Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/2025 Jaipur Literary Festival (and other Global South Literary Events) WikiPortraits initiative (ID: 22830236)

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Applicant Details

Main Wikimedia username. (required)

jalapenopopperz4lyfe

Organization

N/A

If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)

N/A

Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)

Main Proposal

1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.

2025 Jaipur Literary Festival (and other Global South Literary Events) WikiPortraits initiative

2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.

2024-12-31 - 2025-07-31

4. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)

International (more than one country across continents or regions) India, US and possibly Argentina and Kenya pending budget

5. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign, project, or event? If so, please select the relevant project or campaign. (required)

Other (please specify) WikiPortraits

6. What is the change you are trying to bring? What are the main challenges or problems you are trying to solve? Describe this change or challenges, as well as main approaches to achieve it. (required)

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects prioritize and require using freely-licensed images. This presents a challenge when it comes to photos of notable people, because most published photos of notable people are press images with full copyright and non-permissive licenses. This results in a significant number of biographies with poor quality or no photos. This challenge is quite notable in itself, having been covered by various publications including the New York Times in their 2009 article, "Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos". While that article was written almost a decade ago, the problem persists, so much so that @badwikiphotos is an account on Instagram. The English Wikipedia category, "Wikipedia requested images of people", has over 5,000 articles in it.

An effective way to gather freely-licensed photos of notable figures at-scale is to go to where they are. Gage Skidmore is particularly notable for publishing freely-licensed photos of celebrities at pop culture conventions and political events. German Wikipedia set the standard by covering the Berlin Film Festival with its Berlinale-Projekt since 2017.

To help with this effort, the commons:Commons:WikiPortraits Initiative was founded in 2024 to coordinate photographing notable people at events. Indeed, so far collectively, the project has shot over 1,000 notable and near notable individuals where photos have been added to over 90 wikis, and are now collectively viewed upwards of 15 million views per month (sometimes much more with specific movie releases).

WikiPortraits has covered the International Journalism Festival, Cannes Film Festival, SXSW, Venice Film Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Toronto International Film Festival where our subjects have included Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa; comedian Hannah Gatsby; actors Denzel Washington, Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep; director George Lucas; as well as many directors and actors from the Global South, including Iran, Indonesia, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Mexico.

All of these events thus far have been in North America or Western Europe, and the photographers have been from the U.S. or Western Europe.

WikiPortraits has set a goal to cover an event of cultural global stature in a Global South region, and recruit more photographers from the Global South to the project. Jaipur Literary Festival is the most promising event to shoot — one that attracts a worldwide audience, hosts speakers of global stature, and can attract photographers from local and South Asian origin into WikiPortraits as well.

Jaipur Literary Festival is the world’s largest book festival, featuring over 500 speakers in 2024 and drawing attendees from Sydney to New England. It’s now widely considered the best literary event in the world, featuring speakers from the Dalai Lama to Oprah.

This grant request will subsidize travel and housing for photographers and volunteers who will assign and processing photos for Wikimedia Commons, many of Indian origin. The core WikiPortraits project will help the photographers obtain media credentials.

7. What are the planned activities? (required) Please provide a list of main activities. You can also add a link to the public page for your project where details about your project can be found. Alternatively, you can upload a timeline document. When the activities include partnerships, include details about your partners and planned partnerships.

For this project, we will take photos of the Jaipur Literary Festival, enlisting a diverse set of photographers, with an eye towards building a cohort of WikiPortraits photographers in India.

The ideal combination for the inaugural year is one photographer from North America who has done WikiPortraits work before, one active Wikimedia Commons professional-grade photographer from Europe with mentoring capacities, and 2-3 Wikimedian photography contributors from India, who are either professional-level or ones who can be mentored by the European photographer.

We would like to photograph the below categories of people:

Speakers at the Jaipur Literary Festival, including those who have Wikipedia pages. There are 500 speakers and we have some basic scripts to quickly identify which people already have Wikipedia pages and are missing photos.

Speakers and awardees at other Global South literary and publishing events depending on how much travel budget is left over from Jaipur. While our goal is to recruit enough photographers to cover a huge multiday event in Jaipur, it may be hard to find the right combination of Indian photographers who can travel and commit for an appropriate length of time, so there is some possibility of having budget left over.

If so, we could recruit photographers to cover the Macando Literary Festival in Nairobi, or the month-long Buenos Aires International Book Fair. With modest budget, our Indian photographers may also have smaller local literary events that they would also want to go shoot.

