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Fellowship News of September 2012

Fellowship News
VOLUME 1 September 2012 ISSUE 4

The Fellowships Program believes that supporting editors to lead on community improvements is one way WMF can help boost editor engagement. This month, Wikimedia Fellows worked on 5 projects that aim to do just that. Continue reading...

Fellowship News is brought to you by the Wikimedia Fellowship Team. You can change your subscription to this update here.

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We have a great new profile for the Wikimedia Foundation blog about Essam Sharaf, an Egyptian Wikipedian who discusses his involvement with Wikipedia and the revolution in Egypt.

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This banner will invite logged-in editors on all projects to participate in the current public review phase about funding requests by 12 organizations, regarding more than 10 million US dollars of donation money. (Questions about the translation notification system can be asked at [1], and you can manage your subscription at [2].)

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VIDEO

Por favor, cuando puedas, mira los últimos mensajes [3] Mjblanco (talk) 18:26, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Lo he hecho, gracias Mjblanco! Siko (talk) 18:33, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
Hi Sbouterse, my Spanish isn't good enough to follow everything that's happening in this conversation, but I thought that you and the Spanish-speaking editors with whom you're corresponding might be interested in this other video if you're not aware of it already. Cheers, --Pine 18:58, 16 October 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, Pine, I hadn't seen that one before, and it is great! Maria is interested in working on a project idea to bring subject-matter-experts into the collaborative process more on Spanish Wikipedia, and thats what we've been talking about with reference to her video link (just in case you're interested in the background!). My Spanish is terrible too, just for the record :-) Siko (talk) 00:31, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Ya hay proyecto piloto

Vengo contenta a contarte esto

[4]

Mjblanco (talk) 18:15, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Otro piloto wikinavegando

Curso en Oviedo 9 de noviembre [5] Mjblanco (talk) 06:27, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

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Fellowship News of October 2012

Fellowship News
VOLUME 1 October 2012 ISSUE 5

As WMF narrows it's focus, the Fellowships Program will be winding down in early 2013. We'll be investigating other avenues for supporting individuals via grant-making, and meanwhile, Sarah, Steven, and Tanvir will be continuing their projects for several more months, so stay tuned to the News! Continue reading...

Fellowship News is brought to you by the Wikimedia Fellowship Team. You can change your subscription to this update here.


Questions about fellowships and grants

Hi Siko,

What's the practical difference between a fellowship project and a grant-funded project?

Could the goal of the fundraiser be increased to account for the funding needed to maintain the fellowship program?

--Pine 18:21, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Hi Pine! I'm glad you're still thinking about this :-) As the door on fellowships closes, we're looking at opening a door to a new kind of individual grants program for WMF. Would love to have your thoughts and input! I think the main thing to keep in mind is the fellowships program wasn't really shut down because of lack of funding - it was more of a structural issue related to WMF staffing. As I move into the WMF grantmaking team, I think we've found a way to address these issues in a new program that will allow us to support individuals to lead on cool projects a bit more sustainably. Looking forward to hearing what you think! Siko (talk) 18:02, 17 December 2012 (UTC)


Original Barnstar
Thanks for your comments here and on the IEG page. I feel more at ease now. Also, I am glad that you will remain involved with this effort, because although I only barely know you, the Fellows that you selected and supervised did some good work, which indirectly speaks well of you. (: Here's a barnstar for an early Christmas present. --Pine 21:14, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
Aw, thanks for your kind words and the barnstar, Pine. I hope we'll get to know each other better in the future. Siko (talk) 21:43, 19 December 2012 (UTC)
+1 to the good work done by the fellows and by their selector[s]! It would be useful to keep a consistent name like 'fellow' for the whole constellation of individual grant programs, though they will change over time. Building a network of such participants ends up being extremely valuable 5 and 15 years down the line. SJ talk  08:22, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
+1 to continuing to build the network! We left the name "fellows" behind recently, but regardless of whether that gets picked up again, I think it is really important to continue to facilitate the participants network over time, creating opportunities for gathering and sharing learnings, etc. Siko (WMF) (talk) 19:39, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
I was also thinking, considering the amazing contributions we have always had from HS students, about the value of having college scholarships for long-time contributors or people who participate in some kind of annual productive competition (say, a dozen $1-5k scholarships). Again, the value of being welcomed into the lists of scholarship winners is probably more useful to many, long term, than the award. Part of the same extended network. SJ talk  21:43, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
Scholarships for education are a nice idea...no idea how feasible it would be, thought they feel like a reasonable mission fit. Let's pick this thread up again in the future, seems like there are lots of directions we could take grants for individuals if that's the direction WMF starts to invest increasingly in. Siko (WMF) (talk) 21:56, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Grants contact

