Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Enhancing Lace Content in Wikipedia (ID: 22748622)
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Applicant Details
edit- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
Mmangan333
- Organization
N/A
- If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)
N/A
- Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)
Main Proposal
edit- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Enhancing Lace Content in Wikipedia
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2024-09-30 - 2025-08-31
- 4. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
United States of America
- 5. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign, project, or event? If so, please select the relevant project or campaign. (required)
Other (please specify) Some parts of this project include Women in Red, and others will lean on Art + Feminism training materials which are appropriate for this work. But neither suits the full scope of this work.
- 6. What is the change you are trying to bring? What are the main challenges or problems you are trying to solve? Describe this change or challenges, as well as main approaches to achieve it. (required)
There are 3 primary aims of this project. 1) Improve lace content in Wikipedia. 2) Train new contributors from underrepresented communities (gender and age). 3) Raise awareness of the opportunities to use Wikipedia content in the lace community.
Aim 1. Improve lace content in Wikipedia.
Lace has played an important role in women's economic activity throughout the centuries, lace styles can tell us about the fashion in period portraits, and it has been underappreciated as a textile art, likely because the main practitioners were women. The first goal is to improve lace content in Wikipedia. Although there are pages with lace content, most of them need quality control, improvement, and updating. An effort to standardize the pages is included. There are also many pages that are completely absent. Biographies of some of the notable women who have been instrumental in preserving lace knowledge, lace entrepreneurs, and lace practitioners do not exist. Some of these are historical figures with numerous published works and museum pieces, but contemporary lace artists are also largely absent from Wikipedia’s pages.
As a starting point, over the past 2 years I have been maintaining a personal document that records pages that need improvement, and a list of the absences for many lace styles as well. Assessing the current gaps in a formal manner would be the first priority. Refining and prioritizing the needs would be a major project management component initially.
Creating a standard template for lace pages would be another early target. Some pages contain an information box and representative image and a gallery, others are unstructured entirely. Standardizing this would help to guide contributors and also improve usability of the pages.
Aim 2. Train new contributors from underrepresented communities (gender and age).
Outreach to the lace community to locate and train contributors is a primary objective. The lace community consists in large part of women over 40, an underrepresented demographic in Wikipedia editing. The first targeted group would be existing members of the lace community who already write and edit material. Most lace groups around the world have regular newsletters. As an editorial assistant for my local group, I also have access to the network of editors in the US. As a member of 2 international lace organizations, I have access to the editors of their newsletters as well. In addition, outreach to museum staff at organizations who have given talks to our lace groups are good targets.
In addition, many lace groups have a social media presence, driven by a group member that is regularly in need of content.
By reaching out to those who are already inclined to write and share knowledge, we would be starting from a good position. Many are also comfortable with editing and posting. Further, they have a knowledge base of their own publications which would be excellent starting material for many of the targeted pages. They have deep knowledge of their local members’ skills and interests. They would also be able to publicize this effort to raise awareness within the lace community.
Several active training workshops on how to begin contributing, using the Wikipedia guidelines and policies, would be undertaken. These would be Zoom-based meetings to enable people from many locations to participate. They would be recorded for use by the community later as new people become interested in participating.
Relying on the expertise of existing communities such as Women in Red and Art + Feminism, with their guidelines on how to create biographies from scratch, would be crucial. Training workshops would highlight these resources. As the librarian for my local lace group, I also have access to over 450 texts relevant to editing work for providing citations.
In addition to text-based editing, many members of the lace community have valuable and rare lace collections, tools, and lace making experience. Adding photos and other media to Wikimedia Commons would be helpful for improving the pages, and would be another training session. This will help to supplement lace pages. A wealth of lace images exists in the Commons already, but many need better identification and descriptions.
In addition to training, support meetings would be held monthly as the project rolls out. The group meetings would allow us to assess if there has been progress underway on editing tasks, or identify barriers to editing. Reporting back to the project team about the barriers to participation in the wider community would be useful knowledge as well, and a way to guide future training sessions and later run community edit-a-thon events (Edit-a-thons at lace conferences in the future are beyond the scope of this specific work).
