Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Preserving trans art together:Wikipedian in Residence with the Trans Music Archive (ID: 23648727)
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Applicant Details
[edit]- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
RobinIsadorable
- Organization
Trans Music Archive
- 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
[edit]- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Preserving trans art together: Wikipedian in Residence with the Trans Music Archive
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2026-01-19 - 2026-04-19
- 4. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
United States of America
- 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) While not directly part of a Wikimedia movement campaign, project, or event, relevant entities include Art+Feminism, Wiki Loves Women, LGBTQ+ studies, Music, WikiPortraits, Biography, Wikimedia LGBT, and others.
- 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)
The primary goal of this project is to develop a GLAM/Wikimedia partnership with the Trans Music Archive (TMA) to demonstrate a replicable general model for institutions to share biographical data along with other media, such as Wikipedia text and Commons photographs, in contexts where this data is frequently sensitive and challenged. The Trans Music Archive is a unique and useful Wikimedia cultural partner at this time because they have expertise and data on which musicians (including independent artists from minority communities), are publicly out as LGBTQ+, transgender, and use specific pronouns. All Wikimedia projects have routine conflicts and community conversations on when and how to assign biographical metadata in biographies of living persons and in Wikidata. While there are recommendations on how to fact check such claims, such as the recommendations from Wikidata's WikiProject Personal Pronouns (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_Personal_Pronouns) and English Wikipedia's Manual of Style for Gender Identity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Gender_identity), the Wikimedia platform lacks a reliable source dataset and case study for applying data of this sort to a set of individuals. While there are many examples of artists who are known as LGBTQ+ or trans to their fans in social media, often Wikipedia editors challenge the reliability of self-published incidental mentions which suggest, but do not clearly confirm, the gender, sexual orientation, and pronouns of queer artists. The Trans Music Archive is a trans-led and community organized institution that has a process for recognizing, confirming, and assigning data to artists which can verify these and certain other demographic datapoints. This project seeks to provide a scalable model for partnerships with cultural GLAM institutions that seek to preserve biographical data, using transgender demographics as a case study because editors so frequently discuss this data in Wikimedia projects.
Additional goals of this project include expanding and improving content of transgender artists, along with the increasing participation of LGBTQ+ and gender-expansive communities, in Wikimedia projects. With these changes we also seek to empower trans individuals and allies to participate in queer cultural preservation respectfully.
A significant challenge of achieving these goals are that members of the LGBTQ+ community have historically faced discrimination, violence, and outright erasure. These disparities continue today with varying levels of severity and escalation, particularly amongst transgender and gender-queer people. Historic marginalization of trans individuals persists in the digital age, as their cultural contributions remain neglected, underrepresented, or inaccurate. These problems are exacerbated by the mistreatment of trans people in online spaces due to misinformation, disinformation, and harassment. These issues highlight the need for intentional campaigns to preserve and fairly document trans art and artists, particularly when there are efforts to suppress this cultural history.
Despite these challenges, we feel that the Wikimedia ecosystem is in a unique position to help address these problems at a critical time. Our approach for achieving our goals will be to apply the Wikipedian in Residence model by establishing a Wikimedian position with the Trans Music Archive. This Wikipedian will work to 1) expand the knowledge-base of trans musicians and their work primarily on Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikipedia, 2) increase representation and engagement of the LGBTQ+ community in Wikimedia projects, and 3) bring expertise, knowledge, and best practices from the Trans Music Archive into existing Wikimedia discussions to demonstrate expert-approved metadata verification practices and create policy guidelines and best practices for the documentation of trans artists/art.
- 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.
All activities in this project follow this pattern: 1) Identify media, data, and expertise in the Trans Music Archive (TMA), then bring this information into the Wikimedia platform. Typical information will be citations to TMA's authority files to Wikidata entries of artists, which verify that the artist has publicly made known their gender, sexuality, and pronouns, and that they are an LGBTQ+ public figure. Along with that data, there frequently will be photos of the artist and sources to cite describing their art, but the data puts all of this into a context of being sensitive but verified and public biographical information.
2) Once content is in the Wikimedia platform, verify with TMA that the presentation complies with respect to LGBTQ+ communities, and verify with Wikimedia editors that the content and citations meet editorial requirements for fact-checking and publication of sensitive personal metadata.
3) Repeat this individually for each artist, but contribute each example to the collective case study.
4) Invite other editors in other contexts, such as editors creating biographies for women, minorities, LGBTQ+ individuals, or generally for projects like WikiPortraits, to follow this example for recognizing when it is appropriate in Wikipedia to share personal biographical data.
Categorized activities: Trans Music Knowledge-base
- Survey current status of trans music records on Wiki projects
- Establish TMA as a GLAM partner. Present training sessions to TMA staff/volunteers/organizers on how to participate and contribute to Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikipedia (and other relevant projects as needed)
- Incorporate TMA information with Wiki projects; create and document pipelines/workflows for database integration
- Create new content and update/edit existing content for accuracy
- Enumerate the full catalog of trans music recordings
- Create a project page for collaboration, communication, and record-keeping
LGBTQ+ Community Engagement
- Virtual and in-person workshops and edit-a-thons
- Contribute to existing Wikimedia guides for editing sensitive demographic data
- Safe space/harassment trainings
- Outreach/educational events about trans musicians
Trans Artist/Art Guidelines
- Develop useful and respectful data models for trans artists and art; address current challenges in queer ontologies
- Discuss with interested groups, organizations, and projects
- Publish findings as a white paper
- Present findings at relevant meetings
- 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.
