Grants:IEG/WikiProject X/Final

This project is funded by an Individual Engagement Grant

This Individual Engagement Grant is renewed

renewal scope

timeline & progress

finances

midpoint report

final report

Welcome to this project's final report! This report shares the outcomes, impact and learnings from the Individual Engagement Grantee's 6-month project.

Part 1: The Project

Summary

In a few short sentences, give the main highlights of what happened with your project. Please include a few key outcomes or learnings from your project in bullet points, for readers who may not make it all the way through your report.

• We studied the causes of WikiProject success and failure, as documented in our midpoint report
• We created a directory of WikiProjects, including automated lists of WikiProject participants and lists of article subject-area editors. These lists are already being used to supplement WikiProject participant lists on several WikiProjects with little promotion on our part.
• We designed a new template WikiProject interface for WikiProjects to use. This design is currently used on the five pilot WikiProjects, plus three additional WikiProjects. Work still needs to be done to make it easier to "retrofit" WikiProjects to use this system.
• Included in these newly designed WikiProjects are new automated reports, including a feed of new discussions taking place throughout Wikipedia, lists of tasks to work on, and missing articles based on Wikidata information.
• Survey respondents largely agreed that the new WikiProject designs were easy to navigate, that the re-designed WikiProjects helped find other editors interested in the same topic areas as them and that the re-designed WikiProjects helped them find articles to work on.
• There are many opportunities to build off of this work, including deploying to more projects on the English Wikipedia and expanding to other Wikimedia projects.

Methods and activities

What did you do in project?

Please list and describe the activities you've undertaken during this grant. Since you already told us about the setup and first 3 months of activities in your midpoint report, feel free to link back to those sections to give your readers the background, rather than repeating yourself here, and mostly focus on what's happened since your midpoint report in this section.

Our presentation at Wikimania 2015, including many screenshots of the things described in this report.

• We researched WikiProjects and their users, and we developed concepts for a WikiProject directory and a new WikiProject design. This work is highlighted in our midpoint report.
• We launched the WikiProject Directory on May 31, 2015. The directory aims to automatically list every extant WikiProject on the English Wikipedia, of which there are over 2,600. This work included consultation with the WikiProject Council and other volunteers, including on a plan to re-organize the WikiProject categorization system. The directory will eventually replace the manually maintained directory, but even in its soft-launch state it has surfaced useful information about WikiProjects and who is editing what on Wikipedia. For example, we can see that the articles under the scope of WikiProject Medicine, which we now know is the fifth-most active WikiProject (a fact cited in a Wikimedia DC grant proposal), have 905 active editors. In the past when WikiProject Medicine needed this information, including to acknowledge highly dedicated editors (see this talk page message acknowledging a top-10 contributor, for example), it needed to develop its own tools to surface this information. Now it is available to all WikiProjects instantly.
• Adjunct to the WikiProject Directory we have lists of related WikiProjects, which list up to ten related WikiProjects for each WikiProject where the data is available. These lists are generated based on number of overlapping articles. These lists can be embedded onto WikiProject pages and help connect WikiProjects to one another—an alternative to WikiProjects as isolated silos.
• WikiProjects can opt in to new automated reports, currently in use on six pilot WikiProjects. These reports include:
  • A feed of new discussions as they are posted to one of a given WikiProject's many discussion pages. With nearly five million articles on the English Wikipedia and nearly as many talk pages, many talk pages are not frequently monitored or posted to. This feature gives WikiProjects the option to be notified of a new discussion on any talk page under their purview.
  • Task lists related to article assessment, including a list of pages not yet assessed for quality and a list of pages that are not yet tagged by the WikiProject but could potentially be. This feature helps identify pages potentially of interest to WikiProjects. Included with each list is an automated quality prediction rendered by a service made possible through another Individual Engagement Grant. (Yes, the grantees are working together!)
  • A list of missing articles based on Wikidata entries. This service works by pulling titles of Wikipedia articles that do not have equivalents on English Wikipedia—hopefully with the outcome of reducing systemic bias on the English Wikipedia. This service is currently used by WikiProject Ghana to list topics related to Ghana currently missing from the English Wikipedia. The service is based off of a list produced for the Women in Red project launched during Wikimania 2015.
  • An adaptation of SuggestBot for WikiProjects, featuring of lists of articles that need sources, cleanup, expansion, removal of unencyclopaedic content, to be merged with another article, or links from other articles. Right now these lists are based on already-existing functionality from SuggestBot which are then converted to fit the WikiProject's layout through a script.Nettrom, as a volunteer, is working on an update to SuggestBot to have lists generated in this manner automatically.
• Tying together these features is a new design, created out of a need to better organize information on WikiProject pages. This new design is based on modules, with each module representing an aspect of the WikiProject's function, such as to-do lists, project metrics, and lists of resources (including the list of related WikiProjects mentioned above). This approach surfaces action items and timely information and minimizes table-of-contents bloat and profuse documentation that tends to dwell on WikiProject pages. Also built in to the new design is a membership workflow, including a WikiProject member list that automatically moves inactive members to a separate page (and back again when they return). Membership is based on a FormWizard form so that new editors can avoid wikitext markup (although wikitext markup is available as a fallback). This new design is currently on use on our five WikiProject prototypes: WikiProjects Cannabis, Evolutionary Biology, Ghana, Hampshire, and Women's Health. It is also used on WikiProject Women in Technology, a prototype WikiProject created during the design process; the Women in Red project launched at Wikimania 2015; and WikiProject Occupational Safety and Health, used at Harej's other job at NIOSH. Within the next month we are looking to expand to an additional ten WikiProjects.
• We presented at Wikimania 2015, where we discussed our research, design, and experimentation process, as well as the future of WikiProject X. The slides are linked above.

