Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/CCCC Wikipedia Initiative at Conference on College Composition and Communication (ID: 22981745)

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hi Matthewvetter, and thanks for this proposal supporting Wikimedia-related engagement with the academic community at Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Please see my questions and comments below:

• In general, Rapid Funds can't be used to support travel scholarships or conference attendance. We have made exceptions to this when it is clear that the purpose of the proposal goes beyond general participation and involves substantial programming and efforts to support volunteer engagement, such as with the WikiPortraits initiative. My perspective is that your proposal is eligible because it has a sufficient level of planned activities (an edit-a-thon & workshop, an informational table, and a scholarly panel) that moves it past mere conference participation. However, I do want to reiterate that the Rapid Fund program is not designed to support cases where people submit Wikimedia-related submissions to conferences and then, if accepted, those individuals then later request financial support from the Foundation to attend those events. We're not in a position equitably support these kinds of travel needs for individuals and small groups across the movement. While we can move forward with the current proposal on this point, I would like you to consider a different approach to programming and engagement with the academic community in future Rapid Fund requests.
• I think the proposed approach to programming at CCCC is sensible, and provides different kinds of useful opportunities for conference attendees. Offering some lighter-touch ways for folks to engage with you, such as the informational table, might work well for folks just learning about your initiative for the first time, whereas the scholarly panel and edit-a-thon will offer opportunities for conferences attendees to engage with movement topics in a deeper or more concrete manner. It's great to offer options to a large audience coming in with potentially different backgrounds and interests about Wikimedia projects.
• How will you be supporting academics to meaningfully edit across these topic areas? Do you maintain a list of article topics that need to be improved or haven't yet been created that you can recommend to participants who want to edit?

Please let me know if you have any questions or needs for clarification. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 09:45, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi @I JethroBT (WMF),

First, thank you for your detailed response to this rapid grant application. After reading your feedback, I have a clearer understanding of the prohibition of using funds for conference attendance based on this statement from the RFP: "Rapid Funds are project-based resources and only fund travel related to the direct implementation of the project." I agree with you that this proposal goes beyond attendance and typical participation in an academic conference - mostly due to the edit-a-thon and informational table. TO answer your question about supporting academics' meaningful contributions to the topic areas: CCCC Wikipedia Initiative maintains WikiProject Writing (Wikipedia:WikiProject_Writing), which has a list of articles in need of improvement and creation (Wikipedia:WikiProject Writing/Article lists - Wikipedia). This resource will be introduced to edit-a-thon participants. We also plan to reach out to registered participants before the event to suggest a more refined list of articles as well as to give individual participants the opportunity to propose articles they would like to work on (within the scope of the initiative).

Matthewvetter (talk) 13:13, 13 March 2025 (UTC)