Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Centre A & Helen and Morris Belkin Art Gallery Art and Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2023 (ID: 22069393)

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Applicant Details[edit]

Please provide your main Wikimedia Username.

ellie_chung

Please provide the Usernames of people related to this proposal.

N/A

Organization

Vancouver International Centre for Contemporary Asian Art

Are you a member of any Wikimedia affiliate or group, including informal groups like Wiki Fan Clubs, emerging language communities, not recognized Wikimedia groups etc.? Please list them all.

No

Grant Proposal[edit]

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

Centre A & Helen and Morris Belkin Art Gallery Art and Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2023

Q. Indicate if it is a local, international, or regional proposal and if it involves several countries? (optional)

Local

Q2. If you have answered regional or international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.

R. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has.

Centre A: Website: https://centrea.org/ Instagram: centre_a Facebook https://www.facebook.com/CentreAGallery Twitter: @centrea

Helen and Morris Belkin Art Gallery: Website: https://belkin.ubc.ca/ Instagram: @belkinartgallery Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BelkinArtGallery

1. What is the change that you are trying to bring about and why is this important.

For Centre A and Helen and Morris Belkin Art Gallery (Belkin Gallery)’s 2023 edition of the Art and Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, we will be once again working in collaboration to bring forth stories that too often go unacknowledged in the art world. Through our collaborative and individual events, we hope to encourage our audience to create and edit Wikipedia articles about women, LGBTQ2S+, gender non-binary, people of colour, Black and Indigenous artists, curators, and organizations as well as feminist and activist art movements. Through this project, we would like to focus on feminism through an intersectional lens that acknowledges a multiplicity of lived experiences including, race, class, privilege, disability, and sexuality. For the 2023 iteration of the Wikipedia edit-a-thon, we are particularly placing an emphasis on the creation of new pages for female or nonbinary identifying Iranian artists.

As a leading public art gallery that focuses on the ongoing production of contemporary Asian and Asian diasporic artists, we feel that it is important to stand in solidarity with the women and girls of Iran who are courageously protesting for their fundamental human rights. Through our series of workshops and Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in collaboration with the Belkin Gallery, we hope to not only bridge the gap in representation of Iranian artists in open-source knowledge platforms. But also encourage the participants to learn more about the ongoing protest in Iran for women’s rights and freedom after the death of Mahsa Amini. This will be achieved by providing training through the two How to workshops at the Belkin Gallery and engagement with Centre A’s reading room and resources to empower community members to participate in the production of knowledge of Iranian artists that are often silenced or forgotten within open-source knowledge platforms.

2. Describe your main approaches or strategies to achieve these changes and why you think they will be effective.

With our Reading Room dedicated to contemporary Asian art, Centre A is keenly aware of the necessity for marginalized peoples to produce and preserve knowledge about themselves. Thus, our strategies for correcting the relative lack of accessible data on Asian and Asian diasporic artists, particularly Iranian artists include 1) empowering community members to become producers of their own histories, and 2) developing community members’ media literacy by connecting current events to historical contexts.

Since 2019, Centre A has hosted Edit-a-thons focused on Asian Canadian representation. The first iteration, in partnership with Rungh Magazine, was successful in garnering attention from the community. With the help of 12 artists and cultural workers, we created 2 new Wikipedia pages and contributed to 10 existing ones. In 2022, we partnered with the Belkin Gallery and Western Front and exceeded our targets in all areas. We recruited 25 new editors while creating and improving 79 articles primarily on underrepresented Asian diasporic artists, curators, and collectives. These records show us that our communities are eager to contribute our stories and research to Wikipedia. We aim to improve these numbers through more expansive outreach and a greater variety of workshops.

With rising levels of anti-Asian violence, there is an urgency in preserving and sharing our communities’ histories. We are inspired by the work of African American and Canadian librarians in curating collections that connect the Black Lives Matter movement to historic roots. Makiba Foster, at the NYPL’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, notes that locating contemporary events in a broader historical trend can spark public interest in archival materials while “advancing a critical understanding of events” in national history. Therefore, developing our communities’ historical literacy is a great way to engage them meaningfully while inciting their interest in research and editing.

3. What are the activities you will be developing and delivering as part of these approaches or strategies?

This year we will again be partnering with Belkin Gallery to ensure the effectiveness of our strategies. To motivate diverse communities to become knowledge producers, we will be equipping them with necessary research and editing skills. Belkin will be hosting two prep sessions led by Caitlin Lindsay, art librarian at the University of British Columbia, focused on introducing new editors to Wikipedia’s tools and citations protocol. Belkin Gallery has successfully hosted similar workshops since 2017 to prepare participants for creating and editing entries. To complement these sessions, Centre A will be delivering our own workshop for independent researchers, led by Library Assistant Coco Zhou. This online workshop will bring tips and resources to artists, cultural workers, and community members without access to university libraries and databases. By training participants to overcome access barriers, we hope this workshop will empower communities to contribute effectively to Wikipedia and further its goal of open access to information.