Outcomes and impact

Outcomes

What are the results of your project?

Please discuss the outcomes of your experiments or pilot, telling us what you created or changed (organized, built, grew, etc) as a result of your project.

WikiProject Directory

There was some talk at WikiProject Council a while ago about wanting a bot to clean up lists of participants in WikiProjects (mostly removing or marking the usernames of people who haven't edited in years). It would also be nice if the WikiProject Directory were automagically maintained. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:47, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

We are happy to report three years later that an automatically updated WikiProject directory is now available on the English Wikipedia. This directory has attracted some modest usage in its first four months of existence; most notably, the WikiProject description pages are being used as supplementary user lists on WikiProjects. This is true of the five pilot WikiProjects which WikiProject X redesigned, but also of an additional ten WikiProjects, despite minimal promotion of this feature. These description pages are also being used to answer questions by editors; for example:

If you're interested in a particular topic, you can join the WikiProject for it, where you'll find other editors who have the same interests and can give you specific advice. here is Wikiproject Latvia, for instance, although it doesn't seem to be very active right now. --Ashenai (talk) 07:12, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

At least one user has expressed interest in having links to these description pages be a standard feature for WikiProject banners:

Please [can] we add a link to pages like Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Chemistry? the Link text should be something like "Automated statistics for WikiProject Chemistry". Andy Mabbett 20:39, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Since launching in May 2015, the main page of the WikiProject Directory has been viewed 2,687 times, with an additional 903 views for the page listing all 2,600+ WikiProjects. This is modest compared to the 48,346 page views for the WikiProject Council-maintained directory during the same time period, but our goal is to replace that directory with our automatically maintained directory by the end of the year. In the long term, we would like to see this directory help likeminded Wikipedians find each other, including new editors looking to find a group to join as part of their onboarding.

