Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Diversifying Wikimedia’s content and contributors, removing barriers to knowledge, and developing new ways of engaging with the public, partners, learners and contributors in the UK, 2022

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Committee feedback[edit]

Hi @LucyCrompton-Reid (WMUK): and Wikimedia UK colleagues!

Thank you for your grant proposal! The Northern and Western Europe Regional Committee has made an initial review and here is our feedback:

  • This proposal is based on an extensive experience of the chapter, including on learning and evaluation, and advanced analysis of the environment.
  • Wikimedia UK has set ambitious metrics targets and plans multiple impactful intiatives (like a UK-wide offer for secondary schools).
  • Existing strong partnerships are a significant advantage, including covering costs for multiple Wikimedians in Residence.
  • On the other side, we note that other initiatives are vaguely defined, or have identified goals but lack practical steps (such as on Climate crisis).
  • Diversity and notably colonialism initiatives are commendable. However, we want to be sure they will support a cohesive community of editors and that will enable everyone, rather than pitch editors against one another. While there is a strong focus on race, we would like WMUK to also look at intersectionality (e.g. taking into account class and geography inequalities).

This is only an initial review, and before we make the final decision we would like to get more details on the following points:

  1. Thank you for providing the budget for the years 2023 and 2024. Could you please also give an overview of how your activities and metrics would evolve in these periods?
  2. Could you please provide more information on the community engagement around your proposal? How do you define your target communities and how do you work with them?
  3. You mention that you are planning to work internationally and with other affiliates: could you please clarify which and how (beyond FKAGEU)?
  4. How does your vision of a more tolerant society match your description of ugly (...) legacy of colonialism (which is controversial in the British society, especially among Leave voters)? What will you do to make sure that the information you produce, particularly on colonial history, is neutral, and that you do not alienate editors from different political perspectives?
  5. You mention a knowledge gaps research: how will you organise it?
  6. How would work on the Climate Change be implemented? What are the expected outcomes or targets for Wikimedia projects in 2022?
  7. How exactly do you intend to Prioritise racial diversity in all staff recruitment, notably in the context of Equality Act 2010?
  8. Finally, several points regarding the 2022 metrics:
  • Can you please provide a comparison of your metrics with 2020 and/or 2021 (depending on what you have readily available) and comment on the most important changes?
  • Could you please provide some breakdown per programme, at least for major metrics like Wikipedia pages? If you do not have a full breakdown, could you please provide the biggest projects that would drive these metrics?
  • How do you define improvement of an article, particularly in the context of Reach?
  • How do your organisers (300) and volunteer hours (25000) metrics match: do your volunteers really spend 83 hours on average, or do these metrics have different baselines?
  • Do you have any targets regarding minority languages? Beyond numbers, what are the main language communities you want to reach?


Thank you for these questions, and the opportunity to expand on some of the information in our proposal. Please see our responses below, submitted by me on behalf of Wikimedia UK. LucyCrompton-Reid (WMUK) (talk) 11:44, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for providing the budget for the years 2023 and 2024. Could you please also give an overview of how your activities and metrics would evolve in these periods? Our programme is iterative, and monitoring and evaluation plays a crucial role in determining future plans. It’s therefore difficult to say with absolute certainty exactly what activities we will deliver in the second and third years of our proposal. However, these activities will:

  • Be developed in line with our three year strategy - unless some of the assumptions within that strategy turn out to have been incorrect. The timing of this proposal fits perfectly into our strategic planning cycle, and this three year activity proposal matches our new three year strategy for 2022-25. This strategy gives a general direction of our delivery in 2023 and 2024. Additionally, as you will see from our strategic plan, several of our strategic objectives include exploratory questions (e.g. how can WMUK best address the climate crisis) - our activities will therefore evolve as we engage with and answer these questions.
  • Build on the activities and partnerships of 2023/24. As you will see from our Partnerships document, a large number of our planned partnerships in the upcoming year are organisations with whom Wikimedia UK has an existing relationship. In some cases, particularly Wikimedians in Residence, these relationships stretch back years and have seen sustained partnership working that has enabled the testing out of new ideas and practice. We therefore envisage that we will continue to work with many of these partners in 2023 and 2024; although the exact nature and focus of the projects may change according to needs and priorities.
  • Similarly, we envisage that our metrics for the second and third years of this proposal will remain broadly the same - which of course enables us to build up a detailed picture of our delivery and allows us to compare between years. However, we do keep our metrics under review so it’s possible that in the latter years of this three year strategy, and accompanying funding proposal, we might add new metrics or make minor revisions to existing measures. If this proves to be the case we would of course liaise with our Grants Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation and ensure that any changes were agreed.

