2020 Satellite Events - Call for Proposals
Since 2016, there has been an annual WikiCite conference. In 2020, this will become a series of independently organised events around the world.
The steering committee with the financial support of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Wikimedia Foundation, are offering grants to support Wikicite Satellite events in three categories for the first half of 2020:
- International events in association with professional conferences [Maximum $10k, Deadline 1 February]
- Local workshops and meetups [Maximum $1k, Open until funds are allocated]
- Events seeking non-financial support
| Purpose of this approach
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WikiCite has built a community of volunteers and partner organizations who are excited to build databases of open citations and structured bibliographic data to serve free knowledge. These efforts have produced a growing corpus of data that’s being actively curated and reused both inside and outside of Wikidata. WikiCite events from 2015-2018 were designed as an annual centralized conference, but this has its limitations.
WikiCite content and languages have remained focused on the Global North. The tools and best practices that Wikidata and the WikiCite community have developed are not known to many communities which need them. Additionally, participants of past events felt there was not enough time to work on their projects, suggesting a need for more events focused on workshops, hack days, and 'do-athons'.
To expand our community and make it more diverse in both participant and subject area, we need to assist and facilitate the community to organise events around the world to foster interest in the project. Thus the WikiCite steering committee has tried to develop a three-category approach to supporting the concept of ‘WikiCite satellite events’ through grants:
- The first category of grants will be to target specific topic areas of strategic importance to the concept of structured citations and Wikidata. These are three areas we feel have high cost-benefit, existing momentum, and are ripe for higher community engagement. See more information about these areas below. Funds will be used to support side-events at pre-existing professional events in order to maximise the value of that investment.
- The second category of grants is to encourage wider Wikidata community engagement in the general topic of structured citations and to ensure that good, diverse, projects are able to be enacted. This will highlight the languages and content that are currently poorly served and where local context and connections are crucial for event success. Funds will be allocated to this and will be used to support local ‘do-athon’ meetups and workshops.
- The third category is events which are not seeking financial support but might wish to receive other kinds of assistance. It is important that no "permission" is required to run a WikCite satellite event, and to support open knowledge in general! If you have a good idea for an event and don't need a financial grant to organise it, go ahead!
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| Technical Criteria
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- All grant money should be spent, and receipts obtained, before July 2020.
- There are limited exceptions available to ‘roll forward’ the grant to slightly later if the event is happening very close to the deadline.
- All events must comply with the WMF Friendly Space Policy
- Applicants may not be blocked, banned or otherwise flagged by WMF
- Wikicite satellite events are specialist events relating to structured-citations. General outreach about Wikimedia/Wikidata are not eligible.
- The total available across all categories is USD$40,000.
- For increased equity and sustainability, the following types of expenses are allowed to be included in grant requests:
- Carbon offset for travel
- Stipend for the organiser
- Infrastructure for remote attendance (e.g. video)
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1: International events in association with professional conferences[edit]
The WikiCite steering committee has identified three ‘target’ topic areas / professional communities. These are in order of priority based on the degree of existing content in; the importance of that content for; and the degree to which that professional community is already engaged in, Wikidata. These are the structured data of bibliographic metadata, biological/natural history, and legal citations.
Submissions related to these topic areas are encouraged especially so if it is with regards to marginalised knowledge in those fields.
However, based on the submissions received other priority areas might emerge as more important and the focus will shift. Therefore, please these listed priorities be a suggestion, not a restriction.
You do not need to have a fully formalised plan in order to submit a proposal - Please submit your project even at the ‘idea’ stage. Contact the WikiCite project manager if you would like guidance on how to proceed.
- Proposal deadline: February 1, 2020.
- Decision announcement: February 29.
- Amount available per grant: Maximum of USD$10,000, local currency equivalent.
