Grants:IEG/Proofreading semiautomatically the Catalan Wikipedia with LanguageTool/Final

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's 6-month project.

Part 1: The Project

Summary

• The process of proofreading large amounts of text has been improved resulting in 270,000 edits (with spelling and grammar corrections) in the Catalan Wikipedia.
• A test has been made in the Spanish Wikipedia to show that the same approach can be used in other languages.

Methods and activities

• The activities described in the midpoint report have continued.
• The scripts have been adapted to be multilingual and a full test has been run on the Spanish Wikipedia. A bot request has been approved in the Spanish Wikipedia and I started using it.

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

• The process of proofreading large amounts of text has been improved.
• A great deal of edits has been made on the Catalan Wikipedia (270,762 edits in 127,753 articles). This work will continue with current and future content.
• A test has been made in the Spanish Wikipedia to show that this approach can be used in other languages.

Progress towards stated goals

Planned measure of success (include numeric target, if applicable)	Actual result	Explanation
Number of edits made in Catalan Wikipedia articles, of the order of hundreds of thousands (as a rough estimate, 400,000 edits).	270,762 edits in the Catalan Wikipedia between January 2016/July 2016.	The final number of edits is lower than estimated. The number of edits doesn't correspond proportionally to the time needed to do them. Some corrections are very easy, but others need much supervision and are more time-consuming.
A test (without edits) is made in another language.	A test has been done in Spanish. 14,084 edits done with an approved bot.	This result is better than planned, because actual edits were not on the first project proposal.
Code and documentacion is available.	Code is available on Github with documentation.
Annoucements are made to reach other Wikipedias.	So far contributions have started in the Spanish Wikipedia. There are talks with Wikipedia users interested in improving grammar and spelling in the Spanish Wikipedia.

Think back to your overall project goals. Do you feel you achieved your goals? Why or why not?

Global Metrics

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. Number of active editors involved	1
2. Number of new editors	0
3. Number of individuals involved	1
4. Number of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	0
5. Number of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	127,753 articles improved on Catalan Wikipedia. 13,150 articles improved on Spanish Wikipedia.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	0	Not relevant. Correcctions don't involve substantial changes to content.

Learning question

Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

Indicators of impact

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

• The goal of this project is to improve the linguistic quality of the Wikipedia content. This is specially needed in some Wikipedias like the Catalan one. The success is easily quantifiable with the number of edits and articles improved.

• We have also shown that this approach can be used on other Wikipedias like the Spanish one.

Project resources

• Collection of scripts used in this project (on GitHub), with documentation.
• Fork of LanguageTool used in this project (on GitHub)
• Example of file generated for making corrections in the Spanish Wikipedia.
• User page of the bot in the Spanish Wikipedia.

Learning

What worked well

• Learning pattern: Proofreading large amounts of text

What didn’t work

• Sentences in other languages (e. g. titles or quotations in Spanish or French inside a Catalan text) can slow down a lot the supervision process. More sophisticated methods of language detection could be used, but the results (speeding up of the supervision process) are uncertain.

Next steps and opportunities

• The work done in this project was much needed for the Catalan Wikipedia. This work will continue with current and future content.
• Proofreading in other languages will require contributors with a deep knowledge of the language and a good intuition. Improvements in the grammar checker (LanguageTool) will also be necessary for some languages, as the support is uneven.

Think your project needs renewed funding for another 6 months?

Part 2: The Grant

Finances

Actual spending

Expense	Approved amount	Actual funds spent	Difference
Project development (for six 40-hour work weeks)	3,000 EUR	0	0
Server infrastructure costs (Amazon Web Server)	0	65.33 $	- 65.33 $
Total

Note: Probably the small expenses in server infrastructure could have been saved using Wikimedia Labs, but I got a bit lost with the confusing terminology.

Remaining funds

Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadminwikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

Confirmation of project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Please answer yes or no.

• Yes

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

• Yes

Grantee reflection

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being an IEGrantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the IEG experience? Please share it here!