Grants talk:Project/Portalization of Wikipedia

Project Grant proposal submissions due today!

Thanks for drafting your proposal for a Project Grant. Proposals are due today! In order for this submission to be reviewed, it must be formally proposed. When you have completed filling out the infobox and have fully responded to the questions on your draft, please change status=DRAFT to status=PROPOSED to formally submit your grant proposal. This can be found in the Probox template found on your grant proposal page. If you have already done this, thanks for your submission, and you should be receiving feedback from the Project Grants committee in the coming weeks. Thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 18:16, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, round 1 2017

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 1 2017 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through 4 April 2017.

The committee's formal review for round 1 2017 begins on 5 April 2017, and grants will be announced 19 May. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 18:36, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Feedback on your proposal

Dear Dmitry Rozhkov and putnik,

Thank you for submitting this proposal. I am following up to ask you a few of questions about your project idea.

• Do you imagine the portals to be primarily designed for readers, focused on helping them more easily find and consume information about topics of interest to them? Or, do you imagine the portals to be primarily designed for editors, to help them more easily and track and improve articles about topics of interest to them?

• Depending on your answer to the above question, are you aware of any readers or volunteer editors that are asking for "portalization" of Wikipedia?
  • If so, please provide links to any conversations that address this topic.
  • Please also try to prompt anyone you know who is seeking portalization to come and review this proposal and comment on the talkpage about your project plan. Ask them to explain their need as specifically as they can, and to comment on how well your project would meet their needs. Ask them to identify any objections to your project plan.
  • I believe it is unlikely that the committee will move forward with this proposal without substantial evidence that portalization is a priority need. You will need to demonstrate this by soliciting comments on your proposal talkpage from anyone who values the product you are proposing to create, so that the committee can better understand the needs and better assess whether your project will meet them.

• If you project is selected for funding, how will you gather information and feedback from target users to make sure your product is well-designed to meet their needs?

• You note in your proposal that WikiProjects are unfriendly environments for people to engage in their interest areas. Can you say more about what you think is missing from WikiProjects? Are you aware of Harej's work on WikiProject X to improve the usefulness of WikiProjects? You can get an idea of how WikiProject X alters the Wikiproject user experience by viewing the Women in Red Wikiproject, which was created through WikiProject X, and is a very successful WikiProject. Harej is currently working on an extension called CollaborationKit that will further improve upon the WikiProject X interface and make it easier for any WikiProject to adopt. Since we've already funded Harej to do this work, I want to understand to what extent his work impacts your problem statement for this proposal. Perhaps portalization won't be as crucial in light of the CollaborationKit Harej is creating? Harej, I would likewise welcome your feedback on this proposal.

• Would your portals be designed for desktop or mobile use?

• Is it possible for you to provide a rough visual that demonstrates how you imagine a portal would look?

Finally, I want to recommend that you watch all of the tutorials we have created to support applicants in creating their proposal. Currently, your proposal has several sections that are either incomplete or are not sufficiently developed. In particular, I would recommend that you:

• Complete all sections of the proposal, using the tutorials provided in the link above.
• Make your project goals much more specific and measurable, using the related tutorial on creating goals.

Please let me know if you have any questions about my feedback. I recommend that you post answers to these questions well in advance of April 5, when the committee will begin scoring eligible proposals. Ideally, you should incorporate your answers into the proposal itself, and also call attention to the answers here on your talkpage.

Kind regards,

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 19:15, 27 March 2017 (UTC)

Some comments:

• Are the problems identified in the proposal specific to Russian Wikipedia, or all Wikipedia language versions?
• Are these editor-oriented portals, or reader-oriented portals? The requirements of either are very, very different. The main concern for reader-oriented portals is that I am not sure how they would be useful; people visiting Wikipedia tend to arrive from search results as they are interested in a specific subject rather than a general topic area. (As for editor-oriented portals, mw:Extension:CollaborationKit addresses this exact issue. This is not to say that the problem is completely solved; there are a lot of issues left unaddressed, and it would be interesting to see how CollaborationKit could be improved upon. I am also more than happy to help get it deployed to Russian Wikipedia.)
• "Users with different thematic interests are forced to collide with each other in the process of work too often." – isn't this inevitable when writing an encyclopedia? Even with subject-area portals, articles can fall under multiple topics. Serbian football players are relevant to both football and Serbia.
• You mention several other issues that are definitely issues, such as unfriendliness, but I am not sure how subject-area portals would fix them. This is not to say that portals should fix them – rather, it should be made clearer what problem this is intended to solve.
• How are activity-based portals, as opposed to topic-based portals, problematic? Or is the issue more that the latter does not exist in adequate numbers? Could a tool you develop be used for either type?
• Any plans to do research of your intended audience/customer base? It's fine to decide ahead of time what you want the general solution to look like, assuming you have adequate Wikipedia experience to have a general understanding of the problems affecting Wikipedia, but the specifics are very important, and research helps with that.

harej (talk) 01:54, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Round 1 2017 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.

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.

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Portalization of 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?	3.8
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	4.5
(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?	4.1
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	2.9
Additional comments from the Committee: No evidence presented for why the proposed change would constitute a positive impact on the Wikimedia projects, or why it is important in light of the Wikimedia movement's strategic priorities. I don't foresee a big impact. The online impact of the proposed gadget is unclear, as it is unclear how this "portalized" Wikipedia will look. It can even be negative. It might make Wikipedia better for a very small group of readers (still an impact but a low one). Not sure this really fits into our strategic priorities. No specific goals are presented; no metrics or measures of success are defined, and it is difficult to determine how the impact of the project might be evaluated. The approach is iterative--there have been many proposals to emphasize portals (at least in enwiki). However there are significant risks that the impact will be negative on users who enable the gadget. There are no clear measures of success. It is an innovative idea, the main risk is this idea being useless. Unfortunately it looks like this innovative idea, firstly, fails to solve a problem of low quality of portals, secondly, fails to find its target audience (there is nothing proving that this proposal will be useful for anyone). The proposal does not describe specific activities to be performed; consequently, there is no way to assess the realism of the budget or the qualifications of the participants. The ability of the applicants to execute the project is unclear as the amount of work is not well characterized. Participants seem to have necessary skills, but I am not sure this project really needs that high budget. There is little evidence of any attempt at community engagement, and no evidence of community support. The community involvement is very limited for a project with such a potential impact! Lack of community support, so not sure there is a critical mass of people who will need it. The proposal appears to be substantially unfinished and incomplete. A complete proposal needs to be submitted if funding is sought. Seems to want to avoid cross fertilization: "Users with different thematic interests are forced to collide with each other in the process of work too often." Lacking outreach. Lacking project definition. The project does not have a clear plan, well defined measures of success and, even if the gadget is created, its impacts are unclear and utility is questionable. I recommend rejection of this grant application. I do not think we should fund it: while it is an innovative idea, its potential impact is very low, and not sure it will find its target community. I am not ready to invest a rather high amount of money into something that is likely not to be used.