Grants talk:PEG/Nanna1704/WeCanEdit Copenhagen

A decision has been made on this grant. Comments are still welcome on this page.

GAC members who support this request

1. --Ilario (talk) 12:43, 6 February 2015 (UTC)
2. let's see what we will get as a result of the project, seems worth trying rubin16 (talk) 18:59, 8 February 2015 (UTC)
3. Nasir Khan Saikat (talk) 06:05, 12 February 2015 (UTC)
4. Expecting a great outcome. -- ♪Karthik♫ ♪Nadar♫ 08:52, 26 February 2015 (UTC)
5. Cool project. Support. Alleycat80 (talk) 09:41, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

GAC comments

Comments by Kiril Simeonovski

Thanks for the submission. I appreciate your efforts on reducing the gender bias by your attempt to include as many women as possible in your edit-a-thons and your caution in selecting the dates. My questions regarding your request are the following:

1. What is the duration of the edit-a-thon each of the two days?
   Answer: Sunday March 8 12pm-8pm, Monday March 9 3pm-8pm
2. How did you estimate your measures of success? Did you use the realistic scenario? Do you have any evidence to rely on from previous edit-a-thons? Expecting that at least 100 people would sign in for attending the edit-a-thon on 8 March and that at least 300 people would sign in on the project wiki-page is a bit optimistic to me.
   Answer: We have downsized our measure of success on our grant page.
3. How do you plan to attain the measure of success that less than 5 articles would be speedy deleted? I presume that the participants would have to be well educated about editing and the principles of Wikipedia?
   Answer: We aim to maintain a high degree of viable referencing, using a varied range of source materials. We have solicited help from experienced Wikimedians who will help on the days of the Edit-a-thon. We also aim to establish a community of experienced Wikimedians who help look after the articles for the first period after they are published.
4. Can you tell us more about the academic symposium scheduled for the morning of 9 March? What are the topics that will be covered? Is Mr. Jonathan D. Katz the only keynote speaker? What is he going to talk about? What is the topic that the roundtable speakers are going to discuss?
   Answer: The symposium will contextualize Wikipedia's challenges within a well-known cultural-theoretical framework of the archive. As the list of speakers suggests, the symposium is interdisciplinary and brings together a wide range of vital theoretical perspectives on Wikipedia as human rights, language technology, information science, curation and canon formation, information policy, cultural systemic biases and theories on the digital archival environment. Jonathan D. Katz will contextualize the question of archival systemic bias historically based on his extensive research and curatorial practice of queering art canons to supplement he the heteronormative art history we are so familiar with (http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/dec/05/hide-seek-gay-art-smithsonian). We have just confirmed the second keynote speaker, which is actually a joint keynote speech held by Sarah Kember (Professor of New Technologies of Communications, Goldsmiths, and editor of Ada: Journal of media, gender and new technology) and Joanna Zylinska (Professor of New Media and Communications and one of the dditors of Culture Machine, an international open-access journal of culture and theory). They will address feminist technological projects, the nature of the digital environment, the ways in which power is distributed differently in the digital archive etc. The roundtable will be divided into two sessions: one addressing Wikipedia as a cultural archive with all that that entails focusing on questions of power, labor and subversion, the second addressing the infrastructure of Wikipedia in terms of norms, codes and means of regulations.
5. Can you detail the calculation of the item for marketing costs? How much money is going to be spent for promoting on Facebook and how much on purchasing other promotional materials?
   Answer: We have itemized the marketing costs on our grant page.
6. Why do you think that the childcare is necessary? Do you really expect that women would come with their children who need it?
   Answer: Childcare seems essential to any activity claiming to be feminist , as issues of division of domestic labor and free time continues to haunt modern parenting and indeed also arises as one of the reasons why women don't contribute in the first place. However, child care must be requested in advance, and if none requests the service it will not be offered.
7. Who is going to write the academic articles on Wikipedia? When can we expect for them to be published in international journals? From my experience, it may take much time for a working paper or article to be officially published, especially if the journal is assigned a high impact factor.
   Answer: The co-organizer of the academic symposium, Nanna Thylstrup, will write the articles as part of her two postdoc projects ”The Past’s Future: Digital Transformations and Cultural Heritage Institutions” and “Uncertain Archives: Adapting Cultural Theories of the Archive to Understand the Risks and Potentials of Big Data”. They will possibly be co-written in collaboration with others. Realistic submission date of the first article is August 2015 and the second Winter 2016, but it is impossible to give an estimate of a publication date since that will depend on the individual journals' schedule and review processes. It seems, however, that Wikipedia's problem of systemic bias is a persistent problem; hence we do not expect the extended academic process to be a timeframe that renders the treated theme obsolete. We are also looking into the possibility of constellating a theme issue in a good journal on the basis of the symposium.
8. Have you considered the possibility to engage the academic institutions represented at the symposium in the educational programme? You really have a good starting point with the academic symposium and the possibility of writing research papers on Wikipedia and I believe that there is a realistic opportunity for this.
   Answer: Thank you, I did not know about that program, but yes, it seems obvious to engage with the educational program. In a way we already are. Many of the volunteer editors are former students of my class, and will be contributing on female artists they have been working on. One of the research projects behind the symposium will actually also do workshop based teaching in 2016 and this seems to be a great output option. I will join the program and look into the ways in which we can participate.

