Grants talk:IEG/Wikiscan multi-wiki

April 12 Proposal Deadline: Reminder to change status to 'proposed'

The deadline for Individual Engagement Grant (IEG) submissions this round is April 12th, 2016. To submit your proposal, you must (1) complete the proposal entirely, filling in all empty fields, and (2) change the status from "draft" to "proposed." As soon as you’re ready, you should begin to invite any communities affected by your project to provide feedback on your proposal talkpage. If you have any questions about finishing up or would like to brainstorm with us about your proposal, we're hosting a few IEG proposal help sessions this month in Google Hangouts:

• April 5th, 16:00 - 17:00 UTC
• April 8th 1:00 - 2:00 UTC
• April 12th 16:00 - 17:00 UTC

I'm also happy to set up an individual session.

Warm regards,
--Marti (WMF) (talk) 06:03, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed

This Individual Engagement Grant proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for review and scoring. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during this community comments period (through 2 May 2016).

The committee's formal review begins on 3 May 2016, and grants will be announced 17 June 2016. See the round 1 2016 schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us at iegrantswikimedia · org .

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 14:15, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Pageview stats tool integration

This is out of scope for the current work, but it would be nice to see some integration with the Pageview Stats tool so that you could see who is page editors working on most viewed pages, etc. -- ☠MarkAHershberger☢(talk)☣ 20:23, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

Phabricator

Since you are going to be using a lot of WMF resources, it would be great if you could also use Phabricator and a WMF-hosted source code repository. If you already do that, mentioning that in the proposal would have been nice. -- ☠MarkAHershberger☢(talk)☣ 20:25, 15 May 2016 (UTC)

It seems a good idea. For the resource consumption, it is primarily on the Wikiscan dedicated server that performs all statistical calculations. Akeron (talk) 08:56, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Wikiscan multi-wiki

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?	6.5
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	7.5
(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?	7.9
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	7.3
Additional comments from the Committee: This is a meta-level project providing information about all Wikimedia wikis. It’s not exactly something that would enable the projects to move forward, but still nice to have as a way of understanding editor behavior and how Wikimedia projects morph over time. I am unsure about its impact. Since the applicant has already had impact on French Wikipedia, it seems obvious it would have impact elsewhere. This could help "gamify" an editor's experience. Moving the code onto WMF repositories and using tools like Phabricator (as I suggested on-wiki) would help with the sustainability. Our current public analysis tools are nice, but there is always room for improvement. Depending on a single analytics / research team is bound to fail, and hence we should encourage more tools to be built by a diverse set of people. WikiMetrics seems still alive for me. WikiScan is also interesting. Could it adapt from WikiMetrics? I assume this project is efficient with page views? (how else?) I don't know if it is innovative, but it broadens the application of an already-used tool. Risk is minimal. Metrics (covering a larger number of wikis) are there and easy to see. If all this does is make these statistics available for all languages, I think that's still worth it. Reliable, easier to use, visualization. All goods to have. This tool would facilitate measurement of success of the wikis themselves as well as various large scale projects where before and after can be compared more quantitatively and with less effort. Yes. Well-planned out. Yes. Seems very doable, and the grant requestor is the original developer, which makes things easier. The only concern I will point out is that due to the scale of data involved great effort may be required to optimize the software if it will be hosted on a Wikimedia operated server. Lots of support--if implemented I would certainly use it!! I don't see much engagement outside of French Wikipedia, but I do see community support within that community. There are strong backgrounds for WikiScan with good community endorsement. I loooooooove stats and can't get enough of them. Apparently I am not alone I know Wikiscan but there is a MANDATORY request. The code must be published in a public space. I would ask not to finance the project if the software code will not be easily accessible. With the addition of using WMF-hosted tools, I would say go for it. The project mentions Google Analytics, but doesn't explicitly mention which License the code is on. Those two should be fixed - use something slightly more privacy conscious for tracking, and explicitly use a free license. With those, definitely fund. I would suggest to merge some effort with WikiMetrics, etc. Solid budgeting and plan. However, I would support this proposal if its development would yield an output to labs or some other Wikimedia-operated server for sustainability purposes. This isn't very clear in the proposal even though it will use labs in some capacity.

-- MJue (WMF) (talk) 00:48, 3 June 2016 (UTC) on behalf of the IEG Committee

• The free license will be GPL, the same as MediaWiki to facilitate code exchange.
• The code can be hosted on WMF repositories and use Phabricator, I will setup it if it's not too complicated, I'm already using Git on my side.
• « I don't see much engagement outside of French Wikipedia » : to be precise, most of the support from French contributors are not directly from French Wikipedia (I didn't advertise the grant there) but from Wikisource, Wiktionary and Wikiversity, but of course most of them are also active on French Wikipedia.
• About Google Analytics, it is not just for monitoring a project's goal, I'm using it since 2011 to monitor page views, it's really useful to know which parts of the site are most populars, this is a very reliable and powerful analytic tool and the best I know. I am reluctant to drop it, Wikiscan is not a sensitive site, GA is already on a large part of the web, if some people are concerned about it then it's easy to block it on their side for all websites.
• For sustainability, I don't know if a big project like this can be hosted inside labs, it is not just a tool which make requests when visitors push a button, it needs to constantly calculate stats and store them which is resource intensive. Actually it is hosted on a dedicated server rent by Wikimedia France (it cost 30 euros/month), so it's already inside the Wikimedia sphere. If the grant is done, we will have a better knowledge of the resources needs for a multi-wiki site, we will then seek the best hosting solution for everyone.

-- Akeron (talk) 12:13, 7 June 2016 (UTC)

Round 1 2016 decision

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, $7,632

Comments regarding this decision:
The committee is pleased to support your work to provide a user-friendly interface for statistical information across all large Wikimedia wikis. We recognize the strong history of Wikiscan for French Wikipedia and look forward to seeing its impact expand to additional projects and languages. We appreciate your willingness to collaborate with the WMF Analytics team to make sure your work is coordinated with their efforts on Wikistats 2.0.

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.

i18n

I see you plan for translation (of course) so here are the pointers: translatewiki:Translating:New project, translatewiki:Translating:Localisation for developers. Is the source code published somewhere already and in what language is it? With a quick look at the code I could give some specific hints. Nemo 08:23, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Hi, the code is in PHP and is not published yet, I plan to use message keys with a file by language. I don't think I will have time to make myself the support for Translatewiki at this stage but it shouldn't be too complicated once the code is ready for i18n and published (probably in 3 months). Akeron (talk) 10:40, 18 June 2016 (UTC)

Most people prefer JSON data files nowadays (there are libraries to use, extracted from MediaWiki, also to handle plural etc.), but if you want to stick to PHP files then just copy the old MediaWiki format for MessagesXx.php files. Nemo 15:49, 19 June 2016 (UTC)