Grants talk:Project/Photos of Telugu Villages into Telugu Wikipedia

Change status to 'proposed' to submit for 8/2/16 Project Grants deadline

Dear Bhaskaranaidu and Nrgullapalli,

Please note that if you intend to submit this proposal for the August 2 deadline of the current round of Project Grants, you must change the status from draft to proposed. If you have any questions, our final proposal clinic is from 1600-1700 UTC on August 2.

Cheers,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 05:18, 2 August 2016 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, round 1 2016

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 1 2016 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during this community comments period.

The committee's formal review for round 1 2016 begins on 24 August 2016, and grants will be announced in October. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 18:01, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

Questions by Joalpe

Hi, Bhaskaranaidu and Nrgullapalli, thank you for submitting a proposal. I am a member of the evaluation committee, and I have a couple questions to have a better assessment of your proposal:

1. You mention on the section on community engagement --though I think this piece of information should be part of the measure of success-- the goal of improving 450 village articles on Telugu Wikipedia. What is the measure of quality you are intending to reach?
2. Do you think it would be able to use this data research and pictures you expect to collect on other projects, especially as en.wikipedia?
3. Could you please clarify what you meant by "Focused editathon involving content gathered quarterly once"?

In general, I think this proposal is somehow confusing to read, because measures of success are not clearly organized and stated. --Joalpe (talk) 01:06, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

• Thank you for your interest in this project. Here are my clarifications for your questions:

1. Measure of quality can be adding images which doesn't have photos and improving stub class articles to at least start class.
2. Yes. These photos can be used in remaining projects.
3. We plan to conduct edit-a-thons to interested Telugu Wikipedians in order to improve articles by adding photos, content & reference. This edit-a-thon will be focused on those villages which we gather photos & information.

Please ask me if there is anything else. --Nrgullapalli (talk) 12:11, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Questions from Superzerocool

Hi, thanks for your proposal. Here is some questions:

• What do you think about the Wikimedia Spain project "No Spanish municipality without a photo"?. I see a lot of concordance between both projects.
• You will ask for booklets and local information about villages. Who will write about them?, because it is a printed material and it will not be available online to be used for Wikipedians and you will be very busy traveling around the country (a travel every week).

Regards Superzerocool (talk) 12:41, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your interest and my responses are:

1. No Spanish municipality without a photo seems like very good project and thanks for informing us about such project. And we also share similar motto and I will explore it more to learn from their experience.
2. Book lets and local information will be in printed form and we plan to share these with remaining volunteers in focused edit-a-thons we proposed to organise. Participants apart from adding photos into village articles will also improve information in those villages using these booklets & books as sources. Those who started using them as reference can take them away to continue their editing. This is our idea on working with them.

Please write if there is anything else. --Nrgullapalli (talk) 12:26, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Comments from NickK

Hi @Bhaskaranaidu: and @Nrgullapalli: and thank you very much for your proposal, it is great that you are planning to improve articles about Telugu villages.

Your project seems to be similar to Wikiexpedition project done in multiple countries, and I would like to share several learnings based on the experience of this project.

• It would be great to do some research before travelling and try to involve local people. For instance, you can ask local government officials, teachers of local schools or any other relevant people (e.g. historians) to guide you. These people can both give you materials about the village and guide you through important places of the village. In addition, you may convince some of them to become Wikipedians (do not expect too much, even 1-2% will be a great result).
• Please try to involve other users to improving articles on Wikipedia. It might be difficult for you to improve articles about multiple villages weekly, so please try to share materials with other users. Perhaps after first week or two you will find the best way of doing this.
• You added edit-a-thons but you did not budget any costs for them. Does this mean you will submit a separate grant request for them or you do not expect to pay anything (i.e. you already have a place to organise them).

