Project grants WikiPortraits at Edinburgh Fringe and Edinburgh International Book Festival 2025

Basic information

Project Title (If applicable)

WikiPortraits at Edinburgh Fringe and Edinburgh International Book Festival 2025 TEXT

Proposed by

Jennifer 8. Lee

Project description

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

(We know this proposal is very late given that the Edinburgh Fringe has started, but it wasn’t clear how to slice off a £250 slice, until recently, when we looked closely at WMUK’s strategic goals. And we would feel odd not applying for a grant from WMUK, given how big Edinburgh is. And also, we had a 3-event limit for 2025, and we thought we might need it for the Scottish Album of the Year awards, but now this is unclear).

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects require using freely-licensed images. This presents a challenge when it comes to photos of notable people, because most published high-quality 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 both 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.

In addition, the number of new registrations and editors has dropped by 35% since 2019, according to a presentation at Wikimania. The Wikimedia Foundation, and the community at large, is alarmed by this. We at WikiPortraits believe that photography and Wikimedia Commons is an unexplored onramp to bring in new volunteers. We are trying to figure out how to do it at scale.

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 20,000 photos, of which almost 6,000 (and growing) are used on over 180 wikis across over 22,000 pages. Our most notable photo is to get a fresh photo of Pope Leo XIV by recruiting a Vatican-credentialed reporter to take photos.

Since we were profiled by the BBC in April 2025, we have had over 40 photographers in the UK volunteer, including a number in Scotland. In 2024, we sent a few photographers to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and Edinburgh International Book Festival for long stretches to shoot performers as part of a contingent of performers, and we would like to use this opportunity to engage more UK-based photographers to come for a few days at a time. There are two photographers in Scotland and four overall in the UK that we want to bring.

The assignment we have given the photographers for Fringe: - Focus on performance groups from the Global South, including India, Bolivia, Palestine, China, and Brazil. - Performers and writers of color - Visually distinctive images like dance and acrobatics

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 our project). - GLAM tools on Toolforge will help us track these relatively well.

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

The UK photographers are here: - User:TimDuncan (Tim Duncan, Edinburgh) - User:Viggosway (Craig Andrew Robertson, Scotland) - User:Amy Martin Photography (Amy Martin, London) - User:BLloydT (Lloyd Tudor, Leeds UK)

Other WikiPortraits photographers we are sending include - User:Berlination (Bryan Berlin, New York City) - User:Philipromanophoto (Philip Romano, New York City) - User:Quejaytee (Quentin Thompson, Switzerland) - User:Jay Dixit (Jay Dixit, Canada) - User:Jalapenopopperz4lyfe (Sriya Sarkar, New York City) - User:Kevin Payravi (Kevin Payravi, Ohio)

Organizer includes - User:Jenny8lee (Jennifer 8. Lee, U.S.A.)

Of these, these are their first major engagements with UK. - User:BLloydT (Lloyd Tudor, Leeds UK) - User:Viggosway (Craig Andrew Robertson, Scotland)

WikiPortraits photos have been added to over 200 wikis by editors around the world, and we expect our Edinburgh Fringe and Edinburgh International Book Festival to have an impact on different language wikis, especially if the photos are added as P18 attribute on Wikidata for emerging performers.

WikiPortraits provides photos for the larger editing community to engage with, which we have witnessed with the speed that our 2025 Cannes winners were absorbed.

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

WikiPortraits (ourselves!)

Estimated cost

WikiPortraits Fringe will cost us over USD$7,500 for the housing for the volume of photos we shoot (this is covered by WikiPortraits grant out of North America). Travel in general is covered by the photographers themselves. But the £250 WMUK grant will go towards either 1) flight for Amy Martin, a black female British photographer from near London or 2) a group meal for all our photographers, UK and not UK, including the local Scottish photographers.

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