Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/2025 Jaipur Literary Festival (and other Global South Literary Events) WikiPortraits initiative (ID: 22830236)/Final Report
Application type: Standard application
Part 1: Project and impact
1. Describe the implemented activities and results achieved. Additionally, share which approaches were most effective in supporting you to achieve the results. (required)
The WikiPortraits team was able to successfully cover both the 2025 Jaipur Literature Festival and the AAAS Annual Conference. Not only were we able to get significant photo coverage, but we covered events with an incredible amount of diversity among authors and academics, respectively, which helps WikiPortraits in its mission to cover a wide range of individuals from all backgrounds and expertises.
In particular, at the Jaipur Literature Festival, in Jaipur, India, we photographed nearly a hundred nationally and globally renowned authors on panels such as Ijeoma Oluo, V. V. Ganeshananthan, and William Dalrymple. At the AAAS Annual Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, we captured hundreds of numerous academics, government officials, researchers, and postsecondary students at panel discussions, presentations, and simply out and about through the event space. Many of these individuals are notable, with pages, like Holden Thorp, Satyajit Mayor, and Theresa A. Maldonado, while many aren't as notable but could possibly be eligible for Wikidata items or pages later on once notability is demonstrated. In the end, both events were extremely fruitful, image-wise, toward our goals, despite very small teams at each event: 1 photographer at the Jaipur Literature Festival, and 4 photographers at the AAAS Annual Conference. (3 of the photographers at the latter were students, too, whom we got more involved into the Wikimedia movement at previous events and got really motivated here!)
2. Documentation of your impact. Please use space below to share links that help tell your story, impact, and evaluation. (required)
Share links to:
- Project page on Meta-Wiki or any other Wikimedia project
- Dashboards and tools that you used to track contributions
- Some photos or videos from your event. Remember to share access.
You can also share links to:
- Important social media posts
- Surveys and their results
- Infographics and sound files
- Examples of content edited on Wikimedia projects
Our images can be seen at Category:WikiPortraits at 2025 Jaipur Literature Festival and Category:WikiPortraits at 2025 AAAS
We use GLAMorgan to document our impact via monthly page views on articles with our images. Here are some highlights from both events.
- 108 files, with 14 used on 28 total pages across 15 Wikis
- Several high-profile individuals like former Obama staffer Kal Penn, German translator Michael Hofmann, New York Times reporter Edward Wong, and others
- 110,939 views total even in July 2025
- 580 files, with 81 used on 101 pages across 11 Wikis
- Many high-profile individuals like the epidemiologist Nancy Krieger, cardiologist Kiran Musunuru, linguist Sharon Inkelas, and others
- 3,775 views total even in July 2025
Additionally, share the materials and resources that you used in the implementation of your project. (required)
For example:
- Training materials and guides
- Presentations and slides
- Work processes and plans
- Any other materials your team has created or adapted and can be shared with others
We didn't create any materials or resources to train our photographers, as they are very experienced and able to organize themselves with little management or intervention on our part. Even at AAAS, one of our experienced members was able to coordinate the 3 students very well on the ground.
3. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with this Rapid Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals. Required. Select one option per question. (required)
| A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups | Strongly agree |
| B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community | Strongly agree |
| C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups | Strongly agree |
| D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives | Strongly agree |
| E. Encourage the retention of editors | Strongly agree |
| F. Encourage the retention of organizers | Strongly agree |
| G. Increased participants' feelings of belonging and connection to the movement | Strongly agree |
| F. Other (optional) |
Part 2: Learning
4. In your application, you outlined some learning questions. What did you learn from these learning questions when you implemented your project? How do you hope to use this learnings in the future? You can recall these learning questions below. (required)
You can recall these learning questions below: 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.
Since applying for this Rapid Grant, we have continued to emphasize our commitment to non-Western, more Global South representation in the photographs that WikiPortraits takes. We were pleasantly surprised to kick that off with the Jaipur Literature Festival and the AAAS Annual Conference, both of which provided us with hundreds of photos from 1) underrepresented minorities, 2) women, 3) individuals with professional backgrounds outside of film/entertainment, and 4) individuals who are notable but not celebrities. Since then, we've photographed more literary festivals, conference-type events, and otherwise non-film festival gatherings, and we hope to spend more time in countries outside of North America and the Global South to remain faithful to our values in diversity and representation. We also hope to build better systems that can track the metrics of how diverse our subjects are, which we are currently trying to do through categories.
