Individual Engagement Grants (IEG) provide funding to individuals and small teams to take on projects that will have online impact and advance Wikimedia’s strategic priorities. These projects can take on many forms, from building and improving online tools or social processes, to creating new types of partnerships with GLAM organizations or conducting actionable research about Wikimedia content and contributors.
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In this latest round, a total of 26 eligible proposals were submitted for the committee’s review. We recommended seven projects be funded in total, with 13 grantees selected to receive $98,271 overall.
The projects selected for funding this round are: Art+Feminism Editathon training materials and network building: This project will build on a series of successful 2014 edit-a-thons to develop scalable online infrastructure, including training materials and a network of facilitators, to support the expansion and sustainability of the Art+Feminism movement, aimed at improving Wikipedia’s coverage of notable women in history, art, and beyond. Automated Notability Detection: This project aims to develop a classification algorithm that can assess likeliness of notability (initially within English Wikipedia) and can be used to support editors’ review of newly created articles. Digitization of Important Libraries Book Catalog in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana: Through a partnership between the Telugu Wikipedia community and brick-and-mortar libraries in India, this project will endeavour to digitize five library catalogues of Telugu books in order to support Telugu Wikipedians searching for verifiable sources for new article content. Fundación Joaquín Díaz: This project will see 23,000 sound recordings from the ethnographic archive of the Joaquín Díaz Foundation in Urueña, Spain uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under a free license, and could serve as a potential model for other institutional collaborations. Revision scoring as a service: The grantees of this project will develop machine classification for assessing quality of contributions on multiple language Wikipedias as a publicly queryable API. This service will in turn support the development of new and powerful tools to support editors beyond the English language Wikipedia environment. WikiBrainTools: This project seeks to democratize access to Wikipedia-based algorithms across all Wikipedias, and allow Wikimedians to leverage the work of natural language processing researchers to build smarter tools for Wikipedia. In particular, WikiBrainTools will attempt to close the loop between algorithmic researchers who mine Wikipedia to improve computer-derived insight, Wikipedia developers who could be integrating algorithms into their bots and tools, and Wikipedia researchers who could stand to benefit from tools that improve pattern recognition. “WikiBrainIEG”by Shilad, under CC BY-SA 4.0 WikiProject X: This project will explore and test design solutions for encouraging optimal effectiveness and supporting sustainability and collaboration between groups of contributors within a WikiProject on English Wikipedia.
Additionally, one project funded in the last IEG round, Women Scientists Workshop Development, was also approved by WMF for another 6 months of renewed funding to experiment with scaling the model.
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With so many new ideas put forward in this round, we’re seeing a few emerging trends. Just over half (13) of this round’s proposals fell under the “Tools” category, nine fell under “Offline Outreach & Partnerships”, two fell under “Online Community Organizing”, and one fell under “Research.”
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.
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