Could you please provide more information on the community engagement around your proposal? How do you define your target communities and how do you work with them?

In the broadest sense, Wikimedia UK’s community encompasses staff, trustees, members of our Advisory Groups, Wikimedians in Residence, lead volunteers, contributors, members, donors and partners. Our focus in terms of engagement has been around the development of our new three year strategy for 2022 - 2025, rather than the funding proposal itself; as the latter flows from the former. An overview of the process for that - presented to the Wikimedia UK Board of Trustees - was shared with our grants officer in Autumn 2021 and is in a google doc here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PGTHrfL47koJQsaUxUxaV5G1LTG7CUWw0uQT6R2Op7c/edit?usp=sharing

One of the inputs to the strategy was a meeting held more explicitly for the volunteer community, written up in a blog post. The draft strategy was also shared with the community, and volunteers were invited to comment on wiki or to add suggestions directly to the draft google doc (which is how most people engaged with it).

In response to the second question, in our Draft Strategic Framework 2022-25 we outline our stakeholder audiences as four connected groups:

  • Knowledge seekers: individual readers
  • Knowledge creators: individual contributors
  • Knowledge facilitators: volunteer trainers, Wikimedians in Residence, special interest groups
  • Knowledge gatekeepers: publishers, content-holders, Wikipedia admins, funders

Within this model, Wikimedia UK focuses on identifying, supporting and amplifying the experience and voices of participants from underrepresented communities. As examples this approach can be seen in action through our development and delivery of the Celtic Knot conference for minority and indigenous languages, and the promotion and financial support by Wikimedia UK for Women in Red’s 24hr Ada Lovelace Day Global editathon 2021. This latter activity saw 75 editors in the UK engage with almost 3,000 edits, 90 new articles, 1,170 articles edited and earnt the lead volunteer a BarnStar for their contribution to Improving Wiki Diversity. Supporting special interest groups in this way as knowledge facilitators, is a critical pathway to engaging knowledge creators, who through our volunteer training activities can go on to become knowledge facilitators themselves.

Our target audiences have previously been defined in some detail in our Communications and Digital Strategy. The four connected groups identified above have been newly defined, and will inform the development of our Communications and Digital Strategy for 2022 - 2025.

You mention that you are planning to work internationally and with other affiliates: could you please clarify which and how (beyond FKAGEU)?

As one of the largest and most well-resourced chapters we feel that it is important for Wikimedia UK to collaborate with other affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation in the delivery of our goals. Wikimedia UK’s work at an international level tends to fall into the following areas:

  • Peer learning and knowledge exchange, for example through regular ED meetings, as well as more ad-hoc meetings with other groups and volunteers within the movement. In 2022, this will include contributing to the development, resourcing and governance of a regional hub for Wikimedia Europe. We are also keen to collaborate with affiliates leading on particular international initiatives, e.g. Wikimedia Deutschland on Wikibase Cloud and Wikimedia Sweden on content partnerships. We have already established dialogue on these to build on in 2022.
  • Supporting the development and delivery of the global movement strategy. Following significant involvement in this over the last five years, in 2022 our focus will be on the implementation of Initiative Cluster H, in collaboration with colleagues from around the world.
  • Programme initiatives, such as the Celtic Knot conference, which in 2022 will be another virtual event, delivered in partnership with Wikimedia Deutschland and open to international attendees
  • Participation in international campaigns and initiatives such as Art+Feminism, 1Lib1Ref, Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments
  • Finally, because of our location in the UK, we have an opportunity to work with many UK-based organisations that have an international remit. This includes open knowledge fellow travellers such as Open Rights Group, Creative Commons and Mozilla, with whom we collaborate on public policy advocacy. It also encompasses UK based institutions with an international remit - for example, our ongoing Residency with the British Library includes a collaboration with the Bengali Wikisource group, since the BL holds materials relevant to our affiliate colleagues.

