Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/WikiJournal General Support Fund Grant Application 2025

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

@Ecsussman, SHaggstrom, and Evolution and evolvability: Hello WikiJournal User Group, and thanks for your General Support Fund proposal supporting your publishing and organizational activities in 2025-2026. Please review my comments and feedback below, which I am providing independent from the Regional Fund Committee:

• Because you are expecting to complete publications over the next year in some of your journals, shouldn't this mean there are expected content additions on Wikiversity where these publications are housed? If so, can this information be added to this metrics section?
• Another consulting service I have seen used in region is Baretto, which is based out of NYC, and has been used by Wikimedia NYC to support its current strategic plan. If needed, I recommend reaching out to the chapter and the consulting service to see if they are good fit for your needs.
• The decision to strategically scale back your work given several of the challenges named is sensible, but when looking at the solutions involved, such as building stronger partnerships, building more awareness at conferences around your offerings, searching for charitable foundations, developing multilingual content, developing mentorship arrangements, addressing burnout issues, and others, my impression is that will be hard to make meaningful headway on all or even many of these areas on a voluntary basis given your current organizational capacities, and that working to address all of these things over the next year may led to even greater burnout at your organization. Contractual work for WikiJournal is currently focused on technical editors for your publications, but not on these aforementioned tasks. Have you considered a more narrow set of tasks and organizational capacities to focus on in the next year given the funding you are requesting?

Please let me know if you have any questions or needs for clarity around these comments and requests. To support our review and decisionmaking, responses to proposal feedback from myself and Regional Committee members will be due on 2 May 2025. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 4 April 2025 (UTC)

Hello Chris,

Thank you so much for the feedback, and for working with us on this application!

• I've now added the suggested metrics in the application in Fluxx.
• We appreciate the mentioning of the Baretto consulting service. We'll look into whether they are a good fit for our needs.
• It is indeed noteworthy that there is a lot of ambition to improve the project in new ways. Although we will prioritize the fundamental functions of the journals (processing and publishing articles), we'd also like to keep focusing on journal growth and community engagement as well. Such engagement projects give many options for volunteers to join.

Thanks again!

Mikael Häggström (talk) 16:49, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Questions from regional committee member Matthew Vetter

@Ecsussman, SHaggstrom, and Evolution and evolvability: Hello WikiJournal UG; Thanks for this proposal and for doing the great work that is Wikijournals! I just have a few questions that would be helpful in guiding my review of your application.

1. Have you identified any SPECIFIC external partners? The proposal states that WikiJournal “actively works with external organizations” including universities, research institutions, scholarly societies, and conferences. Can you please share more about the specific entities you are working with?
2. You also mention Open Journal Systems as an “open access publishing group” you are researching for potential collaboration. My/our understanding of OJS was as a software enabling open access publications, rather than a “publishing group” - can you elaborate or explain?
3. Finally, as it relates to the metrics sections, can you provide an estimate of Wikimedia contributions (i.e. articled/content edited or improved from WikiJournals content across relevant projects) - this would be an anticipated estimate perhaps based on previous years?

Please ping me if you need some further explanation of these questions. Thanks! - Matthewvetter (talk) 21:15, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Hello Matthewvetter!

Thank you for reviewing our application. Following are my answers to the questions:

1. So far, we're partnering with the University of Sydney in designing a course around WikiJournal and Wikimedia projects. I've added this information to our application. We're also aiming to reach out to other open access journals to share experiences.
2. You're right. The organization or "publishing group" we intend to research collaboration with is the Public Knowledge Project, who can hopefully assist with applying their Open Journal Systems software to one or more of the workflows of WikiJournal. I've clarified this in the application as well.
3. Sure, I've now added estimates in section 14.2. of the application.

Please let me know if you need any additional clarification.

Best regards,

Mikael Häggström (talk) 21:35, 30 April 2025 (UTC)