Grants talk:PEG/UG BG/CEE Spring

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

GAC members decisions

GAC members who support this request

1. --DerekvG (talk) 15:05, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

GAC members who abstain from voting/comment

1. --MikyM (talk) 04:42, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
2. Polimerek (talk) 10:39, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

WMF Comments

Hi Лорд Бъмбъри, thank you for all of the work you and the organizing team have put into coordinating the writing contest and creating this request. It is great to see that you have made changes to in response to lessons learned from the last CEE Spring contest, and that you have put so much thought into your goals and measures of success. We have a few questions and comments about your proposal:

• One of the primary goals of this contest is focused on closing gender gaps in participation and in content. Will you be doing anything specific to achieve this goal, i.e. outreach to women, lists of articles needed about women, prizes or additional points given for gender gap articles?
• APG funded chapters should pay for prizes using their unrestricted annual plan budgets. This includes Armenia, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Austria and Serbia.
• 400 Euro in prizes seems like it may be too much for small countries/languages with fewer editors. Does it make sense to offer up to 400 Euro in prizes based on the estimated level of participation in each country based on results from 2015? Groups new to the contest could make an estimate based on the number of users who sign up, and number of editors in the language.

We understand that the contest starts on March 21st, so please let us know when you have responded to our questions, hopefully we can make a decision by the end of this week. Cheers, --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 06:58, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Responding to KHarold (WMF) about 400 EUR per country. I am one of local organizers (Latvia) and I can understand your concern. Levels of participation indeed can vary from country to country, but I do not see how results from last year can be used to decide this. First, they are incomplete, which is a bad thing that will be corrected this year, as Лорд Бъмбъри has established means of centralized stats gathering. Second, there is no apparent correlation between community size and number of articles (without delving into article quality). Latvia (small community) reached about the same level as Estonia (small, but more developed community with long established chapter) and Bulgaria (at least twice as big community). Proposal says that up to 400 EUR will be available for prizes. I could suggest that some number of articles or participants is required for each 100 of EUR to be made available for prize fund, but this has not been discussed wit other organizers.

Another important thing to note is that this article contest is about collaboration between communities of CEE region and giving different starting positions for each community would not lead towards this goal. I have to remind that prize money will be spent on books or other reference sources which on many cases will add further contributions from participants. --Papuass (talk) 10:01, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Hello Kacie,

on APG funded chapters should pay for prizes using their unrestricted annual plan budgets. This includes Armenia, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Austria and Serbia. - we are fine with that, Ukraine, Slovakia and Estonia have already offered that by themselves, I will exclude Armenia, Czech Republic, Austria and Serbia from the budget.

on One of the primary goals of this contest is focused on closing gender gaps in participation and in content. Will you be doing anything specific to achieve this goal, i.e. outreach to women, lists of articles needed about women, prizes or additional points given for gender gap articles? - I truly believe (looking at the little data we have from last year and mostly based on personal observations) that the participant gender gap in the CEE region is not high and data will prove that at the end of the contest. We have content gender gap, though, and the international organisation team has therefore proposed a category "women" to be added to the article lists per country. Although it is not compulsory, 16 of the 23 local organisers put women in their lists (2 have not published their lists, yet, so we have 16/21 = 76% article lists with a separate category "women"). Letting others know that there are notable women in a certain country is not enough, therefore local organisers are encouraged, though not obliged, to define prize categories for most or best articles about women. The international organisers will also use social media and a blog to steer participants to writing such articles as to reach the defined aims of the project (not only those about gender gap, but also those about the distribution of articles, etc.) - see "Plan" in the grant proposal.

on 400 Euro in prizes seems like it may be too much for small countries/languages with fewer editors. Does it make sense to offer up to 400 Euro in prizes based on the estimated level of participation in each country based on results from 2015? Groups new to the contest could make an estimate based on the number of users who sign up, and number of editors in the language.