How does your vision of a more tolerant society match your description of ugly (...) legacy of colonialism (which is controversial in the British society, especially among Leave voters)? What will you do to make sure that the information you produce, particularly on colonial history, is neutral, and that you do not alienate editors from different political perspectives?

This feels like two questions. In response to the first, I’m unclear as to how our vision of a more informed, tolerant and democratic society is in anyway incompatible with the statement that the recent protests against racism, triggered by the murder of George Floyd, have been underpinned and exacerbated by the legacies of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Whilst of course not everyone agrees about how we should address our colonial history - and indeed, whether we need to - the connection between the protests and the UK’s historic role (both as a coloniser and within the slave trade) is incontrovertable. The ‘culture war’, as it is being framed, is not of Wikimedia UK’s making; however we recognise that it represents a significant challenge for our existing and potential partners within the culture and education sectors, and one that we felt was important to acknowledge within our proposal.

Coming to your second question, I think it’s important to emphasise that, by and large, Wikimedia UK does not produce information ourselves. Instead we support and facilitate the release of content, and encourage reflections on how this information should be presented and contextualised on the Wikimedia projects. The question of neutrality, particularly as it applies to colonial history, is a nuanced one. It is not Wikimedia UK’s role to be political and indeed this would be incompatible with our charitable status. However we do see it as our role to equip people with the skills to examine sources, consider where there might be bias, and work towards an account of historical events which is as accurate as possible. It is not our intention to alienate editors, regardless of their political perspective, and I would hope that the approach described above wouldn’t do so.

It may also be worth mentioning here our reliance on the work of an extended network of residents and expert volunteer trainers who deliver editing workshops on behalf of Wikimedia UK and our partners. These people (described as ‘knowledge facilitators’ in our new strategy) tend to be deeply embedded in the Wikimedia projects. The values and principles of the Wikimedia community - including a neutral point of view - underpin all of their external training and project delivery. Examples of the impact of this extended network include Dr Alice White at Wellcome, originally recruited as Wikimedian in Residence in 2016, who trained not only Dr Jess Wade (now well known within and outwith the movement as a prolific editor focused on the gender gap), but also the female British Doctor who would go on to play a key role in raising awareness of the new coronavirus in early 2020.

You mention a knowledge gaps research: how will you organise it?

Wikimedia UK’s strategy is informed by and supports the direction of the global Wikimedia movement. Our work focuses on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege, and for this reason we’ve put a strong emphasis on the ‘Topics for Impact’ 2030 initiative, with focus on underrepresented content and bridging content gaps. There are two research projects that we have been developing which are relevant to this:

1, ‘Research into Knowledge Gaps’ i.e. a summary and analysis of the movement conversations to date with regards to initiative cluster H. Beyond analysis, this also includes a conversation with Wikimedia communities across projects and languages to determine key priorities and therefore implementation of work on high impact topics and knowledge gaps. We are co-funding this project and have started delivery by engaging with an external consultant with experience in equity work. We are awaiting results of the consultant’s initial research and will plot next steps from there. Our hope is that it will bring energy and focus to the critically important element of the ‘knowledge equity’ strategic direction.