Is there any point of contact, someone that I can discuss grants with? We have a project involving sending a team of three to cover the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi in February 2014. It would be a great thing for Wikimedia. User:LauraHale brought this in person up with WMF in San Francisco earlier this month, but I have no personal experience in applying for grants, and very much need help with applying for it. Some assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Hawkeye7 (talk) 20:24, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Hi Hawkeye7! Although I'm always happy to help kick around ideas, I expect the kind of grant you're looking for in this case is a Wikimedia Grant, and the person best situated to advise there is still Asaf who heads up that program at WMF. Probably the best thing to do is read all the guidelines on that page, start drafting your grant proposal, and contact either Asaf or grantsATwikimediaDOTorg with questions as they come up before you make your final submission. Good luck! Siko (talk) 17:42, 2 January 2013 (UTC)
Thank you!!! Hawkeye7 (talk)


Hi Siko, I just saw your comment on my grant proposal. Thank you for your input. I didn't see any additional changes in the info box, though I'm not sure what you added.

I am ready to shift my status from DRAFT to PROPOSAL but I don't see where/how to do that.

Nevermind, I just figured it out!

Also, HaeB (a Wikimedian, I assume) had some relevant questions. Do I address answers directly to HaeB, or somehow include it in the proposal?

I also figured out how to address HaeB's questions in the discussion section.

Scott

Question

Thanks for your note! I left a question at Talk:Individual Engagement Grants/Committee#OTRS --Pine 20:49, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Your behaviour

I think sending a message in English on the French bistro like you did yesterday diff identifying yourself by an IP (fr:user:90.53.48.83) instead of a meaningful name, having your message being sent by a bot, instead of coming in person, with an "apology" wich is nothing more than a self-serving excuse, is just rude. Especially as we see by your reply to user:Turb at Grants:IEG/Questions#Languages that you have no intention whatsoever to make your grants realistically available to French speaking users. Your bot has something similar with the drones the US air force sends to Afghan civilians. Teofilo (talk) 08:08, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

I offer my apologises for the previous message which doesn't represent the views of the French speaking wikipedia community but only the ones of Teofilio. It makes me feel ashamed. --Kimdime (talk) 13:35, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
+1 Kimdime. The fact my name is in his message does not mean I have something to do with it. Turb (talk) 13:50, 31 January 2013 (UTC)
Teofilo: try to be a bit nicer. I don't think making a comparison between bots that "spam" and drones that kill people is really fair.
If there are specific problems with the new grants program, let's focus on those and get them fixed. Whether they're language barriers (including translation of notices) or other issues you have, they can be discussed and worked on, I'm sure, if they're a problem. Just tone down the rhetoric a bit. And pick your battles. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 23:52, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Reply

Please see my reply at Grants:IEG/Questions#Disbursement questions. --Pine 19:05, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

IEG

Hi, I have proposed a draft idea at the Idea Lab. In proposing the idea, my intention is to encourage interested people to elaborate the idea, take up the project and create similar projects. I have no plans to work on the project myself, or apply for a grant. It is not clear to me yet if it is possible for an IEG committee member to suggest a draft at the Idea Lab. If it is forbidden to do so, I would like the draft be removed. If not, I would like to keep the draft, and wait to see if anyone wants to take up the project idea and work on it. What are your thoughts about this? Thanks in advance! --Netha Hussain (talk) 19:49, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi Netha! That is great - it is exactly what we'd intended for the IdeaLab :-) I, too, created an idea there in hopes of getting others thinking, and my intention is that we will all use the IdeaLab as a place to hold our ideas and bounce them around with others, regardless of what level of participation we intend to have in the resulting project, or whether or not we're eligible for grants ourselves. To help support this use-case for the IdeaLab, we're working on ways to make it easier to see which ideas are looking for other participants to pick them up. (meanwhile, you can add |participants=YES to your idea and it will get automatically added to the participants-wanted list in the Lab). Thanks for participating boldly!! Siko (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

IEG

Hey. I see that I was appointed. How this follows from here? I have been reading the proposals, but I don't know where do we coordinate, talk and such. Please guide me on this :) — ΛΧΣ21 21:13, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi! I'll be adding everyone into the mailing list today at long last (now we've got all members confirmed), and so you should be getting a mail soon with more information about coordinating the review etc. You can get involved in committee discussions on the Workroom talk page too, meanwhile. Thanks! Siko (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Lovely