In short: specific project overview conversations and trainings on the Wikipedia principles and guidelines, basic page creation and editing, and contributing media would be undertaken, with separate project update and support meetings.
Aim 3. Raise awareness of the opportunities to use Wikipedia content in the lace community.
Editors of the lace community newsletters and social media teams are always seeking articles and images to use for their outreach. Raising the awareness of the lace content in Wikipedia would be beneficial to them. This could create a virtuous cycle of knowledge and discovery among lace aficionados. The astonishing amount of unused lace content in Wikimedia Commons can be repurposed in their ecosystem, making people realize how much is available and spurring new users of the content, and sometimes fixing miscategorizations and errors. This is good for the lace community as well as Wikipedia in the long term, with mutual support and reinforcement cycles.
At the recent OIDFA Virtual Congress 2024, I had a discussion with a woman from the UK who created a “lace bingo” outreach event for her community. She said the most difficult part was locating lace images to use. She had been unaware of the wealth of lace images that are public domain in Wikimedia Commons, including excellent examples from The Metropolitan Museum in NY, the Cleveland Museum of Art, MoMu Antwerp, The Auckland Museum, and many more. However, many of these images would benefit from improved identification and name editing that we can show people how to accomplish.
The Lace Museum has also expressed interest in providing educational links about lace from their in person museum exhibits to lace information. The QRpedia mechanism appears to be a good solution for this, but requires the underlying content on the Wikipedia pages to be of high quality.
- 7. What are the planned activities? (required) Please provide a list of main activities. You can also add a link to the public page for your project where details about your project can be found. Alternatively, you can upload a timeline document. When the activities include partnerships, include details about your partners and planned partnerships.
1. Project management meetings with The Lace Museum team to establish the planned workshops and timelines. 2. Assess the status of crucial lace pages and the needs; prioritizing the editing work, creating a “worklist” or wishlist for contributions. 3. Establish a standard template for lace style pages with info box, history, references, suggested image choices, gallery option; begin to bring lace pages to a common format. 4. Organize resources that can be used as starting materials or page supplementation to offer in training sessions. 5. Outreach to the lace community to recruit new editors: start with the newsletter network and social media teams. 6. Recruit and train a core group of new editors to get them started. 7. Build a body of work that we can use to demonstrate the value to the wider lace community, with the downstream goal of having edit-a-thons as components of future lace conventions and local meetings. 8. Offer project update articles newsletters that become content for local lace newsletters that sometimes struggle for content, and serve as outreach to the community. 9. Assess the barriers to editing by the lace community via support meetings, to lower the barriers for future participation when the scope is broadened to the lace community as a whole. 10. Report out on the post-mortem of the project to lace community members.
Benefit to the lace community as well as Wikipedia: provides awareness of existing resources within Wikipedia that the lace community can use, adding support for sustaining wikipedia and improving it. With a better understanding of Wikipedia, the lace community’s participation in contributing and using content, a virtuous cycle can be engaged. This benefits the Wikipedia community by enhancing the sustainability of our movement, and the lace community simultaneously.
Encourage editing during campaigns such as Women’s History Month “Celebrate Women” which offer additional support during this period: be prepared for these opportunities annually. This is an ongoing opportunity to re-engage people over the coming years as these projects roll out. This provides new opportunities for community-building to the lace sphere, and ongoing support for Wikipedia in the long-term. it will also be helpful content for lace newsletters.
- 8. Describe your team. Please provide their roles, Wikimedia Usernames and other details. (required) Include more details of the team, including their roles, usernames, Wikimedia group, and whether they are salaried, volunteers, consultants/contractors, etc. Team members involved in the grant application need to be aware of their involvement in the project.
The project funds are aimed at project management and coordination work, mainly to Mary Mangan as project lead and contractor for the effort.
