Grants talk:TPS/Gretchenmcc/CoLang Institute on Collaborative Language Research

Request funded

Hello Gretchenmcc,

The Participation Support Committee is glad to fund your participation in the CoLang Institute on Collaborative Language Research. Please review the next steps for your grant as described in "How the program works".

The TPS program funds active volunteers in the Wikimedia movement. In reviewing your application, the committee was concerned that your editing history is quite sparse, with a total of 178 edits. Of those, only 131 edits are on English Wikipedia, with the remainder tied to funding requests on Meta. That said, we recognize that you are still a fairly new editor with a clear history of diving into community organizing on Wikipedia. Also, your participation in this event appears extremely well planned and, therefore, likely to achieve impact. We are approving this request with a recommendation that, should you plan to seek future funding through WMF grant programs, you continue to build your editing history on Wikipedia, especially with regard to direct contributions to mainspace articles.

The amount requested for airfare appears to be on the higher end. WMF can book the flight directly, and possibly the hotel. However, the per diem will be a reimbursement.

Note that your post-event report must provide a link to an outcome from your participation. An outcome does not include the materials you prepare to present at the event (though we’d like you to link to those, too), but something that is created during or after the event because of your participation, such as a learning pattern to teach others something you've learned at the event, a link to something new that was co-created by you and your fellow participants at the event, or a blog post you wrote to share your experience with others after the event. We recommend that you start planning your outcome now so you are prepared to submit it as part of your report, which is due 14 days after the event.

Our Grants Administrator will be in touch with you about your grant. Thank you for work on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Warm regards, --Marti (WMF) (talk) 18:06, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Marti (WMF)!

I definitely appreciate the funding and the feedback. Just as a note of clarification, I wanted to add some numbers around my organizing activity. If I spend 2 hours editing Wikipedia myself, my edit history looks good, but if I spend 2 hours running an editathon and helping 10 linguists add their expertise to Wikipedia, my edit history looks like nothing happened but in fact 5-10x as much of a contribution has been made as if I were just editing by myself. (I've rounded down because these are often inexperienced editors.)

I do plan to continue to edit Wikipedia myself in namespace pages, but given that the 10 editathons I ran in 2015 helped over 200 linguists edit or create over 200 namespace articles ( summary here, links to all articles edited here and none of these edits would have happened if not for me, perhaps that can be considered an unofficial addition to my contribution history. And it's not just for the grants - of the 11 editathons that I've run so far, less than half have received any funding from Wikimedia (in fact, I'm doing another one in May that's also not funded).

Last time I applied for a grant, I was given the feedback that I should work more with other people, which seems like the opposite of keeping my head down and editing, so I've been putting a lot of energy into e.g. the partnership with WikiEd (I've since referred over 20 linguistics professors to them) and making this series of events a co-instruction. But of course that involves a lot of email behind the scenes (I can give you email address of people to verify this with) and again, doesn't reflect in my contribution history at all.

On outcomes: I intend to write a blog post about the event, as I have about all the editathons that I've run, both funded and non-funded (see [1]), and I'll consider the other options you mentioned. Just to clarify, does linking to the actual articles edited as a result of the event count as "something new" that was created?

On reimbursement: The food amount is not technically a per diem. The most effective way for me to eat meals with the other participants is to buy a university meal plan, as I'm told that's what all the other participants will be doing (apparently there aren't a lot of food options near the university). The meal plan will need to be purchased directly from the university, and I believe can be done at the same time as the university dorm fee. But perhaps I should just talk directly with the Grants Administrator about the easiest way to do this, as I'd like to avoid converting the grant into Canadian dollars and back out again by running it through me (this caused headaches last time when the exchange rate changed).

@Gretchenmcc: the flight and hotel booking will be done by directly by our travel agency. They typically book accommodations with hotels only but will try booking your dorm room with the university, using the instructions you provide them. However, booking for the meal plan would be beyond the scope of their service agreement with WMF. Since your trip is still weeks away, WMF can advance you the funds for prepay for the meal plan. As for exchange rates from grant funds sent for your PEG, were there exchange rate losses? I've sent you an email requesting for information to issue your agreement and fund your grant. Please include your response regarding the advance funding and exchange rates on your reply email. -- Thank you, JTud (WMF), Grants Administrator (talk) 16:22, 28 April 2016 (UTC)

I really appreciate WMF's willingness to fund this event, and I hope that they'll continue to be willing to consider a variety of ways that volunteers can be "active in the Wikipedia movement".

--Gretchenmcc (talk) 03:07, 28 April 2016 (UTC)