Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/2025 Sundance Film Festival WikiPortraits Initiative (ID: 22830299)

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hello @Everwest, SuperHamster, and Fuzheado:, and thanks for this proposal on behalf of the WikiPortraits initiative to support work at Sundance building off of your group's previous work at the event and other events last year. Unfortunately, I am declining this proposal for funding for the following reasons:

• WikiPortraits currently has a General Support Fund application open that is under review. As a matter of policy, General Support Fund recipients and their groups should not also maintain Rapid Fund grants concurrently. Relatedly, as a matter of practice, we ask groups not to apply for Rapid Funds while their General Support Fund is under review even if that means certain programmatic opportunities will be missed, as having concurrent Rapid and General Support Funds has historically created undue burden and confusion for grantees on program and funding management across different people working in a single group.
• The proposal notes that this Rapid Fund proposal could be completed before the General Support Fund activities start. While this flexibility is appreciated, I also want to acknowledge that resourcing for Rapid Funds and General Support Funds comes from a single budget for this region (North America). This budget is not unlimited, and its growth relative to last year is modest (about 7%). To the extent that WikiPortraits is requesting the maximum budget request for multiple, individual events through Rapid Funds, I am hesitant to approve these proposals as there is a risk that doing so will reduce your organization's ability to be awarded the requested general operating support it has requested for next year.
• While the above points were the reasons for declining as a matter of eligibility, I had one other point of feedback on the substance of the proposal. WikiPortraits has been able to demonstrate impact in several ways, including
  • capturing many high quality photos,
  • capturing photos of notable people,
  • incorporating those photos on highly-viewed articles across several Wikipedia projects, and
  • documenting your programmatic practices so that others know how to prepare similar projects.

However, the rationale and motivation for this and previous proposals from WikiPortraits have all noted that:

• there are a significant number of biographies without images or poor images, and
• there are lots of biographies of people from underrepresented communities that lack photos.

The evaluation plan for this proposal and previous reporting from WikiPortraits do not make especially clear how well this initiative is addressing these aspects of the general rationale for your proposal. This is a potential concern. For example, there is far less impact in capturing images for articles where satisfactory or quality images of those individuals already exist, or if the images captured are having minimal benefits for underrepresented communities. It is hard for me to tell what impact WikiPortraits is having in these areas based on the reported information and the current proposed metrics. Thinking ahead, it will be important to include relevant metrics and ways to evaluate WikiPortrait's impact on these areas (such as evaluating the number of biographies improved that had low quality/no image before & improvements on articles reflecting underrepresented communities of interest to your group).

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments on the decision. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 12:47, 4 November 2024 (UTC)