This project was initiated in discussion with Kimberly Davis, of The Lace Museum. Kim is a volunteer at this non-profit organization, as well as a lace scholar and practitioner. The Lace Museum often fields inquiries from the general public about lace and lace-related tools and lace history. Together we discussed the need for improvement to the lace pages as a means of free public education and outreach. Kim (in a volunteer role) and I would establish the project and begin the initial evaluation and prioritization of page creation and enhancement targets. The existing volunteer network of The Lace Museum will be engaged, and interns from educational programs in the US associated with the museum can also participate during their semester work. Kim would coordinate volunteer outreach among her volunteers if the project receives support.
Subsequently, when the project has matured, I will be the lead on presenting the project to the wider lace community through existing routes such as the International Organization of Lace (IOLI) and L’Organisation Internationale de la Dentelle au Fuseau et à l’Aiguille (OIDFA). This will provide opportunities for participation from around the world in these community organizations. Raising awareness of the contemporary activities of the world-wide lacemaking community will help to both preserve and sustain the art form, as well as generate new textile art practitioners.
- 9. Who are the target participants and from which community? How will you engage participants before and during the activities? How will you follow up with participants after the activities? (required)
The primary working group targets would be the lace newsletter editors, and active museum outreach coordinators who already work within the sphere of the lace community.
Lacemakers are a wide-ranging group with deep knowledge of lace history and practice. Dominated by women, many with decades of knowledge and experience of lace, the field consists of scholars and artists and amateurs and everything in between. The community has a culture of regular ongoing lectures and workshops that explore the history of lace, and the support of contemporary art lace as well. In addition, the community holds hard-to-obtain lending library materials that are available to members. They collect historic laces, tools, and ephemera that would be valuable additions to Wikimedia Commons. Their knowledgebase would be used to improve lace pages and employ a wealth of museum pieces that already exist at scale in Wikimedia Commons. The lace community also publishes internal (members-only) regular newsletters and bulletins that contain scholarship and crucial history relevant to lace. Membership-sponsored lectures by scholars of lace are available to us. The lace community also nurtures and supports new lacemakers and contemporary art projects today, and performs outreach activities to engage the public as an active component of community volunteer work.
Their depth of knowledge, their resources, and their comfort with community lace project outreach mechanisms support the chance of success of this proposed effort.
Training sessions and support meetings will be the primary drivers for active participants, but awareness and outreach will be across the whole community via articles and images used by newsletter editors and social media teams.
- 10. Does your project involve work with children or youth? (required)
No
- 10.1. Please provide a link to your Youth Safety Policy. (required) If the proposal indicates direct contact with children or youth, you are required to outline compliance with international and local laws for working with children and youth, and provide a youth safety policy aligned with these laws. Read more here.
N/A
- 11. How did you discuss the idea of your project with your community members and/or any relevant groups? Please describe steps taken and provide links to any on-wiki community discussion(s) about the proposal. (required) You need to inform the community and/or group, discuss the project with them, and involve them in planning this proposal. You also need to align the activities with other projects happening in the planned area of implementation to ensure collaboration within the community.
Improvements to the lace pages in Wikipedia has been an ongoing personal effort of mine for some time. During the pandemic, I created the completely new page for Ipswich Lace, which received support from the lead scholar of Ipswich Lace, Karen Thompson. I used this example to reach out to the wider lace community with an article in one of the lace bulletins, IOLI’s quarterly publication (Mangan, M. Lace in Wikipedia. The Bulletin. Vol. 42:1 2021). Although this work has received verbal support among the community, and I did receive initial support for the idea of an Edit-a-thon for lace in 2022 in association with the Threads of Power exhibition in New York, financial resources were not available to accomplish that at the time.
It’s my current impression that passive awareness of the needs of Wikipedia improvement is not sufficient, that we have to drive the knowledge of the needs and calls-to-actions more directly in the community. Project management assessment to evaluate the specific page needs, and provide action items for that, and offer training and support for using editing tools, is the way to proceed.
