Grants talk:PEG/Ciphers and Shipmaster - Community of Arabic Wikipedia/Producer Prize

Jury and money transfer

Who is in the contest jury? How it is organised and who choose them? I guess the problem might be with legal issues with money transfer from WMF to either contest winners or the organisers of the contest Polimerek 08:40, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

The contest jury is a group of experienced editors and donors whom are not registered as a participants in the contest. The jury members change each round, and their names are not opened to public. The transfer from WMF to winners is almost impossible due restrictions on the banking systems of most of the participants countries. In the past rounds of the contest, in the case when paypal transfer was not possible for them, we used to buy items upon the winners wish (from amazon, ebay .. etc) and ship them directly to their address. --Ciphers 13:11, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Western Union is also an option that we may want to explore for consistent delivery. It operates in most Arab countries and sidesteps archaic banking transfer methods --Shipmaster 16:19, 2 November 2011 (UTC)

Reach of prizes and non-monetary rewards

Ni!

Hello friends, I like idea of prizes and hope this request succeeds, but then I ask myself how to maximize the impact of the contest and also of WMF's investment.

I don't think handing prizes to only the top three people is the best solution. A lot of editors would simply not feel they have a chance, others would feel they put some energy into this and were left unrewarded, and finally differentiating among the top three is just meaningless. So here are a few ideas.

I'm sure the WMF could provide merchandise (t-shirts, barnstars, buttons etc) to increase that number of prizes to the tens, while handling shipping costs. Then, instead of "first, second and third prize" you could run with "gold, silver and bronze medals" and have 3 people in the gold category who would share equally the monetary prize, 10 people in the silver category who would receive a t-shirt, button and stickers, and 30 people in the bronze category who would get buttons and stickers, plus a virtual barnstar. Everyone else participating in the prize would get an "honourable mention" on their user page.

I feel that something along this line would make more editors interested and the contest more fun for all! Hugs,

--Solstag 20:48, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. In fact, and for the past two years since we came up with this idea, there has been some discussions and many suggestions about the best scheme to give away the prize, and always one big question was there, that is "How can we maximize the outcome of the prize money? is it by giving too many small prizes, or by granting big prizes to small number of outstanding contributors?".

For other projects, the former option (small and too many prizes) could be the best answer, however we could find out that it is not the case of Arabic Wikipedia. There are two main reasons for this.

1. The first reason is logistical. As I mentioned in my answer for the first question above, we had too many difficulties delivering the prizes during the past three rounds to the 9 winners. That was because of barriers related to banking and post infrastructure in most of the Arabic countries. I believe this is not the right place to give more details about this issue, but just to give an example it took us a continues correspondences in the period between Jun, 24th until Sep, 27th last year in order to deliver goods with a value of 150 US$ to one of the winners! Now imagine the amount of work when you have 43 winners?
2. The second reason is about the number of active contributors who might commit themselves for the whole period of six months. Although at the beginning of each term we do a large scale advertising, and a large number of personal messages to users, only a few number of users were interested to join, less of whom who could meet the prize conditions and more less who actually did the required work for the whole period. It is as simple as, during the past three rounds almost all of users who committed to the work were granted the prize, which means we had only about three highly committed users! For this reason, we chose to increase the amount of the prize for the winners, so we could really give an appropriate reward to highly commitment users toward the project. If you could check List_of_Wikipedias, you may notice that one of the largest problem for Arabic Wikipedia today is that there are too many registered users compared to the number of articles or active users, in comparison to other projects. For this reason, the philosophy of this prize came to reward highly committed users.

Finally, you may agree with me that each of the Wikip(m)edia projects reflects more or less the social factors of its contributors, and best solutions to support the project must come to fit the nature of that project and its contributors. I apologize for the long reply, but I wish I could make the point. With my best regards. --Ciphers 14:27, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Influence on the current community

I must agree with the Solstag's questions above. What is the method used to make the optimal prizes for the people to be awarded? And what is the motivation to award the three topping the table with those amounts, instead of more people with less money? I suppose you also gauge the influence done by the people competing for prizes vs. current active users, who may get disparaged when seeing that someone can get money for the work they're doing for years. My notion is that the whole project is very sensitive, so you must conceive it very well to cross upon the agreement of the community. Best regards.--Kiril Simeonovski 00:36, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your comment. I added a sort of general reply in the above section. Would you please refer to it and let me know in case you have any further comments or/and questions. With my best regards. --Ciphers 14:33, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

Apart from different methods I think you all should search other ways like Article creation competition etc.. which can increase quality as well as quantity however this was a suggestion only.I see no issue with this grant request.Best Wishes--Mayur ^{(talk•Email)} 05:27, 15 November 2011 (UTC)