WikiProject design

Among the many requests for WikiProjects to serve as pilot projects, five WikiProjects were selected to serve as pilot projects on the basis that they posed the lowest risk and the highest opportunity. The new WikiProject design was deployed to these five projects, with an additional three projects, for a total of eight WikiProjects currently using the new design. We are looking to deploying to an additional ten WikiProjects during a second round of pilot testing. There has not been organic adoption of the new design (i.e., usage of the templates without our help), as the system of templates used is fairly complex, but with the development of new tools this should become less of an issue.

We received generally positive feedback on the design itself. To assess the satisfaction with our five pilot WikiProjects (plus the Women in Red project), we distributed a survey to participants on these projects, and received complete responses from 30 people, of which 25 reported using one or more of the six WikiProjects. Seventeen out of 25 reported using the new WikiProject interface once per week or less, compared to eight out of 25 using it more than that; this is consistent with our finding that WikiProjects tend to be used casually. Twenty out of 25 respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they could find different sections on the WikiProject layout, and six out of 22 responses indicated the design itself as the most useful feature; i.e., the best part is that the information is well organized. To quote a survey respondent:

The consistent structure, with an icon-based navigation system is major boon to organization and utility, as long as it's done consistently (I see that at least one project, Women in Red, is missing the Discussions feed, and I find that confusing and unhelpful). In traditional wikiprojects, it's too hard to find the available resources, because they all arrange things very differently. In various tab-based efforts to improve layout, the navigation was improved, but the actual ability to find things was reduced, because material was put into subpages, so in-page search was thwarted. Having it centralized but easily navigable is the solution, so good work on that.

The most frequently used feature of the new WikiProject design is the list of the tasks, used by 18 out of 25 respondents. By comparison, the WikiProject talk page (not new at all) was used by 17 out of 25 respondents. Indeed, 17 out of 25 respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that "the new WikiProject layout has helped [them] find articles to work on," and the task list was indicated by seven out of 22 responses as the most useful feature.

One of the key features of the new design is a membership system based on "WikiProjectCards," which are miniature profiles for WikiProject members. There are currently 121 WikiProject memberships on eight WikiProjects using this card system. Seventeen out of 25 survey respondents reported using this feature, and 21 out of 25 agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that the new WikiProject layout helped "find editors interested in the same subjects" as them.

Nine out of 25 respondents used the new discussions feeds, while four out of 22 responses indicated it was the most useful WikiProject feature (second only to the task lists as the featured indicated as most useful). Eleven out of 25 respondents used the lists of related WikiProjects.

We did receive some criticism on some features, including the membership system and the lists of tasks, but for the most part, the criticism focused on technical glitches that can be resolved with some effort.

Community engagement

We established WikiProject X as a WikiProject dedicated to improving the WikiProject experience. This project currently has 12 active participants on the English Wikipedia according to the WikiProject Directory, with a currently inactive outpost on Wikidata and a coordinating page on Meta-Wiki.

Our research process focused on the collection of WikiProject stories. To this end, 44 Wikipedians shared their experiences with WikiProjects; more information about this is included in our midpoint report. A total of 54 people have contributed on WikiProject X's main discussion page.

Broad community participation made our project possible, and with 77 people having the WikiProject X page on their watchlist on the English Wikipedia, WikiProject X is in a good position to continue as a long-term WikiProject, especially if we continue with our work. Community investment in this work will ensure that it stays relevant and useful to Wikipedians as Wikipedia and its surrounding cultural and academic contexts change.

Progress towards stated goals

Please use the below table to:

1. List each of your original measures of success (your targets) from your project plan.
2. List the actual outcome that was achieved.
3. Explain how your outcome compares with the original target. Did you reach your targets? Why or why not?

We established our goals in terms of the Global Metrics; see below.

Think back to your overall project goals. Do you feel you achieved your goals? Why or why not?

Our original stated goal:

The goal of this project is to address the causes of WikiProject failure on the English Wikipedia. By addressing these causes, we hope to increase the activity on WikiProjects and make WikiProjects more central to the experience of editing Wikipedia. This is based on the hypothesis that WikiProjects help facilitate Wikipedia-editing in a given subject area by organizing contributors around a cause and by providing resources and social support.

