Project grant/WikiPortraits at SXSW London 2026

Basic information

Project Title (If applicable)

WikiPortraits at SXSW London 2026

Proposed by

Jennifer 8. Lee of WikiPortraits

Project justification

Briefly describe the issue or problem that motivates this application. What needs are you meeting?

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects prioritize and require using freely-licensed images. This presents a challenge when it comes to photos of notable people, because most published photos of notable people are press images with full copyright and non-permissive licenses. This results in a significant number of biographies with poor quality or no photos. This challenge is quite notable in itself, having been covered by various publications including the New York Times in their 2009 article, "Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos". While that article was written almost a decade ago, the problem persists, so much so that @badwikiphotos and @badwikipediaphoto are accounts on Instagram, not to mention the various galleries news outlets run of galleries of awkward Wikipedia photos. The English Wikipedia category, "Wikipedia requested images of people", has over 5,000 articles in it.

Describe project activities. What will you use the funding for?

An effective way to gather freely-licensed photos of notable figures at-scale is to go to where those people are. Since WikiPortraits launched in early 2024 to do coordinated coverage of events around the world, more than 1 out of every 100 pageviews on Wikipedia globally has a WikiPortraits photo on it. SXSW London has given Wikipedia UK 20 badges, and 8 of them have been allocated to WikiPortraits. In addition we have at least 1 Platinum media credential. While many people live in London and can cover party time, we found from 2025 SXSW London coverage, where we had 8 badges, that giving the badges to London-based people can be hit or miss, as life happens and they get pulled away. Oftentimes it’s more effective to give badges to people from outside London who are committed to covering SXSW because it is what they are there for. So it’s worth the investment of housing to have at least some dedicated people for a dense event like SXSW.. Some of our most dedicated photographers, Amy Martin, who has covered SXSW London 2025 and Edinburgh Fringe, lives outside London, as does a newly enthusiastic photographer who covered BAFTA TV Awards named Jace Merylyn (still figuring out schedule). We will use the £250 towards their housing and WikiPortraits will cover the rest.

Describe your plan for evaluating this project. How will you measure success? What types of things will you measure (e.g. content, participants)?

- Number of photographers accredited. - Number of photos uploaded - Number of unique subjects - Number of views of the photos a year ago.

Identify key people involved in this project. How will or could the wider Wikimedian community be involved?

Jennifer 8. Lee and Kevin Payravi as (remote) WikiPortraits organizers.

So far we have: User:Duk3L1xon (Luke Dixon, London) User:Amy Martin Photography (Amy Martin, greater London) User:David Maynard Photography (David Maynard, London) User:Julia Mustard (Julia Nekhaenko, London)

As always, WikiPortraits provides photos for the larger editing community to engage with. WikiPortraits photos have been added to over 200 wikis by editors around the world, and we expect our SXSW London to have broad impact on different language wikis, especially if the photos are added as P18 attribute on Wikidata.

Estimated cost

£250