Hi all,

In the latest round of Individual Engagement Grants, 26 eligible proposals were submitted for review. The committee recommended 7 projects be funded in total, with 13 grantees selected to receive $98,271 overall, and WMF has now approved all 7 grants.  Here’s what we’re funding.[1]

1. Art+Feminism Editathon training materials and network building: This project will build on a series of successful 2014 edit-a-thons to develop scalable online infrastructure, including training materials and a network of facilitators, to support the expansion and sustainability of the Art+Feminism movement, aimed at improving Wikipedia’s coverage of notable women in history, art, and beyond.
2. Automated Notability Detection: This project aims to develop a classification algorithm that can assess likeliness of notability (initially within English Wikipedia) and can be used to support editors’ review of newly created articles.
3. Digitization of Important Libraries Book Catalog in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana: Through a partnership between the Telugu Wikipedia community and brick-and-mortar libraries in India, this project will endeavour to digitize five library catalogues of Telugu books in order to support Telugu Wikipedians searching for verifiable sources for new article content.
4. Fundación Joaquín Díaz: This project will see 23,000 sound recordings from the ethnographic archive of the Joaquín Díaz Foundation in Urueña, Spain uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, and could serve as a potential model for other institutional collaborations.
5. Revision scoring as a service: The grantees of this project will develop machine classification for assessing quality of contributions on multiple language Wikipedias as a publicly queryable API. This service will in turn support the development of new and powerful tools to support editors beyond the English language Wikipedia environment.
6. WikiBrainTools: This project seeks to democratize access to Wikipedia-based algorithms across all Wikipedias, and allow Wikimedians to leverage the work of natural language processing researchers to build smarter tools for Wikipedia. In particular, WikiBrainTools will attempt to close the loop between algorithmic researchers who mine Wikipedia to improve computer-derived insight, Wikipedia developers who could be integrating algorithms into their bots and tools, and Wikipedia researchers who could stand to benefit from tools that improve pattern recognition.
7. WikiProject X: This project will explore and test design solutions for encouraging optimal effectiveness and supporting sustainability and collaboration between groups of contributors within a WikiProject on English Wikipedia.
   

Additionally, one project funded in the last IEG round, Women Scientists Workshop Development, was also approved by WMF for another 6 months of renewed funding, to experiment with scaling the model.

Congratulations to the successful grantees! We encourage you to participate and follow their progress as they begin work in the coming weeks.

You can also read more about this round in the IEG committee’s post on the Wikimedia Foundation blog.