Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Wikimedia UK - Funding request for 1st February 2023 - 31st January 2025

Climate and Environment an emerging theme in Organizing in the Movement

I wanted to endorse Wikimedia UK's emerging work on climate and environment information. As I explain in this blog post: the topic is both exciting for an emerging network of enthusiastic potential contributors to open knowledge, and could create critical vehicle for improving the neutral and scientifically based information on the internet about the climate crises and other environmental issues -- the well established scientific consensus about averting the worst impacts of climate change, requires up-to-date verifiable information on myriads of topics. We have profound gaps on both English Wikipedia and other language wikis, that need consistent strategic attention in the coming years -- especially as more and more people are asking questions about climate disasters and policy in their context.

Additionally, I think its very strategic for several of our Western European affiliates to be taking convening roles in these conversations:

• First most research done on climate and sustainability topics is (unfortunately) produced in Europe, the UK and the US because of historically inequities in scholarly funding. While communities and researchers in the Global South are well situated to fill the gaps related to the knowledge needed for local activities and context, much of the basic science and internationally relevant data and research is coming from European institutions. Having a strong relationship to academic institutions working on these topics is important for depth of coverage on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
• Wikimedia UK's proposed line of work is consistent with the work of affiliates in the rest of the world. For example, in Latin America, Wikimedistas de Uruguay, Wikimedistas de Peru and the Wikimedia Colombia are all exploring environmental and climate topics, primarily through a climate justice, local knowledge, and human rights lens. The rapid growth of Wikimedians for Sustainable Development and the strong applicant pool for the Organizer Lab on this theme shows a growing demand for knowledge about these practices.
• More affiliates taking leadership rolls on Open Access to climate and environmental data and research, helps us align with both other parts of the open movement. I am part of a collective on Open Climate, Creative Commons is currently coordinating a program on Open Climate research, and the theme of Open Access week this year was climate justice. We are in a moment (like we were with Open GLAM a decade ago) where the open movement is learning how to be effective supporters of the knowledge ecosystem around the climate crises and other environmental issues. Wikimedia organizations need to be involved in that conversation.
• Similarly, funders, especially in Europe, are eagerly looking for communications and knowledge organizations who can effectively spend resources on climate communication. Investing in affiliates doing climate and environmental knowledge programs helps with movement sustainability. The recent Exeter Wikimedian in Residence is one example of these opportunities. Additionally, the Ford Foundation recently published several funder-requested reports on the intersection of digital rights, open practices and climate action/justice, other funder networks are emphasizing the need for digital technology in climate change mitigation and adaptation. As a movement we need more documented, funded projects to help our affiliates seek further funding from this rapidly growing pool of resources.

I hope this is helpful in evaluating Wikimedia UK's strategic, and important work, on the topics for impact related to Climate and the environment, Astinson (WMF) (talk) 14:58, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Feedback from the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Regional Funding Committee on your proposal

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

Thank you for taking time to submit the grant proposal! The Northern and Western Europe Regional Committee has made an initial review and here is our feedback:

• We appreciate that your proposal is clear, detailed enough and well written.
• Wikimedia UK made a good advancement in providing actionable outcomes in line with the new strategy, and we also appreciate addressing our main concerns from last year.
• Strategic partnerships are the major strength of your proposal, with an impressive list from the British Library to Menter Môn in rural Wales and Scots Education.
• We value the idea of Wikimedia Visiting Fellow for Climate. We recognise that you will need time to develop your strategy, but will be interested to review it once it is developed.
• The chapter shows a good understanding of challenges the Wikimedia community faces in Britain and reflects them well in the proposal (but sadly does not mention Northern Ireland).
• The spread of revenue sources is good with external funding sources represented.

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. Your proposal mentions England, Wales and Scotland where you have detailed goals. What is your strategy in Northern Ireland?
2. Could you please give more visibility on what you expect (or hope) to deliver around Climate in two years?
3. Regarding the significant increase in the number of image views, how can you attribute whether a success or failure on this was due to your work or to external circumstances (e.g. less interest to certain topics)?
4. Could you please explain the reasoning between moving the Celtic Knot to the online format? Did it prove to be less efficient offline, or is there some background explaining this move?

Thank you very much and we look forward to hearing from you.

