Grants talk:PEG/Shipmaster - Community of Arabic Wikipedia/Producer Prize-2015

A decision has been made on this grant. Comments are still welcome on this page.

GAC members who support this request

1. Idea is good and budget is not so big. Support. --Hasive • talk • 05:23, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
2. rubin16 (talk) 12:22, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
3. --Ilario (talk) 08:13, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
4. Works for me. --Dry Martini (talk) 09:30, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
5. Support, w/25 entrants. Alleycat80 (talk) 14:55, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
6. Polimerek (talk) 21:47, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

GAC comments

Community involvement

Thank you Shipmaster, Mido, Antime for your submission. This is an interesting project, especially because it explores the boundaries of the wiki-world: given the big scandals that came out last year about paid contribution, your proposal shows that it is possible to have paid good quality editing without sacrificing independence and neutrality. However, an issue came up to me: you say that in past years involvement in Wikipedia has raised because of this project, and you say so based on interactions between the participants and the jury panel. But is it real participation in a "wiki" sense? Does it involve discussing neutrality and building together the article? Or is it just an interlocutory approach towards the jury? Your project gives prizes to users, which is an incentive to working alone to be able to control the whole creation process and to be sure one will win. My question, ultimately, is: does this initiative really promote community involvement and participation?

I see that some users have thought about creating teams: maybe you could encourage a more collaborative approach by requiring them to do so? My suggestion is to change the rules and have all or most of the money given out in prizes to teams, not to individuals. Also, your reports do not explain how does the jury decide and how is the jury formed: is it an elected panel, a co-opted one, a voluntary panel...? Does it take community input into consideration? Years ago I was a juror in a similar contest, dedicated to high schools and sponsored by Wikimedia Italy: in the final e-mail briefing, we agreed that we could have included "community involvement" as an evaluation criterion, so that students would be encouraged to ask for help and feedback from the community. Unluckily, I couldn't join the jury the next year, so I don't know whether they actually changed the rules. Do you think such a change could be implemented in your case? Furthermore, would it be possible to allow community input in the evaluation process? (even this request page does :P ) Personally, I think this could be an important improvement in a project that is, anyway, already well-structured :) --Dry Martini (talk) 09:36, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

edit --Dry Martini (talk) 14:51, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments Dry Martini. There are several points in there I will try to address below:

• Participation between judges and contestants: I had to go back and scan the submission to see what led to this understanding, and I think I found it under the "Impact" section in our report. I sincerely apologize since that may have not been clear. We meant that: By the fact that the judges and contestants are participating in the activities of the competition, their engagement in wp increased. It's not that they directly engaged in a back and forth. Judges are anonymous and they do not know each other. They submit their opinions via an automated survey, so they do not engage contestants directly.
• Does this initiative really promote community involvement and participation? We think so. All the articles, images, portals and other pieces of content created through the competition pass through the regular wiki process of collaboration and examination. For example, if a user committed to a goal of creating x featured articles, he has to go through the process of nominating them and getting support. Most articles will see participation by other members in terms of talk page discussion, POV revisions, etc, just like any other work on Wikipedia, the only difference is that without the competition as an incentive, the same users would not have dedicated the time to create that same amount of content.
• Teams: I like the idea of encouraging more teaming, and maybe we can introduce that in the wording of the contest page, I don't think we can require it though given the small community and the small(ish) number of submissions.
• Judge selection: The organizing committee selects judges and invites them over on a half-yearly basis, the criteria is experienced Wikipedians in good-standing with no clear conflict of interest. The judges do not know each other and the list is anonymous to prevent sensitivities and any problems that arise from the fact the community is small.
• Making community engagement one of the criteria for judging: I think that's an awesome idea, I will coordinate with the rest of the team about including it in the rules and judging criteria from now on.

--Shipmaster (talk) 03:25, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Thank you Shipmaster for your answers. You have been very clear and actually some of the issues were due to misunderstandings :)

On participation and involvement (first 2 bullets): ok, exactly what I was concerned about, now I have no reason to oppose the proposal on this ground.

Teams: it was quite related to the previous issues, as a way to force cooperation between users, but if cooperation is already present, there is no need for such a rule. Would be nice to see if (and how) it works, though.

