Grants:IdeaLab/Inspire/Archive/Content curation & review/FAQ

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This list of frequently-asked questions is intended to provide helpful background to discussions about Inspire Campaigns in addition to this campaign on content review & curation.

What is an Inspire campaign? Why are you running them?[edit]

Part of IdeaLab, Inspire campaigns are roughly one-month events where we encourage ideas along a specific theme relevant to Wikimedia projects. The goal is to promote and elevate ideas that have been developed by participants that address that theme, and turn them into action. One way of doing so is through the use of the grant programs that the Wikimedia Foundation offers. These defined ideas can also be brought back to local projects for discussion, improvement, and consensus-building, and implementation. Last year, the first Inspire campaign focused on the gender gap, specifically, increasing women's participation in Wikimedia projects in addition to the general topical coverage of women. This campaign is focused on content curation and review. This idea was submitted as a part of this consultation. If you have suggestions for future Inspire campaigns, please feel free to suggest them at the discussion page.

What do content curation and content review mean?[edit]

Both of these broad terms have areas of overlap, but also refer to different aspects of how existing content is improved. Content curation refers to tasks and processes related to how project content is organized, structured, and managed. Here are a few examples:

  • Categorizing Wiktionary entries, Wikipedia articles, or primary documents on Wikisource
  • Adding statements to an item or linking items together on Wikidata
  • Participating in efforts to merge, split, or generally reorganize project content.
  • Conducting research or analysis to identify systematic gaps or missing content in projects.
  • Searching for images in Commons and other repositories under an appropriate license (to add to an article, gallery, etc.)

Content review refers to tasks that improve project content through direct modifications to existing content. Some examples include:

  • Bringing attention to concerns with an article, such as its tone, source coverage/quality, and copyright issues.
  • Peer-reviewing processes for the featuring the best content in projects such as those found in articles de qualité, valued images, and libros destacados
  • Performing copyediting of any kind.
  • Reviewing new articles, such as through the New Pages Feed.
  • Detecting and resolving cases when content is obsolete and is no longer accurate.

Why are these tasks important?[edit]

Ensuring the quality of our content through review, in addition to surfacing and connecting our content together through curation are fundamental tasks and are important for readers of our projects. For instance, a 2014 poll showed that British citizens trusted Wikipedia more than several other conventional news sources.[1] Furthermore, the content in our projects is highly visible in search engine results.[2][3] With the degree of visibility of our content and the kind of trust readers place in the knowledge we share, it is important we make strong efforts to improve it through review and organization.

That we edit as volunteers is also important— much of our work is constantly in progress. In many cases, it's not particularly helpful to impose deadlines. On the other hand, our projects reside in the real world, and consequently, there are times when unfinished or uninitiated work is harmful. In the cases when misinformation or problematic content grows and persists in our projects, or when potentially important images, data, or source material is physically lost, the task of reviewing and curating becomes all the more difficult.

What are some examples of problems related to these tasks?[edit]

  • Missing processes for moving and modifying incomplete articles for continued work in draft space[4]
  • Disruptive over-tagging and unconstructive tagging by expressing concerns about project content without sufficient context/explanation
  • Efforts and time commitment required for active, ongoing reduction of backlogs for matters like copyediting and quality content reassessment.
  • Limitations of traditional category systems compared to attribute-based systems[5]
  • Easily addressing systematic errors in wikidata entries when better sources present contradict with previous sources[6]
  • Absence of wikidata items on an immense number of notable paintings.[7]

Can I get funding for my content review/curation idea?[edit]

We hope so! The Wikimedia Foundation offers two grants that are likely to fit with Inspire proposals: Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) and Project and Event Grants (PEG). IEGs are likely to be a good fit for experimental ideas that haven't been done before or are substantially different in implementation from an existing idea. PEGs, on the other hand, are a better fit for ideas that have been done before, such as edit-a-thons, Wikipedians-in-Residence programs, and contests/competitions. Keep in mind that WMF grants cannot fund activities that volunteers are already engaged with, such as basic copyediting and peer-reviewing articles. However, proposals that improve these processes and how editors perform them, such as research or developing a gadget or program, would be eligible.

Will grant proposals related to this Inspire campaign receive preference during review?[edit]

No. Ideas created through the Inspire Campaign roposals will be submitted through the same grant channels as all other proposals. They will be reviewed using the same criteria as proposals not associated with this Inspire campaign.

What are some efforts to assess or improve content curation / content review processes?[edit]

Why is there a Rubick's Cube from Wikipedia 15?[edit]

This is the logo for this campaign.

It's not a perfect analogy, but let me give you my perspective on why it was chosen: Simply stated, a Rubick's Cube is a puzzle where you manipulating a cube to reach an ideal state. The cube never stops being a cube though, so you're not fundamentally changing it when trying to reach your goal. The same principle applies to the work involved in reviewing and curating project content. Reviewing or curating a Wikipedia article, a definition in wiktionary, an image on commons, etc., doesn't (always) require that we fundamentally change what the content is about. But we do shift things around, call attention to concerns, make connections to other content, and generally polish things up.[8]

References[edit]

  1. CNBC: Brits Trust Wikipedia More than the News (2014)
  2. Scientific American: Wikipedia Turns 15 Q&A (2016)
  3. Wikimedia Report Card, February 2016
  4. See this discussion on en.wikipedia
  5. See this proposal
  6. See discussion related to conversion from Gregorian to Julian calendar dates.
  7. See this request for bot help on Commons.
  8. Also, using the cube was actually Siko's fantastic idea.