To sum up, this sounds like a very interesting idea that I definitely support. Please do not hesitate to contact me if anything is not clear — NickK (talk) 16:17, 26 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi NicKK, Thanks for your suggestions and we find them quite interesting & realistic. To involve local people in planning the trip is really very good suggestion and along with remaining local govt. officials we plan to involve some local historians who are going for similar expeditions to get historical data. For your next suggestion on involving wikipedians - we already planned to conduct some edit-a-thons where gathered data & photos will be shared and remaining wikipedians who are interested will also take part in improving articles. We think edit-a-thons can be conducted in a place where our community is using for gatherings, meet-ups, etc., So, we didn't added it into budget. Please write if there is anything else. --Nrgullapalli (talk) 12:44, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

@Nrgullapalli: Thank you for your answers. Great to know that your community already has a fixed place for gatherings and meetups: it will be obviously easier to organise edit-a-thons there if you can. Good luck with your project! — NickK (talk) 17:09, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Comments from Ruslik0

I want to congratulate on writing a good proposal. As compared to many others you at least have well defined problem, solution and goals. However I still have some comments:

• You say "Making census data from census website readily addable to village articles". What kind of census data do you mean? Are there are the same data that are mentioned in your goals: "Collect geographic data of villages through GPS enabled pictures"? Please, clarify.
• If you want to educate people about Wikipedia, you should probably think about creating some printed material that you can hand out during your trips, possibly, in exchange for the material that you are planning to collect from locals. This should be included in the budget.
• One of your activities is "Collecting newspaper references and book references for information on villages and making it available for Wikipedians to work on village articles" This does not seem to be connected with the trips. How and where are you going to collect such information?
• How many people will take part in the trips?
• Are you going to publish a report after the project is completed?

Ruslik (talk) 13:23, 27 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi rislik...

Thanks for your suggestions/comments. Here are the answers point wise.

• 1. The census Date means the census Data published by Government of India that including population of the village, males, females, and no. of houses .... Regarding GPS enabled pictures/ Our gadget does not contain the GPS
• 2.To educate people about Wikipedia The CISK2 proposed to supply us booklet/handout to use in the trips. Wherever possible we will collect the information from the locals. If the book lets/brouchers not supplied then we will think to prepare such printed material to be used in the trips and that will be included in the Budget.
• 3.collecting newspaper references and book references does not concerned with the trips. However we proposed to collect such information from libraries etc.
• 4. It is proposed to participate at least four people during the trips.
• 5. On completion of the project will will publish a report.

Bhaskaranaidu (talk) 17:24, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

I think you should put these clarifications into the text of the proposal. Ruslik (talk) 17:03, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

Comments from Flixtey

Hi @Bhaskaranaidu: and @Nrgullapalli:, I will wish for you to share a few things that might be useful to your grant.

• You stated under the community engagement section "Around 450 village articles on Telugu Wikipedia to be improved involving community" and said something different under measures of success"Improve at least 25000 village articles on Telugu Wikipedia village articles with census data" can you please explain?
• You stated that you will be doing 4 trips a month but its not clear how many villages you intend to visit on each trip or even at the end of the entire project. This will help create a correlation between the number of places and the total number of pictures expected.
• How many people are going to go on the trips, because you can't be the only one taking photos, seeking information and gathering data in the form of newspapers, brochures, etc.
• Can you find a way to merge your measures and success with you community engagement as these are mostly identical? You may leave activities that interact with the community or items that reflect the communities role in the project.

Thanks for your project --Flixtey (talk) 15:42, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi Flixtery ....

• we proposed to involve our co-Wikipedians to improve the village articles duly giving the information gathered during trips alongwith photos. If possible we will involve the new wikipedians for this purpose.
• The no. of villages to be covered during a trip can not be assumed now. It will depend upon the distance of the villages and size of the village etc. However we presumed to cover arount 20 villages during a trip covering 150 photos with relevant information.
• We proposed to participate at least four persons during the trips.
• We hope the community will appreciate our activity of our project.

Bhaskaranaidu (talk) 17:41, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

photo experience

Hello! I like you project but want to clarify several points:

• what equipment will you use during your photo-trip?
• the quality of images will be similar to commons:Special:ListFiles/Bhaskaranaidu? I do suggest moving a couple of images for discussion on Commons to get advises about exposition, light, etc. to get images really perfect :)
• I do suggest some kind of insurance in case expensive equipment will be used rubin16 (talk) 16:56, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi Rubin16 .....

Thanks for your suggestion....