Per our goals of growing our WikiPortraits model, these two events were incredibly successful because they showed that skilled, experienced members of our team can go to an event basically alone (or with a few younger, newer photographers/editors), self-manage, and churn out a high output of photographs and subsequent contributions to Wikimedia properties. This is a huge contrast, and revelation, compared to our larger, more high-maintenance work at film festivals which involve bigger teams, more photographers, and significant coordinating efforts. Both scales are important to our work: we want to make sure we can operate efficiently as a team on massive operations with incredible yields like TIFF, but we also want to have breadth across whatever smaller, yet still culturally significant, events may be happening in our photographers' immediate vicinities. Both the Jaipur Literature Festival and the AAAS Annual Conference were respectful efforts toward the latter, and since then, we've continued to replicate this, as a "repeatable and scalable template" as predicted, and send numerous photographers to other events to cover. For instance, User:Phibeatrice recently went to Defcon 33 in Las Vegas, Nevada, alone and shot a couple hundred speakers, and a handful of our European photographers are at the Locarno Film Festival in Locarno, Switzerland. Additionally, we are doing pretty well on credentialing, and are now able to get a decent amount of credentials for each of our photographers at some pretty big events that we weren't able to get last year when we were much smaller and lesser-known.
5. Did anything unexpected or surprising happen when implementing your activities? This can include both positive and negative situations. What did you learn from those experiences? (required)
Even though we weren't able to get credentialed for the Jaipur Literature Festival due to some lateness on our part, it didn't affect our photographer's experience. She was able to smoothly and efficiently attend panels, talks, and other kinds of events to take photographs, without any problem. We were very pleased with how easygoing the event was and how the photos turned out. Since our photographer attended last year's Jaipur Literature Festival, we figured that it would be very straightforward and predictable, without surprise.
Similarly, the AAAS Annual Conference was just as straightforward and mostly predictable. However, some of the shooting conditions were poor, with some conference rooms having really bad lighting, making a few of our photographs unusable (especially among the students). Next year, we are debating whether to set up a portrait studio in the event space (in partnership with AAAS) to set up better shooting conditions and have attendees sign up with us to take their pictures for Wikimedia Commons.
6. What is your plan to share your project learnings and results with other community members? If you have already done it, describe how. (required)
We have hundreds of photos from both events at Our images can be seen at Category:WikiPortraits at 2025 Jaipur Literature Festival and Category:WikiPortraits at 2025 AAAS, many of which have improved photo quality on over a hundred Wikipedia articles across many language Wikis. We would like to get our usage statistics up even further, so we'll likely plan to thoroughly dig into these categories and see which pages can be updated from them. We also are starting to build Wikidata into our team and will hopefully start creating items and connecting them to photographs as appropriate.
As usual, we intend to promote WikiPortraits at numerous Wiki events. In the past, we have already done so at WikiCredCon, as well as WikiCurious and Wiki Day events in places like Sundance or SXSW, and we have programming lined up for the WikiConference North America. Members of our team were just at Wikimania 2025, and they had a delightful time sharing the experiences and results of growing WikiPortraits in the last year.
Part 3: Metrics
7. Wikimedia Metrics results. (required)
In your application, you set some Wikimedia targets in numbers (Wikimedia metrics). In this section, you will describe the achieved results and provide links to the tools used.
| Target | Results | Comments and tools used | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 200 | 300 | |
| Number of editors | 7 | 7 | |
| Number of organizers | 5 | 7 |
| Wikimedia project | Target | Result - Number of created pages | Result - Number of improved pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 40 | 0 | 130 |
| Wikimedia Commons | 200 | 700 | 0 |
| Wikidata | 35 | ||
| Wiktionary | |||
| Wikisource | |||
| Wikimedia Incubator | |||
| Translatewiki | |||
| MediaWiki | |||
| Wikiquote | |||
| Wikivoyage | |||
| Wikibooks | |||
| Wikiversity | |||
| Wikinews | |||
| Wikispecies | |||
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
8. Other Metrics results.
In your proposal, you could also set Other Metrics targets. Please describe the achieved results and provide links to the tools used if you set Other Metrics in your application.
| Other Metrics name | Metrics Description | Target | Result | Tools and comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
9. Did you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results? (required)
No
9.1. Please state what difficulties you had. How do you hope to overcome these challenges in the future? Do you have any recommendations for the Foundation to support you in addressing these challenges? (required)
Part 4: Financial reporting
[edit]10. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency. (required)
5000
11. Please state the total amount spent in US dollars. (required)
5000
12. Report the funds spent in the currency of your fund. (required)
Provide the link to the financial report https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qVSz71g0s4kpc59KcPHFg8lGQZRyE4JXhXoGj5uwQ4Y/edit?usp=sharing
12.2. If you have not already done so in your financial spending report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal. (optional)
13. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?
No
13.1. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.
N/A
13.2. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?
N/A
13.3. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.
N/A
14.1. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?
Yes
14.2. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
Yes
14.3. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
Yes
15. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here. (optional)
Review notes
[edit]Review notes from Program Officer:
N/A
Applicant's response to the review feedback.
N/A