In addition, it seems that a prejudice about Wikipedia may be at play. Many members of the lace community are older people who have outdated ideas about the role of Wikipedia and hold some stereotypes about the information within based on their earlier misgivings when Wikipedia began. We need to overcome some of these ideas, and explain how quality information gets into this resource. It may also be worthwhile to stress the importance of human knowledge in this time of the looming influence of AI (which is particularly terrible at lace, in my initial explorations).
It is possible that the barriers to contribution are also about understanding the software tools–which have improved since many people were first exposed to Wikipedia and Wikimedia. This project would also help to understand the barriers and help to lower the barriers to participation. And that could mean that some people don’t do the editing themselves, but provide the text and citations to willing volunteer editors in a pipeline. And that would be a fine outcome as well, but more difficult to track from a contributions metric format. We need to establish a pathway for contributions from people who don’t directly edit or submit materials.
The lace community is very keen to make the wider public appreciate and understand lace and lace history, techniques, art, and the lace organizations goals include active outreach. They just need some training wheels to do it online.
- 12. Does your proposal aim to work to bridge any of the content knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Content Gender gap
- 13. Does your proposal include any of these areas or thematic focus? Select one option that most applies to your work. (required)
Culture, heritage or GLAM
- 14. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Age (diversity of age groups)
- 15. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select one that most applies. (required)
Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement
Learning and metrics
edit- 17. What do you hope to learn from your work in this project or proposal? (required)
1. What are the gaps in lace knowledge? 2. What are the barriers to editing in our community? 3. Can we create new editors and contributors in a knowledge community? 4. If we create “call to action” or “wishlist” pages to will it prompt contributions? 5. Can we provide new routes for interested people to find the lacemaking information and community that they need?
- 18. What are your Wikimedia project targets in numbers (metrics)? (required)
| Other Metrics | Target | Optional description |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 30 | 30 active attendees and up to 100 later viewers for Zoom presentation |
| Number of editors | 15 | At least 5 Wikipedia editors, establish a core for future training and outreach. Some existing, some new.
At least 10 Wikimedia content contributors. Some existing, some new. |
| Number of organizers | 2 | 2 main project drivers, one paid to do most of the project management, 1 guiding the material creation priorities. |
| Wikimedia project | Number of content created or improved |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 50 |
| Wikimedia Commons | 50 |
| Wikidata | |
| Wiktionary | |
| Wikisource | |
| Wikimedia Incubator | |
| Translatewiki | |
| MediaWiki | |
| Wikiquote | |
| Wikivoyage | |
| Wikibooks | |
| Wikiversity | |
| Wikinews | |
| Wikispecies | |
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
- Optional description for content contributions.
Based on my current knowledge of the gaps in biographies of women in the lace community, as well as completely absent pages on lace topics and styles, surely 50 articles can be created or enhanced. Paired with these articles is at least one new image to support the high priority pages. These are likely low-end estimates, as the evaluation efforts in the early stages of this project will identify a more accurate set.
Minimums: 1. Identify at least 10 target pages with top priority to improve 2. Identify at least 5 target pages to create from scratch, including at least 3 biographies of notable women in lace 3. Score and create a list of at least 25 pages with next tier priority for improvement or creation 4. Identify the need for at least 25 photos of lace, lace tools, or lace related publications or reference materials to add to the knowledgebase
- 19. Do you have any other project targets in numbers (metrics)? (optional)
No
| Main Open Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
- 20. What tools would you use to measure each metrics? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support. (required)
I have begun to explore the use of a project Dashboard (based on a training video from the Art + Feminism project). I'm still learning how to use that, and the topics may evolve as the project proceeds. But the initial framework can be seen here: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/campaigns/lacecouvige2024/overview
Financial proposal
edit- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
- 22. and 22.1. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
4420 USD
- 22.2. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.
4420 USD
- We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback
editPlease add endorsements and feedback to the grant discussion page only. Endorsements added here will be removed automatically.
Community members are invited to share meaningful feedback on the proposal and include reasons why they endorse the proposal. Consider the following:
- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).