• We are using a Kodak still camera and Sony still camera during our trips.
• The quality of the pictures will be similar to that of ours already uploaded in commons. We will be very glad for your advises about expositions etc.,if any.
• We hope insurance may not be necessary at this juncture.

Bhaskaranaidu (talk) 17:47, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

WMF comments

Hi Bhaskaranaidu and Nrgullapalli. Thank you for this proposal and I apologize that we have not been able to connect on Skype. The committee was supportive of this grant request as it is a good idea to get broad coverage of Telugu villages and engage the community in integrating photos. We know the Telugu language community is very active and would like to support your initiatives. However, we do have a number of questions about the project and would like to get your feedback before the committee has its final deliberations on September 25th.

1. How have you received feedback on this project from the community? Is there demonstrated interest that editors are excited about integrating the photos and improving articles about villages?
2. The proposal says up to 4 people per trip. Who else will join these trips? It seems that one of the two project leads has experience on Commons. Do you expect to have participants with more photography/Commons experience? After looking at the contribution records we are concerned about the level of quality of the photographs. Many of the current village photos seem to have been taken out of a moving car, lack encyclopedic points of interests or useful descriptions. Before moving forward with this request, we want to be sure there are more experienced photographers who have committed to participating.
3. Please clarify the measures of success since there are conflicting numbers in different parts of the proposal and on the talk page. How many villages do you expect to be covered? How many photos per village?
4. One of the goals is to educate people about Wikipedia and “make new Wikipedians”. It would be great to do general awareness building about Wikipedia when traveling to the villages, but in terms of teaching editing skills it is very difficult to get anyone trained with a one-off session.
5. The committee had a lot of concern about paid content creation. If the project were just about going to villages to take photos, it could be perceived this way. For us, the important component of the proposal is community engagement through activities to integrate the content, such as offline events (editathons) or an online contest. The proposal says you will organize one editathon per quarter. Can you please provide more details about this? Will you need funds to hold these events? It may be useful to hold an online contest for photo integration to motivate people to use the content.
6. If the goal is to cover as many Telugu villages as possible, another strategy you could consider is one similar to Wikimedia Czech Republic's Mediagrant. They have a list of all the villages without Wikipedia articles or photos and community members go out on their own or in groups to cover them. They then ask for reimbursement for their expenses through an easy reimbursement system. This spreads the work out and engages more people. It has been very succesful both in terms of community engagement and content coverage. You can read more about it in their recent report as well as these blog posts: the mediagrant program and evaluating mediagrant. If you are interested in this approach, I would be happy to share more.

Please let us know if you have questions about the above. We are looking forward to your responses. Best, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 16:49, 21 September 2016 (UTC)

hi Alex Wang (WMF) Thanks for your feed back. you can find our response, point wise here under.

1. The telugu wiki pedia community is very much interested on this project and encouraged us in many ways through village pump page, through phone and in our talk pages etc.https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grants:Project/Photos_of_Telugu_Villages_into_Telugu_Wikipedia&action=edit&section=14
2. The group in the tour would be 4 to 5 persons. The other 3 persons would be from the wiki community the interested persons would join us. All the wikipedians are familiar to take photos and to upload them into commons. Now-a-days taking photos is not an expertise job/profession., any body can take photo. The photos you observed taken from a moving car is not actually taken from moving car. The photos taken from a moving vehicle will not be clear and no use. The photos you observed are taken from the car after going to nearby the sight. Some times we need not get down the vehicle, locate an angle, to take the photo is not necessary. Simply taking the photo from the vehicle itself is more enough and clear. As we are using an ordinary still camera, we believe that, not expert and professional in photography is required. Now a days every body is enough knowledge to take photo. Generally most photos of villages are not encyclopedic in nature. The are only informative. Only a few may have such nature, such things has to be taken more care.
3. Fixing target to cover number of villages before a trip may not be possible. Because This will depend upon the distance from one village to another and size of the village. We experienced previously that we could cover one village in 20 minutes and another village it took one hour. If the village is familiar the work is easy... and it is a new to us and big in size, it would take much time. How ever we believe to cover 10 to 15 villages during a trip and to take more than 100 photos.
4. Educating people about Wikipedia and make new wikipedians is not a goal of the project. It is only a side job. However we going to the village, taking advantage of the trip we proposed to give the broachers/ handouts(CIS-A2K) promised to give the brouchers etc) to the student(mainly) and highlight about about wikipedia in a few words, and ask them to contact us for further details on phone.
5. The aim of the project is not simply going around the village taking photos. We have to gather some other information with proofs about the important places of the village historical importance etc., Taking photo of site is simple and it will be finished in a second or two. But gathering information about the site takes much time. After taking photos much home work is left over. Choose the correct photo from the photos taken, edit them, writing caption to the photo and upload the photo to the commons is time consuming job. After that, down load the photo from commons, and upload the photo to the appropriate village essay at appropriate place, and writing details of the photo, is another time consuming work. However the community members are ready to take up this work as wikipedians. Regarding editathon,.... editathon is much time consuming process. During the tour it may not be possible. But if any big village with suitable infrastructure is found therein, one particular day has to be kept for that purpose and go there separately for that purpose only. For that purose seperate budget has to prepared.(This will be submittee seperaately at appropriate time) In that editathon we can create full awareness about wikipedia learn them how to create essays, edit etc, and to create new wikipedians.