This year we have decided to host our Edit-a-thon under the theme of Iranian artists, in solidarity with the women’s movement in Iran, to align with our strategy of developing community members’ capacity to conduct historical research in relation to contemporary events. Centre A will be hosting an event called Collective Investigation, a social method for mapping an archive. As they examine our library’s collection of historiographies on Asian art, participants will follow a list of questions about Iranian artists and their contribution to social struggles. They will then have the opportunity to share their findings with each other. We have previously hosted a Collective Investigation and found it an enjoyable yet thought-provoking way for folks to engage with our library. We expect this year’s event to be equally successful in facilitating a collective learning experience about the role of history in contemporary movements.

4. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign or event? If so, please select the relevant campaign below. If so, please select all the relevant campaigns from the list below. If "other", please state which.

Not applicable

5. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?

User: Coco Zhou (Program Manager; Contractor) User: Ellie Chung (Program Manager; Salaried) User: Dianehywong (Program Coordinator, Salaried) User: HIlahi (Program Assistant, Salaried) User: Asthejayflies (Collaborator; Morris and Belkin Art Gallery) User: Gideon09 (Collaborator; Morris and Belkin Art Gallery) User: bahar BaharMohazabnia (Collaborator; Morris and Belkin Art Gallery)

6. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified CONTENT knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.

Geography, Other global topics for impact (topics considered to be of global importance), Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial

6.1 In a few sentences, explain how your work is specifically addressing this content gap (or Knowledge inequity) to ensure a greater representation of knowledge.

7. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or THEMATIC focus. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work and explain the rationale for identifying these themes.

Advocacy, Human Rights, Diversity

8. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities?

Geographic , Ethnic/racial/religious or cultural background

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?

For our 2023 Art & Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, we will engage with a wider number of communities that we are building upon from our 2022 activities. Centre A will be partnering up with the Belkin Gallery again to further engage with the UBC arts community. As a gallery situated in Vancouver’s Chinatown, we also strive to encourage participants from various galleries in our neighborhood. For this year’s edition, we will also be sharing our events to different grassroots organizations in the Chinatown community such as Yarrow, Youth Collaborative for Chinatown, and many more to encourage intergenerational perspectives and help our community develop media literacy to bridge knowledge gaps with open source media. Lastly, we will be expanding our engagement with the Vancouver Iranian community and create a space to honor the Iranian women and girls who are courageously protesting for their fundamental human rights in Iran.

We will be sending out an email to participants after the event with follow-up questions and a survey to gauge participant satisfaction and see if we can improve on anything for similar future events. For certain events, for example, Collective Investigation is created in a way where participants continue to interact with the materials they encounter during their time with the Centre A’s Reading Room. The research materials participants interact with during the workshop will be scanned and shared with all the participants. To further engagement with the Vancouver Iranian community, we will be seeking partnership with local Iranian Art Historian and curator, Bahar Mohazabnia, who is also leading the UBC component of the program to guide us and bridge the gap in open source data for Iranian female identifying and nonbinary artists. We will further engage with the Iranian communities by supporting an exhibition independently curated by Bahar featuring two female identifying Iranian artists after the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon ends.

10. In what ways are you actively seeking to contribute towards creating a safer, supportive, more equitable environment for participants?

Centre A and the Belkin Gallery have rigorous guidelines to ensure that we each facilitate a safe learning environment. As part of UBC, Belkin has established protocols for managing student conduct. Centre A’s own Accessibility Policy outlines our responsibility for creating a welcoming space for all through prohibiting divisive, incendiary, or discriminatory behaviours and speech. All events will be overseen by experienced facilitators who are committed to upholding such ethics.

11. Please tell us about how you have let your Wikimedia communities know about the planned activities and this proposal. Use this space to describe the processes you carried out to make the community more involved in planning this proposal. Please link the on-wiki community discussion(s) around the proposals.