We addressed some of the underlying causes, including the tendency of WikiProjects to go unmaintained by automating several key features. We also surface information about participation on articles related to a WikiProject using existing infrastructure on Wikipedia, giving Wikipedians the opportunity to reach out to each other. These features reduce the amount of effort Wikipedians need to expend to maintain WikiProjects, freeing them up to perform other tasks and reducing the risk of a single point of failure. There is still more work to do to make the system of Python scripts and templates more scalable and sustainable, but we have made good progress up to this point, and we look forward to continuing to work to make WikiProjects useful to Wikimedia project contributors.

Global Metrics

We are trying to understand the overall outcomes of the work being funded across all grantees. In addition to the measures of success for your specific program (in above section), please use the table below to let us know how your project contributed to the "Global Metrics." We know that not all projects will have results for each type of metric, so feel free to put "0" as often as necessary.

1. Next to each metric, list the actual numerical outcome achieved through this project.
2. Where necessary, explain the context behind your outcome. For example, if you were funded for a research project which resulted in 0 new images, your explanation might be "This project focused solely on participation and articles written/improved, the goal was not to collect images."

For more information and a sample, see Global Metrics.

Metric	Achieved outcome	Explanation
1. Number of active editors involved	211	Computed for an eight-month period, 1 January 2015 to 31 August 2015, based on the standard definition of "active editor".
2. Number of new editors	15	This project did not focus on attracting new editors, but it seems 15 new users participated anyway, at least according to Wikimetrics (measured in the period 1 January 2015 to 31 August 2015). How about that!
3. Number of individuals involved	277	87 involved on pilot WikiProjects; 208 users making edits to the WikiProject X page, its talk page, or subpages; with 18 involved on both. Our original goal was to involve 100 online participants and 20 for in-person testing. Our one in-person testing experience was with WikiProject Women in Technology at a Washington DC edit-a-thon about the same, which had 17 participants; it is not clear which participants used the WikiProject. Eight of these are IP addresses and cannot be run through Wikimetrics
4. Number of new images/media added to Wikimedia articles/pages	0	We have no effective way of measuring content productivity as an outcome specifically of WikiProject participation.
5. Number of articles added or improved on Wikimedia projects	0	We have no effective way of measuring content productivity as an outcome specifically of WikiProject participation.
6. Absolute value of bytes added to or deleted from Wikimedia projects	0	We have no effective way of measuring content productivity as an outcome specifically of WikiProject participation.

Learning question

Did your work increase the motivation of contributors, and how do you know?

Our approach to measuring increased motivation is measuring user contributions relative to the launch of the pilot WikiProjects. Of our 87 pilot project participants, we measured their edits for three different eighty day periods:

• 11 July 2015 to 28 September 2015, or 80 days from the launch of the pilot projects;
• 22 April 2015 to 10 July 2015, or 80 days prior the launch of the pilot projects (and including the launch day);
• 11 July 2014 to 28 September 2014, for measuring year-over-year differences

We measured contributions in the article, article talk, project, and project talk namespaces.

Comparing the 80 days before and after the launch of the pilot projects, we found a decrease or flat rate in editing for all 87 users. However, comparing year-over-year edits, we find significant increases, with 81 users (93%) making more edits than in the same period of time the prior year (including 64 [74%] making more than double the number of edits). The users participating in the WikiProject pilots are certainly motivated editors, but without more data, it is difficult to determine what the source of motivation is.

As an anecdotal example however, the Women in Red project has clearly motivated users to contribute to Wikipedia, with their metrics page (currently updated by hand, unfortunately) indicating the thousands of articles written by those project's participants since the project was founded in July 2015. This indicates the potential a WikiProject has for organizing people, but a reminder that it takes more than technological tools: rather, the technological tools help WikiProject leaders with their jobs.