Regarding online photo contest, it is to inform that telugu wikipedia previously announced village photo contest with prizes expectating much more photos would add to village essays, was utterly failed. No one came forward no single photo was uploaded. As many more village essays are lack of photos, the present project is proposed.

6.unlike Czech Republic wikipedia, Telugu wikipedia has every village essays in the wikipedia, they are more than 30,000 in number. But most of the village essays are limited to their names only, and no other information and no photos. Hence the present project proosal. The plan of Czech Republic wikipedia may not be suitable in telugu wikipedia. As already said, though even prizes are announced to those who upload village photos, no body came forward. As such the scheme of Czech Republic wikipedia taking photos of the villages at their own, duly incurring expenditure and reimburse later on will not work here. Further, this involve much expenditure, and no body will come forward to spend that huge amount from his pocket, and wait for a long time for the reimburse at a later date.

Hope this will suffice. Thanks Bhaskaranaidu (talk) 16:00, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Photos of Telugu Villages into Telugu Wikipedia

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	6.9
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	6.8
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	7.4
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	6.7
Additional comments from the Committee: Both photography expeditions and edit-a-thons are established models for achieving offline and online impact within the Wikimedia movement. While they are relatively labor-intensive and consequently do not lend themselves to rapid growth in impact or scale, they are an effective mechanism for producing moderate impact on breadth and quality of content. Taking photos, collecting information about the villages, and putting them into the Wikipedias (and on Commons) is a goal that nicely fits within the Wikimedia’s strategic priorities. The online impact is obvious. I like what the grants seeks to achieve however i think a little restructuring will help the grantee do better with this grant. Even though the grant seeks to do a couple of things, i think its main goal is to get pictures of the places mentioned and to use these pictures to improve the articles. The grantee streamline their measures of success along such actions, like, having in mind the minimum number of places to visit per trip, how many pictures they expect from each trip, etc. Realistic measures of success and clear targets for evaluating impact. It takes care of a big gap that would take several years to fill. The online impact is considerable. These expeditions will have an impact on Telugu Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, and we are not likely to get photos of these villages in any other way. I hope this project will also inspire other Indian communities as it is rather easy to replicate. The proposal aims at improving the quality of a relatively small community, thus signaling the fostering of a diverse community, at least from a global standpoint. The improvement of content, especially images, on Telugu villages could be reproduced on other communities. The only concern is that the proposal is overall ill-defined, as stated by many reviewers on the proposal's talk page. The project is aligned with Wikimedia’s priorities, but cannot be scaled or made sustainable as currently designed. Similar projects are organized very successfully in many countries. However, it would have been helpful to have more background information on Telugu villages, the grantee, and their relevant skills. The project is straightforward to implement, and the risk in funding and executing it is minimal. This project may be easy to measure only if the right estimations are done. I would advise the team to do more research on the potential villages before traveling to be well prepared. The success of this project depends on a community of editors that will contribute to keeping this initiative active. It is not clear how this community of editors would actually be built. Very good idea to organise edit-a-thons to improve articles not only with pictures but also with text. It would be helpful to have more budget details as the project could be considered as paid content creation. * The project borders on paid editing by one individual. It may be optimistic to expect to do one trip per week and have so much volunteer engagement regarding writing articles. The proposed scope and budget are reasonable, and represent an efficient, low-cost investment given the potential return. The project does not require a significant degree of specialized skills or experience for successful execution, and the individuals involved appear to be sufficiently experienced to execute it successfully. The project can be accomplished within 12 month. Its budget is realistic and both grantees are experienced and respected members of