Huzzah! A worthy goal; thanks, philg. I am thinking of the many fantastic illustrators who pepper the projects, waiting for people to ask them for suitably interesting or difficult illustrative tasks -- one of the most delightful classes of wiki editors I have ever run across.

We'll see how funded content creation goes; but whether or not the funds end up being the key to encouraging new work, these illustrators certainly deserve this sort of attention for their fine work.

SJ

On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, Cary Bass wrote:

Forgive my misspelling in the announcement. Subst "a" for "u".

Cary Bass wrote:

...

Cross posting to Commons-l and Foundation-l (forgive the duplication):

The Greenspun Illustration Project

What is it?

The Wikimedia Foundation has received a donation from Philip Greenspun for the purpose of creating and improving illustrations on Wikimedia. The Board has decided to accept his donation of $US20,000 for this special purpose.

This is the first time the Foundation has been directly involved in funded content creation, although the German chapter's experience in winning a government grant to write articles on sustainable development has helped pave the way. The Foundation wants a "hands-off" minimal administration role with the bulk of the work of organizing the project and creating the content to be completed by members of our community.

Since this is the first time we've done this, we're not sure how it will go. This is a bit experimental and we ask for your patience and enthusiasm to help make it a success.

Brianna Laugher (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pfctdayelise) will be coordinating the project, with my help as the Foundation's Volunteer Coordinator.

How will it run?

Since Philip's kind donation is a lot of money and we're planning to pay around US$40 per illustration (with some lower and higher amounts, see details to follow), we want to progress the project in stages. Starting out with a small number of 50 requested illustrations, we'll look at our results and modify and improve it for successive stages.

The project will flow along as follows:

* Create list of requested illustrations.
* Open illustration requests on issue tracking software
* Users will self-assign requests, signaling his or her intent to
  create that illustration.
* On creation and approval, the user is paid the amount as set in
  the original request.

Things to note:

* The list of requests will be approved by Brianna, in order that
  balance exists among "things any decent reference work needs";
  "things the Wikimedia community requests"; and "things we nearly
  have, or have poor versions of".
* Approval: a review group will be formed in order to provide
  assessment of submitted images. The main checks will be 1)
  editor's original work and acceptable license, 2) correct
  rendering on MediaWiki and 3) how well the image depicts the
  requested item. No image will be accepted that do not pass all
  three of these checks.
* Other checks will be recommended (e.g. language-neutral version).
* The payment system is not yet finalized.


How you can help

If you are interested in suggesting illustrations to be created, you don't have long to wait: soon there will be some pages on Meta where you can get involved. We will write to foundation-l when the pages are ready for your input.

If you are interested in being part of the review group, please email Brianna as follows:

brianna.laugher AT gmail DOT com

The benefits

This project can have two good outcomes. One, we get illustrations we wouldn't otherwise have, or wouldn't otherwise have had so quickly. Another benefit is that we can use this project as a way to encourage and launch new people into the "illustrator community".

Creating high-quality SVGs is not a skill a lot of people have immediately, but may be developed fairly quickly. While many people might be vaguely interested in it but no more, a monetary incentive might be enough to push them to act, and learn, and create. Some of the image requests will be for smaller amounts (US$15) for relatively simpler illustrations—these will be specifically targeted to newcomers to encourage them to get involved. At the end of this project we might have $20,000 worth of illustrations, but the value of the content creating community will potentially be a lot higher. We expect a side benefit to this project will be the creation/finding and maintenance of good documentation for specific tasks using tools like Inkscape.

More details

See the project specifications at:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/5/51/WMF_Greenspun_Illustra...

-- Cary Bass Volunteer Coordinator

Your continued donations keep Wikipedia running! Support the Wikimedia Foundation today: http://donate.wikimedia.org

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. Phone: 727.231.0101 Fax: 727.258.0207 E-Mail: cbass@wikimedia.org

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