Wikimedians Strengthening Knowledge and News Credibility on the Internet
Wikimedians Strengthening Knowledge and News Credibility on the Internet
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Introducing WikiCred
The WikiCred project supports research, software projects, convenings, and more so that the Wikimedia community can play a role in improving information literacy and credibility on the internet and beyond.
To help achieve this goal, the WikiCred project regularly offers microgrants of between $250 to $10,000 to individuals and teams for pilot projects on how to support credibility on the internet using Wikimedia, and from insights from the Wikimedia community.
Applications
Note: Following the WikiCred Phase II submission deadline in December 2022, the WikiCred applications process is currently paused. Please check back for more information.
What kinds of ideas are suitable for WikiCred grant funding?
- WikiCred grants typically support exploring and prototyping tools and software, conducting research projects, and convening events.
- For example, past WikiCred application rounds have focused on issues such as increasing and improving information on Wikipedia about elections and reproductive health care.
- WikiCred funding can also be used to convene Wiki meetups or gatherings aimed at journalists, librarians, editors, teachers, media literacy groups or NGO’s.
- As a general guideline, Applicants should expand on the ideas, themes, and work of past WikiCred projects.
Who can apply for a WikiCred grant?
- Researchers, Wikimedians, credibility enthusiasts and members of the open knowledge communityare invited to apply. If you have an idea, we want to hear it!
- Note: All Wikipedians are welcome to apply regardless of geographical location.
How can I apply?
- See the Call for Proposals (CFP) and application form for more information:
Join WikiCred Discussions Online
WikiCred Demo Hours are a regular online meetup that brings together members of the Wikimedian community, open-data and open-knowledge enthusiasts, academics, journalists, researchers, and professionals from the online credibility space.
These presentations are reguarly shared in our newsletter, and on the Misinfocon blog.
About WikiCred
WikiCred comes out of the WikiConference North America 2019 meetup at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The conference was co-branded as “WikiCredCon”, where Wikimedians and representatives from Credibility Coalition explored intersections between these groups and their respective missions.
The winner of the 2019 conference’s Credibility Award was Cite Unseen, a tool for visualizing the nature of Wikipedia citations. The tool was initially created at CredCo’s 2018 hackathon by Wikimedian Kevin Payravi.
Since 2018, over 200 Wikipedia editors have installed the tool to “help guide themselves on the nature and reliability of sources at a glance, and to remove or replace unreliable references.”
Creative projects like Cite Unseen and the camaraderie of the 2019 conference helped to inspire the launch of WikiCred.
WikiCred Phase II (2022-2023) funding was generously provided by the Wikimedia Foundation and Craig Newmark Philanthropies.
Our Focus
👥 Inclusiveness
The WikiCred team values inclusivity. We invite projects that have the potential to reach out and onboard new and diverse members to the Wikimedia movement. We encourage efforts to support credibility and information trust in North America in languages spoken in North America—particularly the Spanish language.🗂 Topics
We support credibility projects around a range of subjects, including climate science data and information, health information, as well as policy and political media.
🎯 Impact
WikiCred grants aim to support scalable impact. As members of the Wikimedia movement, we want to elevate ideas and projects that improve information reliability and credibility in the larger information ecosystem on the internet and in the real world through a myriad of open knowledge tools including the many Wikimedia projects.
WikiCred Projects
WikiCred funds projects that have impact
2022-2023 Projects
Mapping and bridging the knowledge gaps related to women’s health on Wikipedia
The ‘Women’s Health on Wikipedia’ project aims to map and reduce the knowledge gaps related to women’s health on Wikipedia. This will be accomplished by documenting the knowledge gaps and credible resources related to women's health and by conducting edit-a-thons for health experts, newcomers and existing Wikipedia editors for improving the content related to women's health. Learn more.
WiSCoM
Wikipedia Source Controversiality Metrics
WiSCom will generate and assess actionable metrics for source controversiality in Wikipedia. To guarantee universality (i.e. applicability to all Wikipedia language editions), knowledge equity and avoid dependence on the specifics of a given language, WiSCoM will solely rely on language-agnostic approaches using mainly data from editing activity. Learn more.