400 Euro is an amount which is typical for the region. It is a typical amount for prizes in Estonia, as @Adeliine: once told me. @Magalia: told me that Poland has around 1000 Euro for prizes. The Serbs have a digital camera, a tablet and a laptop rucksack in their prizes for CEE Spring. @Ата and Ата: told me that there are considerations that they send their winner to the next CEE Meeting. In Macedonia there is a one Month competition about villages running, where the first three prizes are 250 Euro, 150 Euro and 100 Euro, 500 Euro in total. Their last one, about Olympic games had 5 participants and 700 Euro prize funds. Comparing to those, the amount of 400 Euro for a 72-day all-region well organised contest, arguably the largest in Europe, with clearly defined and measurable strategic and social aims is not large.

(Start of personal comment) Smaller communities organise their contests without prizes all the time and the aim of this grant is to let them have the possibility to use grant money easily once in their lifetimes without taking the days needed for going through the bureaucracy a grant proposal. I know it from own experience that my own user group, Wikimedians of Bulgaria, always considers writing a grant proposal for Wiki Loves Earth and all the others to be too much work, therefore we just leave it and then other countries with yearly budgets have much more pictures per person than we and all we do is buy a small souvenir from our personal money, which makes the community feel bad about getting money from friends. (End of personal comment)

Apart from that, the money from this international grant will only be given for "books or other reference materials (journal subscription, CDs, paid access to professional databases etc.) - useful for writing articles in Wikipedia." (look at "Rules on international level" in the grant proposal). Also, point 5: "It is up to local organizers how many prizes they want to offer, but the overall sum for all of them in each country cannot exceed 400 EUR". So, local organisers in smaller communities can offer 20 books á 20 Euro and raise the number of participants this way, and larger communities can offer 4 books á 100 Euro and motivate their editors by very high quality sources. Local organisers know best how they could use the money in their own context. In short, it is already unfair that large chapters are allowed to have larger prizes than smaller groups and making the prizes for the latter even smaller would not help.

Best regards, --Lord Bumbury (talk) 14:38, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Hello Lord Bumbury and Papuass for your quick replies. Your explanations for why 400 Euro for each participating country are helpful, it is great to hear that many of the organizers plan to offer books and journals as prizes as well. Would one of you please update the budget table to show how many countries are will be elligible for the 400 Euro in prizes - it is not clear if 22 countries are participating in total, or if that number excludes the chapters who will provide their own prizes. Thanks! --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 19:21, 16 March 2016 (UTC)

Feedback about metrics

Hi! This looks pretty good. Im wondering about the targets you set. In the Writing contest evaluation report, in the key findings page, you can find a table with rough estimates for what metrics to aim for. We did not include article quality since the criteria used for ranking page quality changes from one project to project. So my recommendation is to report these all as one group as "rated articles". Also - will you have a bot set up for tracking? How do you plan to track metrics? There are some incredible bots that others have used. I can look/ask about them if you'd like. They may be in the contest toolkit ob meta. Hope this helps! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 07:58, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Also, here is the link about bots -- EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 08:03, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

We gave a lot of thought to coming up with meaningful metrics and if you wish we can throw away this immediately and do whatever you make us to. I was asking about a way to count what we thought was meaningful. The table with the metrics is not helpful for us - excuse me, but 14 created or improved articles in 11 weeks and 36 participants is simply laughable. I bet we will have these by the end of day one.

Our proposed goals are very high and we do not want to organize any article writing contest, but the best one. Our proposed goals are based on analysis of participation in some countries last year and we have proposed very diverse goals – not only a lot of new content, but also a good distribution of it. We want to be measured not only by a number of articles, but by the contribution of many articles with normal length, accompanied with a few Crème de la crème-articles – something pretty new. We want to be measured not only by the number of bytes, but also by the fair distribution of them on all countries, so that we do not end up with 6500 articles about one country and 500 about all the rest. We want to be measured not only by the number of participants, but by the high number of female Wikipedians which we have in our region. So please, please do not measure us with standard metrics, but try to understand how much more we wish to do!