the Wikimedia community. The grantees are experienced Wikimedians. I would recommend they continue to work on improving their photography skills. I would suggest continuing to work on measures of success related to fostering a community of editors. The proposed effort will directly address diversity with regard to coverage of Indian topics and Indian-language projects, which are both historically under-represented and a growing area of future impact for the Wikimedia movement. There appears to be a reasonable degree of community engagement for a project of this size and scope. The focus is the Telugu community, but it has had little support from this small community. The proposal could be expanded to also integrate good-quality images entries on English Wikipedia, that could lead to more visibility of outcomes. I’d like to know more about how they will recruit 20 new editors. I’d hope to see more engagement of community instead of being a project led and implemented by one individual. Suggested metrics: how many places to be visited per trip, how many pictures expected as a minimum per each trip. The total number of pictures for the entire campaign based on the suggested measures. A minimum number of articles expected to benefit from the pictures. Given the massive number of articles related to villages on Wikimedia, it is important to collect more data and photos to improve these articles. I'd suggest that the grantee also run a parallel online campaign to invite users to upload images of villages and identify the most engaged participants of the campaign as volunteers for the project. In doing so, there will be more helping hands and more impact. The online campaign will also reflect the level of interest within the community in this project. Please remember to share your findings as a blog post so that leaders from other Indic communities can execute similar projects by iterating yours. This is a good idea, that could improve the quality of the Telugu Wikipedia and others. Yet, grant applicant should answer questions on Talk Page and incorporate issues and clarifications that are mentioned on the talk page onto the proposal page. A photo contests may result in more photos with a smaller budget.

This proposal has been recommended for due diligence review.

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal and recommended it for due diligence review. This means that a majority of the committee reviewers favorably assessed this proposal and have requested further investigation by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

Next steps:

1. Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page.
2. Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on Thursday, May 27, 2021.

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

Bhaskaranaidu and Nrgullapalli, the due diligence process is well underway now (I'm getting these comments posted late). You are still welcome to record any response you have to committee comments on your talkpage to make your feedback publicly accessible, but I think we have already gathered the information we needed for the committee during our recent communication with you. Best regards, Marti (WMF) (talk) 18:53, 2 October 2016 (UTC)

Round 1 2016 decision

This project has not been selected for a Project Grant at this time.

We love that you took the chance to creatively improve the Wikimedia movement. The committee has reviewed this proposal and not recommended it for funding. This was a very competitive round with many good ideas, not all of which could be funded in spite of many merits. We appreciate your participation, and we hope you'll continue to stay engaged in the Wikimedia context.

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee recognized the value of documenting Telugu Villages and filling this gap on Commons and Wikipedia. They also appreciated the additional details provided on the talk page. Nevertheless, they were concerned about the level of community engagement and quality of photographs. They suggested the applicants apply for a pilot under the Rapid Grants program, identify more experienced Commons photographers who can join the project team, and develop a more robust community engagement plan. They also were supportive of the idea of a photo contest based off of best practices from around India. Staff will be in touch shortly to provide more detailed feedback about potential future opportunities.

Next steps: Applicants whose proposals are declined are welcome to consider resubmitting your application again in the future. You are welcome to request a consultation with staff to review any concerns with your proposal that contributed to a decline decision, and help you determine whether resubmission makes sense for your proposal.

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We are also currently seeking candidates to serve on regional grants committees and we'd appreciate it if you could help us spread the word to strong candidates--you can find out more here. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.