Best regards.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 10:36, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your prompt response to clear it up. I just need additional clarification on the downsizing of the measure of success on the grant page. You mention that you did some changes but unfortunately it is's evident when checking the page history. Even so, do you have any specific reason for downsizing it and why? In my last question, I meant about the Wikipedia Education Program. Best.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 07:55, 5 February 2015 (UTC)
Answer We must have not saved the downsizing measurements for sign-up. The numbers are now changed and are based on the interest we have already gathered (we are close to having 50 people volunteering already), the communication and followers we have (Renegade Runners alone have over 1300 followers on Facebook and their latest event held this Wednesday 7-10 am attracted more than 2000 people and got national press coverage) and the expected synergy effect from having a symposium side by side with the edit-a-thon.

WMF comments

Thank you for this grant proposal and your engagement in the discussion. We appreciate your efforts to include more women and diversity in Wikimedia projects, both in terms of contributors and content. It's obvious that the team has worked to integrate our original feedback on the project idea --thank you! We still have a few remaining questions and look forward to your response:

1. Of the trainers listed on the proposal (and who listed their usernames under endorsements), only one seems to have experience editing Wikipedia. With an expected group size of over 100 people, you will definitely need more experienced Wikimedians who can help conduct the training and support new editors during the workshop and editathon.
2. It's great that you will be tracking participant editing activity with Wikimetrics. Please let us know if you run into any challenges and need help. Have you thought about how you will follow-up with participants after the event is over, with both online and offline support? It sounds like you plan on organizing four smaller volunteer editing workshops in the coming months, which is great!
3. The proposal mentions participating in the Wikipedia Education Program. We encourage you to contact Floor Koudijs, Wikipedia Education Program Manager, for more information on how to start an education program. There are also lots of resources on the Education Portal.
4. Please see the Wikimedia Trademark Policy for information regarding use of the trademark.

We will post additional questions regarding the symposium in the next day. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:36, 22 February 2015 (UTC)

We have reviewed the symposium portion of this grant request and have the following comments:

1. We are interested in research that can have an impact on the Wikimedia projects. While the speakers do not seem to have an obvious intersection with the Wikimedia movement, we are excited by the opportunity to engage a good number of researchers and activists who are interested in Wikipedia and the gender gap. The additional recruiting/education efforts for other university students (through the planned subsequent workshops), are also encouraging.
2. When we fund research, we expect researchers will publish any output in an Open Access outlet under a Free License. If a work based on the project is accepted for publication in a peer reviewed outlet that is not Open Access, an electronic copy of the author’s accepted manuscript (whether the pre-print or post-print) will be submitted to a public and permanently archived repository by the official date of publication, without any embargo period, and released under a Free License.

answer the publishing will be done in open access journals

1. Funding international travel for keynote speakers or event organizers is beyond the scope of what we normally fund. We are happy to fund reasonable travel costs for experienced Wikimedians from Denmark to help facilitate the event and for the local roundtable speakers.
2. Regarding the projector, we will support rental, but not the purchase of equipment.

Please let us know if you have questions about the above. If not, please update the proposal page accordingly and we can move forward with approval. Cheers, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 01:31, 27 February 2015 (UTC)