That is why I asked for help with the bots to count metrics in the first place. We know there are tools for counting the standard ones, but we are not standard. Thank you for your understanding! --Lord Bumbury (talk) 20:05, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Lord Bumbury for the clarifications. Now that I think about it a bit deeper, this is quite the project and I commend you and the organizing team on coming up with this proposal. To clarify, the table is actually PER participant PER week. So its 14 articles x 11 weeks x 36 participants = 5,554 articles. I am sorry that was not clear - I tried to show this with the example under the table. We had to do the calculation this way since contests ranged from one week (e.g. Norwegian Wikipedia weekly contests) to 11 months (e.g. English Wiki Cup, Producer Prize on arwiki). So for your contest 400 participants x 6 weeks x 14 articles = 33,600 articles on the high end! And 400 participants x 6 weeks x 1 articles = 2,400 articles on the lower end. Average between these two: 18,000 articles. Perhaps aim between 18,000 and 33,600? You may also want to change the 6 to a 5 since not everyone is starting on the same week. Also you will probably want to split the overall target among countries based on how many people you expect to participate within each country or language project.You can also try to set weekly targets to help distribute when people submit articles; I've heard in a contest on chinese wikipedia, participants will submit content at the very last minute (from User:Shangkuanlc).

As for the crème de la crème, I believe English Wikicup has also done this as well and they have built tracking tools. We did not closely analyze this since quality articles change from one language to the next. But you can see the counts of high quality articles overall on the outcomes page. To measure female participants - will you be using a survey to track? As for bots - are you asking for help in creating bots rather than finding bots? I can ping a few WMF staff who might be able to help with bots, but I need a little more clarity. If this becomes a challenge - there is a way to use Quarry to track the data which I can show you how I did it for the evaluation report. You need to have usernames and the article submissions for the contest; with these two you can get quite a bit of data quickly with quarry. Do you know how many languages & projects will be involved? Thanks! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

Based on the data from the six countries in the grant proposal, we can say that last year there were 1.79 articles per active editor which leads us to expect 7125 * 1.79 = 12753 new or significantly edited articles this year if we did nothing about it. We'll think about a more suitable goal. Could you give is the ratio for Wikipedia Asian Month, which is the other large international article writing contest, conducted in many languages?

Country	Sum of editors from March to May 2015	Average number of editors	Number of created articles	Created articles per editor
Albania	28	9.3	65	7
Bulgaria	171	57	216	3.8
Slovenia	101	33.7	60	1.8
Poland	408	136	693	5.1
Russia	1738	579	264	0.45
Ukraine	531	177	477	2.7
Sum	2977	992	1775	1.79

We would rather not split the overall target among countries, because among those six countries the number of articles per active editor ranged from 0.5 (Russia) to 7.0 (Albania) and we do not consider it possible to estimate this value.

Our weekly aims will have linear distribution. Submitting at the last moment would lead to lower participation, because editors would not push each other higher and higher by seeing the results of the others, so we will motivate them to submit their articles constantly.

To measure the female participants we will conduct a post-contest survey. Not everybody defines their gender on their user page, so a survey is the only feasible option.

Quarry sounds like a very good idea and we would gladly use it. We could get the user names and article submissions if participants put a template on the talk page of every article they created or significantly edited. We would gladly get help with counting the number of words, as that was done for Wikipedia Asian Month.

As visible from the grant proposal, there will be 19 language versions of Wikipedia (as of now, the Slovaks are still thinking about it).

One last thought, counting bytes is not an option here, because in Cyrillic there are two bytes per letter and in Latin – one. To make it nicer some languages in the region use both Cyrillic and Latin letters. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 21:34, 19 February 2016 (UTC)

About average amounts per user in Asia Month - I won't be able to pull those numbers easily (I dont think). The best way to do this easily is to make sure all countries set up the contest the same way so its easy for you to pull the data. Basically - make sure that usernames and page titles are on the same page. You will also need contest start time/date and end time/date. We can go over this when we meet

Re: splitting across countries - makes sense. You can make "suggested" targets or goals for volunteers, and each country can set their own. It is a good way to help encourage individual goals -- sort of like 100 wiki days.

About the survey - I'd be happy to help you with that since it is my current focus :)

Quarry - yes, it does take some time to do, and its very important to set up the contest in a way that you get the pages and users. We can chat more about this when we meet

While counting bytes is not ideal, its at least one way to show how much content was added. Counting words sounds super interesting, and I'd be curious to learn how its done.