On behalf of the NWE Regional Committee — NickK (talk) 00:17, 15 November 2022 (UTC)

Many thanks to Nick and the rest of the Committee for your detailed review of our proposal. I am in the process of gathering feedback from other members of the staff team on your questions, and will respond here early next week. Best wishes, Lucy LucyCrompton-Reid (WMUK) (talk) 20:03, 18 November 2022 (UTC)

Response from Wikimedia UK on initial feedback from the Northern and Western Europe Regional Funding Committee

Please see below for our responses to the questions raised by your review. If anything isn't clear, or needs expanding, please do let us know. Also, we are very happy to answer any additional questions that you have on our proposal.

Your proposal mentions England, Wales and Scotland where you have detailed goals. What is your strategy in Northern Ireland?

As the Wikimedia chapter for the UK, we have been considering our strategy for Northern Ireland for several years. Whilst we don’t have an extensive programme in the area, we do deliver some activities for Northern Irish contributors. For example, Wikimedia UK's 'Celtic Editors Group' meets over Zoom and includes editors from all six Celtic languages. The group includes people from both Ireland and Northern Ireland, who contribute to the Irish Wikipedia. This year our Wales Programme Coordinator, Robin Owain, worked with Rebecca O’Neill from Wikimedia Community Ireland to encourage participation in Wiki Loves Earth from Northern Irish contributors. Wiki Loves Monuments is also open to contributions from Northern Ireland, although historically the uptake has been low.

Our strategy in Northern Ireland is informed by the political and cultural context. There are several barriers to Wikimedia UK delivering a more extensive programme in Northern Ireland. Firstly, it feels politically sensitive for an organisation based in England to lead projects in Northern Ireland. This may weigh particularly heavily on staff and trustees who grew up during the Troubles. We are also aware of the need to respect and work with indigenous languages, and the important role that these languages play in the cultural identity of the UK’s nation states. In Wales, much of our programme is focused on the Welsh language, which English leaders have historically sought to suppress. Similarly, in Scotland we have previously invested in a Scots-Gaelic residency (in partnership with the National Library of Scotland) and actively support the work of the Scots language community on Wiki. In Northern Ireland, the indigenous languages of Irish and Ullans (Ulster-Scots) are important to particular communities however we don't currently have any staff or community leaders with these languages.

The population of Northern Ireland is around 1.89 million people. Every one of the nine regions in England has a significantly larger population than that - for example, North West England has 7.3 million people while South East England (excluding London) has a population of over nine million. Whilst we don’t distribute internal resources strictly on the basis of population size, it remains the case that Northern Ireland has a relatively small population, with internal divisions that could present unique challenges for our staff and volunteers to navigate. We know from our work in Scotland and Wales that the most powerful partnerships - with both organisations and communities - happen when someone is based locally. For Northern Ireland, which is separated from mainland Britain by the Irish Sea, this has historically been a barrier from both a practical and financial perspective.

Looking ahead, there are several factors that we hope will enable us to connect more with potential communities in Northern Ireland. In particular, the restructure of our Programmes Team, mentioned briefly in our funding proposal, is now underway. As a result, from January 2023 we will have two Programme Managers reporting into our Director of Programmes and Evaluation, with one of these managers having particular strategic responsibility for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as well as community development more broadly (with the other Programme Manager focusing on England and major projects). As part of this change we will be exploring the potential to support more work in Northern Ireland - whilst recognising the resource constraints and capacity issues highlighted above. Whilst our project grants are already open to volunteers from Northern Ireland, in 2023 we will pilot ways of promoting these specifically to Northern Irish contributors, and explore other possible models for community engagement. We have also begun thinking about possible partner institutions in Northern Ireland.

I will update our three year strategy and draft Delivery Plan for 2023 to make this exploratory work more visible.

Could you please give more visibility on what you expect (or hope) to deliver around Climate in two years?

The three year objectives for our Climate & Environment theme are to:

• Explore what role Wikimedia UK could take in supporting and growing the global community of editors contributing to climate-related articles and pages on Wikimedia; connecting with existing groups and affiliates to amplify rather than duplicate activity.
• Facilitate the participation of new contributors, drawing on citizen science models to enable people to participate in capturing and disseminating climate information.
• Scope new and existing partner organisations working in the areas of climate and environment, and pilot projects to identify where and how we can have the greatest impact as the UK chapter for Wikimedia.
• Identify and build relationships with funders who are working at the intersection of digital rights and climate justice, developing Wikimedia’s case for support as a leading information resource and platform for digital volunteering and citizen science.