Indicators of impact

Do you see any indication that your project has had impact towards Wikimedia's strategic priorities? We've provided 3 options below for the strategic priorities that IEG projects are mostly likely to impact. Select one or more that you think are relevant and share any measures of success you have that point to this impact. You might also consider any other kinds of impact you had not anticipated when you planned this project.

Option A: How did you increase participation in one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option B: How did you improve quality on one or more Wikimedia projects?

Option C: How did you increase the reach (readership) of one or more Wikimedia projects?

Our work sets the stage for increased participation and improved quality by setting a technological foundation for organizing effective working groups on Wikimedia projects. Already our tools are being used by Wikipedians to find other people working in certain subject areas, or to find articles to work on. With a basic infrastructure in place we can build more, better tools to discover opportunities to contribute and to find collaborators for articles. This includes opportunities for WikiProjects to serve as entry points for external communities, such as GLAMs and professional organizations.

Project resources

Please provide links to all public, online documents and other artifacts that you created during the course of this project. Examples include: meeting notes, participant lists, photos or graphics uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, template messages sent to participants, wiki pages, social media (Facebook groups, Twitter accounts), datasets, surveys, questionnaires, code repositories... If possible, include a brief summary with each link.

• WikiProject X on the English Wikipedia, Wikidata, Meta-Wiki
  • Newsletter
  • WikiProject Stories
  • Internal workspace
• WikiProject Directory, used as a data source
• wikiproject_scripts repository on GitHub
• Phabricator project

Template messages

Notification about initial grant proposal

Comment on the WikiProject X proposal

Hello there! As you may already know, most WikiProjects here on Wikipedia struggle to stay active after they've been founded. I believe there is a lot of potential for WikiProjects to facilitate collaboration across subject areas, so I have submitted a grant proposal with the Wikimedia Foundation for the "WikiProject X" project. WikiProject X will study what makes WikiProjects succeed in retaining editors and then design a prototype WikiProject system that will recruit contributors to WikiProjects and help them run effectively. Please review the proposal here and leave feedback. If you have any questions, you can ask on the proposal page or leave a message on my talk page. Thank you for your time! (Also, sorry about the posting mistake earlier. If someone already moved my message to the talk page, feel free to remove this posting.) Harej (talk) 22:47, 1 October 2014 (UTC)

Message sent on Day 1

WikiProject X is live!

Hello everyone!

You may have received a message from me earlier asking you to comment on my WikiProject X proposal. The good news is that WikiProject X is now live! In our first phase, we are focusing on research. At this time, we are looking for people to share their experiences with WikiProjects: good, bad, or neutral. We are also looking for WikiProjects that may be interested in trying out new tools and layouts that will make participating easier and projects easier to maintain. If you or your WikiProject are interested, check us out! Note that this is an opt-in program; no WikiProject will be required to change anything against its wishes. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you!

Note: To receive additional notifications about WikiProject X on this talk page, please add this page to w:Wikipedia:WikiProject X/Newsletter. Otherwise, this will be the last notification sent about WikiProject X.

Harej (talk) 16:56, 14 January 2015 (UTC)

Candidate for pilot testing, round 1

(example: WikiProject Women's Health)

Hello, WikiProject Women's Health!

On the recommendation of Keilana, I am happy to announce that this WikiProject has been selected for the first round of WikiProject X pilot testing! Pilot testing candidates were selected on the basis for potential success of the WikiProject.

The goal of WikiProject X is to improve the WikiProject experience through research, design, and experimentation. On that basis, we've prepared a new WikiProject design template based around modules. These modules include features you are already familiar with, such as article alerts, but also new features such as automated work lists, a feed of discussions taking place on the 130 talk pages tagged by WikiProject Women's Health, and a new member profile system with opt-in notifications. The new design is available for your review at w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Women's Health/New. Please let me know what you think. (Note that some of the modules depend on output from other bots, meaning there will be some visual inconsistencies for now. I hope to resolve this in the long term.)

