Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Trinity College ArtplusFeminism Edit a thon 2023

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki
statusNot funded
Trinity_College_ArtplusFeminism_Edit_a_thon_2023
start date2023-06-01
end date2023-07-31
budget (local currency)1400 USD
amount requested (USD)1400 USD
grant typeNonprofit organization with Wikimedia mission
funding regionunknown region
decision fiscal year2023-24
funding program roundundefined round
applicant and people related to proposalm_mahoney
organization (if applicable)Trinity College

This is an automatically generated Meta-Wiki page. The page was copied from Fluxx, the grantmaking web service of Wikimedia Foundation where the user has submitted their application. Please do not make any changes to this page because all changes will be removed after the next update. Use the discussion page for your feedback. The page was created by CR-FluxxBot.

Applicant details[edit]

Wikimedia username(s):

m_mahoney

Organization:

Trinity College

G. Have you received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation before?

Applied previously and did receive a grant

H. Have you received grants from any non-wiki organization before?

Yes

H.1 Which organization(s) did you receive grants from?

N/A

M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

No

M1. Fiscal organization name.

N/A

Additional information[edit]

R. Where will this proposal be implemented?

United States of America

S. Please indicate whether your work will be focused on one country (local), more than one or several countries in your region (regional) or has a cross-regional (global) scope:

Local

S1. If you have answered regional or international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.

T. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has. (optional)

Trinity College: https://www.trincoll.edu/

The Center for Hartford Engagement and Research (CHER): https://www.trincoll.edu/cher/ The Public Humanities Collaborative: https://cher.trincoll.edu/community-learning/public-humanities-collaborative/ Art+Feminism at Trinity: https://dsp.domains.trincoll.edu/artandfeminism/ 2022 Art+Feminism Rapid Grant Application: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/Rapid/Art%2BFeminism_2022_Trinity_College

M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

No

M1. Fiscal organization name.

N/A

Proposal[edit]

1. What is the overall vision of your organization and how does this proposal contribute to this? How does this proposal connect to past work and learning?

We are applying for a Wikimedia rapid grant to fund an Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon at Trinity College. We will host it as part of a summer program called the Public Humanities Collaborative offered through the Center for Harford Engagement Research. The Public Humanities Collaborative brings together students, faculty, individuals, and organizations in Hartford to work on public humanities projects. In the past, these have included the creation of walking tours that present local and community histories, arts programs with local theater companies and museums, and oral history projects. As a part of this program, students receive training on research education and information literacy to prepare them to work on faculty and community research projects. To support this broader work and reinforce the value of an awareness of the politics of knowledge production that affects issues such as representation in public humanities, we will invite students, faculty, and community partners to create a list of Connecticut-related women and non-binary artists and related organizations about whom we will generate content on Wikipedia. This focus will qualify the event as part of the larger efforts of the national art+feminism nonprofit. We will invite two local artists to give a talk at our event to explain to students why this kind of representation in Wikipedia matters, and then invite students and community partners to learn how to edit Wikipedia and work on this list of topics.

In the past, we held our art+feminism edit-a-thons in the library during the academic year. We partnered with a students arts organization to produce the events which centered art creation and student and community performance as much as teaching participants to edit Wikipedia and help address its lager issues of representation. While the events were a success in driving student interest, we learned that performance and art creation often pulled focus from the goal of introducing our campus and the broader community to Wikipedia editing, the gender and racial disparities inherent in representation on the platform, and the value of editing to redress these issues. By offering the event through a program that directly asks students to produce public knowledge on the humanities, we are hopeful we will generate more interest in Wikipedia editing as a means of making a meaningful contribution to the public humanities. This event will prove an important milestone in the program’s training efforts and offer participants an opportunity to contribute to public knowledge of our community. We also hope these students will become ambassadors to drive further engagement during the academic year at future edit-a-thons. For our community partners, its an opportunity to co-create community knowledge of underrepresented artworks and artists. Our budget asks for related food costs for the event and includes honorarium for two artist speakers.

