Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/CIPedia (ID: 22282891)

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hello Egezort, and thanks for this proposal to continue some of your prior work with the CIPedia project at Sabancı University. Unfortunately, we will not be able to move forward with funding the proposal at this time. While I think there are some important strengths to this proposal, such as the support and resources you are receiving from the university and that some aspects of the project have been piloted, I also have a number of concerns:

• In some of our previous discussions regarding this proposal, we had discussed that leadership at Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey is willing to provide constructive feedback on future proposals from you, and I had requested that you reach out to them to do so, in part because they have considerable experience with building and running educational programs.
• I have some capacity concerns about the overall ratio of students you are specifically supporting related to Wikimedia training. From your proposal, you are the only person named on your team with some Wikimedia experience that I can evaluate. One person supporting about 100 students across five separate groups is going to make it challenging to provide a lot of meaningful support around Wikimedia-related topics. While I understand there will be co-supervisors involved, it's not clear these individuals are focused on Wikimedia-related support for the students involved, or they may not be experienced enough to do so. This is important because when there is insufficient support for new or relatively new contributors, it can result in low quality contributions. In some cases, it can also cause complaints in the local community about those editors or the related projects they are participating in.
• The field work component of this project is somewhat underdeveloped, and therefore difficult to evaluate. While I think there are some good ideas and aspirations behind the field work aspect of this proposal, there are still a lot of unknowns in terms of things like whether experts will be available to support field work and what the substance of those programs might be.
• The proposal doesn't make it clear what general Wikimedia skills CIP students will be taught in the context of their training through CIP. Relatedly, the proposal to create video lessons should be much clearer about why there is need to produce videos and what content this will cover. Relatedly, the content should not overlap or duplicate training content already available in Turkish (e.g. Wikipedia 101 Education Set for Beginners/tr), and especially English, because there is a great deal of English-language training resources already available from other affiliates (see these materials from Art+Feminism, for example).

To address these needs, I am requesting the following if you would like to resubmit this proposal in the future:

• As we discussed, please proactively reach out to Wikimedia Community User Group Turkey leadership for feedback on the proposal, and as needed, revise the proposal based on suggestions or ideas they offer that you think will improve the proposed program. In your next proposal, please summarize the feedback you receive, and what changes you make (if any) based on that feedback. To be clear, this does not mean that you must make changes based on feedback you generally receive, but that you should be prepared to respond to constructive feedback to explain why a suggestions may not be helpful or improve the project in some way.
• Gather more organizers with adequate Wikimedia experience to support the number of students, or reduce the number of students you will actively support in the program so that it's more manageable based on the number of trainers with adequate Wikimedia experience available.
• Develop the field work aspects of the proposal further so you have some clearer expectations about what students may do (even if they elect not to do it, which is fine, given there are alternatives available.)
• Provide more clarity over the topics that will be included in training, and what specific topics you will create video lessons on, ensuring that video content for specific skills that you want to create isn't already available elsewhere.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 19 September 2023 (UTC)

Hello, thank you for your feedback, I want to respond to and also clarify some things in how I had approached each article you provided.

• I am open to talking to the people from the leadership of WMTR and am planning to do so in the future, however when I was applying for this project, I couldn't really find the opportunity to talk about the details of this project because I only reached them about some other subjects regarding community conduct. I am trying to seek new channels for healthy communication about my projects, which is something that I will need help with. I am open to talking to you about the best way to navigate through this.
• I am indeed the only person with Wikipedia experience running this project. However I want to clarify some things. 100 is the number of participants in the project and not the amount of students I'll be supervising. 50 of the intended participants would be one time participants from the CIP fair and from club events. As for the 50 students, my plan was to have 5 different groups with around 10 people each. Each group would have 5 one and a half hour lessons (and 5 field work lessons) in which I would be able to help each of them individually. I also plan on starting with small contributions and moving on to bigger ones later with solid foundations as not to create a lot of unproductive edits. I also have the extra time to provide one on one help to each student in need of help outside of lesson hours.
• My co-supervisors are to be responsible both the laywork of the projects (keeping track of attendance, helping with basic things, documenting some things from the meetings etc.) and also to be trained in order to be able to supervise a Wikipedia project in the next years. I also think that they may do one of the presentations but that would be optional and I would expect them to have studied their material well in case they opted in.
• The field work part is indeed very unclear at this point. I can come up with more solid activities for my next application.
• The specific skills that I plan on teaching are indeed not clear in the proposal. I was planning to come up with them while preparing the slides in accordance with what I wanted to focus a given lesson on. I am planning to make that part more clear for my next application. (Perhaps I can create the slides before I re-submit this application)
• I may have been unclear about how I would make the video lessons. My plan was to record the first half hour (presentation part) of each lesson and to upload them on Youtube with a CC license. This does cover some of the areas of the Wikipedia101 project, but is very different as medium. The English videos would be the presentations using the translated version of the Turkish slides, but with me doing the lesson with international students. So the plan doesn't involve a separate effort to create videos, but instead delivering the presentations in the lessons in a video-like form. This is both as a resource for the next generation of supervisors and also as a video series that Wikipedians can watch.

As for what I plan to do, here's how I can summarise the situation:

I had put school on hold due to some technical reasons about my scholarship, and therefore have a lot of time for this project in this term. Since that probably won't be the case next term, I have this formula in mind:

• I still intend on doing the project but with 8 lessons and probably 2 in-campus fieldwork activities instead of 5 lessons and 5 fieldwork days. I still intend to do it with 5 groups of 10, which I believe is not too many people, but I'm open to hearing a different opinion on this.
• I won't do the club events, and for the CIP-fair, I will plan something more modest. I also won't get logo/poster etc. designs done in this term.
• For the increased number of lessons, I plan to incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN in the project, which is something the CIP project sometimes focuses on (and something I recently realised Wikipedia has a user group on).
• I plan to still record the lessons and upload the slides and the presentations on Youtube. Since I will be doing the project without a budget, I don't know if the overlap possibility is still an issue, but as I said, since it's a different structure than the Wikipedia101 lesson series, I don't think there will be a problem on that front (even in cases they overlap in subject).

For the next time I apply, many more things will be clear regarding course content, I also will have created a sizeable amount of supervisors to work with. I will only have time to supervise for one project in my next term, but I think that CIP will still be able to do 4-5 projects with the new pool of supervisors. I don't know yet how I will have to change the structure of my budget. I will also need your advice on how I can document this process as meaningfully as I can, which we can talk about in the office hour I have reserved.

Note: Nothing I said here is for certain, but just my general idea about what I want to do right now.

Please let me know what you think. Egezort (talk) 01:08, 20 September 2023 (UTC)