Project grant/WikiPortraits at SXSW London 2025

Basic information

Project Title (If applicable)

WikiPortraits at SXSW London 2025

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 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 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 15,000 photos, of which almost 4,000 (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. SXSW London has given WikiPortraits 4 badges (three platinum and one conference), in lieu of press credentialling. However we have more than 4 volunteer photographers who want to shoot SXSW. We are prioritizing those badges to the 4 photographers who have been fairly active and are self-assigned, including the three who went to the Great Escape Festival in Brighton, a four-day music festival that ran May 14-17, 2025 which featured over 300 artists in various local venues, including a number from the Global South. They did a great job (still uploading), even without media credentials, by being strategic about which venues to shoot. In addition, we would like to buy music wristbands at £99 each for other London people who want to shoot SXSW London, but don’t have the demonstrated track record to get one of the platinum badges. But this gives them the opportunity to try. The caveat is that we do not know what access they have with their cameras if they don’t have media credentials, but we find that for emerging artists, the venues are less stringent.

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

While we are only asking for the music badges, we will count all of our SXSW London together. 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 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?

User:Duk3L1xon (Luke Dixon, UK) User:Amy Martin Photography (Amy Martin, London) User:David Maynard Photography (David Maynard, London) User:Sol Procter-Tarabanov (Sol Procter-Tarabanov, London) We are asking the others, and have at least two who are interested. If in the end people don’t end up using all the money, we would use it for food for the four photographers or for social media time to post the SXSW. Wikiportraits photos have been added to over 170 wikis by editors around the world, and we expect our SXSW London to be have broad 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)

WikiPortraits (ourselves!)

Estimated cost

£297 GBP for 3 badges Not included is the support for the SXSW London, including the credentialing process. That is covered by a new WikiPortraits grant given by the North America.