2, Research into ‘Representation of Non-Western Cultural Knowledge on Wikipedia’. Connecting with cultural heritage experts in our community, we funded this project in 2021, recognising that some content gaps on Wikipedia are much better understood than others (notably gender gap). Visual arts is one such example. The research demonstrated that Wikipedia as a whole gives seven times as much coverage to the most notable Western artists as to the most notable artists from outside the Western canon. This ratio differs among the different language versions of Wikipedia, but even Wikipedias in Asian or other non-European languages show a strong bias towards European art and artists. One output of the research is also a detailed tasklist, an editing ‘to do’ for our communities to work on the identified gaps. In 2022, following the successful completion of our research on a culture gap in visual arts, we propose a series of papers to investigate imbalances and identify under-represented topics in six aspects of culture, including literature and music. Delivery will depend on securing additional external funding, but if successful we are confident that the findings would add valuable insight into the knowledge gaps work within our movement.

How would work on the Climate Change be implemented? What are the expected outcomes or targets for Wikimedia projects in 2022?

As we have tried to indicate in our proposal, our work on the climate crisis is very nascent, and we do not yet have concrete targets in terms of how this work will impact on the Wikimedia projects. Within the metrics question further down we have however provided indicative splits of metrics within our three strategic programmes, including the Climate Crisis targets. As currently envisaged, this will be content-heavy work, possibly led by Wikidata contributions. This is exploratory and will be monitored closely (internally we capture metrics every quarter). In terms of implementation, as this is an area we have been exploring over the past year, we have some partnerships activity in place already, including:

  • We are working with open data climate startup Climate Policy Radar to improve Wikidata's ability to support environmental policy work
  • We are working with the DecarboN8 research network involving universities and local councils to share information around decarbonisation. The intention is to build this into a self-sustaining group over time.
  • We have been supporting the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to share images and text content on Wikimedia, with a focus on food and environment issues.
  • We have been working with existing partners Natural Resources Wales and Llen Natur to feed localised data directly onto Wikipedia based on the threat of climate change to every community.
  • We are working with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and other partners to release text, images and videos created through the 6-year European-funded Ireland-Wales project CHERISH (Climate, Heritage and Environments of Reefs, Islands, and Headlands), documenting the erosion of coastal heritage.
  • We are supporting the Aberdeen-based civic hacking initiative Code the City to work on environmental data such as air quality.
  • We have previously been involved in discussions with several editors involved in climate change coverage on wiki (Su-Laine Brodsky, John Cummings and Femke Nijsse) and the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter; developing plans for a Wikimedian in Residence. Initial fundraising attempts for this were unsuccessful, however we are hoping to pick this up again if all parties are still interested.

How exactly do you intend to Prioritise racial diversity in all staff recruitment, notably in the context of Equality Act 2010?

The UK Equality Act 2010 is the guiding legislative framework for our work in the area of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion. It does not prohibit positive action in the recruitment of any or all underrepresented groups, and it is up to individual organisations to determine specific priorities. In our case, as outlined in our EDI Framework, within the staff team there are high levels of representation from all protected groups with the exception of people of colour. Within our EDI action plan we have therefore detailed a number of initiatives to help address this, including:

Look for patterns in the recruitment cycle data to find where the barriers lie, for example in requirements of the person specification, shortlisting, or the makeup of recruitment panels Review the internal and external recruitment process from start to end, looking at job design, advertisement, and selection processes to analyse and amend points at which we are excluding candidates with marginalised identities (e.g. requirement for a degree, or bias in panels). Undertake an adjusted pay gap analysis at all levels of the organisation to determine whether there are gender or race pay gaps, and take immediate steps to close them. Commit to unadjusted pay gap analysis that results in action to address underrepresentation at senior levels.

Finally, several points regarding the 2022 metrics:

  1. Can you please provide a comparison of your metrics with 2020 and/or 2021 (depending on what you have readily available) and comment on the most important changes?
  2. Could you please provide some breakdown per programme, at least for major metrics like Wikipedia pages? If you do not have a full breakdown, could you please provide the biggest projects that would drive these metrics?
  3. How do you define improvement of an article, particularly in the context of Reach?
  4. How do your organisers (300) and volunteer hours (25000) metrics match: do your volunteers really spend 83 hours on average, or do these metrics have different baselines?
  5. Do you have any targets regarding minority languages? Beyond numbers, what are the main language communities you want to reach?

