Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Wiki Takes Curious Steps (ID: 22026084)/Final Report

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hello Egezort, and thanks for your report on Wiki Takes Curious steps. I am accepting it with the following comments:

• Thank you for working to integrate Wikipedia projects into an existing academic program. It's great that participants were able to visit and engage with places in the community that were meaningfully connected to the topics thematically related to the project. Participants also benefitted from becoming initially oriented to Wikipedia, Creative Commons, and some movement initiatives like Women in Red.
• Regarding the loss of the edit-a-thon, it's unfortunate that this needed to be dropped from the project, though I understand why this happened due to the circumstances described in question 7 in the report. In the future, please be aware that you can reach out to us to extend your project deadlines if more time would be supportive to holding events that may not be possible to schedule as initially planned. Extensions are quite normal for organizers to receive given these kinds of disruptions and problems that are beyond an organizer's control.
• I appreciate your reflections on the Featured Article process as well as on more general planning for your project. What I am hearing from this report is that the original plan was perhaps too ambitious in scope, and that you may need to scale down your activities with considerations to your participants' needs as well as your own capacity.
• I have seen that perhaps it is too ambitious to expect continued involvement on Wikipedia projects after these events. My experience in reviewing many, many Rapid Fund proposals is that edit-a-thons and general Wikimedia events do not tend to retain a lot of newcomers as editors, unless there is some specific effort to continuously engage those participants after the event. Retention rates for newcomers tend to be less than 10% of participants in these cases. (If they include or primarily focus on existing editors, it is a different story, of course.) That said, I think retention can be an important goal for Rapid Fund projects, but need to be deliberately designed for by movement organizers using their knowledge of their communities, as you've noted in the report.
• In terms of the remaining funds, you are welcome to retain these funds for your next approved projects. I also want to confirm our team normally allows applicants to hold unused funds if they expect to reapply for Rapid Funds in the future.

With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 08:44, 27 February 2024 (UTC)