Grants talk:TPS/Ladsgroup/WWW 2017/Report

Feedback on your report

Dear Ladsgroup,

Thank you for submitting this report. I am requesting some revisions to your report, based on our reporting guidelines, as referenced on the talkpage of your initial request in Alex Wang's approval post. Our guidelines say:

"Instead of writing a detailed account of the event in your report, we want you to share the benefits of your participation more widely with the community. Your outcome could be a learning pattern to teach others something you've learned, 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."

I need you to provide a link to an outcome that meets these requirements. In your report, you said:

"I cover all of my research outcomes and send an email with a link to this page into research-internal or research-l. This way it would reach the biggest number possible."

This would meet the outcome requirement, but you need to provide a link both to the page you create as well as to the posts on mailing lists where you share it.

This TPS request, at $2,300, is at the very high end of costs we typically fund through this program. We would typically not fund such a large request if we understood that the planned level of participation is as low as presenting a poster. In your initial request, you said in the infobox summary that you would be leading a workshop in the Wikiworkshop in WWW conference. Did you mean the poster presentation? If not, can you tell us more about whether this workshop happened and what the outcomes were? I'd like to expand further your description of how you believe your participation in this event contributed to the Wikimedia movement.

Given that you say that you explained your poster to only ten people, that makes the impact to cost ration appear to be very low. You might say more about your engagement with the ten people you presented your poster to and list any follow-up activities you have completed or plan to complete in relation to the them. Describing any follow-up support you are offering is one way to flesh out this report. You could also list other ways, besides presentation of the poster, that your participation in this event contributed to the Wikimedia movement.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Warm regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 12:08, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

Answer

Hey, Regarding poster and presentation, I had a full paper that got accepted in the workshop and given my experience in different events, I thought I would've given the chance to to present it in front of people for at least 20 minutes and that, to my surprise, didn't happen but I got three minutes for presenting my poster in front of all audiences (which was around thirty participants) which I consider as "not that bad". The another thing about this event was that almost all participants were from high-prestigious universities and companies, i.e. world-class experts. It means there weren't much of them and even engagement ten high-class experts is a very good outcome of this conference.

Another part of outcome of this event IMO, is about learning from the experts in AI and coming back to use it to help Wikimedia movement. As an official research collaborator and member of scoring platform team. Lessons I learned from the conference greatly helped me to improve ORES and that alone directly impacts Wikimedians in all languages and projects. I'm not sure if that justifies for conference but I think it should help for making a case.

I hope that helps Amir (talk) 13:10, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Additional question about your report

Hello Amir,

Thank you for this follow-up information. I understand from your response that you understood that you would be given the opportunity to give a presentation along with your poster, but this was not the case. Instead, you were given only three minutes to an audience of 30 people with global standing in this field. It's helpful to understand what your expectations were going in, and to know that there was a misunderstanding about what you thought would happen and what did happen.

I agree with you that your own learning from this event is very valuable. The reason for our concern is that, from our internal programmatic guidelines, we cannot fund people to attend events for the sake of their own individual learning. The reason is that we do not have enough funds to fairly distribute them among all of the active volunteers in our movement who would benefit from the learning they would receive at conferences. So, instead, we focus on funding Wikimedian volunteers to educate others about our projects. When we fund international travel, ideally we hope that the level of engagement will be very robust--again, because we cannot fund everyone to travel internationally to present at conferences. We look for exceptional levels of engagement--usually through a full presentation plus additional forms of outreach, training or follow-up.

I am recording this here not because you did anything wrong--we understand you submitted this proposal in good faith and we are happy to have supported your learning. Nevertheless, this is not a proposal we typically fund, and I want to make sure this is clear for the sake of fairness and equity for other applicants who might wish for us to fund them to present a poster at an international conference.

Lastly, I asked you in my comment above about the outcome requirement for your report. As quoted from our guidelines above, "Your outcome could be a learning pattern to teach others something you've learned, 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." Can you please indicate what you are submitting for your outcome requirement? This should be something that was created as a result of your participation in this conference, rather than something that was created before the conference (for example, the materials you presented at the conference do not meet this criteria.) Is there a way you have shared with the community about what you learned at the conference? You referred to how much you value the learning you received from the experts in AI and the ways you believe that the learning can benefit the Wikimedia movement. I would love for you to write up a blog post summarizing this learning so that other Wikimedians can encounter what you learned.

Thank you again for your service!

Warmly,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 16:35, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Hey, Regarding the learning from the event, I understand that it solely should not be a reason for a fund, I wanted to emphasize that presenting a poster was not my only reasoning to participate. Regarding the second note about sharing my experience, I wrote this report and sent a detailed email to the researchers of WMF (research-internal mailing list) which they talked about my ideas and there was a long thread about my leanings and how we can use them to help the movement. It's not public though so I don't know if that's enough but I can forward you the whole thread if that helps and also I shared these researches about sock-puppetry to the new researchers in WMF that want to work on building tools to handle these cases. Amir (talk) 15:43, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Report accepted

Amir,

I'm very sorry this report has waited so long for formal notice of acceptance. I had misremembered that I had responded previously, and obviously something went awry. In light of the long delay on my part, I am accepting the report now.

In regard to the outcome requirement, I want to note (mostly for reference should you participate in TPS in the future) that we cannot accept this report as your outcome requirement. Rather, the outcome requirement is one aspect of the report. However, the email thread is acceptable in these circumstances. An email discussion--particularly an internal one--is not an outcome we would typically accept, but given my own delay in reviewing your report, it will suffice as I don't wish to ask you to blog about an event that you attended months ago (I am making note that this is an exception to our standard practice because we use previous decisions posted on talkpages as the basis for future decisionmaking and I want it to be clear that this is a deviation from the norm). Since the thread you referenced was internal, I will not ask you to forward it as I want to respect the privacy of the participants. However, I would appreciate it if you could provide a quick summary here on this talkpage about any actions or results that have come from the discussion at this point, if any.

Thank you again for participating in this event as a representative of the Wikimedia Foundation. We appreciate your engagement with other participants about ways to help the movement.

Warm regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 22:58, 8 February 2018 (UTC)

Hey, User:Mjohnson (WMF). Thanks for accepting my report, I got back and looked at the email I sent to resaerch-interal, the original email is practically copy-paste of the "Outcome" section of the report, which started discussion regarding use of NLP tools in detecting vandalism in Wikidata (also some discussions for enabling description editing on the mobile app) and also another discussion about different strategies to detect vandalism in Wikipedia (using Markov chains or PCFGs). Some of these ideas are now implemented and being used in production. If you need details of the discussions, I can ask participants to give permission of sending the threads to you. Best. Amir (talk) 00:07, 14 February 2018 (UTC)