Grants talk:Project/Find It On Wikipedia!!!

Scope and past examples

If I understand correctly, this is about organising some sort of contest or virtual Wikipedia event over the radio. It would be useful to know what previous experiences the proposer has considered. It seems that it would be relevant to summarise and compare all past efforts of communication over the radio or TV (and other audio/video media), past virtual editathons and trainings (whether in person or online, such as a MOOC) which offered some task for users to conduct autonomously. Nemo 13:16, 23 February 2020 (UTC)

Hello Nemo,

I apologise for the delay in answering your question, I was caught up in other things. You can find the past examples for this project here: Find It On Wikipedia!!!.

Thank you.

--Uzoma 19:52, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, but I was asking about previous experiences by others which were incorporated in your project. For instance, New Readers/Messaging for Nigeria (phabricator:T180651#3833398) seems useful for statistics.

I have a keen interest in projects focused on radio and I've added some to Category:Radio but I'm sure you know much more than me, so it would be useful to see what you found. Nemo 08:57, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, Round 1 2020

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for Round 1 2020 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through March 16, 2020.

The Project Grant committee's formal review for Round 1 2020 will occur March 17 - April 8, 2020. We ask that you refrain from making changes to your proposal during the committee review period, so we can be sure that all committee members are seeing the same version of the proposal.

Grantees will be announced Friday, May 15, 2020.

Any changes to the review calendar will be posted on the Round 1 2020 schedule.

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:29, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Find It On Wikipedia!!!

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?	5.8
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	6.0
(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?	7.2
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	4.6
Additional comments from the Committee: Fits with New Readers initiatives and pilot projects to raise awareness of Wikipedia in Nigeria. It's not clear how they will reach the public. This is the critical point for impact. There is not a clear strategy about how to increase or reach new public. Increasing readership for Wikipedia articles is important. This is a great project which can be sustained, scaled, and adapted elsewhere. Looking at the the experience of the project leads, I believe they will be able to pull this off and so I believe this project deserves to be funded. Significant impact considering the relatively low grant amount. Meets strategy goals around new readers and audiences. More or less seeks to replicate a project previously run under a 2018 Rapid Grant, but this time expanding it to three radio programs. There is potential for impact in terms of building awareness and exposure to Wikipedia in target communities but not enough evidence of how this project will continue to have a positive impact at the end of the grant. The budget is not too high but the project could use clarification. For example, why does this outreach project consider radio as preferable to social media? Did they investigate about the use of the radio in Nigeria and the access to internet? After reading the report for the same project which was funded by WMF and led by the same team, it was clear that participation was great and page views increased within the period of the contest. But what wasn't clear to me is whether all or some of the participants who participated in the radio contest, continued using Wikipedia after the radio show ended or not. If a good number of the participants continue to use Wikipedia after the radio show ends, then I would say the project was a success but if after each occurrence of the radio show a few or majority of participants do not continue using Wikipedia, it will be best for organizers to find out from the participants why they do not continue using Wikipedia before they seek to organize subsequent shows. Innovative use of the medium of radio. Would like to understand more about the potential in working working with Wikipedias in the local languages and uploading the radio segments to Commons. What is the potential of doing similar campaigns in other regions? How can this activity also be used to identify gaps in the content about Nigeria in English Wikipedia? Grantee has previously run a similarly scoped project. Proposal does not provide enough details about the social media campaign. Yes the scope can be accomplished in 12 months or less and the budget is realistic. Track record from previous project. I have concerns about the breach of people's privacy in the social media screenshots included in the previous project's evaluation report. Would like to see a plan to engage participants after the radio show - for example, by surveying them a number of months later to see if they continue to use Wikipedia. Would also like to know if grantee plans to engage with Wikimedia User Group Nigeria The Nigerian Wikimedia community will be involved in this but there are no endorsements from any of the community members so it is really unclear to me if the community is in support of this. Would be willing to support if project scope decreased to 2 radio programs (and budget reduced appropriately) and there is an evaluation/post engagement plan with participants The plan is to broadcast and to use social media but the project is unclear: Why is this the best solution for outreach? Why might the radio be a good channel of communication for Nigeria? I don't see the problem this project intended to solve in the target Wikipedia (English Wikipedia). One of the problems of the English Wikipedia isn't readership. English Wikipedia is the most popular and widely read Wikipedia of all language versions. If this is targeted at local languages (Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo) Wikipedia for example, I'd be happy to recommend it for funding. It is also not clear how this grantee plans to evaluate impact. They listed the pageview tool (Tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/) as what they would use to evaluate impact. Pageview tool does not give information about a number of readers from a specific country. They simply cannot evaluate the impact with this tool. There is no timeline for this project. For example, there is no information on when this project would start (if funded) and end. The grantee wrote "15 minutes bi-weekly) and budgeted 3,165 USD for airtime. 1. How much will be paid to each station as airtime? 2. How many weeks will the program run per station? 3. 900 USD was budgeted as a stipend for the presenter. It isn't clear from the proposal how many hours this presenter would be working to determine the remuneration per hour. 4. 330 USD was budgeted for logistics, it isn't clear from this proposal what the logistics would cover. 5. 900 USD was budgeted for "token for winner". WMF does not give cash prize. 900 USD is a lot for gift and could be reduced to 500 USD depending on the type of gift to be awarded. 6. The 400 USD budgeted for project management is reasonable. I'd like to recuse myself from scoring this proposal as I have met the grantee in person even thou I have no relationship with them. I decided to provide this feedback based on my experience as a co-producer of a Wikimedia radio programs. From the looks of things, this project can help increase readership for a certain period, which is during the time the show is ongoing but it is not certain or clear as to whether few or majority of the participants will continue using Wikipedia after the show and so that makes it quite risky investing in this project. If I do not come across other projects which are much attainable and will yield plausible results than this, then will recommend this for funding. Would like to see more to address Wikipedias in the local languages/dialects, uploading the radio segments to Commons, addressing the ethical considerations of working with social media/instant messaging apps, and potential to connect competition participants to activities by affiliates/organizers in their region.