If the money leftover is quite modest for any travel, we would use it towards a local editathon with New York City to then add the WikiPortraits photos to existing Wikipedia pages.

8. Describe your team. Please provide their roles, Wikimedia Usernames and other details. (required) Include more details of the team, including their roles, usernames, Wikimedia group, and whether they are salaried, volunteers, consultants/contractors, etc. Team members involved in the grant application need to be aware of their involvement in the project.

Sriya Sarkar (User:Jalapenopopperz4lyfe) is a WikiPortraits photographer who has covered the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, the Jaipur Literary Festival events in New York City, and the New York Film Festival. She has also undergone Wikimedia Immersive Training with Jake Orlowitz and has a focus on photos and articles centered around diverse women. She was recruited to go to Jaipur Literary Festival. VOLUNTEER.

Andrew Lih (en:User:Fuzheado): Andrew Lih is a Wikimedian Laureate who knows the organizers of the Jaipur Literary festival and has attended the event in the past with his wife. VOLUNTEER.

Jennifer 8. Lee (en:User:Jenny8lee): Jenny is a co-founder of WikiPortraits, an adviser to the Wikimedia NYC, a founder of WikiCred project, film producer, and an adviser to SXSW Interactive. She is a volunteer for this project, but will help coordinate the logistics and the press credentials. LOGISTICS. REMOTE VOLUNTEER.

Sara Komatsu (en:User:saraa.kom): Sara is an active WikiPortraits contributor, having shot at Toronto Film Festival, and helped with logistics at Cannes, Sundance and SXSW. She is the key person for coordinating press credentials for WikiPortraits. REMOTE LOGISTICS. PAID.

(We might be able to recruit a few more local photographers in India and New York City.)

9. Who are the target participants and from which community? How will you engage participants before and during the activities? How will you follow up with participants after the activities? (required)

There are two main target populations for this project:

Notable individuals who have Wikipedia articles, particularly ones lacking a photo or need a better photo taken. The writers are often from communities that are commonly under-represented on Wikipedia photos, and the scientists could include a number of women.

Editors of individual biography pages across all languages who are looking for photos of the subjects. Our WikiPortraits photos were used across over 100 Wikipedia with an estimated peak of over 30 million monthly views in September 2025 across all of them in September 2024. These include ruwiki, hewiki, rowiki, nowiki, ukwiki, elwiki, viwiki, dewiki, itwiki, svwiki, kowiki, zhwiki, jawiki, arwiki, arzwiki among many others.

10. Does your project involve work with children or youth? (required)

No

10.1. Please provide a link to your Youth Safety Policy. (required) If the proposal indicates direct contact with children or youth, you are required to outline compliance with international and local laws for working with children and youth, and provide a youth safety policy aligned with these laws. Read more here.

N/A

11. How did you discuss the idea of your project with your community members and/or any relevant groups? Please describe steps taken and provide links to any on-wiki community discussion(s) about the proposal. (required) You need to inform the community and/or group, discuss the project with them, and involve them in planning this proposal. You also need to align the activities with other projects happening in the planned area of implementation to ensure collaboration within the community.

Given that over 600 WikiPortraits photos were added on over 100 different language wikis, with a collective estimated 20 million views in September 2024, we feel there is strong global community demand for what WikiPortraits is adding.

WikiPortraits has a presence on the Wikimedia Commons, at Commons:WikiPortraits. We have also created a meta page to catalog related efforts called Wiki Covers Events and to share best practices. Among notable related efforts are the German Berlinale-Projekt.

Wiki Covers Events + the WikiPortraits initiative has also been discussed within the GLAM Global Telegram group, which has over 200 community members.

At Wikimania, it was clear there are a number of affiliates and Wikipedians who are doing their own version of event coverage. Thus it would be good to combine forces for resources such as scripts identifying speakers/performers/honorees with Wikipedia pages. It’s a project with lots of cross-affiliate potential. WikiPortraits has reached out to partners in Wikimedia Canada for help in credentialing in TIFF, Wikimedia Deutschland for their excellent volunteer photographers and Wikimedia Sverige for contacts at the Nobel Prizes.

The WikiPortraits origin story, for background: the WikiPortraits idea was originally the brainchild of Andrew Lih, a past Wikimedian Laureate, who presented on a Wikimedia panel at SXSW 2023 with WMF CEO Maryana Iskander. Andrew has done similar self-funded photography efforts and book festivals and comicons and saw the potential of SXSW for doing that on a larger scale. He has socialized this WikiPortraits idea in the GLAM Telegram group, as well as on Meta Wiki.

