Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Using Award Anthology Short Stories Data for Advanced Editor Training (ID: 22763030)

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Applicant Details

Main Wikimedia username. (required)

phibeatrice

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.

Using Award Anthology Short Stories Data for Advanced Editor Training

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

2024-10-31 - 2025-03-01

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)

Not applicable

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)

While editor training on Wikipedia around articles is fairly well-honed, we want to help newer editors learn table creation, which is a key method of ingesting a large lists of likely notable people onto Wikipedia, ranging from literary award winners, film directors in important film festivals, or artists in art exhibitions like the Venice Biennale. This can help us identify individuals, especially women and people of color, who might be notable enough for Wikipedia pages.

For example, there were more than 300 artists in the main curation of the 2024 Venice Biennale, with a large number of them in indigenous, immigrant and minority communities given the theme: Foreigners Everywhere.

While many of those artists already had Wikipedia pages, a significant number of them did not. The list of artists was published in a number of independent media outlets, so was citable. The achievement of being in the Venice Biennale helps strengthen the case for dozens of artists for notability, and this was a very efficient way to get their names onto Wikipedia.

Another value of on-wiki recent awards tables is that they are easier for people who are working on Women in Red or Art+Feminism style projects to find names that feel contemporary and relevant. The lists that are autogenerated from Wikidata items sometimes feel more remote for some editors, since they sometimes can be from the 19th or 18th centuries.

But it is sometimes hard to find enough data for tables to use for training a large number of people.

English Wikipedia has the list of The Best American Short Stories volumes going back to 1982 on the site. English Wikipedia’s American Short Story category has about 250 stories which have risen in fame to the point that they are notable enough to have pages Category:American_short_stories. British short stories have another 40 or so Category:British short stories.

The entire Best American Short Stories series dates back to 1916. We assume the effort to put the lists of stories on Wikipedia fell off because earlier books are not in digital format and print editions of the books are actually quite hard to obtain, as they are scattered across libraries and not in complete sets.

We have located a private repository of the books that goes back until at least 1926, with a few earlier volumes. While the earlier books are quite fragile, the ones back to the early 1950s seem robust enough to borrow and scan.

Short stories are important places to identify potentially notable writers from underrepresented communities, whether emerging or lost to history, as the barriers for publishing short stories is lower than getting books published.

Our project tackles two things: helping editors learn how to add tables to Wikipedia, while also helping add more history to The Best American Short Stories pages. If this is successful, there are other anthologies as well.

As a bonus, we are interested as to whether ChatGPT and LLMs can lower the barrier to entry for the intense formatting that tables on Wikipedia often require.

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.

We are compiling data and then doing training around data.

We would scan the table of contents and the list of notable stories in the back. Since The Best American Short Stories lists on Wikipedia already go back to 1982, we feel like this has good precedence for being notable enough to hit the Wikipedia bar and new editors won’t risk deletion.

We will also pair these with training and a potential editathon at a literary-focused space which would include a section on how to create tables and add historic data (which is more advanced than normal article editing).

Our first choice is The Ruby, a coworking and community space in San Francisco which is centered on non-binary, transfeminine and female-identifying creatives (imagine if Art + Feminism were a community space). Rosie Stephenson-Goodnight has agreed to come speak about Women in Red at the Ruby, and we can potentially bring her in for something around this. Alternatively, depending on the dates, we could do the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City, where Kelly Doyle Kim could come and speak.

We will use the short stories as a way to engage people to contribute to Wikipedia. And we will use them to teach people how to create advanced tables, using the Visual Editor, and possibly getting ChatGPT as an assistant for formatting help.

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.

Ben Phi, preferred name Bea Nguyen, (User:Phibeatrice) is an active Wikipedia editor with a focus on literary and film content. They basically put the entirety of the SXSW film winners on-wiki through a lot of energetic use of ChatGPT. Currently an assistant editor for Poets & Writers’ online databases, they will join the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in fall 2024. [PAID FOR SCANNING AND LOGISTICS]

Jake Orlowitz (User:Ocaasi)) was the former Senior Program Manager for Libraries and Knowledge Integrity at the Wikimedia Foundation. Jake founded and ran The Wikipedia Library, a partnership with 70 publishers to give 25,000 editors free access to 100,000 academic and scholarly journals. He kicked off the partnership with Internet Archive to rescue 15 million dead links on Wikipedia. He also built the Wikipedia Adventure learning game and tutorial. [PAID, TRAINER]

Kelly Doyle Kim ([[user:Kelly Doyle)) was the Open Knowledge Coordinator for the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, where she stewarded the addition of over 1.2 million new words about American women to Wikipedia through her public programs and training sessions. Kelly has worked in the open access and cultural heritage space for over a decade, exclusively focusing on the gender gap on open sites like Wikipedia. [PAID, TRAINER]

Kevin Payravi (User:SuperHamster)) has contributed to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites since 2007, and is currently a co-organizer of WikiConference North America and Wiki Loves Monuments in the United States. He also serves on the Board of Wikimedia DC. He has served as a photographer for WikiPortraits at Sundance, SXSW, and Cannes. [VOLUNTEER, CONSULTANT]

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)

The main target population is semi-experienced editors who can write an article with citations, perhaps from scratch. This is helping them level up with their skills.