Opportunity to respond to committee comments in the next week

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal. Based on their initial review, a majority of committee reviewers have not recommended your proposal for funding. You can read more about their reasons for this decision in their comments above. Before the committee finalizes this decision, they would like to provide you with an opportunity to respond to their comments.

Next steps:

1. Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback carefully and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page by 5pm UTC on Tuesday, May 11, 2021. If you make any revisions to your proposal based on committee feedback, we recommend that you also summarize the changes on your talkpage.
2. The committee will review any additional feedback you post on your talkpage before making a final funding decision. A decision will be announced Thursday, May 27, 2021.

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 00:46, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Answers to Questions

Hello Marti (WMF),

Thank you for the chance to respond; unfortunately, I was not able to respond to the questions on time as I was caught up in other things. Also, I think five days is not enough time, considering the times we are in. About your concern in reaching the public, The project is a radio show, so the people we are targeting are the listeners of the various popular radio show in three geopolitical zones.

On the matter of sustained impact at the end of the grant; many listeners would be enlightened and eager to join the different community to learn how to edit Wikipedia. Moreover, the whole aim of this project is to increase readership and awareness of English Wikipedia amongst Nigerians. To take into account, the above consideration sustained impact; we can put measures or ways to evaluate this aspect through a survey for listeners who participate by sending in their answers.

On the question: Why radio? Radio in Nigeria has a broad reach across all ages and is usually a fun way to engage Nigerians. Besides, listeners are not only listening; they will participate with their mobile devices to check the answers to the question in Wikipedia and send it to the designated channel to stand a chance to win.

For evaluating impact, yes, the pageviews do not give specific information about the location of page viewers. Still, with the Whatapp, we can track the number of participants to ensure that the impact is tangible, the same way it was done in the previous project.

Project timeline: The project will start July and end in October 2020, a three months period.