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

1) To create a community around co-creation. Our campus is located within the city of Hartford, and we see this event as one means of encouraging co-creation with the larger community of which we're a part. We recognize that knowledge can be silo-ed within hierarchies whether in higher ed or between our campus and the larger community. This event presents an opportunity to bring a broader Hartford community together in service of learning about and addressing larger issues of representation on a digital platform often used to communicate knowledge of our community to a broader audience. Inviting multiple constituencies together to contribute to public knowledge of our shared community is one way of developing co-creation between our campus and the Hartford community. 2) To recruit new editors by demystifying Wikipedia editing. By inviting community partners and campus partners into the practice of editing Wikipedia with a focus on local and underrepresented artists, we want to not only engage in co-creation but dispel any myth of specialized knowledge or gatekept practices associated with this work. Our community may be familiar with Wikipedia and associate it with democratized knowledge that is freely available online, but we want to further emphasize that the right to contribute is also open to all. We can do this by building on resources we’ve created for previous edit-a-thons to share tutorials that invite volunteers into every step of the editing process. 3) Present Wikipedia editing as a form of public humanities work. The PHC program emphasizes the value of work designed to benefit the public, whether drawing on faculty research or showcasing the work of Hartford and community non-profits. We want to draw a connection between the kinds of works traditionally affiliated with public humanities and the research and editing offered by Wikipedia. One area of clear connection is representation. Many of our previous projects have offered representations of underrepresented groups in our community, filling in gaps reflective of broader societal biases. This same presentation of neutrality that simultaneously reflects the societal biases of its edtiors is true of Wikipedia as well, as the national Art+Feminism initiative has made plain. We want our participants to understand a challenge within all humanities work to address biases and silences, and the value of doing so with attention to research and information literacy. Contributing content to Wikipedia that adds a greater representation of artists in Connecticut’s history is a meaningful and important contribution to public humanities. 4) To contribute to public awareness of art and artists in our community on Wikipedia. We are located in a community with art museums, arts non-profits and performance spaces, and an active community of artists on campus and in Hartford. We want to create a greater representation of the historic contributions of Hartford and Connecticut's women and non-binary artists on Wikipedia.

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

1) To create a community around co-creation.

  • We will invite PHC participants to take part in the edit-a-thon, invite two local artists to give talks emphasizing the importance of the arts+feminism mission and work with community organizations to populate a list of names of women and non-binary artists who deserve greater representation on the site.

2) To recruit new editors by demystifying Wikipedia editing. We will work with our PHC students to build on their research skills to contribute citations, internal links, content, and new pages for artists and artworks at the edit-a-thon. We will put out a call to our broader campus community to take part in the edit-a-thon in addition to our community partner organizations. 3) Present Wikipedia editing as a form of public humanities work. We will offer training in both Wikipedia editing and also present the connections between academic or public humanities research and the knowledge production that results in Wikipedia pages. Drawing on work presented by art+feminism, we will also educate participants on the biases apparent in public humanities work and in Wikipedia that we can both call out and address during the event through editing. 4) To contribute to public awareness of art and artists in our community on Wikipedia. We will share a list of artists and artworks created by Connecticut women and non-binary artists that we will work on at the event. We will share the list on a website we created for previous art+feminism edit-a-thons that we will continue to use throughout the 2023-2024 academic year in future edit-a-thons on campus.

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

We will host an edit-a-thon in late June for our program participants and community partners. We will work with community organizations to update a list of Connecticut women and non-binary artists and artworks. We will redesign our art+feminism website to reflect this updated list, provide resources on how to do research on these subjects, and further develop training resources on the site that educate volunteers on how to edit Wikipedia. We will create a wiki dashboard for the event which will allow us to provide resources and support for new editors training for the event, and allow us to focus edits on artists we select. Afterwards, the dashboard will also be useful as a means of tracking the scope of edits created.

5. Do you want to apply for multi-year funding?      

No

5.1 If yes, provide a brief overview of Year 2 and Year 3 of the proposed plan and how this relates to the current proposal and your strategic plan?

N/A

6. Please include a timeline (operational calendar) for your proposal.

Here is our timeline:

May 2023:

  • The Public Humanities Collaborative will begin the week of May 22nd. As part of this program, student researchers, faculty, and community partners will gather for workshops on topics including project design, research design, information literacy, and digital humanities approaches.
  • In the first few weeks of the program, we will work with community organizations to build our list of artists for use in our edit-a-thon in late June: https://dsp.domains.trincoll.edu/artandfeminism/list-of-artists/
  • We will use this list to create a wiki dashboard for the event that centers the subjects we want to encourage editors to work on. This dashboard will also be helpful in providing resources directly to editors and helping us gauge the scale of edits attempted and completed.

June 2023:

  • At the beginning of June, we will advertise the event to our campus and community partners and review research skills with our student researchers.
  • The week of June 12th, students will complete a workshop on best research practices from our arts & humanities librarian. This workshop will include attention to researching subjects for inclusion in Wikipedia.
  • The week of June 19th, we will host a day-long edit-a-thon on June 20th with PHC participants and our campus/community volunteers. At the event, we will invite two artists to speak about the importance of addressing the gender and racial issues of representation at the core of art+feminism.
  • June 21 - event participants will receive a post-event survey to collect feedback on how the event changed their perceptions of Wikipedia, open learning, and the issue of representation in the politics of knowledge production
  • The week of the 26th, we will provide follow-up resources to participants on how to continue to edit Wikipedia and ask participants to suggest future themes for edit-a-thons for the 2023-2024 academic year. These resources will also include statistics on the page views edited pages have already received in the week following the event. We want to emphasize the contribution editing Wikipedia presents to public humanities.