Robin Isadora Brown, Ph.D. (Username: RobinIsadorable) Role: Wikimedian-In-Residence. Robin is a scientist and researcher by training. She has been using Wiki projects to archive queer musicians, art, and events for several years through her work with Chinchilla Café. She will be doing the bulk of the proposed work as a compensated researcher, liaison with TMA team members, host for Wiki trainings and events, content creator, and lead author on workflows and documentation.
Ariel Loh Role: As President and co-founder of the Trans Music Archive, Ariel is committing to provide access to their data archives and Wikimedia-copyright compatible media. They will voluntarily assist with community engagement work, grant administration, research, archive integration, and other activities as needed.
Rowan McDonald Role: Rowan is the Secretary and Treasurer of the Trans Music Archive. She is a software engineer and will assist in structuring their datasets to be compatible with Wikidata's data model and Wikipedia's citation needs. As a co-founder of Trans Music Archive, she will also voluntarily assist with community engagement work, grant administration, research, archive integration, and other activities when needed.
- 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)
This project seeks contribute the practical, citable, and desired dataset of biographical information from the Trans Music Archive as a case study for use in existing Wikimedia community guidelines, including for gender identity and personal pronouns, which currently have identified many on-wiki content disputes but no expert stakeholder organizations to demonstrate best practices. The expected audience for this project is anyone who refers to these existing guidelines. While there are some Wikipedia editors who seek out LGBTQ+ and gender-related editorial conflicts, much more commonly, casual users only refer to such guidelines when they look up the Wikipedia documentation on managing personal metadata. It happens that these are popularly referenced guidelines, as evidenced by the list of incoming links which refer to them (https://linkcount.toolforge.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&page=Wikipedia%3AManual+of+Style%2FGender+identity).
For more general outreach, this project will organize training and community discussions where target participants include members of the LGBTQ+ community, trans people, allies, and music fans. Wiki target participants include members of groups/projects such as Music, LGBT+, Biography, Art+Feminism, GLAM, Portraits, and others.
We will engage with participants at all activity stages through a variety of means, including but not limited to: social media (e.g. Instagram), Talk pages, Village pump, other communication platforms (e.g. Discord, Telegram, Whatsapp), and e-mail listservs. During activities, we will engage with groups of participants and individuals via virtual calls (e.g. Zoom). Asynchronous recordings of trainings/events, along with any associated documentation, will be available online (e.g. Wikimedia Commons, YouTube). Some activities will occur via in-person talks.
- 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.
We have had several discussions regarding the scope and aims of this project over video calls and email. Robin has discussed this project (and/or presented on relevant topics) with many people, both in-person and online, and has received encouraging support at events such as WikiConference North America (2024-25), Queering Wikipedia 2025, and Wikidata Day 2025.
- 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)
Content Gender gap
- 13. Does your proposal include any of these areas or thematic focus? Select one option that most applies to your work. (required)
Gender and diversity
- 14. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Gender Identity
- 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
[edit]- 17. What do you hope to learn from your work in this project or proposal? (required)
-Where can GLAM institutions quickly find summary information to guide how they share sensitive but citable/verifiable public demographic information in Wikimedia projects?
- What information on trans musicians and music exists on Wikipedia and Wikidata? What media exists on Wikimedia Commons? What is missing or inaccurate?
- What are the most effective strategies in researching and documenting trans music?
- How does one respectfully and accurately document gender and sexuality information?
- What are the current limitations in modeling trans artist/art data in Wikimedia projects? How can they be improved?
- How can the cultural contributions of a group of people be preserved in Wikipedia?
- How many musical groups have or have had trans band members?
- How many albums have been published by trans musicians? What are their names and other relevant information?
- What obstacles do queer and trans people face in contributing to Wikimedia projects? How can we best address them?
- What motivates queer and trans people to contribute to Wikimedia projects?
- 18. What are your Wikimedia project targets in numbers (metrics)? (required)
| Other Metrics | Target | Optional description |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 1000 | indirectly 1000 experienced Wikipedia editors will participate in talk page discussions which reference the guidelines we will develop |
| Number of editors | 100 | directly 100 editors will join programs of this project, with half of those from existing Wikimedia community user organizations |
| Number of organizers | 3 |
| Wikimedia project | Number of content created or improved |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 50 |
| Wikimedia Commons | 500 |
| Wikidata | 1000 |
| Wiktionary | |
| Wikisource | |
| Wikimedia Incubator | |
| Translatewiki | |
| MediaWiki | |
| Wikiquote | |
| Wikivoyage | |
| Wikibooks | |
| Wikiversity | |
| Wikinews | |
| Wikispecies | |
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
- Optional description for content contributions.
1000 Wikidata edits, 500 Wikimedia Commons uploads and metadata edits, 50 Wikipedia articles developed
- 19. Do you have any other project targets in numbers (metrics)? (optional)
Yes
| Main Open Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| Pageviews of English Wikipedia articles edited | Pageviews of English Wikipedia articles edited, anticipate 1+ million/year | 1000000 |
| Linkcount to existing and developed Wikimedia guidelines | Linkcount to existing and developed Wikimedia guidelines, 1000+ and increasing | 1000 |
| Wikimedia guidelines developed | Wikimedia guidelines developed, 2 | 2 |
| case study published in Wikidata | case study published in Wikidata, 1 | 1 |
| white paper published to present the guidelines and case study in a citable format | white paper published to present the guidelines and case study in a citable format, 1 | 1 |
- 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)
https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/ https://pageviews.wmcloud.org https://linkcount.toolforge.org
Financial proposal
[edit]- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SwfxahOXdGXjr55EFZdzy28sKmczbPbQodQrFeiOmHU/edit?usp=sharing
- 22. and 22.1. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
4950 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.
4950 USD
- 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).