The series of events will be shared to our community through social media, monthly newsletters, and word of mouth. All social media content will be cross-promoted with the UBC and the Belkin Gallery. The events will also be posted on the Art and Feminism Wikipedia web page and dashboard. We will also be promoting the planned activities to other organizations, local or international with Art and Feminism campaign that have previously focused on improving wikipedia articles on Asian and Asian diasporic artists such as M+ Museum and Asian Art Archive in Hong Kong. We will also be actively engaging with different fine arts student groups at UBC such as the Visual Art Student Association and Art History Student Association to encourage participation from the Art History, Visual Art, and Theory Department at UBC. We will also ensure that the planned activities will also be shared with the UBC Persian Club and other Iranian student associations in the Lower Mainland.

12. Are you aware of other Rapid Fund proposals in your local group, community, or region that are being submitted and that align with your proposed project?

Yes

If yes:

12.1 Did you explore the possibility of doing a joint proposal with other leaders in your group?

Yes

12.2 How will this joint proposal allow you to have better results?

We are submitting this proposal as a joint effort with the Belkin Art Gallery. We are working closely in collaboration with the Belkin Art Gallery to ensure that we are not duplicating in our own respective programming and collaborating when possible. Our events are set up in a way that participants can first learn the skills how to effectively edit and cite Wikipedia articles. After the Belkin’s events, Centre A will further engage our collective audience through a series of our own Edit-a-thon and two additional programmes will act as an extension to the events at the Belkin to maximize participation throughout the course of two months.

13. Will you be working with other external, non-Wikimedia partners to implement this proposal? Required.

Yes

13.1 Please describe these partnerships and what motivates the potential partner to be part of the proposal and how they add value to your work.

For this year's Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Centre A is once again partnering up with the Belkin Art Gallery at UBC after a successful partnership last year. With our previous collaboration, we were able to greatly increase the qualitative metric from our previous Art and Feminism events.

Our ongoing partnership with the Belkin Gallery mobilizes our collective audiences through collaborative events that further engages both of our audiences. We are not only collaborating on this rapid grant proposal and funding, but we will also be cross promoting all event communications to better reach our audiences to encourage participants for our respective events and development of new engagement with each other’s audiences. If successful, we will also be sharing our resources from this funding proposal to help the Belkin Gallery cover food and beverage and childcare expenses. Lastly, we will also be sharing resources for research from our respective library/reading room and archive.

14. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select a maximum of THREE options that most apply.

Coordinate Across Stakeholders, Identify Topics for Impact, Innovate in Free Knowledge

Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation[edit]

15. What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?

Engage with more diverse communities in Vancouver / enable inter-community solidarity through the sharing of stories How can Centre A better serve communities identifying as Asian in Vancouver and meaningfully include perspectives outside of East Asia? What may have been obstacles in inter-community exchange in the past? To what extent have Art + Feminism events corrected these?

Community members are motivated to produce open-access research on Asian art, particularly Iranian Art through achieving a higher level of historical literacy How do members of the Iranian community in Vancouver view the movement for informational freedom and access? Are they likely to continue contributing to Wikipedia as editors? What factors influence this likelihood? To what extent have our workshops removed barriers for communities to access and contribute knowledge on Wikipedia? How has an increase in research skills and historical literacy affected communities’ desire to continue producing knowledge?

16. Based on these learning questions, what is the information or data you need to collect to answer these questions? Please register this information (as metric description) in the following spaces provided.

Main Open Metrics Data
Main Open Metrics	Description	Target
Number of articles on Iranian artists created	N/A	10
Diversity of participants	N/A	20
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A

17. Core quantitative metrics.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics	Description	Target
Number of participants	New participants: 20 Returning participants: 60	80
Number of editors	New editors: 15 Returning editors: 45	60
Number of organizers	Paid Organizers: 6 (across both organizations) Volunteer organizers: 5 (for Centre A Events)	11

Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project
Wikimedia Project	Description	Target
Wikipedia	New Pages: 20 Edits to existing pages: 80	100
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A

17.1 If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation.

18. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support.

We will use the Wikipedia event and program dashboard to track the core metrics selected in this proposal. For Main Open Metrics 1 (number of articles created about Iranian artists), we can also utilize the program dashboard and cross-check it with the list of Iranian artists we will share with the participants. For Main Open Metrics 2, we will be asking the participants to share

Financial Proposal[edit]

19. & 19.1 What is the amount you are requesting from Wikimedia Foundation? Please provide this amount in your local currency.

4945 CAD

19.2 What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?

3705.13 USD

20. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NFDCClHE8Nhb-wew3n3HsjpXepopr1c1Wk1EZYGn3_U/edit?usp=sharing

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

Yes

Endorsements and Feedback[edit]

Please add endorsements and feedback to the grant discussion page only. Endorsements added here will be removed automatically.

Community members are invited to share meaningful feedback on the proposal and include reasons why they endorse the proposal. Consider the following:

Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
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).

Endorse