We expect to fund between USD$20-30,000 of activities to this category.
| List of questions in the application form
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- Professional event’s name and website
- Professional event’s subject / field of work
- Description of the professional event, and why it is applicable to Wikicite
- Event date(s)
- Event location (city and country)
- Do you already have a relationship to this event?
- Grant applicant’s name (person or organisation who will organise the event)
- Name and contact details of the individual contact person (if the applicant is an organisation)
- Amount of grant funding requested, in USD$ (approximately)
- Are there other grants being applied for, for this event
- Please provide an approximate breakdown of how funding will be used. If additional budget or in-kind support from other sources is available and required in order to support the event, please indicate this.
- Describe your event. What will you do? Who will attend? What problem are you trying to solve at this event? What is the format and structure of the event?
- Describe the outcomes and goals of the event. If the event is a success, what will it have achieved? How will you measure that achievement? How will it address the problem or need you have identified? How will you document your activities?
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2: Local workshops and meetups[edit]
Can be run independently, or in association with another Wikimedia or professional event.
Priority is given to languages, regions and subject areas that are currently poorly served by Wikidata. All proposals must be for events with clear and practical outcomes; running targeted activities. Proposals should outline how the activity aligns with existing WikiCite activities (or describe how there is lack thereof in the specific context) and how the event will be documented. Proposals should not be for general outreach about Wikimedia/Wikidata.
| Examples of kinds of outcomes which would fit this description
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- Clearly scoped events which have X as a tangible outcome, where X can be:
- The upload or completion of a well-defined corpus relevant for WikiCite
- Content: Items, Properties, Lexemes
- Explanations: Metadata mappings, Shape Expressions
- Outputs: Queries, data visualisations, reports
- A bot or tool which assists one of the above
- Translations of existing content for underserved languages
- Documentation for implementing any of the above
- Communications and participation campaigns focused on introducing new community members to the WikiCite environment (i.e. like OAWiki, #1lib1ref, etc), as long as they have a clearly defined scope/goal and measurable impact.
- Hackathons/'Do-athons'/Convenings focused on:
- Re-using the bibliographic data on Wikidata or in a Bibliographic Wikibase
- Enriching/documenting/implementing existing Data Model for WikiCite
- Developing new Data Models to support WikiCite
- Hands-on tutorials/intro/workshops sessions: Introducing communities that previously have not been involved in WikiCite
Example project themes:
- high quality data models for sources that are not largely represented in Wikidata, including for non-scholarly magazines, oral knowledge, archival materials, etc.
- experiments on how to leverage Wikibase to store local knowledge bases and federate them with Wikidata
- efforts driven at creating corpora or datasets of authors, creative works, institutions from a broader range of cultures and demographic backgrounds
- Improving WikiCite workflows, e.g. in terms of data quality or adaptation to a new context or language
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- Proposal deadline: Open until all funds are allocated.
- Decision announcement: On a rolling basis, within a month of application being received.
- Amount available per grant: Maximum of USD$1,000, local currency equivalent.
We expect to fund between USD$10-USD$20,000 of activities in this category.
| List of questions in the application form
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- Name of the event
- Event dates(s)
- Event location (venue, city, and country)
- Grant applicant’s name (person or organisation who will organise the event)
- Name and contact details of the individual contact person (if the applicant is an organisation)
- Amount of grant funding requested, in USD$ (approximately)
- Are there other grants being applied for, for this event
- Please provide an approximate breakdown of how funding will be used. If additional budget or in-kind support from other sources is available and required in order to support the event, please indicate this.
- Describe your event. What will you do? Who will attend? What problem are you trying to solve at this event? What is the format and structure of the event?
- Describe the outcomes and goals of the event. If the event is a success, what will it have achieved? How will you measure that achievement? How will it address the problem or need you have identified? How will you document your activities?