Hope this helps! Email me when you want to meet (or just ping me here when is good for you). Thanks! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 00:32, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Here are my comments on your points, in a nutshell - it has already been taken care of:

About average amounts per user in Asia Month - then I would like to stay with the stated number of 1 article per active user. It is hard to define a good aim when there is no good data to compare with. I promise that next year we will estimate the numbers based on good data from this year. Asia Month was international and large, which makes it the only comparable contest. A contest on one wiki cannot be comparable to CEE Spring, because of the Law of large numbers.

The best way to do this easily is to make sure all countries set up the contest the same way - each participant will put the template CEE Spring 2016 to the articles with which they participate, which would allow us to create a list of all articles by using Pywikibot. It is on Wikimedia CEE Spring 2016 under Participating countries and organizers -> Duties.

You will also need contest start time/date and end time/date - at Wikimedia CEE Spring 2016 we also have a time plan. The contest will start on 21 March and end on 31 May.

You can make "suggested" targets or goals for volunteers, and each country can set their own - at Wikimedia CEE Spring 2016 we have a section named Methods to achieve the aims where exactly such targets are suggested (at the moment six of them, feel free to give us more ideas).

About the survey - I'd be happy to help you with that since it is my current focus - thank you, I was leading in conducting the post-conference survey of Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2015 and I'd be glad to exchange my knowledge with you. A lesson I learned - don't make it seven pages long, the participants might want to kill you.

Quarry - yes, we'd have to meet, definitely after Saturday, the 28 February, ideally before 7 March and with a few people participating, because Quarry can be useful not only for me, but also for every local organiser. Girls and boys, this is an invitation.

While counting bytes is not ideal, its at least one way to show how much content was added (sic) - I hope given a list of articles you can give me a way to count bytes automatically. My understanding is that there is such a way. It is not quite easy, because only the bytes added by a certain user have to be counted, not the bytes, which came from other users. It is also interesting how a tool could cope with two people making significant changes to an article. But since you wish for the bytes I hope you'll provide a feasible way to do it.

Counting words sounds super interesting, and I'd be curious to learn how its done - I stole the idea from the Asian Month. They had a tool for that, but I have still not had time to ask for it.

EGalvez (WMF), your points definitely helped in giving us the information that we are suitably prepared :-). Thank you for that now and thank you in advance for the byte counting tool which you will provide :-) ! --Lord Bumbury (talk) 10:00, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Budget

I've changed the budget because the Czech Republic joined. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 18:18, 5 March 2016 (UTC)

I've changed it again because Bashkortostan joined. This is the maximal possible amount, some affiliates might decide to use their own budgets for their prizes. I've also changed the number of languages to 20, because Moldova and Romania share a language, as Serbia and Republic of Srpska. I also changed the word "Wikipedias" in "affiliates" because of that. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 17:14, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

I reduced the budget by 400 EUR because the local organiser for Estonia, @Adeliine: told me that they will use their own budget for prizes. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 11:46, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

I confirm that such was the decision of WMEE's board. Adeliine (talk) 11:51, 13 March 2016 (UTC)

Same for Ukraine, because of information by board member @Antanana:. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 12:34, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

I confirm the information, the local prizes will be funded from our annual budget --アンタナナ 17:52, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

And I have changed the budget again, this time because Azerbaijan has joined. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 22:28, 15 March 2016 (UTC)

Republika Srpska???

Who allowed "Republika Srpska" to join this contest? How is it now possible for Bosnia and Herzegovina to join, if half of it's territory is already in competition. What we should do now, add "Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina" as our title? C'mon people! Don't make it worse than it is currently. --Munja (talk) 22:47, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

I did. The organisation of this year's contest was started on 12 January and the communities of Central and Eastern Europe were informed by an e-mail to the mailing list for Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe [1] and the Facebook group Central Eastern European Wikimedia Community on 19 January. Republika Srpska declared its participation on 23 January [2]. They are a recognised user group and Republika Srpska is administrative entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina just as Bashkortostan is a federal subject of Russia and has their own local competition. Bosnia and Herzegovina could join later without being part of the PEG Grant for CEE Spring which was approved by the Wikimedia Foundation on 16 March [3] just as Belarussian classical orthography Wikipedia (be-tarask), Croatia and Turkey already did [4]. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 07:05, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

