Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Atudu/Wiki Loves Butterfly - Phase VI

Paid content creation

As a principle, paid content creation should perhaps never be allowed, certainly not where photographs are obtained with considerable uncertainty. Further a number of these photographs simply cannot be identified to species unless they capture the specimens, dissect their genitalia and examine literature, in short they need to conduct good quality research to be able to produce reliable content. I certainly do not think this should kind of paid photography trip be considered as a priority, and I say this as someone with a formal training in entomology and who really thinks Wikipedia is filled with gaps as far as biodiversity goes. It seems to be rather classic example of profligacy to spend funds raised by WMF on such projects, on the other hand, if this is indeed what the community think is the biggest gap in Wikipedia that needs to be filled, so be it. I have heard expressions that the WMF is compelled to spend on the "Global South" and that any projects from the region regardless of their quality or justification would ultimately have to be funded. Shyamal (talk) 06:29, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi @Shyamal:, thanks for your feedback and apologies for the delayed reply. I must say we are a bit surprised to see the concerns you have raised after six consecutive years of project work and five successful grant applications. On behalf of the WLB team, I am trying to address the concerns you have raised.

First of all, we assure you that the WLB team never receive or spend any money for content development on different Wikimedia sites, be it article creation or enrichment on Wikipedia, photograph uploads on Wikimedia Commons or data curation on Wikidata, so there is no question of paid editing in our program. The grant amount is only spent in the field documentation process as reimbursement for transportation, accommodation, food, forest entry fees, guide and camera charges etc. as these are the necessary expenditures to execute such activities. Most of our team members are students studying in colleges and universities or under-privileged simple middle class persons with financial constraints. The grant helps them to meet up the huge expenditure of documenting in those remote distant places of the vast area of eastern and north-eastern India, which we cover during the project.

Next comes the question of whether proper identification of species is possible or not through photographs and close observation of their behavioral patterns only. Yes, it is very much possible to identify the species without capturing them and dissecting their genitalia in laboratories. Only some species of the Hesperiidae family (specially the swifts) and a few Lycaenidae species need such a lab-based identification process. But in case of most of the Hesperiidae and Lycinidae and other families; a species, its dimorphism, even polymorphism and seasonal morphism can be authentically identified by way of its wing (both upper and lower) patterns; dots, streaks, bands, brands etc. Hence in this respect photographic records, close observation of habits, habitats and behavioral patterns and consulting of available literature suffice for identification. To say about available literature and regular new research in the field of butterfly; we affirm that our members are well aware of these and study regularly. Some of our team members have their own research paper publications on butterflies and related matters.

We have conducted the documentation for the last 6 years and covered more than 500 species and subspecies of butterfly from eastern and north-eastern part of India, uploaded photographs of many of them which had not been uploaded on Wikimedia Commons before us, uploaded photographs which are considered superior as per technical quality of the images concerned, captured life-cycles, morphologies and even a gynandromorph which was the first to be documented in India for that species, published findings in peer-reviewed scientific journals, spread awareness about the importance of butterfly and their digital conservation, brought together a team of butterfly experts and enthusiasts under one umbrella to regularly plan and execute the rigorous documentation process, always requested for a decent amount of fund unlike others which can be optimally used, spent the grant money with utmost transparency taking care of cost-effectiveness of the project and submitted reports before deadline. In spite of all of these impacts, if WLB is considered a classic example of "profligacy", then of course, it is up to the grants committee to decide and reject this proposal and we will accept the decision and stop the program here. – Atudu (talk) 13:51, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Just to note, this is not a comment to you (@Atudu), it is more a comment about policy. As you would very well know, you are not the only person looking at butterflies, a growing number (thousands) of participants from across India are taking pictures of not just butterflies but all forms of life and you only have to look at iNaturalist - as of today there are more than a million photo records for the South Asia region. Quite a large number of those images are licensed on CC and available for use on Wiki. There really is no shortage of butterfly images. There is a shortage of ecology-literate editors (at least on English Wikipedia) with interests in taxa from the Indian region. Life-histories cannot be studied by merely visiting locations. Ecological research needs to be done in situ. It will definitely grow organically and will spill into free-licensing when closed-projects like https://www.ifoundbutterflies.org/ grow beyond their capacity. And well, of course butterflies are not the only life-forms that need study. There are literally millions of other insect species that are being ignored on these funded travels. Shyamal (talk) 23:36, 18 November 2022 (UTC)