The next steps:

1. If you are all satisfied with the design, I will implement it on the WikiProject page. Unless there are major points of contention, I hope to get this done by Friday, July 10.
2. Using information from w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Women's Health, I will work on recruiting new members for the WikiProject. I will also reach out to your current listed members.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Cheers, Harej (talk) 00:21, 10 July 2015 (UTC)

Candidate for pilot testing, round 2

(example: WikiProject Women writers)

Hello WikiProject Women writers!

Based on the recommendation of Rosiestep, I am happy to announce that WikiProject X has selected this project as part of a round of pilot testing.

The goal of WikiProject X is to improve the WikiProject experience through research, design, and experimentation. On that basis, we've prepared a new WikiProject design template based around modules. These modules include features you are already familiar with, such as article alerts, but also new features such as automated work lists, a feed of discussions taking place on the 21,551 talk pages tagged by WikiProject Women writers, and a new member profile system. To see what this new setup looks like, you can browse the first round of pilot tests: WikiProject Cannabis, WikiProject Evolutionary biology, WikiProject Ghana, WikiProject Hampshire, WikiProject Women's Health.

If there is consensus among the participants of this WikiProject, I will proceed with implementing this interface based on the current contents of w:Wikipedia:WikiProject Women writers. Please let me know if you have any questions or requests. Harej (talk) 23:01, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Survey

Which of these WikiProjects have you used in the last two months? “Used” includes browsing the pages and posting on discussion pages. Select all WikiProjects that apply.

• WikiProject Cannabis
• WikiProject Evolutionary biology
• WikiProject Ghana
• WikiProject Hampshire
• WikiProject Women’s Health
• Women in Red subproject of WikiProject Women
• None of the above

Of the WikiProject above you have used the most, how often do you use it?

• 5–7 times per week (approximately every day)
• 2–4 times per week (multiple times per week but not every day)
• Once per week or less
• I have only used it once
• I have never used any of the above WikiProjects

Which of these WikiProject features have you used? Select all that apply

• The new discussions feed
• The tasks list
• The related WikiProjects list
• The WikiProject member list
• The WikiProject discussion page (e.g. “Wikipedia talk:WikiProject X”)
• None of the above

To what extent do you agree with these statements:

• “I know how to find different sections on the new WikiProject layout.” (sa/a/n/d/sd)
• “The new WikiProject layout has helped me find articles to work on.” (sa/a/n/d/sd)
• “The new WikiProject layout has helped me find editors interested in the same subjects as me." (sa/a/n/d/sd)

In the new WikiProject layout, which feature is the most useful to you and why? How might we improve this feature? [open-ended]

In the new WikiProject layout, which feature is the least useful to you and why? How might we improve this feature? [open-ended]

Do you have any other comments or requests? [open-ended]

Learning

The best thing about trying something new is that you learn from it. We want to follow in your footsteps and learn along with you, and we want to know that you took enough risks in your project to have learned something really interesting! Think about what recommendations you have for others who may follow in your footsteps, and use the below sections to describe what worked and what didn’t.

What worked well

What did you try that was successful and you'd recommend others do? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

• Grants:Learning patterns/Designing and developing for an active, existing project

What didn’t work

What did you try that you learned didn't work? What would you think about doing differently in the future? Please list these as short bullet points.

• We tried to accomplish more, including creating a working replacement for the oft-criticized WikiProject banner system, but we were not able to spend more time on it. But that's okay. We focused on what was important and made sure to do a good job at that.
• The initially established goals did not exactly make sense. Then again, we entered this project not 100% knowing what we were going to do, because we wanted to wait until after we've consulted with other editors. More research in advance would have helped us here.
• Things took longer than expected, especially since the amount of work that needed to get done was larger than initially expected. We will be addressing this in our renewal proposal by bringing on a dedicated engineer.

Other recommendations

If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please list them here.

