheless, we have proposed an ongoing WiR contract position to NCTE/CCCC, we are pursuing the possibility of an endowment to sustain ongoing grad fellowships, and we are exploring a range of grant funding opportunities to support our growth and study the impacts of our ongoing work.
4. We are documenting and sharing our work back in public, academic, and Wikimedia and Wikipedia-facing venues. Our curriculum materials, help resources, WikiProject, and reports are freely available online and the knowledge we’re producing about academic editing is informing ongoing research projects and circulating through conference presentations.

Fit with Wikimedia strategic priorities

We are working to create pathways for international academic contributors with a focus on addressing issues of knowledge equity, prioritizing high impact content, and developing guidance around Wikipedia policies and guidelines that currently restrict the development of content related to underrepresented communities. This initiative is responding to the current vision of the Wikimedia movement and the following strategy recommendations in particular:

• Recommendation 6: Invest in Skills and Leadership Development
• Recommendation 7: Manage Internal Knowledge
• Recommendation 8: Identify Topics for Impact
• Recommendation 9: Innovate in Free Knowledge

Thanks so much for your time, support, and thoughtful feedback on our proposal!

Drkill (talk) 01:01, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Round 1 2021 decision

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project Grant.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, $31,050

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to support a Wikimedian in Residence to develop training, cultivate inclusive community, and build structures of support and recognition for scholars of writing, rhetoric, literacy, and language studies who want to engage with Wikipedia as a form of global public scholarship. The committee was particularly interested in the innovative approach of having a very experienced WiR train six graduate fellows to conduct organizing activities, particularly to the extent that the selection of these fellows prioritizes knowledge equity goals.

Funding contingencies:

• Funding is contingent upon committee review and approval of the outcomes of your current project funded through Project Grant, as reported in your Final Report. They were hesitant to award funding prior to this review and emphasized that they want to see demonstrable results from the first round of funding before proceeding with renewed funds.
• If the project includes any offline activities (e.g. travel and in-person events), funding is contingent upon compliance with the Wikimedia Foundation's COVID-19 guidelines. We require that you complete the Risk Assessment Tool. Offline events may only proceed if the tool results continue to be green or yellow. You must complete the tool:
  • 14 days before any travel and/or gathering event
  • 24 hours before any travel and/or gathering event
• You must provide a job description for the Wikimedian in Residence specifically outlining the scope and planned activities of the role. Your Program Officer must review and approve the job description before the project begins. Please note that we consider funding for WiR activities to be short-term. Grant funding that the Wikimedia Foundation provides for WiRs is not intended to support ongoing workflows, but to leverage the partnership to build a sustainable platform that ensures outcomes long after the WiR has completed their service. Their work should secure long-term outcomes that do not depend on ongoing grant funding.

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
4. Start work on your project!

Upcoming changes to Wikimedia Foundation Grants

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We are also currently seeking candidates to serve on regional grants committees and we'd appreciate it if you could help us spread the word to strong candidates--you can find out more here. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.

Marti (WMF) (talk) 05:06, 23 April 2021 (UTC)