Grants talk:Project/Wikidata post-election updating toolkit

Project Grant proposal submissions due 30 November!

Thanks for drafting your Project Grant proposal. As a reminder, proposals are due on November 30th by the end of the day in your local time. In order for this submission to be reviewed for eligibility, 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. Importantly, proposals that are submitted after the deadline will not be eligible for review during this round. If you're having any difficulty or encounter any unexpected issues when changing the proposal status, please feel free to e-mail me at cschillingwikimedia.org or contact me on my talk page. Thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 23:17, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, round 2 2018

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 2 2018 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through January 2, 2019.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for round 2 2018 will occur January 3-January 28, 2019. Grantees will be announced March 1, 2018. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

--I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 16:45, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Questions about How To guidance

An interesting proposal, but it would be useful to provide us with a little extra detail on the tools and guidance you hope to create. You seem to be dividing the problem into two halves:

1. how can editors discover missing data? (solved by developing tools)
2. how can editors fill in missing data? (solved by writing documentation)

You include both in a single line of your proposed budget, but they seem quite different things. Would you be able to split these out into separate entries, with an indication of how much time you think would be spent on each?

Thanks for your questions. As seen with the verification-pages tool, some of the filling in of missing data can be more easily accomplished using tools, and some of the task of finding missing data could be made easier with better documentation, so I suspect it won’t be quite so clear a match up between the parts of the problem and the solutions. I’ve split out the documentation and tool development tasks into separate lines with indicative timings. Louisecrow (talk) 18:16, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

In your previous grant, Documentation was originally listed as the #1 outcome of the project. According to your final report you weren't able to achieve that within the grant period (though you asked for an extension several times, from 4 months to 12 months). You then said you would spend the next few months (since July 2017) completeing it. But from your comments on the report, it seems that has still not been enough time, and the project page for Scenario-based documentation relating to political data in Wikidata still only contains two entries, one of which was written before your grant), even though you said you would create one new entry per week. What made documentation so difficult in your previous grant, and what will be different this time?

I think there were two main issues - firstly we focused on tool building to the detriment of documentation. Secondly, we created documentation outside of Wikidata initially, partly due to concerns about the right point at which to share new tools and approaches and associated documentation with the wider community. We’re trying to get the right balance between developing the tooling to the point where it’s error-free enough for wider release, and getting something useful out into the wider community for early use and feedback - we had some partners working with the verification-pages tool relatively early in its development, for example, so we shared documentation with them specifically. We’re now going to share that on-wiki.

We recognise engagement with the community and specifically documentation and communication around what we’re working on as two areas that we want to improve on in this grant. We’ll focus on working in public and on-wiki, beginning the project with a block of work on the ‘How to’ guide, documenting existing tools and approaches to updating data after an election before we do any tool development. After that, we’ll continue to ringfence time for documenting throughout the project timeline. Louisecrow (talk) 18:16, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

@Louisecrow: you seem to be talking here primarily about documenting tools that you have created. But my question was actually about the general documentation you originally set out as the #1 primary approach of your solution in the first project. You said:

our efforts would primarily address how to enter political data based on particular use cases. For example, we would help provide documentation on Wikidata around common scenarios which would help people to understand the interrelations between data ... We will document common use cases such as “What do I need to update when a head of government changes?”, "How do I add historic cabinet positions?", or "How should I enter an election that is both for the president and the legislature?". We will iterate and add to the documentation, learning from common mistakes made by editors when adding the data. We expect to create approximately one significant new piece of use-case-driven documentation per week. This documentation will live on Wikidata where it can be actively maintained beyond the life of this project.