• Even if you think you know the answer, you don't always. You can't anticipate every possible scenario in advance. Be willing to challenge your preconceived notions.

Next steps and opportunities

Are there opportunities for future growth of this project, or new areas you have uncovered in the course of this grant that could be fruitful for more exploration (either by yourself, or others)? What ideas or suggestions do you have for future projects based on the work you’ve completed? Please list these as short bullet points.

• When this project started, I (James) had no expectation of the amount of code that would need to be written. Having now written a lot of it, I can safely say that for this project to expand effectively, it will require the services of a professional to turn our suite of WikiProject scripts into a proper software application.
• There are opportunities to expand onto other projects. For our next phase, I would like to expand onto Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata: our two multilingual projects that feed into Wikipedia in all languages. I would like to see coordination between editors on Wikipedia, Commons, and Wikidata so that knowledge flows between the projects, with WikiProjects being a potential conduit.

This, and more, in our renewal proposal.

Part 2: The Grant

Finances

Actual spending

Please copy and paste the completed table from your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed the actual expenditures compared with what was originally planned. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided to explain them.

Expense	Approved amount	Actual funds spent	Difference
Project management	$10,000	$10,000
Design	$10,000	$10,000
Merchandise	$75	$0	$75
Total	$20,075	$20,000	$75

Remaining funds

Do you have any unspent funds from the grant?

Please answer yes or no. If yes, list the amount you did not use and explain why.

• We did not use our $75 budget on merchandise, as we ultimately canceled our interview program (in deference to another WikiProject-related interview program that was already going on).

If you have unspent funds, they must be returned to WMF. Please see the instructions for returning unspent funds and indicate here if this is still in progress, or if this is already completed:

• It was never disbursed to us per se, so... problem solved?

Documentation

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to grantsadminwikimedia.org, according to the guidelines here?

Please answer yes or no. If no, include an explanation.

• The only expenses were payments to the project manager and designer disbursed directly by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Confirmation of project status

Did you comply with the requirements specified by WMF in the grant agreement?

Please answer yes or no.

• Yes

Is your project completed?

Please answer yes or no.

• Yes, or at least this six-month phase of it is.

Grantee reflection

We'd love to hear any thoughts you have on what this project has meant to you, or how the experience of being an IEGrantee has gone overall. Is there something that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed, or that you’ll do differently going forward as a result of the IEG experience? Please share it here!

• It was a very busy six months... make that eight months and counting. In that time I developed my skills considerably—I now know how the MediaWiki database is laid out and I can write some semblance of software. And I didn't even sign up to do that! But I tapped into something of strong interest to many diverse groups of people, and there is so much more that can be done. What is satisfying to me is not so much what I got done in the six months of the project—which, in the grand scheme of things, isn't much—but the knowledge that there are now things that the Wikimedia community will be able to do that it was less suited to do before this project began. I hope to continue working on this project and seeing it to its full potential. harej (talk) 05:56, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
• It was very interesting to work on a project that's largely tangential to my usual interests and work. WikiProjects are there, and something I was familiar with at least in passing, and something potentially rather important to the overall project, but they're also not something I normally deal with much at all as a user or developer. But this seems like a good place to be from a design perspective, and also a scary one - I did not know what I was getting into ahead of time, but I also didn't come in with too many prior expectations, so it was much easier to just go along with what we found, with what stories folks gave, and what made sense at the time. But there was also so very much of it to wade through, so many conflicting stories and data points and observations, all which make their own sense in context, and still so much left to bring in. I just hope we've done justice to those people who actually use this stuff, and won't have made the overall situation worse down the road. It's a very easy trap to fall into. I've seen it happen so many times already, in so many different places around the software.

I suppose continuing will be what shows which way this project will go. I do hope to do so, but there is always that chance, and I have no idea how to avoid it in practice. -— Isarra ༆ 16:42, 30 September 2015 (UTC)