@Shyamal:, apologies for the late reply as I have not noticed your message until now. We definitely are not the only persons documenting butterflies in the eastern and north-eastern parts of India and have not claimed that at all anywwhere. We are fully aware that there are iNaturalist, Ifoundbutterflies and many other communities, groups or individuals who are doing amazing works around this. But not all of them release their photographs under licenses comaptible with Wikimedia sites. I just checked a butterfly sub-species very randomly on iNaturalist, it turned out that it had only two observations from 9-10 years ago and none of them were released under free license to be used on Wikimedia Commons. Contrary to that, Wikimedia Commons already has a decent coverage from recent times only because of WLB. So, while we agree, there are lots of images of butterflies already available on internet, it is also true that many of them are not freely licensed and reusable on Wikimedia sites, even from iNaturalist website. This was just a random example and we are sure that there are all kinds of variations in these comparisions among these initiatives for other butterfly species or sub-species. So, we feel all these initiatives to document butterflies including ours are equally important as all these initiatves have limitations and strengths and none are 100% perfect to blindly follow. Also, it is worth noticing that even if we have freely licensed images on iNaturalist, the javascript which currently allows us to import images from iNaturalist to Commons have its own limitations, like it is slow to load, don't import Exif metadata of those images, can't batch upload etc. Regarding your concern about ignoring millions of other kinds of insects during our project, we can only say, we do not have the expertise and capacity to do that from our side as our team does not have experts on other fields of entymology. We are just a bunch of people interested and focused on butterflies and that's what brought us together as a team in the last six years. -- Atudu (talk) 04:39, 8 December 2022 (UTC)

Feedback from the SA Regional Funds Committee

Hi Atudu, Sandipoutsider, Subhendukhan

Thank you for applying for the Wikimedia Community Funds. The South Asia Regional Funds Committee has gone through your application and want to share some observations and suggestions. Please note that these suggestions are made in order to improve the overall purpose and impact of the project and you can make changes/alignment/improvement based on these suggestions before 18 November 2022. If the suggestions are unclear or you would need more information a meeting can be set up with the members of the Regional Grants Committee before 12 November 2022.

Wiki Loves Butterfly has been an impactful project across all its iterations and has consistently grown taking into account the suggestions offered and the learning that the organising team has identified upon evaluation of the project. The South Asian Regional Funds Committee acknowledges the shift in the operational strategy that the project team planned during the pandemic. The shift in the nature of the activities and documentation work has worked well and can be seen in the goals outlined in the current proposal. The establishment and continuity of certain thematic partnerships and expansion of the project to other Indian states is one of the most important accomplishments of the project. Along with these positive observations it is of immense importance that organisers should also take cognisance of the comment left in the discussion page regarding the project.

We urge the organisers to ensure that there is ample support available to the leadership team. We recommend that a small administrative team can be put together to reduce burden from the leaders of the project. Another option would be that the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group can consider offering the administrative support under their activities.

Considering that the project is entering into its VI phase, it is of importance that the project moves from an activity mode (of organising activities) to becoming a movement of sustainable future. While the work around documentation of butterflies will go on for some time, it is important for the sustainability of the project that the project begins to start thinking about developing learning modules, creating learning patterns for community members who might want to take up a similar effort in their own context.

Another recommendation from the committee is for the organisers to explore the opportunities to produce scholarly articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals. These articles can focus on the sightings, discovery/re-discovery or any other facet of the documentation. It would also be important to ensure that the project begins to share some secondary information about the habitat, ecosystem and other important factors that the researchers encounter during the project. These would add a component of novelty to the project and also ensure that there are multiple touch points for engaging with the project.

In addition to the above suggestions there are a few programmatic and operational suggestions that the committee wants to share with the organisers:

1.Is there a system for regular analysis of participation? What is the rate of retention across the project in the last iteration (Phase V)?

2.Apart from the incentives and support mentioned in the application are there any other measures that are being used to communicate appreciation for regular contributors? What can be some ideas that the team can adopt to ensure that there are such measures of recognition? For example: custom made barnstars, coffee mugs of ‘quality images’, appreciation from an expert  lepidopterist…

3.Would the organising team be open towards creating and publishing an open access coffee table book?

4. Organisers should plan an interaction with educational and research institutions across different levels (primary, secondary, higher educational institutions) both as an outreach effort and as a pedagogical resource that can be utilised as a long term resource.

On behalf of the South Asian Regional Funds Committee THasan (WMF) (talk) 11:21, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

@THasan (WMF): A lot of thanks to the Grant Review Committee for their valuable suggestions and guidelines which shall definitely improve the overall purpose and impact of WLB Project and lead the project to further heightened levels. The WLB project team tries to take into account the suggestions offered in different phases for the growth in terms of impact and enrichment and endeavors to implement the learnings and experiences it identifies for its future phase. This time too we shall try our level best and put our best effort to implement the valuable suggestions and guidelines of the Grant Review Committee in the ways and means of WLB Project Phase VI.