Your original goal (and the subsequent discussion of it) was always about a very different thing from simply documenting your own work or new tools that you have built. Creating use-case driven documentation on how non-expert editors could add political data was your number one listed solution to the problems you identified of missing and inconsistently-entered data. Your final report for that project claimed that although you had had problems creating that documentation, you still planned to complete the work post-grant. Your grant finished July 2018. Not only have you still not produced any of the use-case driven documentation, you now claim the lack of it is a problem that could be solved by giving you a second grant. Even if you have abandoned your original promise to do this work as part of your first grant, do you not think it would be helpful to create at least a few examples, so everyone can see whether you are actually capable of creating useful how-to guides, when evaluating whether you should be funded again to do a type of work you have only so far shown great difficulty with? --NF Ford (talk) 07:47, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

You list quite a few different people involved with your project. Which of them would be writing the "how to" guide? Can you provide a link to other Wikidata documentation they have written? --NF Ford (talk) 09:23, 22 December 2018 (UTC) [and updated 24 December]

I think we’d want to make use of multiple skill sets within our core team - user research, information architecture, people with more and less experience editing Wikidata and using the associated tools and queries. For that reason, we’ll take a multi-disciplinary approach, with several team members working together - likely to be Chris, Nick, Zarino and Emily. Louisecrow (talk) 18:16, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

@Louisecrow: And my second question here? "Can you provide a link to other Wikidata documentation they have written?" --NF Ford (talk) 07:50, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

• In the initial grant request, you mention some legal restrictions limiting your approach. For which countries did this pose to be an issue? How does the guidance given to users address this? Are there any countries you consider having worked on being limited by this? Jura1 (talk) 07:45, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

As described in our original grant proposal, the tools we’ve built in our work on Wikidata are tools which facilitate human editing, rather than bulk uploading. There were several reasons for taking this approach, one of them being the legal question of database rights. Louisecrow (talk) 18:16, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Question about Goals

Your primary goal is for "data on political position holders in at least three legislatures to be substantially correct and complete [in Wikidata] within a month of an election". Your grant would be for a 12 month period, and during that time there would probably be parliamentary elections in about 50 countries. In how many of those do you think the information on successfull candidates would get entered in Wikidata should your project actually not get funded?

Your second goal takes things beyond Wikidata into the number of pages about the data "created or improved across all Wikimedia projects". Can you describe the existing baseline here? How quickly after elections do different Wikipedias currently get updated with results? --NF Ford (talk) 07:50, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

These are good questions, but not ones that I think we know the answer to at the moment. We’ve allocated some time at the start of the project to confirm in detail how we’ll implement evaluation - a valuable part of that will be getting some baseline metrics for what the likelihood of data in a given legislature being updated in a relatively complete and systematic way is at the moment and where any update activity is likely to take place - e.g. Wikipedia vs Wikidata. Louisecrow (talk) 18:17, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

@Louisecrow: I would have thought that identifiying the scale of the existing problem should be done in advance of a grant request, to show the value in funding you to address it, rather than seeking funds, only to discover that the problem is very different, or perhaps doesn't even exist. But, if you don't have answers to these questions, where do your targets come from?

The targets also seem very low to me. With your previous grant you aimed to get complete data for 30-40 countries, which would then continue to grow to 70-80 countries in the following months. If you had been completely unsuccessful I would be able to understand you saying "That was much too optimistic, so we should scale back for a second grant". But that wasn't what happened. You say you have already brought many new groups to Wikidata, and individual contributors have already been contributing legislative data in at least 60 countries, and you have confidence that the growth will continue, especially after discovering that it only requires a single person to upkeep the data for a country. With such momentum already in place, do you not think that suitable data would be created by the existing Wikidata political data community anyway in at least three countries with national elections in the next year? --NF Ford (talk) 08:32, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

I thought it would be interesting to do a quick survey of the Wikipedia pages relating to each national election held in 2018. (Disclaimer: I am not involved with this project, though I was with the previous mySociety grant.) Starting from the list at the 2018 national electoral calendar, I looked primarily at the local-language versions of the page for each election, to see whether I could easily find a complete list of the winning candidates by (a) one week after the election; (b) one month after the election; or (c) three months after the election. (A better version of this would have based this on the dates the lists of elected representatives were announced, rather than the dates of the elections themselves, as in some countries there can be quite a large gap between those two, but that information wasn't as easily to hand, and I didn't really want to spend more than an hour on this).

