Grants talk:Project/Whose Knowledge/VisibleWikiWomen2019/Final

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

@Seeeko, Aadele, Anasuyas, Señoritaleona, and Tinaral: Hey there Whose Knowledge? team, and thank you for your final report on VisibleWikiWomen2019. Please accept my apologies for the long overdue review of your work and achievements. I am accepting the final report with the following comments and questions:

• Congratulations on exceeding your stated goals related to gathering and uploading images in addition to growing your network of partners aligned with your mission. The effort required to coordinate and build meaningful relationships with 26 partners across at least 9 different countries is substantial, and your outcomes demonstrate how valuable this effort was, and how effective these collaborations were toward your project goals: You were able to coordinate edit-a-thons in more countries, upload substantially more images, and improve biographies and other content in an astounding 81 Wikipedia projects.
• Quick shoutout to the printable postcards, as I know they have made the rounds at multiple movement events. This approach a fun and effective way to showcase both your work and the stories of women who were made more visible through this campaign. :)
• Your report contains a wide variety of project resources that serve several useful purposes for the movement: Deepening movement conversations on representation, highlighting biases in Wikipedia project content and participation stemming from project policies and how they are (or are not) implemented, providing resources to organizers and participants across multiple languages for a variety of important needs (e.g. asking for image donations from GLAM institutions, requesting and providing consent for images). These outcomes from VisibleWikiWomen2019 also fit very well with recommendations in movement strategy concerning the need for skill development. Thank you for providing such a wealth of resources for current and future leaders in the movement.
• The link to the reflections from Bangalore after a Wikipedia edit-a-thon podcast is broken and may have been moved-- is this recording still available?
• Could you provide some context regarding the role of this team/the campaign when it comes to images where partners and their events were involved? For instance, the summary for File:Artist Abigail DeVille.jpg reads Artist Abigail DeVille in 2019 photographed as part of Black Lunch Table's Art+Feminism photo studio at MoMA, NY. It's fantastic to see cooperation between movement affiliates on common goals and challenges in the movement, but I did want to better understand what sorts of support, resources, or coordination there was between you and other partners in these sorts of circumstances.
• A final note that I've found that the GLAMorous tool has had some issues in producing reliable results in its queries in the past several months. I think it was working fine at the time this report was prepared, but

When you're able, please respond to my questions above, but there is no particular hurry here. Thank you for your work in making substantial improvements in how women from diverse backgrounds and social origins are represented on Wikimedia projects. I know I am not alone when I say I look forward to continued rabble-rousing from Whose Knowledge? and that we may be able to support those efforts in the future. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 09:26, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

I JethroBT, I think you have a truncated sentence above, "but"... I suppose it was "but I currently don't manage to reproduce the result you wrote in the report" or similar. :) Nemo 14:50, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

@Nemo bis: Oof, unfinished sentences have been a bad habit of mine recently. As it turns out, it looks like the GLAMorous tool was only used in the 2018 campaign, not the current one, so I've struck those comments. However, are issues with GLAMorous producing reliable results on category membership, so I'd recommend not using it. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:49, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Interesting, good to know. In my experience it works fine as long as you try 2-3 times until most of its results are cached and you see the same result twice in a row. I've not used it seriously in the last few months though. Nemo 22:27, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

@I JethroBT (WMF): Hello Chris, thank you again for supporting last year's campaign! Answering your last two questions/comments below:

• Yes, this podcast episode remains available. We’ve created a new site to host our Whose Voices? podcasts since the final report has been published, so now you can access this episode here. The final report's link has also been updated.
• During VisibleWikiWomen, we encourage our Wikimedia partners to address women's invisibility on Wikipedia by bringing the campaign to their March edit-a-thons. Their goal is the write women's biographies and our goal is to make sure these biographies have images. We follow their leadership to organize and host these events and support them by promoting their events and creating resources they can utilize, especially with folks that are new to Wikimedia. During last year’s campaign, for example, we were inspired to create this learning pattern after the successful experiences of Black Lunch Table. This now is a resource that can be shared within and outside our movement for folks planning their edit-a-thons or photo-thons.

Hope this helps address your questions. Warm regards, Aadele (talk) and the Whose Knowledge? team