Grants talk:Project/Rapid/pperdiga/Youth in IG WikiContest

Comments from DSaroyan (WMF)

Hello pperdiga and Youth SIG Team, thanks for submitting this comprehensive grant proposal and congratulations on your first Wikimedia Foundation grant. We are excited about the opportunity to support you in organizing this WikiContest and appreciate the efforts put in this project. I reviewed the grant proposal and have a few questions and comments that I would like you to address:

• Do you have a list of articles about Internet governance for Wikipedia, Wiktionary, or Wikibooks which you plan to offer to new participants, so that it will be easier for them to start editing?
• Please consider using the Programs & Events Dashboard to track participants’ contributions. It also has a training library that might be interesting for you.
• In the proposal, you mentioned that you would engage experienced Wikimedians to support you and participants during the project. Could you please share their usernames? We need to make sure that you have experienced contributors who can guide and train the organizers and participants if requested.
• Please confirm that you won’t provide any cash prizes to the winners. We currently do not fund cash prizes for contests or other competition winners.
• Which video conference tool will you use and for how long will you purchase a subscription?

Looking forward to hearing from you. Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 10:41, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

[DSaroyan/WMF] Answer to questions

Hi DSaroyan,

Thanks for your response and sorry for the delayed answer, I'll explain the reasons below.

[Questions are in bold, answered with normal text inline]

Do you have a list of articles about Internet governance for Wikipedia, Wiktionary, or Wikibooks which you plan to offer to new participants so that it will be easier for them to start editing?

Yes.

1) From Wikipedia, we planned to expose the difference between the "Internet Governance Forum" page in English and in other languages, to show themes that need to be updated regularly and the disparity between languages, as a stimulus for translations. "Access Now" was identified as a model of an institutional page that can be complemented even in English, using "Internet Society" as a basic model and "Association for Progressive Communications" as a more complete model. We were also going to ask people to align their contributions with the Internet Society Work Plan for 2021 (https://www.internetsociety.org/action-plan/2021/), working or creating pages such as "Community network", "Internet Impact Assessment Toolkit", "Open Standards", "MANRS", etc.

2) From Wiktionary, we were going to ask participants to focus on basic Internet Governance concepts and acronym, such as "cryptography", "IXP", "grassroots" and "ICANN", to learn and check for others that are incomplete or do not exist.

3) From Wikibooks, we were going to ask participants to check out the English "Internet Governance" Wikibook for a basic example and try primarily to upload existing public domain or CC-licensed books into the platform or contribute with existing books that are under construction there, such as "Perspectives in Digital Culture"

Please consider using the Programs & Events Dashboard to track participants’ contributions. It also has a training library that might be interesting for you.

That'd be a much better idea than developing our own system at youthsig.org, we are surely going to adopt it. About the second suggestion, thanks for the suggestion, we were planning on using the training library (I believe you are referring to https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/training/students, right?) as learning material to participants, before the webinars - you were saying that we should do this, or suggesting that we should read it to learn how to use the Programs & Events Dashboard?

In the proposal, you mentioned that you would engage experienced Wikimedians to support you and participants during the project. Could you please share their usernames? We need to make sure that you have experienced contributors who can guide and train the organizers and participants if requested.

Hi, we asked for help and got confirmation from these Wikimedians: i) GiFontenelle; ii) VIGNERON; iii) Joananetoc. I also noticed that "DaSupremo" and "Robertjamal12", from Ghana, volunteered to help, but I have not yet contacted them. The reason I took some days to answer the questions posed is that the Wikimedian who speak Spanish natively and was going to be one of our judges said that new assignments came up and he couldn't help us anymore, so we are looking for someone to substitute him, and I'll update this info here as soon as we get a confirmation.

Please confirm that you won’t provide any cash prizes to the winners. We currently do not fund cash prizes for contests or other competition winners.

We confirm. Our main plan was to give Apple or Google gift cards as prizes, but, if that's not allowed as well, we can change for prizes that don't have their value directly linked to money.

Which video conference tool will you use and for how long will you purchase a subscription?

We were planning to buy a Zoom subscription for a year since its significantly cheaper than paying month by month, but I've been updated by other board members that Internet Society made available to us again a shared Zoom account (shared among Special Interest Chapters), so it won't be necessary anymore. Waiting for this response was the other reason why we took a while to answer. I'll update the resources needed in the original post to erase this resource if it's possible to do it at this phase of the proposal.

To maintain our proposal around the same value, we would also change the prizes to:

2. Resources to provide awards for winners, transferred through Paypal or Gift Cards to avoid bank wiring taxes that could consume most of the lower prizes - U$620,00:

2.1 - U$100,00 first-place general, one language, selected by all the judges among the winners of each language (x1);

2.2 - U$70,00 - second place in the winner’s language and first place for the three other languages (x4);

2.3 - U$40,00 - third place in the winner’s language and second place for the three other languages (x4);

2.4 - U$20,00 - fourth place in the winner’s language and third place for the other three languages (x4). — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Pperdiga (talk)

Hi Pperdiga, thanks for your detailed response.

About the second suggestion, thanks for the suggestion, we were planning on using the training library (I believe you are referring to https://dashboard.wikiedu.org/training/students, right?) as learning material to participants, before the webinars - you were saying that we should do this, or suggesting that we should read it to learn how to use the Programs & Events Dashboard?

I was referring to this page: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/training. You can use it to learn how to use the Program and Events Dashboard, as well as a training module for the participants. Feel free to adjust it to your needs.

Our main plan was to give Apple or Google gift cards as prizes, but, if that's not allowed as well, we can change for prizes that don't have their value directly linked to money.

It is permitted. You can offer Apple or Google gift cards to the contest winners.

Hi, we asked for help and got confirmation from these Wikimedians

I'm glad to hear that you will have experienced Wikimedians supporting the contest.

I'll update the resources needed in the original post to erase this resource if it's possible to do it at this phase of the proposal.

Yes, please update the detailed budget and requested amounts in the probox (right sidebar).

Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 10:43, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Proposed Changes (pperdiga)

We were making some tests with those that applied for the Contest, and one thing became very clear to us, so we would like to request an internal change to the project. Editing Wiktionary and Wikibooks is too hard for most participants, who are new to this environment. People were a bit more comfortable with Wikipedia, even though some communities were a bit rigid. Wikidata is the most newbie-friendly of the projects.

We tried a few ways to adapt and maintain the proposed platforms during these last days, but it seems like this idea would push newcomers away instead of making them engaged. Because of that, we would like to change the platforms involved: instead of Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikibooks, it would become Wikimedia and Wikidata. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Pperdiga (talk)

Hi Pperdiga, thanks for posting your request, it is now formally approved. You can now make the described changes. Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 11:30, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Another set of small changes

@DSaroyan: Hi, DSaroyan and Rapid Grants Staff,

The contest is done and we are finishing the judging phase. We were happy with the engagement from beginners in some languages, but two languages (FR and ES) had no participants that fulfilled all the eliminatory criteria, so there were no winners at all. However, there were 3 people that participated meaningfully but forgot to do some of the actions required (such as translating an entire article). Since we will be returning around half the grant value transferred to us (around U$260,00), I was thinking of using a small portion of it to give a "consolation prize" of U$10,00 to those that participated but were eliminated for not complying with all required conditions.

Is it possible? — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Pperdiga (talk)

Hi Pperdiga, thanks for posting your request, I approve it! Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 10:57, 15 June 2021 (UTC)