Another pool is editors we are training who are members of The Ruby, a female and non-binary arts and letters coworking space in San Francisco. Alternatively, if we find it is more cost effective, we can try to do this in New York City with people from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

We also just welcome anyone who is wikicurious and would like to come to a training event. Live wikievents in the Bay Area are relatively few and rare. This is an opportunity to begin building an active community in the Bay Area, outside of the WMF’s gravity.

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.

This is partially inspired by our work around adding lists of notable artists from festivals or exhibits, which is of varying quality on Wikipedia (some is very good, and others are more erratic). It is also inspired by Women in Red, and seeing how they crowdsource or datasource women’s names.

We came to this idea through a few experiences:

Jenny Lee and Bea Nguyen created the aggregate page for all award winners for the SXSW Film festival going back to the beginning. This was not done as a table because they did not know how to do well-formatted tables at that time. As of now, it is a freeform list that is a bit confusing to read.

Then Jenny Lee, Ariela Ortiz, and Sara Komatsu tried to add the names of the 300+ artists in the 2024 Venice Biennale in a table, with assistance from Jake Orlowitz, who helped with some of the more precise formatting, and some ChatGPT. That was done as a table and looks much better.

In both cases, we used the red links among the notable artists for inspiration for Wikipedia biography articles.

We realized at that point that to get potential notable people en masse, adding tables is an important skill for editors who care about moving the needle on biographies.

Then we went looking for potential material we could use, and came across the Best American Short Stories on Wikipedia and noticed it dropped off prior to 1982. There are other series which could be useful, such as Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best American Mystery Stories, The Coolest American Short Stories, and Best Horror of the Year.

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)

Not applicable

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)

Ethnic/racial/religious or cultural background

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

Invest in Skills and Leadership Development

Learning and metrics

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

In addition to teaching more advanced editors, we would layer the table creation skill on to other training that we are already doing for female and diverse editors.

We believe that organizations with a strong identity centered on diverse writers are an ideal pool for Wikipedia to recruit from since they both are comfortable with prose and have a mission of elevating underrepresented voices.

While editathons are good for “top of the funnel” recruiting, these don’t always turn into long-term engagement. We believe that the mission-oriented nature of the diverse arts and letters organizations can create a strong enough bond so that the participants reinforce involvement in Wikipedia.

The advanced model for training looks like this:

1) “Training.” This is a “come learn about Wikipedia and eat yummy lunch.” This is largely a social experience and we help people who are already Wikicurious. 2) Then the bulk of the training is remote in groups on Zoom. Interested people sign up for a few sessions to become proficient on editing/formatting tables and cleaning/uploading data (we have another grant that helps with this). 3) Everyone has to produce an edited article and also add a table. 4) We have an “editathon” which again is people eating yummy food, but is mostly a social experience, where they may add links or new article drafts based on the added tables.

Note: this format may change depending on what the partners feel is most conducive for engagement.

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	15	15 for table editing, and more for social activities.
Number of editors	15	We would like to get at least 15 new editors across the ecosystem to try to add charts. If we end up with 5-6 long term contributors, who do more tables, we will consider that a win.
Number of organizers	4	2 on the ground organizers: Bea Nguyen and Jennifer 8. Lee, + one non-profit organizer. 1-2 trainers including Jake Orlowitz and Kelly Doyle Kim, who previously did training through the Smithsonian.

Number of content contributions to Wikimedia projects
Wikimedia project	Number of content created or improved
Wikipedia	600
Wikimedia Commons
Wikidata
Wiktionary
Wikisource
Wikimedia Incubator
Translatewiki
MediaWiki
Wikiquote
Wikivoyage
Wikibooks
Wikiversity
Wikinews
Wikispecies
Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia

Optional description for content contributions.

At least 20 stories for 30 years of Best American Short Stories. So 600+ stories. And if Wikipedians will allow us to add the honorable mentions, that is about another 2,000 short stories listed.

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 use the Outreach Dashboard (outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org) to track all contributors and articles to get metrics (words added, references added, views, etc.).

Financial proposal

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

Budget.pdf

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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