I like the IdeaLab very much :) How does the interface scale? How would you feel about slowly migrating all of the Strategy:wiki ideas into it? --SJ+ 08:13, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! Looking forward to seeing some of your ideas there, SJ :-) It is intended to scale about as well as any hacked-together wiki system (ie, with iteration to meet demands over time). We'll need to get smart about localization in the coming year, and we'll need to work on the display/sorting/matching ability that allows potential collaborators to find ideas as we start to have lots more of them, but I don't think either is a barrier to growth, they're just 2 main factors in my mind that will need to be tackled as we scale beyond the pilot. We added a link to the strategy proposals in the IdeaLab because I do think this space could be a good way to pickup the thread of earlier ideas that haven't yet been implemented. On the other hand, it might not make sense to automatically transfer all older ideas in - I would prefer to know that an idea still makes sense in the context of today, and has at least 1 active Wikimedian who is interested in talking about it (mostly because I tend to think that ideas need people engaged to keep them alive). I'm not sure if pointing people to those older proposals as we did will be enough to get folks picking up those that strike them as most amazing and migrate them into the IdeaLab format, though. What did you have in mind? Siko (WMF) (talk) 19:31, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm thinking along similar lines. Say, defining an active process that takes in ideas - any idea that meets a minimum threshhold for interest (say 3 supporters and 1 current person who chooses to guide it through the process?) - and
  • turns them into actionable tasks / task-sets that others could act on, in whole or in part. (one popular idea might be broken down into 3 tasks).
  • reviews these tasks and clusters them into groups of similar tasks
  • lets people note when they're working on a ask [cluster] and when there is some output that is testable
  • lets people prioritize tasks (clusters)
  • has a "recent changes" style feed and/or watchlist that lets people get push-information when a task has been moved forward.
note that a lot of the above can be done today with bugzilla. By "slowly" I mean you could start with ideas that had 50 supporters, and move your way gradually down to more niche or less-publicized ideas. I asked about scaling thinking that 500 good ideas turning into ~5000 possible tasks before those tasks are clustered back into ~1000 distinct clusters. but compared to what people can evidently wade through (think: pages of 200 categories at a time), this may not be a significant problem. SJ talk  21:39, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm into this idea, SJ - it seems like it would both be a good use-case to play with scaling IdeaLab around. I worry a bit about things getting buried in bugzilla and would wonder how we might surface what is tracked there in the IdeaLab context, but it is a good point that the next logical step after surfacing people and ideas is to integrate them into tracked and followed tasks. When we've got the first batch of IEGrantees cooking, I will have a little more mental space to think about what else we should do with IdeaLab next, but meanwhile, keep brainstorming, please :-)

re

Hi, you have a new message here. Thanks! Gryllida 14:38, 11 February 2013 (UTC)


Hi, I replied at IEG/A revival of Outreach to Increase Participation‎‎. Let me know what is your opinion about the strategies? -- ɑηsuмaη ʈ ᶏ ɭ Ϟ 19:36, 13 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi, you must be busy at the workroom. I have replied to your question, please reply when you got time, and is it okay to include one more participant as I explained on the same page? -- ɑηsuмaη ʈ ᶏ ɭ Ϟ 02:11, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Grant

What you said

I'm not asking money to write all important medicine/psychology articles, I will continue to write for free, but I'm moving closer to my med school and I don't have money for the internet. I can improve my proposal to 15 health articles per month, but without internet at home I will be dependent of the university library. Do you have any idea how expensive med school is? I already created/improved more than 200 psychology/medicine articles for free, most with more than 1000 views/month, is $100 to much to ask to not stop making a dozen health articles every month? EternamenteAprendiz (talk) 01:07, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I didn't say it is too much to ask, on the contrary, your contributions seem really valuable and commendable! That doesn't mean that they fall within the scope of what this grantmaking program can give funding for, though. Paid content creation is just not eligible, sorry :-( Siko (WMF) (talk) 06:12, 14 February 2013 (UTC)
Can I ask for a grant to buy medicine books and use them to create new medicine articles then?EternamenteAprendiz (talk) 00:47, 16 February 2013 (UTC)
I read the rules and it says you can't pay for writing, but that is not the case. It's only for the support needed for writing, I can scan the bills.EternamenteAprendiz (talk) 09:26, 18 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm truly sorry, but the answer is still no. IEGrants are simply not for this use. Let me see if I can find another program that might support your situation - if I can, I will let you know. Siko (WMF) (talk) 17:17, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

WMF grant eligibility requirements

Siko, thanks for evaluating the status of the IEG/SOLRSearch project. I'll be interested in seeing the list of projects you ultimately fund, given my fresh understanding that "assistance from staff engineers" disqualifies all proposals from further consideration.