During 2022, we have started to develop new partnerships relating to our climate objectives. Most notably, we have secured a grant from an external funder for a one year residency at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute. The overall intended outcome of this project is improved access to high quality and well sourced knowledge and information about climate change and related issues. The indicators that will enable us to measure the extent to which this outcome has been achieved, are as follows:

1. 100+ climate-related Wikipedia pages have been created or improved
2. High impact climate-related articles that have been improved through the project are viewed more than 3000 times a month
3. Reliable and up-to-date expert sources for climate related information have become the leading scientific source for Wikipedia volunteers to use in their editing
4. Climate-related Wikimedia pages and media that have been added or improved through the project have received over 2 million views by the end of the first year.

The expected outputs for the first year (which runs from October 2022 to September 2023) are as follows:

1. Recruit, train and support 100+ volunteers to become editors and contributors to climate topics on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects
2. Work with experts to improve at least 50 high impact climate-related articles
3. Create authoritative lists of sources for editing workshops
4. 5 - 10 partner organisations to release their climate-related media onto Wikimedia Commons

Beyond the residency, some of our planned activities for next year include:

• Connecting with the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development User Group and other related initiatives, and seeking connections with other actors in the open knowledge sphere
• Developing citizen engagement projects connected to content partnerships;, exploring the potential of civic technologies for collective climate action
• Explore further ways of working with the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works
• Repurpose unfunded project plans for Climate Beacons COP 26 for a climate partnership
• Work with Climate Policy Radar with a focus on enriching Wikidata
• Continue working with research network DecarboN8 (involving universities and local authorities) to share information around decarbonisation
• Refine our narrative and messaging around climate change work, to make our partnership offer clear and attractive

Regarding the significant increase in the number of image views, how can you attribute whether a success or failure on this was due to your work or to external circumstances (e.g. less interest to certain topics)?

Our image views increased significantly from 2020-21 (1.43 billion) to 2021-22 (15 billion views). Whilst it’s not possible to pinpoint exactly what drove this increase, it’s certainly been the case that in recent years, we have facilitated or delivered more activities related to images. These have included our residency at the Science Museum as well as work with communities in Wales and partners such as National Library of Wales and WiciMon, both of whom have recently run a number of image-driven campaigns.

We only started collecting data relating to image and article views in 2019, and it’s therefore also possible that our mechanisms for data collection have become more sophisticated. We primarily use this figure externally, to illustrate the enormous reach of Wikimedia when advocating for cultural institutions to open up their collections.

Our target for 2022-23 is 14 billion views.

Could you please explain the reasoning between moving the Celtic Knot to the online format? Did it prove to be less efficient offline, or is there some background explaining this move?

Celtic Knot began as an in person conference in 2017, and has been held in Edinburgh, Scotland; Aberystwyth, Wales; and Penryn, Cornwall. It was due to take place in Ireland in 2020, in collaboration with Wikimedia Community Ireland when the global pandemic meant a shift to an online event. This was followed by another online version of the conference in 2021, this time in partnership with Wikimedia Norway and styled as Arctic Knot. Both of these online events proved to be a success, in terms of the number of people who attended (which exceeded participation in the in-person events, for perhaps obvious reasons) but also the quality of the experience for participants.

We began planning the 2022 Celtic Knot in late 2021, and started drafting our grant application in December, at which point the Omicron Covid variant was spreading rapidly across the UK. At the stage of planning the 2022 event it was uncertain what restrictions would be in place around travel, especially between countries. We took lessons from earlier editions of the conference and concluded that a programme focused on online content would reduce the chance of disruption caused by Covid, while leaving the option of localised gatherings in line with local Covid restrictions. However, we realised that audiences may be fatigued by online events, and so decided to experiment with the format of conference. Celtic Knot 2022 was therefore structured around a series of workshops, with space for participants to connect and share knowledge in less formal encounters than perhaps a typical online conference event. Our learning from the 2020 online edition is on meta here:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiProject_remote_event_participation/Documentation/Celtic_Knot_conference_-_July_2020#Concept

There is also a summary of feedback to our participant survey in 2020: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Celtic_Knot_2020_survey_summary.pdf )

We will shortly be posting on meta our learning from Celtic Knot 2022. This, and previous evaluation reports, will feed into our decisions for the conference going forward.

LucyCrompton-Reid (WMUK) (talk) 13:52, 28 November 2022 (UTC)

Round 1 2023 decision

Congratulations! The Northern and Western Europe Regional Funds Committee has recommended your proposal for funding!

The Wikimedia Foundation has approved the committee's recommendation to fund your proposal in full for 410,000 GBP

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement.
2. If you have questions, you can contact the Regional Program Officer for the Northern and Western Europe Region.

Posted on behalf of the Northern and Western Europe (NWE) Funding Committee, –Marti (WMF) (talk) 07:11, 5 January 2023 (UTC)