• In almost all cases, the overall results of elections (in terms of seats by party, vote share etc) are available on Wikipedias extremely quickly (usually within a day).
• For the following elections, the full list of individuals elected was available in at least one Wikipedia within a week (in many cases within a day): Costa Rica, Colombia, Bhutan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Slovenia, Turkey, Pakistan, Sweden, Czech Republic, Latvia, Luxembourg, United States, Fiji, Bahrain
• For the following elections, the list of individuals elected took more than a week, but less than a month: Monaco, Italy, Hungary, Mexico, Cambodia, Zimbabwe
• For the following elections, the list of individuals elected seems to have taken between one and three months: El Salvador, Brazil
• I could not immediately find a complete list of winners on-wiki for the following elections: French Polynesia, Paraguay, Greenland, East Timor, Iraq, Barbados, Mauritania, Rwanda, Swaziland, Gabon, Bosnia and Herzegovina, São Tomé and Príncipe, Afghanistan. (This doesn't mean they don't exist: I could easily have overlooked a link, or not chosen the correct Wikipedia to look on. If anyone else can find these, please do add relevant links!)

--Oravrattas (talk) 18:37, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

Question about Community Support

One of your main goals is to grow and strengthen the Wikimedia communities interested in election data. You had a similar goal in your previous grant, but in the final report you say that you actually didn't end up working with the Wikidata community very much, and "with hindsight ... would liked to have been more active in providing direct community support early on". But you then say that things substantially improved at the end of the project, when two new people (Georgie Burr and Kelly Doyle) joined. I can't see very much detail about how things actually played out though. Could you talk a bit about the things you achieved because of their work, any useful learnings, and how you believe everything could work better with a second grant? I don't see either Georgie or Kelly listed in your new proposal. Who is to be working specifically with the Wikimedia communities this time? Do they have experience of working within the relevant Wikidata or Wikipedia communities? --NF Ford (talk) 08:21, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

In terms of what’s been achieved with a partner community manager and Wikimedian in Residence, we’ve had some really positive results from introducing civic tech groups to political data in Wikidata, and having them contribute to the data for their regions - for example OpenUp in South Africa and Code for Pakistan in Pakistan. We’ve also developed our relationship with Wikimedia UK - we’re planning to collaborate with them on developing some ‘How to’ screencasts on editing political data in Wikidata. We’ve made positive contacts with several other Wikimedia chapters, including Wikimedia Argentina, who will be focusing on politics in 2019 - they’re planning an editathon in May and interested in using the verification tool. We also facilitated a session at MozFest around political engagement through Wikidata and supported editathons.

In terms of lessons learned - we’ve found that community development takes time and requires consistent attention. We’ve learned about the importance of attendance at meetups and conferences, and in-person contact in general - we’ve planned for that explicitly in this proposal. Unfortunately, we have not been able to employ Kelly or Georgie on a permanent basis. However, we’ve also learned that community engagement can’t just be left to one or two community engagement staff members - it has to also be the people working on tools and data and documentation. We’ve built up and are continuing to develop experience across the team in working within Wikimedia communities. Louisecrow (talk) 18:22, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Maybe you could add those lessons to your final report and turn them into a Learning Pattern or two? In terms of the specific 'civic tech' groups like OpenUp and Code For Pakistan, you said in your final report that "The most important thing we achieved was to encourage more of our peers within the ‘Civic Tech’ and political transparency communities to actively become members of the Wikidata community". Can you provide a list of all the groups you are including in this (with links to the Wikidata user accounts for them)? Do any of these groups come from countries where there will be elections next year, and if so, will they enter the results even if your new grant request is not accepted? What would prevent them doing so? --NF Ford (talk) 07:53, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Question about the use of Wikidata as MySociety's primary database

How does this work out? Is this generally desirable? How compatible is MySociety's use with data in the preexisting formats? --Jura1 (talk) 09:50, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

I think the ability to demonstrate the value of Wikidata as a global source of consistent and complete political position holder data by driving tools and analysis from it is valuable. We’re planning to transition EveryPolitician.org to be driven, where possible, by Wikidata as such an example. Can you explain a bit more about what you mean when you say ‘the preexisting formats’? Louisecrow (talk) 18:22, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