Judge selection: this was mainly out of curiosity and of course linked to the community feedback issue.

Community engagement as a criterion: jolly good, I'm glad you liked the idea.

One final issue before I vote: I guess your estimate of transfer fees is based on past experience and is therefore accurate. Nonetheless, I'd like to hear from you what your backup plans are in case these estimates are wrong (too high - meaning you have spare money - or too low - meaning you don't have enough money), since you didn't elaborate on that in the request. Thank you for your patience. --Dry Martini (talk) 07:33, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Actually, both situations happened before over the years since transfer costs differ per country. Three years ago we were under estimate since most winners had Paypal accounts, in that case we returned the difference to the foundation at the end of the year. Last year we were over by a small amount and we covered that through community donations. --Shipmaster (talk) 03:12, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

No risks? I see a risk...

Hey user:shipmaster, thank you for submitting the grant request. I have several things I want to see if you are doing the exact same thing like yesteryear.

• More aggressive targets: only 20 submissions? this means approx. 1 in 3 people wins something - this is not a competition. What about trying to achieve double submissions than last year? The targets are too safe!

• I would like to see at least one judge out of your community - I find external judges add some objective perspective. I'm not assuming bad faith here, but I'm thinking an external eye could be beneficial - or we run the risk of just having "paid editing in disguise".

I'd like to hear your thoughts (and other GAC members' thoughts) about this.

Alleycat80 (talk) 16:53, 18 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments Alleycat80. Response below:

• More aggressive targets: I think our targets are consistent with the current active community size and growth. The targets reflect how many people we think will be interested and year to year increase reflects year to year growth in editors we see. Remember that we are mostly targeting somewhat experienced editors not brand new users of ar.wp (we are not telling people join wp so that you can participate in this competition). We did add one organizing team member based on last year's GAC suggestions for whom the main task is outreach: socializing the competition on wikipedia-specific social networks and forums, etc. , but still, we are targeting editors and are restricted by the growth of that pool year to year.

Sorry to nag about this; how big is your possible contributor community? How is it that so few people enter the competition? How is it you are not at all concerned about how to at least double (if not triple/quadruple) your entrants every year? What I'm seeing here are talks around this point, but not an answer. Sorry to be strict about this; I'll remain as an opposing vote until I see a clearer answer. Alleycat80 (talk) 00:44, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

• I am all for a more diverse judging panel, if feasible. I don't think either way we run into risks of paid editing as the judging panel is diverse and the judges do not know each other and we are very conscious of any conflict of interest that arises. But like I said, the more experienced and diverse judges the better, any suggestions on how to find experienced Wikimedians who are fluent in Arabic but are not ar.wp community members are welcome. I do think they need to be experienced Wikimedians just because they are incorporating a lot of wp specific criteria in their judging.

Fine, I get that.

--Shipmaster (talk) 03:03, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

WMF comments

Hi Shipmaster. Thanks for this grant request, your continued support of this project on Arabic Wikipedia, and your engagement with the GAC in the discussion. Speaking to Alleycat80's hope for increased targets year-on-year, we would encourage you to think about increasing the targets by ~25%, so to 25 submissions instead of 20, etc.. We don't believe it's reasonable to double the targets considering there are only 104 very active editors on Arabic Wikipedia and this contests targets only the most very active ones. Just a reminder to the GAC, that each submission is not just one article, but a portfolio of work that includes on average 50 high quality articles. Otherwise, we are fine with move forward with the grant. Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 22:48, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

I get what Alex is saying. I might've been too hot headed here :). Good luck with the competition, Shipmaster...

Hi Shipmaster. I see you updated the # of submissions to 25 -- great! Would the other targets go up as well as a result? Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 22:30, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

Hi all, yes sorry I am late in replying. I updated to 25 since 20 to 25 is not that big of a difference and I still think is achievable. I will look at how other measures get affected. We will probably pump them up a little bit accordingly but I need to calculate how much. --Shipmaster (talk) 22:40, 29 May 2015 (UTC)

After talking to the team, I have revised the goals up accordingly. --Shipmaster (talk) 05:44, 31 May 2015 (UTC)