The first two questions above are addressed in this table: ​​https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lPTsfR7ZhoUOYZhM167mWDmSsbCMWAf7wAe35jvXjuI/edit#heading=h.2b4irm46a0gu

For the third question - assuming it relates to the 'new content contributions per Wikimedia project’ metric - following past practice in capturing ‘new or improved’ content pages, we capture pages that have been changed in any way.

Volunteer hours for us are ‘Hours spent on activities by people involved in WMUK activities, and by leading volunteers.’ So this metric includes organiser contributions, and constitutes a significant part of that metric, but we also capture some of the time spent on editing. This is for example to recognise the value of free digital labour that students contribute within the Wikimedia in the Classroom activities.

We have a metric proposed in this application which tracks ‘how many languages have we worked across’. Within this, we track Wikipedias on which editing took place within our programmes. These often come from our minority language outreach work, and student courses where we focus on minority language translation. We also track where the images added to the Wikimedia Commons category ‘Supported by WMUK’ have been later used in various language version wikis - this can be tens of wiki projects in a year and so does reach a high number of minority languages. Through our longstanding work on Celtic Knot we focus on indigenous languages of the UK, while also connecting to the migrant communities in the UK.

LucyCrompton-Reid (WMUK) (talk) 14:11, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

We are looking forward to hearing from you, and we will make our final decision towards mid-January upon receiving your feedback. On behalf of the NWE regional committee — NickK (talk) 22:20, 30 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Funding recommendation[edit]

Hi Wikimedia UK and @LucyCrompton-Reid (WMUK):,

Thank you again for your proposal and for your detailed answers. Congratulations, your grant is approved!

The committee approved full funding in the amount of 355 000 GBP for the grant term 1 February 2022 to 31 January 2023 to Wikimedia UK. The committee did not approve the multi-year option and would like to see a new application from Wikimedia UK in autumn 2022.

We appreciate the experience of the chapter and the vast community of members, volunteers, partners and supporters Wikimedia UK can rely on. The ability to attract external funding, develop impactful partnerships and organise impactful initiatives are major strengths that we believe will help the organisation reach its goals. We believe that the staff and budget structure of Wikimedia UK are relevant for achieving these goals.

The main reasons for not supporting the multi-year funding are the following:

  • Concerns regarding initiatives potentially out of scope of the Wikimedia movement. This notably relates to the plan to have five policy touchpoints on the climate crisis: while we understand that WMUK members are interested in this topic, we believe climate policy lobbying is not something Wikimedia UK should engage in. On the other hand, partnerships with organisations working on the climate crisis to increase the amount of free knowledge on this topic are something we are willing to support.
  • Issues related to neutrality of the content produced and the diversity approach chosen. We appreciate the initiative to work on knowledge gaps, and we are happy to support even wider community engagement on these topics if WMUK needs it. We expect the chapter to make sure the content produced is considered of high NPOV standards by the community, and that Wikimedia UK does not become a part of the 'culture war' but rather stays above it.

We recognise that Wikimedia UK has just completed a strategic review, and as a result, many of the initiatives are in early stages and potentially lack clear action plans at the current stage. We are willing to support these new, potentially experimental activities, as well as empower the chapter to continue developing and adapting the existing ones over the 2022/23 cycle.

In the application for the following years we expect to see, on one hand, the outcomes of the first year, the impact achieved and lessons learned, on the other hand, the adjusted action plans based on the results of the first year.

Thank you again for your proposal and for your involvement and we wish you a successful and impactful work!

On behalf of the NWE regional committee — NickK (talk) 15:03, 25 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]


Many thanks to the committee for your detailed review of our proposal, and for awarding us a grant for 2022/23. We look forward to delivering a wide range of impactful activities over the next 12 months, and sharing our results with you and others through our reports. We will reflect on the feedback given above regarding multi-year funding, and consider how we can describe our work and approach more clearly in future applications. Thanks again, Lucy LucyCrompton-Reid (WMUK) (talk) 09:25, 4 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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