@Louisecrow: Your original proposal for the EveryPolitician grant listed four stages of activities. One of those was "Once data is sufficiently complete in each country we will switch EveryPolitician.org to be a Wikidata-driven front-end to it". I cannot find any reference to this goal or how you did against it in your final report. If you are now saying that this is something you're still planning to do, does this mean that this was another goal from the original grant that you were unable to do? If so, can you explain a little more why this was difficult, and why your final report appears to be silent on two of the four main activities for which you received a grant? --NF Ford (talk) 08:07, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

"preexisting format" would be any content already present at Wikidata, but not consistent with data uploaded by MySociety staff. Jura1 (talk) 09:40, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Question about content generated by MySociety staff

Which parts of the data added under the previous grant were added by grantees or members of the MySociety staff? --Jura1 (talk) 09:50, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

The main focus of our work under the previous grant was tool and report building, data modelling and documentation. As part of our wider Democratic Commons work we have also worked with partners to contribute position holder data they’ve collected into Wikidata. Louisecrow (talk) 18:23, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

@Louisecrow: I am also interested in a response to the question asked here by Jura1. You seem to be implying that you did not do any data entry yourselves, yet your report states: "We directly contributed data in the UK and a handful of additional countries". What data was contributed by mySociety, and in which countries? You also state that "We supported partners through events or other resources to contribute data in over a dozen countries." What were these other resources? Were any of these partners paid to contribute data? --NF Ford (talk) 21:59, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't think Louisecrow actually responded to the question. A perecentage estimate would be helpful (with a samples how it's calculated). --Jura1 (talk) 09:40, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

@NF Ford: @Jura1: Acording to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Jbothma mySociety paid OpenUp for editing data for South Africa.

• There are at least three others (mySociety staff). There seem to be just too many open questions on this talk page about the proposal for it to go anywhere. Given the unclear results of the previous WMF funds disbursed, we might be better of offering funds to whoever offers the largest amount of data per dollar. Jura1 (talk) 13:20, 26 January 2019 (UTC)

Question about UK data generated under the previous grant

How much UK related content was generated through the previous grant? --Jura1 (talk) 09:50, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

• The UK is one of the nine countries for which gender/age statistics of all current legislators by political party/group or region can now be produced and for which it is possible to compare statistics for members of the cabinet vs members of the legislature. Louisecrow (talk) 18:23, 4 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Do we know if the previous grant had any impact on this? --Jura1 (talk) 09:40, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Question about Wikidata community notification

How does MySociety or grant requestors or grantees notify the Wikidata community about its activities? --Jura1 (talk) 09:50, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

This is something we’re seeking to improve on - so far we’ve posted suggestions, questions and progress via https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_every_politician, the grant reporting page, and attended meetups and facilitated a session around political engagement via Wikidata at MozFest but recognise that we need to continue to actively look for ways to share our work within the growing community. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by

• Wikidata is mainly an online community with relevant project. Any work being done with these? Jura1 (talk) 09:40, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Question about content generated under the previous grant

For each country that you consider having been developed under the previous grant, what percentage of politicians were actually missing in Wikidata (item had to be created)? --Jura1 (talk) 07:48, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

• We haven’t collected detailed statistics on that, but there were some general trends from our wider work on political position holder data in Wikidata that may be interesting to note - that there is quite wide variation between countries in the proportion of existing items for politicians, but a general trend for more existing items at the national level and progressively fewer at the regional and local or city level respectively. Louisecrow (talk) 18:24, 4 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Do we know if any new ones were actually generated? --Jura1 (talk) 09:40, 8 January 2019 (UTC)
  • I can't say that's an especially surprising results: many project do not want local politicians in the first place and actively delete content about them. They might be ok for Wikidata though, if one manages to focus on objective data available from official public sources. Nemo 09:42, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Questions about the new browser tool

You describe the new browser you want to build as "a key tool", but you haven't given very much information about why it's needed, or your goals for it. Why do you think an off-wiki solution would be most suitable here, especially given you already built an on-wiki framework for seeing the data in aggregate with your previous grant? How would Wikidata editors know your new tool should be used instead?

