Hi all,
In the first round of Project Grants, 13 eligible proposals were submitted for review. The committee recommended 6 for funding, with a total of $180,396 in funded projects. WMF has now approved all 6 grants. Here’s what we’re funding.[1]
Software - 3 projects funded
Improving the citation ecosystem for Wikipedia so editors can more easily look up relevant sources could greatly improve their productivity and ease of editing. This grant supports the development of Librarybase, a project to develop structured bibliographic data around citations. There are numerous benefits to creating this structure, especially for hard-to-model books, including the generation of source recommendations for specific topic areas or WikiProjects, migration of notable references to Wikidata, and more.[2][3]
Wikidata Module
One of the biggest challenges in using Wikidata content on Wikipedia is having a simple, user-friendly integration tool and workflow for editors. User:Putnik’s Wikidata module is currently used by over a million articles on Russian Wikipedia to add information from Wikidata to article infoboxes. Through this project, Putnik will improve the Lua module to make it easier to install, easy to integrate with infoboxes without knowledge of Lua, configurable for the most common use cases, and extendable.[4][5]
WikiFactMine
Contentmine software helps turn peer-reviewed literature into Wikidata-based facts. It can crawl up to 10,000 articles per day sourcing information and making it available for integration into the database. This project will build infrastructure to connect ContentMine to Wikidata, creating an accelerated conduit to populate Wikidata with new datasets. It will also place a Wikipedian in Residence at Cambridge University to coordinate human curation of data extracted from WikiFactMine.[6]
Offline outreach - 2 projects funded
A Wikipedian-in-Residence to Engage 500 Librarians and their Communities
Public libraries and librarians are natural partners for the Wikimedia movement, sharing a commitment to free access to knowledge. A leader in the library field, the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) has secured funding from the Knight Foundation to capitalize on this synergy and create a national training program for 500 public librarians to build skills in editing Wikipedia and implement Wikimedia programming for their local community members. This grant funds a Wikipedian-in-Residence at OCLC to serve as the content expert in developing training materials, understanding Wikimedia community norms, and mentoring librarians.[7][8][9]
Why women don’t edit Wikipedia
The Wikimedia Community User Group Greece will partner with two Greek women’s organizations, SheSharp and Telesilla, to better understand the challenges faced by Greek women in participating in the Wikimedia projects. They will utilize their collective networks to build awareness about editing Wikipedia, conduct trainings, and provide mentorship based on their learnings.[10]
Research - 1 project funded
Strengthening Indigenous-Language Wikipedias in Latin America
Previous attempts to engage indigenous language communities in developing new Wikipedias have been been met with many challenges and varying degrees of success. Global Voices, a nonprofit focused on digital activism and with deep networks in Latin America, will work with Wikimedia affiliates in the region to review the existing active and incubator Wikipedia projects in the indigenous languages of Latin America. By mapping successes and challenges, the team will develop best practices and guidelines for how to support communities that are interested in developing their indigenous language community and important learnings for both WMF and the Wikimedia community on if and how we can best support them.[11][12]
You can read more about this round on the Wikimedia Foundation blog.[13]
The current call for round 2 of Project Grants ends October 11th. The next open call begins December 19th. [14]
Congratulations to the successful grantees!
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Browse_applications>
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Harej/Librarybase:_an_online_reference_library>
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Putnik/Wikidata_module>
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/WikiFactMine>
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/UGGR/Why_women_don%E2%80%99t_edit_Wikipedia>
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2016/10/07/new-project-grants/ >