In the other-requirements section of the proposal I was thinking more in terms of the general community reviewing the work products as I went along, not WMF engineers in particular. Thanks - --Hypergrove (talk) 18:49, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

That constraint is a bummer, isn't it? I, too, will be interested to see the final list of projects we ultimately fund! Good to understand you had general community review more in mind, that does make sense. Unfortunately for any extension to be deployed it will still need to go through WMF code review though...perhaps in future years the MediaWiki code review process will change, but for now it is my understanding that extensions can sometimes sit waiting for review for up to a year, and that makes extension-building a pretty poor investment for a grant at this point. I'd rather disappoint you before you've spent a bunch of time and energy writing all the code, than 6 months from now, I guess :-) Thanks Siko (WMF) (talk) 18:58, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
Not being argumentative, I've not experienced the horror story you describe with respect to normal git core/extension review. I'm sure you didn't mean to slam the entire MW process as justification to not further consider the proposal as I've found WMF engineering staff to be extraordinarily courteous helpful and speedy throughout my experiences building & deploying MW extensions. ---Hypergrove (talk) 19:13, 15 February 2013 (UTC)
I'm glad you've had good experiences! It was staff from that department (who I would agree are awesome and give 110% to their work) that have requested that we go off the worst-case scenario...because they can't promise timely review, and because they have seen the worst case scenario happen before, this is what we've got to work with. It is not my intention to slam the process or those staff though, we're all just doing the best we can with the resources we have, and trying to be realistic. Siko (WMF) (talk) 20:01, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Easy Media Uploader Ineligibility?

Hi Siko, Thanks for the short explanation of your decision. I still feel strongly that this is a worthwhile proposal even if it has to be executed without direct communication with the Wikimedia Foundation product and development staff. Part of the stated eligibility is alignment with the 5 strategic goals of the foundation, so the thought that outsiders could never impact those goals are a bit at odds with this grant process and format...no? How can community projects be fostered if they can never aim to actually make concrete impact on the experience around quality and user engagement?

Are you open to considering my proposal if I modified it to be less dependent on any coordination with the Foundation developers by creating a Widget or putting the tool as 'Experimental' for logged in users only? After having talked with several past contributors to this initiative, in and out of the foundation, including Maryana Pinchuk working on the mobile uploader - I'm confident this could be executed without heavy engagement from the foundation if given the chance. Neil Kandalgaonkar - one of the original developers assured me the technical task is actually a fairly simple one and its mainly getting community feedback that is the key to success. I understand that you're learning as you go, but I think I should have a chance, as you did, to update my proposal to meet the 'new' eligibility criteria and see if there is a more independent way this can happen and if successful be migrated into core WIkipedia. --Ashstar01 (talk) 04:40, 16 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi! So, it is true that getting the feedback about this so late meant that you weren't afforded time to see if your proposal might be refactored to meet the eligibility criteria - that part of your argument I find compelling. To be perfectly clear, though: what we are looking for is something that requires no engagement from Foundation product/eng staff, not just no heavy engagement. I know that sounds a little heavy handed. But it is exactly this kind of lightweight consult with staffers so far that have made our executive team uncomfortable with the engagement level on your project, and have brought us to the point of spelling out the eligibility criteria related to software development more clearly. Bringing up Maryana or Neil if anything it makes your case a harder sell. If you could develop your tool independently as a gadget, that would make it eligible technically, yes, assuming you can hire someone to do the dev work who has the admin privileges on English Wikipedia to get it turned on. But because gadgets are generally opt-in features, then you've got the problem of users knowing it exists. Wikipedia is full of ideas and features that go unused because they're buried (this is something that totally depresses me, but I've learned to live with it until we get some more basic things that modern websites have like a good notifications system). Does this feel backwards compared to how most webthings work? You bet :-) If we meet up sometime I'll tell you the story of how we built the Wikipedia Teahouse, a community project that has arguably had a fair amount of impact on the new user engagement experience, with spit and duct tape last year. I bet you've got lots of good ideas and ways to contribute to this movement that could be enacted in clever ways that don't run up against the given constraints. Meanwhile, it is difficult to see how this particular project would be well served without integration with the core website. Siko (WMF) (talk) 22:47, 16 February 2013 (UTC)