Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Alliances Fund/Improving Mental Health Care Information on Wikipedia

Timeline update for funding decision announcements

@Margika: Due to an unexpected medical issue I experienced earlier in April, I unfortunately was not able to interact with the Regional Committee or generally work during much of April last month. Due to this absence, we were unfortunately not able to provide committee feedback in a manner consistent with our original schedule. Consequently, we will be adjusting the date for announcing a funding decision for your proposal by one week from May 18th to May 25th. This change will help support the time needed for you to review and respond to committee feedback which I expect to provide in the next day, as well as for the Regional Committee to finalize a funding decision. Please let me know if you have any questions or need clarification over this change in the schedule. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 23:38, 3 May 2022 (UTC)

Regional Committee feedback and questions

Hello Margika, and thanks for your proposal on behalf of Margika focused on mental healthcare information on Wikipedia projects. The US/Canada Regional Committee has initially reviewed the proposal, and wanted to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review:

• Margika's broad mission presented in this proposal is clear and represents an important goal that has alignment with the Wikimedia movement: to improve mental healthcare information in languages other than English. Mental healthcare information is important and should be available to anyone, regardless of language.
• We appreciate seeing Margika's work in connecting with AfroCROWD and representatives from WikiProject Medicine. What roles will they be playing in this project, or what support will they provide in this project?
• The committee feels the proposal could be improved with more specific information in a number of areas:
  • What are the targeted languages? Is mental health information in English or mental health info in Western contexts applicable to other cultures and contexts? Who will be doing the translations (Volunteers? Or Margika staff?).
  • What type of content is targeted for the CC licenses? Is this information available on hospital web pages or journal articles?).
  • Could you outline a bit more about what these workshops will look like (are these the organizations from Q20a), and what participants will do in them? Who (which roles/positions) in these organizations do you expect will participate in these workshops? Will workshops take place in the United States, or elsewhere? We also wanted to bring your attention to courses offered by the Network of the National Library of Medicine focused on health and medical information in case they may be supportive.
  • What are the desired outcomes of these workshops? The proposal indicates that you want these organizations "to freely share their content in the public domain". Would a simple release of existing materials be considered a success, or are you aiming for them to incorporate the content in a format that is more directly applicable to Wikipedia standards? If the former, do you have strategies to ensure that the content is integrated?
• In Q17 you indicate that Margika will focus a lot of different underrepresented groups, and potentially several languages as well. Could you explain your strategies on how you will conduct outreach to these groups? The committee also feels it may be challenging to focus on all these groups in an effective way all at once, in a single project, and that it may be more effective to focus on a smaller number of communities initially.
• One of the focus points of your proposal is to convince other organizations to publish their information under a free license, and presumably explain copyright implications. Could you elaborate how your own organization is using licenses and what external expertise you will be tapping into? In what ways does your organization set an example when it comes to freely-licensed healthcare information?
• It seems that a statement in the proposal related to strategy got cut off: The following is the strategy Margika will implement to retain participants-. Could you please verify?

• We are aware that the process around supporting the release of scientific content under open or free licenses can be complex. For example, many medical doctors have not retained the rights to their own work, instead the journal holds the copyright. If you get a doctor’s permission to release copyright, it does not mean that the journal has released the copyright. We would like to understand more about how visiting hospitals will support your goals if the journals hold the copyright?
• Finally, we want to acknowledge that funding available for the Wikimedia Alliances Fund is limited in this current round. Given our budget, it will not be possible to fully fund all proposals we have received this round. While no decision has been made at this time about this proposal, the committee would like to understand whether this project could proceed with partial funding, and if so, what would need to change about the project with a partial funding decision.

We would like your feedback on these questions/comments by Thursday, 12 May 2022 to support a final decision from the Regional Committee, and please use the talk page here to share your response. Thanks you again for the hard work on this proposal, and we look forward to your responses. On behalf of the Regional Committee, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 15:46, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

Answers

Hello I JethroBT (WMF) and Regional Committee members, thanks for taking time to go through our proposal and thanks for sharing your feedback.

We appreciate seeing Margika's work in connecting with AfroCROWD and representatives from WikiProject Medicine. What roles will they be playing in this project, or what support will they provide in this project?

We will invite community leaders and experts to conduct the workshops. We and our partner organizations have expertise in mental healthcare whereas Wiki community leaders (WikiProject Medicine and AfroCROWD) have expertise in the Wikimedia ecosystem. We will create a platform/bridge where Wiki experts and mental healthcare organizations can work together to share authentic healthcare information on Wikipedia. We will be mostly in the mediator role in this project.

What are the targeted languages? Is mental health information in English or mental health info in Western contexts applicable to other cultures and contexts? Who will be doing the translations (Volunteers? Or Margika staff?)

Experienced Wikipedians will offer training to the participants in suitable languages. Example - for Spanish speaking audiences, we will get Spanish Wikipedia community members to conduct the workshop. We expect participants to be bilingual (English + other language). Our main target language for content acquisition/creation is English and then it can be translated into various languages depending on volunteer/participant interests. Translation will be a collaborative process. We will be imparting basic information related to mental healthcare which will be applicable to all cultures and contexts.