In our local competition we clearly emphasize that Republika Srpska and Bashkortostan are not separate countries but just special topics along with Esperanto just because they have active user groups. --Papuass (talk) 08:28, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Could we then add flag of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina in our language project (bs). Current Bosnia-Herzegovina flag represents all nations, but Bosnian is spoken only by Bosniaks, so we should use our lily-flag, right? And what do you mean by "Bosnia and Herzegovina could join later without being part of the PEG Grant for CEE Spring"? Does that mean that we can't join to get reward? Nobody informed us about this event in time. And by the way, Republika Srpska is genocidal entity. They made their land on our land by killing our civilians. --Munja (talk) 10:43, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

To get your flag in the list of countries, please create a list of topics like other communities have made. Personally I would suggest using Bosnia-Herzegovina flag, but Bosniak flag would also be fine. If you do not feel capable of organizing contest in Bosnian Wikipedia, your effort in creating the list will be still appreciated and you would be able to reuse it in future. It may sound harsh, but there was a deadline for grant proposal and it can not be changed after approval, so most likely there will be no prize fund for Bosnia-Herzegovina contest. The contest has been discussed in CEE Facebook group and mailing list for several months. Please make sure someone from you community joins and follows these information channels (no need to be actively involved). Regarding your statements about real life political situation, be aware that it can not be resolved online in Wikipedia. --Papuass (talk) 12:09, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

I know it can't. I am just saying that the organisation should not let RS join contest, it should have been whole country only. We got 6 days ago message on our bs.wiki community, after deadline. If someone should be involved, then you make sure to contact all competitors, right? And yet nothing. --Munja (talk) 12:25, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

This is our (as organisers) fault indeed: we thought that messages on Facebook and on the mailing list would be enough, but unfortunately it was not, probably because there were few or no Bosnian Wikimedians subscribed. On the first day of the contest I noticed that Bosnian community is not involved and I immediately left a message on the bs.wiki village pump.

Concerning prizes, we should look what we can do (in any case we already have Croatia and Turkey). On one hand, it is indeed late for this grant, on the other hand, it is partially because we did not make enough efforts to reach these communities. Perhaps we can ask for an additional (smaller?) grant or for an increase on this one if it is technically possible? @Лорд Бъмбъри:, what do you think? — NickK (talk) 13:55, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Munja, please refrain from political statements here. The mailing list and the Facebook group are well known sources of information for the CEE region, but as I have now learned no participants from Bosnia and Herzegovina participated at the last two CEE Meetings or the Wikimedia Conference, so you could not have known about those information channels. Please subscribe now to them, so that we do not have similar situations in the future. Concerning prizes for late beginners the international organisers are doing everything possible to find some. As one example, Wikimedia Estonia will fund some prizes for the competition on Sakha Wikipedia, which will start soon and User:Ранко Николић from Republika Srpska told me that they will need 289 Euro of their 400 Euro prize money, so we could use some of the saved funds for funding prizes for late beginners like Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Turkey and Sakha Wikipedia. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 14:18, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

There is only about 10 of us active on bs.wiki. I could try to make this work with 1-2 more members, other things I can't guarantee. --Munja (talk) 14:36, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