Arbiter
A tool to identify networks engaging in the manipulation
Arbiter Report will identify networks engaging in the manipulation of online discourse through the promotion of news from unreliable and non-credible sources. Learn more.
CiteFix
A tool that will suggest improvements within Wikipedia
English Wikipedia has several maintenance categories that are auto-populated based on errors in referencing and citation templates. There are thousands of pages in these categories that are left unattended for a long time. While some of these are easy to fix manually, some of them aren’t. “CiteFix” will suggest changes to users to fix the errors. Learn more.
Can I Trust My Politician?
A project from Full Fact
Fact checking organisations hold crucial data on politicians, including the claims they make and if they correct false claims. We want the information we produce as fact checkers to be easily connected to other projects by using wikidata. This project will test the impact of linking politicians with their track record of claims and corrections.
Ikusgela
Free educational videos for the Wikimedia community
The Ikusgela project creates free pedagogical videos to be included in Wikipedia. Previous videos produced as part of the Ikusgela project were only available in the Basque language. With funding from WikiCred, videos will be translated and dubbed into more languages. The project has started with videos on philosophy, economics, and literature.
African Open Biodiversity Project
Promoting the quality, reliability, and credibility of Wikipedia articles about biodiversity in Africa
The Africa Open Biodiversity project promotes the documentation of African biodiversity on Wikimedia projects. The campaign aims to advocate and support current biodiversity conservation efforts while bridging the knowledge gap about African content on Wikimedia projects. Learn more.
Project Korikath
Empowering the public to contribute to Wikimedia Commons
Project Korikath is an organized initiative by South Asian Wikimedians that encoourages the public to capture and upload images to Wikimedia Commons. Images will be used to close content gaps and improve or replace exisiting images. Learn more.
Previously-funded WikiCred Projects
Glassbox
A WordPress Plugin for Opening The News
Pepe Flores and Noé Dominguez are developing a WordPress plugin for news publishers to make article edits public after publication as well as a wikibot which will notify Wikipedia editors whenever these articles, as cited source, change. You can read and comment on the grant application here.
Scribe Reference API
Scribe Structures New Cited Sources on Wikipedia
The Scribe reference API will list references based on usage and domain by language. This API is a useful tool for Scribe, but also outside the project can be widely used whenever credibility of references from a Wikipedia perspective needs to be referred to. Understanding the reusability of Wikipedia references can scale to a variety of other projects. You can read and comment on the grant application here.
Covid19Relay
A Graph Database of Coronavirus Research and Concepts
Covid19Relay is a wiki created to document COVID-19. With WikiCred’s support, we are building an annotatable database of COVID-19 research as part of the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge (CORD-19). This will allow Wikidata and the public to view, annotate, and query the CORD-19 dataset, showing connections and relationships between concepts. You can read and comment on the grant application here.
WikiUX
UX of Wikipedia Credibility
WikiUX takes a user-centred approach to address credibility. The project examines how end-users respond to different types of credibility signals on such as the structure of the page, tone of writing, and placement of citations within Wikipedia articles, as well as Wikipedia content that exists elsewhere on the web, such as within information cards on search and social platforms.
Source Scour
A Collaborative News Site
Mixing crowdsourcing, Wikidata’s rich catalogue of information, and a network that spans thousands of newsrooms, Source Scour will identify key areas where more information is needed and help journalists, researchers, and policymakers quickly spin up well-sourced, verified data sets with the answers the public needs. Source Scour builds on the existing crowdsourcing software created by MuckRock/DocumentCloud and used by thousands of newsrooms around the world.
Sourceror
The Wikipedia Community's Platform Against Disinformation
Sourceror leverages Wikipedia’s credibility data to improve media literacy and combat disinformation on the web. The platform provides a browser extension that informs Internet users of the quality of the content they consume, and an API that enables developers to incorporate the Wikipedia community’s reliability evaluations into new technologies.
WikiWhatsThis
A Browser Extension for Adding Context to Online Stories by Suggesting Related Wikipedia Articles
WikiWhatsThis will be a browser extension that adds context to online stories by allowing readers to highlight arbitrary chunks of text and request related Wikipedia articles. The extension will use text features combined with Wikipedia page quality signals to show the user the bigger picture around what they are reading.
Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos
Promote Credibility on Wikipedia Pages with Multimedia Files
The Wikipedia Pages Wanting Photos (WPWP) is an annual contest (campaign) where Wikipedians across Wikipedia language projects and communities add photos to Wikipedia articles lacking images. The primary purpose is to improve the quality, reliability, and credibility of Wikipedia articles with photos
RefB
A Bot to Add References to WikiData Statements
RefB is a bot that can automate adding references to Wikidata statements in the biomedical context based on PubMed Central database. This bot can be adapted later to support Wikidata statements in other contexts or to add references to Wikipedia articles when needed.
Iffy.news
A new way to assist in evaluating the credibility of media sources
Iffy.news maintains a list of unreliable news/info sites, linked to site-ratings and fact-checks. This WikiCred project will add Wikipedia data to the index, contribute to related Wikipedia articles, and find indicators (via the Wikimedia API) to help programmatically identify fake news sites.
The Vaccine Safety Project
Strengthening information on vaccine safety on Wikipedia
The Vaccine Safety Project aims at documenting the existing knowledge as well as finding and reducing the knowledge gaps related to vaccine safety on Wikipedia. This project will involve research around resources related to vaccine safety within and outside of Wikipedia and collaborations with experts from Wikipedia and the Vaccine Safety Net.
Reading together
Reliability and Multilingual Global Communities
This is a research project that will work to expand the definition and scope of what is considered a reliable source (WP:RS) on Wikipedia for marginalized communities. Art+Feminism is an intersectional feminist non-profit organization that directly addresses the information gap about gender, feminism, and the arts on the internet
News On Wiki NOW
Helping the Public Navigate a Challenging Media Landscape
News On Wiki NOW helps Internet users gain insight into the media they encounter, by adding information to the websites they already visit. We recruit people to put accurate information about established publications onto Wikipedia and search engines. Our focus for this phase: Washington State, Black-owned, and Caribbean newspapers.
Cite Learn
An academic tool for learning to cite sources
The CiteLearn project will build a text-based game in which university students learn about verifiability, using data from Wikipedia and receive automated feedback support on their citation practices.
Your project
What is your mission?
We support software and research projects that strengthen credibility on the internet through tools, data and improve the community's understanding of how we consume news and link to credible information on open-knowledge platforms. Submit your idea today!
Funders
Who We Are
We're on a mission to connect your cause to the people who care the most.
WikiConference North America is the annual conference of Wikimedia enthusiasts and volunteers from throughout North America, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. The 2023 conference will take place in Toronto, Ontatrio November 9–12 at the Toronto Reference Library,
Credibility Coalition is a research community that fosters collaborative approaches to understanding the veracity, quality and credibility of online information. We incubate activities and initiatives that bring together people and institutions from a variety of backgrounds.
The Wikimedian Community
Kevin Payravi (SuperHamster), Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight (Rosiestep), Samuel Klein (Sj) and Andrew Lih (Fuzheado), members of the Wikimedia movement and Wikimedia DC are teaming up with MisinfoCon to identify and select projects that will advance credibility and information reliability on open-knowledge platforms such as Wikipedia and other platforms.
MisinfoCon is a global movement focused on building solutions to online trust, verification, fact-checking, and reader experience in the interest of addressing misinformation in all of its forms. MisinfoCon brings together academics, journalists and technologists to speak on the topics of misinformation in science, health and electoral politics.
The Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism (CUNY) serves as a catalyst for journalism innovation and sustainability by running education programs, events, and communities.
Since 2010, the Center’s mission has been to help create a sustainable future for quality journalism in three ways:
- Educating students and mid-career journalists in innovation, entrepreneurship, and business management
- Researching topics relevant to the development of viable economic models for new and emerging digital media
- Funding, developing, and nurturing new journalistic enterprises
- Contact Us
Send us your inquiries about the scope of the grants on this form
© 2019-2020.
Photos of WikiConference North America 2019 by Victor Grigas licensed the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.