Could you outline a bit more about what these workshops will look like (are these the organizations from Q20a), and what participants will do in them? Who (which roles/positions) in these organizations do you expect will participate in these workshops? Will workshops take place in the United States, or elsewhere? We also wanted to bring your attention to courses offered by the Network of the National Library of Medicine focused on health and medical information in case they may be supportive.

Workshop participants/Workflow

We will use WikiProject Med’s SWASTHA workflow for our workshop (kindly see the image). Workshop participants will include subject experts, translators, university researchers and Wikipedia community members. Workshops will be hosted primarily in the USA. Depending on the approved budget, we will finalize the number and location of workshops. Thank you for sharing the Network of the National Library of Medicine resource, we hope to collaborate with them as well.

What are the desired outcomes of these workshops? The proposal indicates that you want these organizations "to freely share their content in the public domain". Would a simple release of existing materials be considered a success, or are you aiming for them to incorporate the content in a format that is more directly applicable to Wikipedia standards? If the former, do you have strategies to ensure that the content is integrated?

Release of the material under CC-BY-SA followed by integration into relevant Wikipedia articles will be considered a success. Organizations will be encouraged to (re)produce their existing content as per Wiki standards. We will also collaborate with experienced members from the Wiki community to integrate the content.

Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project

Wikimedia Project	Description	Target
Wikimedia Commons	Infographics Healthcare articles need infographics for better reach	50
Wikipedia	Donated infographics will be added to relevant healthcare articles	50

One of the focus points of your proposal is to convince other organizations to publish their information under a free license, and presumably explain copyright implications. Could you elaborate how your own organization is using licenses and what external expertise you will be tapping into? In what ways does your organization set an example when it comes to freely-licensed healthcare information?

What type of content is targeted for the CC licenses? Is this information available on hospital web pages or journal articles?).

We are aware that the process around supporting the release of scientific content under open or free licenses can be complex. For example, many medical doctors have not retained the rights to their own work, instead the journal holds the copyright. If you get a doctor’s permission to release copyright, it does not mean that the journal has released the copyright. We would like to understand more about how visiting hospitals will support your goals if the journals hold the copyright?

Our organization will be the first one to release our content under Wiki friendly CC-BY-SA license. We will be recruiting copyright lawyers and experts for technical/legal guidance. We will also document steps involved in the process, which can help other organizations to follow our path. We hope to publish simple guidebook for any organizations willing to donate the content. We will work with community members who have experience in content adaptation from healthcare organizations to understand the process. We have allocated sometime and budget in our workshops as well. We will be focusing only on infographics/pictures in this phase as they are easy to obtain and recreate if needed. We have budgeted for expert graphic designers as well who can help organizations to adapt infographics as per CC-BY-SA.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" - it will be relatively easy to translate infographics and they tend to get more eyeballs than long paragraphs. Infographics will be uploaded to Wikimedia commons and will be linked to respective Wikipedia articles. We believe that it will be relatively easy to convince healthcare organizations to donate more content beyond infographics after a year. We will be having viewership numbers through pageviews and mostly it will be higher than their own website hits, this will help them to understand the reach of Wikipedia.

In Q17 you indicate that Margika will focus a lot of different underrepresented groups, and potentially several languages as well. Could you explain your strategies on how you will conduct outreach to these groups? The committee also feels it may be challenging to focus on all these groups in an effective way all at once, in a single project, and that it may be more effective to focus on a smaller number of communities initially.

We definitely agree with the committee's suggestion on focusing on smaller communities initially. We will focus on African communities with the help of AfroCROWD and WikiProject Medicine.

It seems that a statement in the proposal related to strategy got cut off: The following is the strategy Margika will implement to retain participants-. Could you please verify?

We will pair regional healthcare organizations with local Wikimedia volunteers for sustainability. Typically, healthcare organizations don't have bandwidth/skills to update content on Wiki-like platforms, whereas community members have bandwidth and necessary skills/expertise. It will enable Wikimedia communities to use authentic and verified information on Wikimedia platforms as the content won't be copyrighted anymore. This will increase the outreach of mental healthcare organizations as well. Participants will be retained as it is a win-win situation (community members get reliable and authentic Wiki-friendly information whereas donor organizations get more readers for their content).

Finally, we want to acknowledge that funding available for the Wikimedia Alliances Fund is limited in this current round. Given our budget, it will not be possible to fully fund all proposals we have received this round. While no decision has been made at this time about this proposal, the committee would like to understand whether this project could proceed with partial funding, and if so, what would need to change about the project with a partial funding decision.

Full funding will enable us to conduct more workshops however, we can work with partial funding if needed. We will reduce the number of workshops and target organizations. We can get expected results with fewer workshops (less funding) however we need minimum funding so we can get legal/copyright/design experts. We can reduce the budget by 30 to 33% (updated request would be $67,250) to get satisfactory outcome. We have tried to update this application on Meta in the past and our edits were reverted by Fluxx bot. Kindly let us know if there is any other way to update the budget in the application or we would like to request you to update the budget on our behalf.

Thank the once again for suggestions and inputs. We'll be happy to discuss further or provide addition information, if needed. Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks --Margika (talk) 20:16, 12 May 2022 (UTC)