Project grant/WikiPortraits at the 2025 Great Escape Festival in Brighton

Basic information

Project Title (If applicable)

WikiPortraits at the 2025 Great Escape Festival in Brighton

Proposed by

Jennifer 8. Lee

Project description

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

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects prioritise 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 to do?

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, the initiative has uploaded 12,000 photos, of which almost 3,000 (and growing) are used on over 170 wikis across over 10,000 pages. Since we were profiled by the BBC in April 2025, we have had over 40 photographers in the UK volunteer, and a number of them are music concert photographers. Three of them would like to go to the Great Escape festival in Brighton, a four-day music festival that runs May 14-17, 20025, which features over 300 artists in various local venues, including a number from the Global South. In April, WikiPortraits helped the UK photographers apply for press credentials, but we were just turned down (perhaps because we were on the later side and many were already distributed). However, we know it is still possible to buy passes and shoot in smaller venues and get good photos (versus larger venues where you need a credential to get into the photo pit). This is a good fit for or diversity goal since smaller venues is where many of the emerging artists are playing anyway.

Among those artists from the Global South we would like to take photos of are the ones below. 0.76 (China) Ava Rasti (Iran) Cifika (South Korea) KABEAUSHÉ (Kenya) michaelachel (Indonesia) mudi sama (UK (England), Nigeria) Muroki (Kenya, New Zealand) Nighticket (China) NONÔ (Brazil) Priyaji (UK (England), India) RadioMars (China) Tomi Owó (Nigeria) Tommy WÁ (Nigeria) 大波浪 · Dabo Lang (China)

In addition, we would prioritise BIPOC performers from the UK, Canada, Australia, the United States and other countries, including

Chinese American Bear (United States) Billy Khan (UK, England) Brian Nasty (UK, England) CHISARA (UK, England) Chloe Qisha (UK, England) DeeRiginal (UK, England) Demae (UK, England) Dred (UK, England) Gia Gray (UK, England) IRAH (UK, England) J Appiah (UK, England) Jazz Lee (UK, England) Kamran Kaur (UK, England) Konyikeh (UK, England) Ahmed, With Love. (Ireland {Republic}) Blush Always (Germany) Enji (Germany) Maïcee (France) Alix Fernz (Canada) Aqyila (Canada) Debby Friday (Canada) GeminiCrab (Malika Tirolien & Caulder Nash) (Canada) Divide And Dissolve (Australia)

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

We will measure the following as part of typical metrics for WikiPortraits: - number of unique individuals/performers we take photos of - percentage women of those photos - percentage BIPOC of those photos - number of new photos added to Wikipedia pages - monthly pageviews of the articles with the photos - total number of photos from the events used across how many wikis - whether the photographers we send are still active in the movement one year out (this will not be during the timeframe of the grant, but is important to us as a long-term health of the project

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

The photographers are all new Wikimedians but fairly energetic They include

• User:Duk3L1xon (Luke Dixon, UK)
• User:Amy Martin Photography (Amy Martin, London)
• User: David Maynard Photography (David Maynard, London)

Wikiportraits photos have been added to over 170 wikis by editors around the world, and we expect our Great Escape festivals to be smaller than that but significant impact on different language wikis, especially if the photos are added as P18 attribute on Wikidata. WikiPortraits provide photos for the larger editing community to engage with.

If applicable, identify partnering organisations for this project (not essential)

N/A

Estimated cost

£375 GBP for 3 badges * Additional £500+ for lodging (but I think they are covering it themselves. They seemed happy that we would pay for the badges) * Transport (they seemed fine paying for themselves) Total £1000, but we know the grant is £250.