July:

  • We will send out a resource guide to community partners to encourage additional edit-a-thons on Connecticut-related artists and artworks.
  • July 28th - the PHC program concludes for the 2022-2023 academic year

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

Our event team consists of the following full-time salaried staff members:

Mary Mahoney, Digital Scholarship Strategist and Co-Director, Public Humanities Collaborative (Partontheedit on Wikipedia; m_mahoney on Wikimedia) Erica Crowley - Co-director, Public Humanities Collaborative and Director of Community Learning Center for Hartford Engagement & Research Joelle Thomas, Systems, User Experience, and Discovery Librarian (jethomes2 on Wikipedia) Jeff Liszka, Arts & Humanities Librarian

8. 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.

Content Gender gap, Sexual Orientation, Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial

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

This event is part of art+feminism which seeks to address the lack of representation of women and non-binary artists on Wikipedia. In so doing, it also works to raise awareness of and contribute to silences around LGBTQIA artists and artists of color.

9. 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.

Education, Human Rights, Diversity

10. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Please note, we had previously asked about inclusion and diversity in terms of CONTENTS, in this question we are asking about the diversity of PARTICIPANTS. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.

Ethnic/racial/religious or cultural background

11. What are your strategies for engaging participants, particularly those that currently are non-Wikimedia?

We will invite PHC participants to learn about Wikipedia editing and to receive training on basic introductory editing practices such as adding citations, adding internal links, and working to add content to stub pages. We will offer introductory research skills training for use in surfacing citations and content to contribute to artist pages we identify and provide on the day of the event. We will provide artist talks to explain and emphasize the value of combatting issues of representation on Wikipedia and in our community. To promote the event to our campus and community partners, we will share a website we've used for art+feminism edit-a-thons in the past. We will do direct emails to these partners to emphasize no previous experience is required and welcome them to our campus.

12. In what ways are you actively seeking to contribute towards creating a safer, supportive, more equitable environment for participants and promoting the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy, and/or equivalent local policies and processes?

We are contributing to an emphasis on digital equity on our campus and in our broader community. We are working to democratize digital skills and raise awareness about issues of representation online and the politics of knowledge creation that create them. We will consider barriers of entry to new editors and work to provide resources, training, and a welcoming environment to co-create a community of editors on campus and in our Hartford community.

13. Do you have plans to work with Wikimedia communities, groups, or affiliates in your country, or in other countries, to implement this proposal?

Yes

13.1 If yes, please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.

We will work with art+feminism, as we have in the past. We will create a wiki dashboard for our event and share the link with our art+feminism regional coordinator. We will check in with her about our event plan and share updates to our event website which houses training, research, and content resources: https://dsp.domains.trincoll.edu/artandfeminism/list-of-artists/ We will follow up with our coordinator at art+feminism to talk about the metrics we collect in our dashboard regarding the success of our event.

14. Will you be working with other external, non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?

Yes

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

We will reach out to the Connecticut Historical Society, the Connecticut State Library, Wadsworth Athenaeum, the New Britain Museum of American Art, Hartford Stage, and other community arts organizations to suggest subjects for volunteers to work on during our event. We will also invite them to participate with us on the day.

15. How do you hope to sustain or expand the work carried out in this proposal after the grant?

We will invite attendees to future edit-a-thons during the 2023-2024 academic year and ask attendees to suggest future themes to encourage and build on the practice of co-creation. We will update our event website and use it for future events and to reach out to faculty to encourage the development and design of Wikipedia editing assignments.

16. What kind of risks do you anticipate and how would you mitigate these. This can include factors such as external/contextual issues that may affect implementation, as well as internal issues, such as governance/leadership changes.

We anticipate the timing of our event (summer) at an academic institution may limit our capacity to attract volunteers among the faculty, staff, and students on our campus outside of Public Humanities COllaborative participants. We will use our campus email lists and daily newsletter to raise awareness of the event with this potential limitation in mind.

17. 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.

Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement, Coordinate Across Stakeholders, Identify Topics for Impact

18. Please state if your organization or group has a Strategic Plan that can help us further understand your proposal. You can also upload it here.  