Jennifer 8. Lee also discussed the idea at 2024 Wikimania in Singapore with Frank Schulenberg, who is the secretary of the Commons Photographers Users Group. He was so enthused that he decided to self-finance a trip to the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, and obtained an assignment letter from Nadee Gunasena at the WMF, which was submitted to the Sundance Film Festival press office by Jennifer. This then led to SXSW 2024 WikiPortraits project, as well as Cannes, Edinburgh, Venice and Toronto.

At this point WikiPortraits, with an established and replicable model, is looking to federate to contributors beyond the original core group and looking to expand to events in the Global South.

At Wikimania, Jenny and Andrew have been asking people if they would cover the Jaipur Literary Festival, and when Sriya said it worked for her schedule, they encouraged her to apply for her own Rapid Grant.

On top of film festivals, literary events are very promising. Andrew has covered the National Book Festival, hosted by the Library of Congress, in Washington DC. And WikiPortraits has covered the 2024 Edinburgh Book Festival as it was taking place concurrently to 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Through this, photographers discovered that literary events are good because they have very civilized photo calls for authors that allow for nice pictures without the craze of a red carpet; panels, which are well lit and long; or they have author signings where the subjects are sitting but animated for long periods of time.

12. Does your proposal aim to work to bridge any of the content knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)

Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial

13. Does your proposal include any of these areas or thematic focus? Select one option that most applies to your work. (required)

Culture, heritage or GLAM

14. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)

Geographic

15. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select one that most applies. (required)

Identify Topics for Impact

Learning and metrics

17. What do you hope to learn from your work in this project or proposal? (required)

This project — in conjunction with our film festival work at Sundance, SXSW, and Cannes film festivals in 2024 — is WikiPortraits first cultural event of global significance that takes place in a country outside North America and Western Europe. This is a great model to bring to local countries, but want to first start by sending experienced WikiPortraits photographers who understand the workflows we have set up. These include our best practices for identifying subjects, creating captions, setting metadata, editing the photos and uploading them.

We hope the project continues to build a repeatable and scalable template for experienced Wikimedia Commons photographers to get press credentials at well-established cultural awards events. Our intent with this, as with our previous projects, is to elevate the Wikipedia presence at global-level cultural events.

Historically, volunteer Wikimedian photographers are not plugged into the media infrastructure that is built around credentials. Given the support of credentialing letters, we hope that the press office decisionmakers of these awards events will become more receptive to having Wikimedia photographers participate, as it only serves to amplify the cultural impact of their events across the many language wikis. This involves helping photographs build their portfolios to be submitted to the credentialing offices.

Jaipur will be our first global literary event which we aim to get multiple photographers credentialed for.

18. What are your Wikimedia project targets in numbers (metrics)? (required)

Number of participants, editors, and organizers
Other Metrics	Target	Optional description
Number of participants	200	200 notable targets who have Wikipedia pages or deserve one.
Number of editors	7	We have 4-5 (or more!) photographers, 1-2 data upload people. WikiPortraits photos have been added to over 100 wikis, we expect something roughly akin to that, though writers are less worldly figures than movie stars.
Number of organizers	5	3 logistics organizers: Sara Komatsu and Andrew Lih to help get credentialed and set up. 3-4 additional photographers who will be organizing amongst themselves

Number of content contributions to Wikimedia projects
Wikimedia project	Number of content created or improved
Wikipedia	40
Wikimedia Commons	200
Wikidata	35
Wiktionary
Wikisource
Wikimedia Incubator
Translatewiki
MediaWiki
Wikiquote
Wikivoyage
Wikibooks
Wikiversity
Wikinews
Wikispecies
Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia

Optional description for content contributions.

40 articles improved, potentially 50.

~200 photos of people uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, which likely will be used across different language wikis.

19. Do you have any other project targets in numbers (metrics)? (optional)

No

Main Open Metrics Data
Main Open Metrics	Description	Target
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A

20. What tools would you use to measure each metrics? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support. (required)

We would utilize a tool like BaGLAMa to measure how many pageviews our portraits receive over time through their inclusion on Wikipedia articles and other Wikimedia projects.

Financial proposal

21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)

BUDGET - Jaipur Literary Festival 2025 -WikiPortraits 2025 Proposal- Rapid Fund.xlsx

22. and 22.1. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)

5000 USD

22.2. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.

5000 USD

We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.

Yes

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Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).

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