You seem to have had difficulties building external tools in your previous grant, with several approaches abandoned before switching to an entirely new "verification-pages" tool which still isn't complete, almost six months after the end of your grant. Bearing in mind the suggestions at the "Learn in detail about existing tools before building new ones" learning pattern, perhaps it would be better to help improve an existing tool, rather than building another new standalone one? Do you already know of any existing tools that could be extended? How much of the grant do you propose to spend on the browser? --NF Ford (talk) 09:10, 31 December 2018 (UTC)

I think the browser could be key specifically in bringing in new contributors to the Wikidata community and in conveying to people outside the community what the quality and coverage of position holder data is. It’s needed because, based on our experience of introducing new contributors to Wikidata, the on-wiki framework isn’t particularly user friendly to them. It also needs some level of manual editing to create and maintain for new countries. As you dig into it, you’re pretty quickly faced with SPARQL queries, which can be intimidating to new users. It has data on completeness, but you have to work a bit to find and understand it - there’s a learning curve and there are limitations to the UI that you can create on-wiki. The goal for the browser is to be a very easy to use representation of the political position holder data in Wikidata that can show people who are not yet familiar with Wikidata at a glance how complete the data is for different legislatures within a country.

To respond a bit to your comment on difficulties developing external tools, and specifically the verification-pages tool, we’ve perhaps been too conservative in holding it back from wider release when trying to balance the problems of handling complex cases against getting something useful out into the community. I do take your point about looking for opportunities to improve existing tools though - we’ll start by writing the ‘How to’ guide - which will involve spending some further time researching and documenting the tools available and how they can be applied in a post-election situation. Generally we work in an agile way, so if, in the process of doing that, we discover tools that could be usefully extended, we would do so instead. I’ve broken out the time currently allocated to browser development in the budget in the proposal. Louisecrow (talk) 18:25, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Your final report for the previous grant explains that the on-wiki framework you created was adapted from a similar one used by Sum of all paintings, one of the most successful Wikidata projects. Have you talked to them about whether they have experienced similar problems with their version, and how they have addressed these? What advice have they given you? Can you explain further about the UI limitations with creating your reports on-wiki, and which lead to you wanting to create a new off-wiki application instead? --NF Ford (talk) 08:16, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Who would actually be working on this?

Your listed Grantees are Chris Mytton, Emilydrk, Zarino, and Markcridge. Your Participants section only lists mySociety, as a company. You also list a variety of people as "staff working on Wikidata", but you don't make it clear whether all of these people would actually be working on this project (or perhaps only on the other Wikidata work from your prior grant-funded project you refuse to report on or discuss). Your previous grant also seems to have had a significantly different list of participants in the People tab to those in the original proposal. You also don't seem to have kept that list up to date. Georgie Burr and Kelly Doyle have not been included, and you reports show Rich Cassidy, Jukesie and Abimysoc being involved, but none of them have been listed either. One of your named grantees (ODenman) from that project appears to have not made any contributions to any Wikimedia project during the entire grant period.

Is your request for money the company can allocate whatever way you like to whatever staff seem suitable? Or do you have specific named people you know will actually be involved, and any changes to that will be requested or at least notified? --NF Ford (talk) 08:08, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

A few additional questions

I have a couple questions on your proposal Chris_Mytton, Emilydrk, Zarino, and Markcridge -

• Can you speak how meta or micro you envision going related to your goal of "Data on elected representatives is substantially correct and complete within a month following an election, leading to improved quality and consistency of data in Wikidata." Do you envision only on a national level, or also province, state, region, local, etc.?
• What mechanism will this project use to track when the elections and results are for the responses to the above question, and what will a reliable source for these data points be considered?
• How do you envision the instructions and guidance to be created and available for mass usage once this project is complete, and how do you perceive these being disseminated to a wide audience?

I look forward to your responses. --- FULBERT (talk) 18:11, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Wikidata post-election updating toolkit