Yes
https://www.trincoll.edu/strategic-initiatives/trinitys-bicentennial-strategic-plan/

Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation[edit]

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

We want to learn if students appreciated the value of becoming new editors, and in particular if they grasped the issues inherent in the politics of knowledge creation built into editing Wikipedia. Our students draw on knowledge from Wikipedia daily, but have they considered where it comes from and how that knowledge might reflect biases or interests of editors? How might these issues connect to larger issues of digital literacy that will be vital for students to parse throughout their lives? Will this experience create greater buy-in to learn how to vet and question what they know, how they know it, and how they can better understand it? Specifically, we want to connect the importance of information literacy and research design to the importance of diversity and inclusion in digital platforms (and the issues that often prove barriers to this). This speaks to our broader institutional goal of developing a campus community that embraces diversity and complexity. We want to create a community around co-creation that connects our campus community to the broader Hartford community. We want to assess the work of this event in making both campus and community partners feel a greater sense of connection to our shared region and its histories.

20. 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 space provided.

Main Metrics Description Target
New editors created We will use the wiki dashboard for the event to track how many new editors we create during the event. 15
Number of edits completed We will track how many edits volunteers create during the event in our event dashboard. 50
Pages Edited We will track what subjects most interest our volunteers by tracking what pages editors contribute to. 10
Pages created Although we will encourage new editors to focus on adding citations, adding internal links, and working on stub pages, we will also track how many new pages are created to provide representation on Wikipedia 5
Page Views We will use the event dashboard to monitor how many page views the pages edited at our event received in the week following the event. This will let us report back to participants on the reach of their work which will emphasize the value of editing Wikipedia as a meaningful contribution to public humanities. 1000

Here are some additional metrics that you can use if they are relevant to your work. Please note that this is just an optional list, mostly of quantitative metrics. They may complement the qualitative metrics you have defined in the previous boxes.

Additional Metrics Description Target
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities In our post-event survey, we will ask: 5
Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities N/A N/A
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability N/A N/A
Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors We will create a post-event survey using Microsoft Forms for participants to share their experiences and offer suggestions on how to improve our training, resources, and event structure to create more effective onboarding of new editors and retain editors in the future. Our survey will be sent to all constituencies (students/faculty/staff/community parnter) and ask each to identify themselves and answer all quesitons that apply:

We will ask:

  • How have student/faculty/ staff/ community partner perspectives about Wikipedia changed after they participated in our event?
  • Are they using Wikimedia projects/open knowledge projects differently in their daily life, if so how or why didn't they? Do they share this with others, if so how or why not?
  • Did the edit-a-thon invite volunteers to question how gender and race affect what information they consume online? Do they think differently about issues of representation and digital literacy?
  • What factors motivated them to continue to connect and maybe contribute more actively? What factors act as barriers?
  • How was our edit-a-thon effective in bringing in communities we hadn’t worked with before? What didn’t work out as expected?
  • Were we effective in making people feel welcome, safe, not intimidated? What are some of the ongoing challenges?
  • Have we been effective in guiding potential contributors to the different ways they can contribute and further develop the needed skills and support?
  • Do new editors have the skills needed? What form of training and support was most/less useful in gaining these skills?
  • How many people are continuing to edit after the events/activities?
  • What motivates editors to continue to edit after activities? What are some of the existing barriers, are they receiving the needed support?
  • What types of support and activities are most interesting to participants who want to learn more about the Wikimedia community?


To community partners, we will specifically ask:

  • Does our wider community feel that they are actively participating in defining the plan and they feel ownership of it? Did our intention to co-create the event register outside our campus?
  • Does our plan respond to communities' needs, our organizational vision, and the wider Movement Strategy?
  • Has building our plan strengthened our organization or relationship to communities in any way? Have we managed to bring in underrepresented groups into the planning?
10
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees N/A N/A
Number of people reached through social media publications N/A N/A
Number of activities developed N/A N/A
Number of volunteer hours N/A N/A

21. Additional core quantitative metrics. These core metrics will not tell the whole story about your work, but they are important for measuring some Movement-wide changes. Please try to include these core metrics if they are relevant to your work. If they are not, please use the space provided to explain why they are not relevant or why you can not capture this data. Your explanation will help us review our core metrics and make sure we are using the best ones for the movement as a whole.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics Description Target
Number of participants N/A 30
Number of editors N/A 30
Number of organizers N/A N/A
Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project
Wikimedia Project Description Target
Wikipedia N/A 35
N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A
N/A N/A N/A

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

N/A

22. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?

We will use the Programs & Events Dashboard and the Event Metrics tools. In addition, we'll create a post-event survey in Microsoft Forms.

Financial Proposal[edit]

23. & 23.1 What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency. If you are thinking about a multi-year fund, please provide the amount for the first year.

1400 USD

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

1400 USD

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

Here is our event budget: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LcvyogMyWHnliAU5UIb7fwdFJdPCfCUXu4IZqZU5TRY/edit?usp=sharing

23.4 Please include any additional observations or comments you would like to include about your budget.

N/A

Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.

Other public document(s):

Final Message[edit]

By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.

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

Yes


Feedback[edit]