Grants talk:IEG/The Wikipedia Library

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for an Individual Engagement Grant.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, $7500

Comments regarding this decision:
We're looking forward to seeing Wikipedians get increased access to valuable reference material!

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
4. Start work on your project!

Questions? Contact us.

Aggregated feedback from the committee for The Wikipedia Library

Scoring criteria (see the rubric for background)	Score 1=weakest 5=strongest
Potential for impact
(A) The project fits with the Wikimedia movement's strategic priorities	4
(B) The project has the potential to lead to significant online impact.	4
(C) The impact of the project can be sustained after the grant ends.	3
(D) The project has potential to be scaled or adapted for other languages or projects.	4
Ability to execute
(E) The project has demonstrated interest from a community it aims to serve.	4
(F) The project can be completed as scoped within 6 months with the requested funds.	4
(G) The budget is reasonable and an efficient use of funds.	4
(H) The individual(s) proposing the project have the required skills and experience needed to complete it.	4
Fostering innovation and learning
(I) The project has innovative potential to add new strategies and knowledge for solving important issues in the movement.	3
(J) The risk involved in the project's size and approach is appropriately balanced with its potential gain in terms of impact.	3
(K) The proposed measures of success are useful for evaluating whether or not the project was successful.	4
(L) The project supports or grows the diversity of the Wikimedia movement.	3
Comments from the committee: While this proposal may not be very innovative, there appears to be strong community to support and Ocaasi has a track record of success and demonstrated capability. Although reach would apparently be English Wikipedia, translations could make it go beyond that. Quality of articles would be improved with access to these sources. The budget requested seems reasonable. In the long term it has potential to increase the amount of editors, and the quality of our articles. These resources that would be provided in The Wikipedia Library would make it easier to reference articles with high quality sources, write new articles about obscure topics, and improve existing articles. Hopeful for the integrated system that this proposes, more than the addition of individual new references sources. One of the risks would be failing to decide how to fairly distribute the donated accesses. As it grows larger, the existence of inactive registrants and how to track them will be important to handle well. Would like to see improved measures of success - numbers are important.

Independence of phase 1

Hi Ocaasi, thanks for submitting this proposal. I would like clarification from you on the extent to which you believe that phase 1 is useful as a stand-alone project. Because your vision of phase 2 relies on having a hosting plan for this library, as well as WMF's work on OAuth, and also what may prove to be significant development customization to bridge between OAuth and each individual organization's existing system, we know there are some serious dependencies that would need to be resolved before a second phase can come to be. As such, I would want to know that phase 1 alone will produce some really useful, impactful things (more partners, more editors getting access to more stuff more easily using improved on-wiki systems, etc). I think this is where you are going, but would appreciate confirmation. One of the things that sparked this question for for me was the list of open questions you've got on the page, which don't all seem to be entirely relevant for a phase 1 project plan. Cheers! Siko (WMF) (talk) 22:10, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi Siko. I've tried to streamline the proposal to be useful even as a standalone project. Expanding the number of Wikipedia Library participants by 2x-3x would benefit thousands of editors and provide opportunities to references tens-hundreds of thousands of instances of content. While laying groundwork for phase 2 is still of interest, there would be attainable benefits from relationship-building and account-management improvements regardless. Cheers! Ocaasi (talk) 22:17, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for confirming, and updating the open questions, that eases my concern on this issue. Siko (WMF) (talk) 22:31, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Scale in projects and languages...

Ocaasi SbouterseHow is this going across different language Wikipedias? Gryllida 00:20, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Is this specific to Wikipedia or is some of this project also ongoing at other sister projects? Gryllida 00:20, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

We have opened operating satellites in Arabic and Chinese Wikipedia. We're involved in planning with German and Spanish Wikipedia and have identified volunteer coordinators in those languages (but not set up pages yet). It's quite possible editors are using their resources for contributing to sister projects (provided they signed up on Wikipedia); I frankly don't have any anecdotes or data about that however. For the future of TWL, the first priority is new partnerships and the second priority is developing branches globally (third priority is placing visiting scholars, fourth priority is building tools to support research, and fifth priority is promoting open access, sixth priority is connecting to librarians and archivists). It's worth mentioning that although signups have primarily happened on ENWP, that has been open to all global editors with 1000 edits and has included numerous editors from German, Arabic, and other language projects. A good project to do in the next month would be looking through all prior signups to see how many editors are primarily active on a non-ENWP project (and which ones). In the future, all signups will happen at local branches rather than just on ENWP. For example, Arabic and Chinese editors can already signup for resources from their local pages. A big next step is finding non-English sources and university partnerships for those communities. That task will primarily fall to local coordinators; although, we'll support them with promotional material and strategic planning. Thanks for your question, Gryllida! Ocaasi (talk) 10:14, 17 July 2014 (UTC)