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?	5.7
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	5.2
(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?	5.3
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	6.0
Additional comments from the Committee: This could be a high impact project, but the people involved do not appear to be creating much documentation on Wikidata. Others have raised concerns raised on the talk page. This could be explained by the use of software bots to update Wikidata, but there isn't a mention of that and the focus seems to be on developing documentation of how to use tools rather than the tools themselves. Lydia Pintscher's endorsement is persuasive (hence my rating), but I am concerned that I don't see much on-wiki participation as far as documentation creation. The project fits with Wikimedia's strategic priorities and has a potential for online impact. However it is difficult to judge it sustainability and scalability as its goals and measures of success are very vague. local decision, not scalable for lots of other, even more important data - GDP, populations, etc. There is no scalable decision here Moderate impact potential. This is a rather good fit and potentially a good opportunity for further use of Wikidata. It also particularly targets sustainability of the previous initiative by updating data, but unfortunately it is not clear how it will challenge the community involvement sustainability. This project has potential for positive impact, but there are many questions asked that were unanswered or in the responses raise additional questions, so it is unclear to what extent this may have an impact. The approach is iterative - it is based on previous grant to the same grantee (MySociety). The impact is potentially significant but risks are relatively low. However the project goals and measures of success are very vague. They should be improved and specific tools to be developed identified. On the other hand the only quantitative measure of success: "data on political position holders in at least three legislatures to be substantially correct and complete within a month of an election there" looks too easy to achieve. Actually, we are paying for edits: that information is anyway updated if politicians are notable and interesting for local community Second iteration of the previous EveryPolitician project, and innovation from Wikidata point of view as there is no good update toolkit so far. Reasonable ration between potential risks and potential impact, but measures of success are slightly weak (not clear how many users will be involved). This project appears to be iterative, though I am not clear what exactly they are hoping to do or how they will do it. I see no problems here but the budget should be improved: it is not clear how the money will be distributed among the participants and whom is responsible for any specific task. Excessive budget and we are paying for editing! Rather average on this point. There is a reasonably good plan, and a good budget. People involved in the project are qualified both in political data and in Wikidata. The main concern is their previous project which took too long to be implemented. There are numerous questions about this that remained unanswered, and while it seems a good idea, it is unclear if it is doable. The community engagement could be better. Good community engagement, with a good support of Wikidata community. It also supports diversity by working with multiple countries, including Global South. I would appreciate a bit more details on the community of users of this project. There was positive engagement, though as several questions and requests for more information were left unanswered, it is unclear how much engagement the grantees have. I don't have an idea if these data for elections are really a problem. My feeling is that the updating of the community is sufficiently quick to don't be a problem. I'm neutral on this one because while people I respect are endorsing it, I'm not sure if this is because they like the concept being proposed or if they are looking at the previous work done by these people and saying they should continue. I am willing to support this project as I supported its predecessor, which was not completely successful as the promised documentation is still incomplete. However the measures of success, goals should be made more specific and tools to be developed clearly identified. The budget should also be improved. I hope they will finish the documentation this time. Overall I am supporting this project as I find it impactful. My two main points of concern are: 1) more clarity on community involvement, notably how many people will be involved in updating this data, 2) ensure there is good multilingual documentation (or at least a detailed enough English documentation that would allow someone to use without help). I would be also more favourable if an extension to other topics (e.g. adding winners of cultural prizes, updating statistical data after censuses etc.) would be possible - this should not be extremely different and should increase use of this toolkit. There were many questions that were asked and were not answered, and between them and a lack of clarity for this reviewer as to how this work would actually proceed, I do not think this is a fit at present.

Opportunity to respond to committee comments in the next week

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal. Based on their initial review, a majority of committee reviewers have not recommended your proposal for funding. You can read more about their reasons for this decision in their comments above. Before the committee finalizes this decision, they would like to provide you with an opportunity to respond to their comments.

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 carefully and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page by 5pm UTC on Tuesday, May 11, 2021. If you make any revisions to your proposal based on committee feedback, we recommend that you also summarize the changes on your talkpage.
2. The committee will review any additional feedback you post on your talkpage before making a final funding decision. A decision will be announced Thursday, May 27, 2021.

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

@Chris Mytton, Emilydrk, Zarino, and Markcridge: Please see note above about the opportunity to respond to committee comments before they finalize a decision on your proposal. Please let me know if you have any questions. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 05:08, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

Round 2 2018 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 appreciates this iterative project as a natural extension of the EveryPolitician project. However, they did not support funding of the proposal based on concerns with documentation practices, the absence of responses to some questions on this discussion page, and whether the project can be reasonably completed.

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.

Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 17:26, 1 March 2019 (UTC)