We can increase the set aims and ask for additional budget. I will do it tonight or tomorrow, taking into consideration the newcomers. This is CEE, we might be late but we are still capable of standing for each other and doing good things! --Lord Bumbury (talk) 14:57, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Republic of Srpska has every element of political entity recognized by international law: its own territory, population, and its laws which are upheld on its territory. Its place in the structure of Bosnia and Herzegovina is recognized by Dayton Accord and constitution of the country. Wikimedia Community of the Republic of Srpska has been recognized by the Wikimedia Foundation itself as an official user group. There is no reason it should be barred from participation in the CEE Spring. Wikimedia of the Republic of Srpska has nothing against participation of other sides from Bosnia and Herzegovina or events organized by them as long as they are not titled as Wikimedia of Bosnia and Herzegovina given that this title would be misleading and would indicate the complete populace of the B&H is represented by bosnian or other Wikipedia/Wikimedia, which is not the case. I would like to draw attention to heavily biased and hate speech statement on the part of Munja in his statement “And by the way, Republika Srpska is genocidal entity. They made their land on our land by killing our civilians." Regards.--Ljubiša Malenica (talk) 15:03, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Soon I will organize Wikimedia of Bosnia and Herzegovina, I have nothing to ask you about. You should have asked us to make so-called "Wikimedia of Republica Srpska". Serbia didn't asked anything Bosniaks of Sandžak and Croats and Hungarians of Vojvodina. Also, I might contact Kosovo representatives from Albanian Wikipedia to organize Wikimedia of Kosovo. There is always solution. --Munja (talk) 15:42, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

@Munja: You can indeed create a Wikimedia user group without asking anyone else, as there are already groups by language (e.g. Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group) or by region of a country (e.g. Punjabi Wikimedians User Group). Attacking the group of Wikimedians of the Republic of Srpska is not the solution, it is more productive to create a group of Bosnian Wikimedians and show that you can organise better events and involve more users.

Concerning this contest, we need to decide how we go forward: either we merge both Bosnian entities in a common list (you or other bs.wiki users add articles about the Federation and we merge it with Republika Srpska list into a joint Bosnia and Herzegovina list) under the flag of Bosnia and Herzegovina or we keep two distinct lists, one for the Federation (with the flag with lily) and one for Republika Srpska — NickK (talk) 23:37, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

@NickK: He does not want to create a Wikimedia User group, he just wants only to provoke. He can not cooperate with someone, starts to insulting. --Kolega2357 (talk) 01:02, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Come on guys. This guy have very rich and pitoresque history, even on Bosnian Wikipedia looool --НиколаБ (talk) 18:24, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Nije have nego has. Naučider malo engleski i treće lice jednine. ;) --Munja (talk) 18:28, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I think that radical nationalism is the worst thing in history of human society. And Munja boy is school example of it. A ti za početak nauči malo maternji (naučider). Elem da li da spomenem i tvoje banovanje na svim eks-ju jezičkim projektima i sokpapet naloge koje si pravio (čisto da ljudi vide s kim pričaju)? Cheers honey --НиколаБ (talk) 16:20, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Prizes for Kosovo

Hi, Kosovo joined late. Any chance it could be eligible for grant money for prizes? Thank you! --Arianit (talk) 09:08, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

We will try to expand the grant for countries and regions which joined late. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 07:43, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Lord Bumbury, will you please let us know what the procedure will be for funds applications for laggards? --Arianit (talk) 13:17, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

See this. --Papuass (talk) 14:39, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

You can also write to me on Facebook or send me an e-mail. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 20:26, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Oh, ok. I thought there is some sort of per-qualification as well. We'll see you on the other side then. Thanks! --Arianit (talk) 11:16, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Grant adjustment because of new participating communities

Since the beginning of the contest seven new communities have joined – Belarussian classic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Sakha and Turkey. I have included them into the Goals section of the contest. The communities would be happy if they could be part of the international grant although they were late joining the contest. Would adjusting the grant by 7 local prize budgets of up 400 Euro and 7 bank transfer costs of 20 Euro be possible? The newly joined participants have to abide to the Rules on international level and can get up to 400 Euro for books and other reference materials. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 14:41, 3 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Lord Bumbury. As Kosovo co-org this would be very much appreciated. --Arianit (talk) 17:00, 4 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi Lord Bumbury, we have approved the request for an additional 2,940 EUR to provide prizes for the additional 7 languages that signed up after the grant was initially approved. We are pleased to hear that several additional groups have chosen to participate, however we will not approve funding for any additional prizes. In the future, please set a cut-off date for participation before you submit your grant request. Cheers, --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 23:04, 5 April 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Kacie! We will not request additional funding and if someone joined now we would split the funds we have. Next year we'll be even better. --Lord Bumbury (talk) 09:30, 6 April 2016 (UTC)