Grants talk:PEG/UG TH/WLX in Thailand 2016

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

GAC members decisions

GAC comments

Awards

I personally do not support cash prizes because of various reasons. First of all, I think that prizes should be at first matter of honor and not material benefit (which is not necessarily contradictory to prizes being valuable). Basically something so banal like cash doesn't sound like "prize"... Another of reasons is that it is much closer to "paid editing" (although a prize) than any other type of awards.

I obviously don't have a clue on what you can buy in Thailand for intended amounts, but I would strongly encourage you to refrain from cash prizes and think about something unique. (Experience from the writing contest I've organized: The first prize was netbook. Other prizes were valuable as well. All laureates werte to receive the glass artefact. Some user said: I don't care about netbook, I don't care about other prizes, they don't tease me. But the glass is what I want and that's why I'm going to participate!)

— Danny B. 01:09, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. We do give trophies/glass artifacts for WLM and WLE. Though, I personally believe that cash prizes should still be there, perhaps with a smaller portion (i.e., 50% of what we intended). I will talk to our team/sponsors and see what options are available. Once decided, I will update on the grant page. Cheers. --Athikhun.suw (talk) 01:57, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

It is a local norm for competition to advertise prize money. Similar competitions in Thailand pay more than 10 times our prize money. (For example, the Department of Fine Art competition pay THB100,000 for the first prize.) So, in order to stay attractive and relevant, we need $$$ prize. However, we can consider voucher options as it is also a norm for WLE/WLM competitions. Winners will have options to take the prizes out as vouchers or as "scholarship" (cash). --Taweethaも (talk) 03:27, 4 May 2016 (UTC)

Community comments

• thank you for the proposal! could you please clarify the Proposed activity schedule? you have written that the upload periods for WLM are August and September. are you really going to upload pictures for two months? --アンタナナ 13:40, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
  • @Antanana: (アンタナナ) Thank you for raising this question. We have clarified it in the proposal. WLM upload will be open only during September. Sorry for the confusion. --Taweethaも (talk) 07:45, 1 May 2016 (UTC)
    • thanks) @Taweetham and Athikhun.suw: you are already rather experienced in organising photo contests, so I wanted to know if you have heard about European Science Photo Competition 2015. I think the contest can easily become just Science Photo Competition in 2016, if more countries are interested :) the scope of the contest is different, but the results are really useful for wikiprojects --アンタナナ 23:50, 1 May 2016 (UTC)
      • We would be happy to join the competition if the you allow a country from Asia to participate. We usually have a leftover budget to do related side activities. --Taweethaも (talk) 05:14, 2 May 2016 (UTC)
      • Thank you for the info. It is indeed an interesting competition and we look forward to it. --Athikhun.suw (talk) 13:06, 3 May 2016 (UTC)

WMF Comments

Hi Athikhun.suw, thank you for your hard work planning these projects, creating the request and responding to community comments. The plans you have outlined look good - it is great that you are continuing to do activities that were very successful in WLX Thailand 2015. Please reply to the questions and comments below:

• Last year you exceeded your goals for participation, new articles and new images, but you have not increased those goals this year. Is there a reason why you have not changed the goals?
• The budget for promotion is higher this year and includes t-shirts, postcards and calendars. What will these items be used for?
• In order to approve funding for travel support for winners and participants to attend an event, it should be more than an awards ceremony. This could be a good opportunity to do workshops with photo contest participants to teach them how to add their images to articles as well as a few basic editing skills. In your previous report you note that your community would like to learn new skills, such as how to run scripts, bots and work with tool server. This could be a good chance to organize a workshop on one of those topics.

We look forward to your responses so that we can learn a bit more about your project before making a funding decision. Please let us know if you have any questions. Cheers, --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 22:39, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Hi KHarold (WMF), thank you for your comments. Here are responses to your questions:

1. Our goals are conservative as we wish to aim for quality and we also acknowledge that WLM has reached its saturation point in Europe. Having said that, we are happy to increase the goal (number of uploads) from 2,000 to 3,000. Other goals have remained unchanged for now, though, we are open for any side activity. Last year, originally we didn't have any plan for the Wikipedia Asian Month. We came up with it in the last minutes as a result of discussion at Wikimania in New Mexico and we got quite impressive results. This year, we wish to participate in the Science Photo Competition as suggested above by Antanana, if they allowed a non-European country to participate. Even though most of the goals have remained unchanged, we will thrive for high quality outcomes this year and we remain open for other innovative activities if opportunity arises.
2. Yes. The amount of promotional material budget is relatively higher this year. This is proportional to more frequent activities/meetups and expected number of volunteers/participants. These items will be given to our participants, local partners, juries and volunteers taking part in organising the events. The previous budget was low as we expected to get in-kind merchandise support from WMF. The model was proven uneconomical as the postage and taxes were unexpectedly high. The current practice is cheaper and more transparent.
3. Yes. This is exactly what we plan to do. The award presentation ceremony is expected to be in the middle of a meetup or edit-a-thon workshop. We learn this from Diego Delso (User:Poco a poco) from our discussion in Berlin and put it to a test in this proposal. Winner participation in edit-a-thon is not required but encouraged. Surely, there is a potential to recruit high-quality volunteers from our winners. Also, this is an opportunity for our volunteers to learn from each other and discuss the future direction of our movement in Thailand.

Cheers, --Athikhun.suw (talk) 00:28, 14 May 2016 (UTC)

Funding decision

Hi Athikhun.suw, thank you for your quick responses to our questions. The reasons you have given for the increase in promotion budget make sense and we are happy to hear that you learned about opportunities for additional contests and got advice on planning workshops from Poco a poco and Antanana in Berlin. It is OK to leave the goals the way they are now, but if you do decide to do additional contests or make any substantial changes to your plans, please post the request for change here, and include updates goals. We are pleased to approve this grant request and look forward to updates on how the projects are going. Please note that the THB 60,232.42 left from PEG/UG TH/Wiki Loves X in Thailand 2015 should be applied to this project and will be deducted from the amount that we send to you for this grant. Cheers, --KHarold (WMF) (talk) 20:18, 18 May 2016 (UTC)