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If this project isn’t suited to the kind of work you want to do, there are also several other kinds of grants that might be appropriate for you. Including:
3: Events seeking non-financial support[edit]
Aside from the annual WikiCite conference, there have been many events which have featured WikiCite’s aims and content over the years. They are listed on the rolling calendar. These kinds of events can and should continue. The steering committee wishes to support such activities as far as possible - you do not need permission to run your own self-funded event about WikiCite.
Separately from the above event grants, you wish to organise a ‘WikCite satellite event’ but do not require financial support. Instead, you might require other kinds of assistance. This could include:
- ‘Branding’
- Suggestions for topics, finding local contacts, or creating 'do-athon' task lists
- Assistance in inviting a speaker
- A supporting letter for travel visas
- Promotion and social media before, during and after the event...
In such cases, please contact the WikiCite project manager if you would like guidance on how to proceed.
About WikiCite
The idea is curate the collection of citations in Wikidata, or perhaps in local instances of the Wikibase platform at particular institutions. To the extent that Wikidata has capacity and data is compatible, then information is in Wikidata. When the data seems too large, or not formatted for Wikidata, or when there is another constraint, anyone can host it in their own Wikibase instance and still make it compatible with WikiCite for possible later integration.
WikiCite is among the most popular projects in Wikidata. This popularity is a legacy of an old desire in the Wikipedia community to better manage citations across Wikimedia projects and languages. While WikiCite cannot quickly fulfil all dreams and ambitions, some community wishes for WikiCite is that it leads to better research discovery for Wikipedia and for all research in general. Potential applications include ease of discovering publications on a given topic, profiling of authors and institutions, and visualizing knowledge sources in new ways. WikiCite promises to open citation data, which many people are surprised to hear is a closed dataset in many fundamental ways.
One application for WikiCite is the management of citations on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Other applications for WikiCite imagine fundamental improvements to the way the Wikimedia community and the world access information. These applications include cataloging all possible knowledge sources which a person might use to develop Wikimedia projects or any off-wiki project, analyzing datasources with new technology to gain new information, and creating a network which ties Wikimedia information to the best available knowledge sources which anyone might access anywhere on any topic in the scope of Wikimedia coverage.
Contributors engaged in developing WikiCite typically seek to design bibliographic data models and to ingest bibliographic databases into Wikidata and to develop that information by annotating it and cross-linking it with other items in Wikidata. You can join! Challenges include identifying databases, getting the data, executing the import, verifying accuracy of content, disambiguating the authors and organizations which citations credit, and developing the citations in new ones by interconnecting their elements to other databases or in-wiki cataloging. Various tools can remix and visualize information from WikiCite, such as by presenting insights about publications from a researcher, university or region. The only connections between WikiCite and individual Wikimedia projects are experimental, so there is not social permission to - for example - routinely generate citations in Wikipedia from the WikiCite content in Wikidata. There are countless tasks for persons at all skill levels to do with WikiCite. Technically simple tasks include disambiguating authors and institutions or manually entering citations. More complicated tasks are similar but scaled up with automation.
WikiCite participants become excited about the project by imagining citations in a way that makes them radically more useful than they could have been before the advent of internet. For example, in the paper age a citation for a research project would name the authors of the paper. WikiCite aims to connect a publication to all persons involved in research, and to their institutions, sponsors, other research publications, research outcomes, citations in other literature, an analysis of the nature of citations, and whatever other information is public and implicit in a citation.
Various Wikimedia projects and proposals have sought to accomplish what this current iteration of WikiCite is advancing. The current WikiCite project began in 2016, but various people have used the term "WikiCite" since 2005 and many Wikimedia community members have participated in discussions or efforts to build an interconnected citation database for Wikimedia projects and beyond. Credit for WikiCite goes to 10s of highly engaged Wikimedia participants, 100s of rather engaged Wikimedia and off-wiki contributors, and 10,000s of individuals who have made some labor contribution to the project either by editing citations in any Wikimedia project, or by editing Wikidata citation content, or speaking up in any of the many community conversations about this which have been ongoing since the establishment of Wikipedia.
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