On behalf of the team, I have also addressed the concerns raised in the talk page and shared our perspectives.

WLB, being well under the supervision of the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group, is totally open and fine to receive administrative support from the user group and has discussed the same with the affiliate. However, you might be aware that the user group is currently run by volunteers and do not have any staff capacity to handle more administrative burdens which they are already handling for their activities.

The team has already started thinking about the question of sustainable future of the said project in the 2nd half of 5th phase. We have started developing learning modules for community members based on our learning experiences and lessons that we have so far gained. Some of them will be published for the final report of Phase V soon.

Our team members have already published scholarly articles in different peer reviewed scientific journals based on their findings. One such recent article was about a gynandromorph specimen of a butterfly species found in West Bengal. We shall do best to explore the opportunities to publish more in this phase too whenever an opportunity comes.

I am trying to respond below to the programmatic and operational suggestions from the committee.

1. We have developed a system over the years to interact with and retain our participants. Whenever we identify potentially promising participants from any of our outreach events, we start interacting with them regularly on a 1:1 basis. They are given necessary basic instructions on how to upload images on Wikimedia Commons and are tracked of their uploads. If the participants upload at least 100 photographs and the team gets satisfied with the quality of the uploaded photographs, only then they are approached to take part in the funded field-trips in the remote areas as a team member. In this way, it is ensured to maintain the quality of the project along with the participants. There are also few social media channels and groups to interact with them on a regular basis.
2. We have given physical tokens of appreciation on different occasions to our valued team members and some of our outreach event participants. We will continue that practice in this phase too. Previously, West Bengal Wikimedians User Group had provided Wi-fi devices to two of our team members to overcome their issues of limited internet connectivity and that option is still open for this year too, if anybody needs that in our team.
3. That’s a great idea actually to publish a coffee table book. We will definitely try to do that in this phase.
4. In the fifth phase, we have started interacting with a few schools in Sikkim and engaged their students to raise awareness about identification and conservation of commonly available butterflies. We will do the same this year too. Thank you--Atudu (talk) 17:08, 7 November 2022 (UTC)

   @THasan (WMF): and regional grants committee members, w.r.t. the administrative support towards WLB from West Bengal Wikimedians User Group, I would like to reiterate on behalf of the user group about what @Atudu: said in her reply. We are very much interested to be an organized support system towards the impactful projects led and run by our community volunteers, but that requires us to have fully equipped and trained staff structure, which sadly we do not have till now. We have been discussing internally about this and seeking active help from different key players to provide us the legal guidance and logistical support, so that we can turn into an affiliate which can sustain and provide impactful results for at least a decade or two in the future. Since there are recommendations coming from the funding committee on different occasions which seeks support from the user group for different projects in our region, we hope, we will get necessary support from the relevant WMF teams to help the user group organize and sustain in a meaningful way. -- Bodhisattwa (talk) 10:05, 10 November 2022 (UTC)

Funding recommendation from South Asia Regional Funds Committee

Hello Atudu, Sandipoutsider, and Subhendukhan,

Thank you for your grant application and your responses to the questions and concerns raised during the review process. We are pleased to recommend full funding of your application. We believe that the members behind the project will continue to be as productive as they have been in previous phases, not least due to their ability to strategically shift in response to pandemic conditions and their openness to partnerships and constructive idea exchanges. There are nevertheless some points that require careful thinking and planning, these are mentioned below.

As you have appeared receptive to the suggestions that have been provided of the coming phase, we trust that you will make efforts to see that these are accomplished. In particular, we hope that the development of learning resources for newcomers, sustained interactions with schools and research groups, and the diversification of tokens of appreciation and exhibition (e.g. a coffee-table book) will both provide a source of sustenance for the efforts of the project and promote those efforts more widely.

The issues of administrative capacity that have been raised are not likely to go away soon, and after five successful phases of the project we hope a sixth will lead to greater alleviation of these issues. No matter where and how you decide to build this capacity up, it will become more of a necessity should the project wish to grow more than it already has.

At the time of submission of the progress report we would like to have a clear understanding of the consolidation effort that the project team has taken towards ensuring that the administration, finance and outreach efforts are not placed on a single individual.

We wish you all the best in this new phase of the Wiki Loves Butterfly project.

On behalf of the South Asia Regional Funds Committee THasan (WMF) (talk) 14:55, 1 December 2022 (UTC)