Targeting local language Wikipedia: Unfortunately, I can't guarantee a high impact because the Igbo and Yoruba Mainpage do not have featured articles, pictures of the day, etc. like the English Wikipedia. So the user experience for the listeners I suspect won't be good enough to make them participate again. On the questions:

• • 1. How much will be paid to each station as airtime?
    • $1055

• • 2. How many weeks will the program run per station?
    • 4 weeks
  • 3. 900 USD was budgeted as a stipend for the presenter. It isn't clear from the proposal how many hours this presenter would be working to determine the remuneration per hour.
    • Usually, two presenters anchor the show weekly. For the three radio stations, we will be having 6 presenters that will anchor a total of 12 radio shows.

--Uzoma 02:00, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Previous results

I've given another look at the 2018 edition per the comments above.

• I wish we could do without WhatsApp: it's creepy. Do we really need to collect people's phone numbers? We now have some more options for microcontributions, OAuth etc. than we had in 2018; you can now choose some tool where people in a few taps will be able to make an edit or sign a wiki page (maybe the outreach dashboard or the Wikidata game?).
• I appreciate that some of the episodes used the correct Wikipedia logo. Please try not to use the pre-2010 logo.
• As a European user, I admit I'm not that interested in increasing traffic from Africa to the English Wikipedia, which smells of neocolonialism, although sadly it attracts 97 % of traffic from Nigeria as of September 2018. The traffic spikes on Monday for the English Wikipedia seem rather inconclusive to me.
• I'm however happy to see what seem to be genuine spikes in pageviews in May 2018 for yo, ig, ff and ha Wikipedias. The "unique devices" numbers are probably more useful but they start in April 2018.

Nemo 09:33, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Thank you Nemo for your suggestions. I do understand your concerns you about the Whatsapp. Still, honestly, I think I will take the blame for the privacy issue as I would have edited the screenshot before using it for my documentation (I did not have a good understanding of privacy issues then). About using outreach dashboard I don't think it will work in this case as this proposal is not about adding content but about consuming it (readership and awareness)

I understand your concerns about drawing traffic to English Wikipedia. However, I hope to use my learnings and evaluations for this project to replicate it for language Wikipedia. Also, the Igbo and Yoruba Wikipedia not having an organised MainPage is a challenge I will face and will need to find a way around it. The Wikipedia Logo was a bit confusing, but thanks to Amir Aharoni for bringing to my notice and helping me see the difference.

Uzoma 18:48, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

I understand your frustration with the lack of development of the smaller Wikipedias but your past project shows you can have a big impact on them, so don't give up. As for the dashboard, you may not have a use for its contribution statistics, but the single-click registration is quite useful and may make the WhatsApp messages redundant. Nemo 20:12, 19 May 2020 (UTC)

Round 1 2020 decision

This project has not been selected for a Project Grant at this time.

We love that you took the chance to creatively improve the Wikimedia movement. The committee has reviewed this proposal and not recommended it for funding. This was a very competitive round with many good ideas, not all of which could be funded in spite of many merits. We appreciate your participation, and we hope you'll continue to stay engaged in the Wikimedia context.

Comments regarding this decision:
We will not be funding your project this round. The committee is in support of projects to raise awareness about Wikipedia, however, they would like to see you develop a stronger evaluation plan for tracking impact. Without such a plan, the committee is concerned there will be now way to understand whether the project is creating significant change or not. In addition, the committee would like a better plan for addressing privacy concerns in how you communicate with participants.

Next steps: Applicants whose proposals are declined are welcome to consider resubmitting your application again in the future. You are welcome to request a consultation with staff to review any concerns with your proposal that contributed to a decline decision, and help you determine whether resubmission makes sense for your proposal.

Over the last year, the Wikimedia Foundation has been undergoing a community consultation process to launch a new grants strategy. Our proposed programs are posted on Meta here: Grants Strategy Relaunch 2020-2021. If you have suggestions about how we can improve our programs in the future, you can find information about how to give feedback here: Get involved. We are also currently seeking candidates to serve on regional grants committees and we'd appreciate it if you could help us spread the word to strong candidates--you can find out more here. We will launch our new programs in July 2021. If you are interested in submitting future proposals for funding, stay tuned to learn more about our future programs.

-- On behalf of the Project Grants Committee, Morgan Jue (WMF) (talk) 19:25, 29 May 2020 (UTC)