Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Flávia Varella/Contest Theory of History

Comments from DSaroyan (WMF)

Hello Flávia Varella, thanks so much for submitting this new Rapid Grant request. We are excited about your first Rapid Grant proposal and activities you plan to carry out. I have a few questions about your project:

• In the proposal you mentioned that Wikisul has developed a strong program about research in the theory of history. Could you please provide more details about this research?
• You also mentioned that you would provide a list of suggested articles in the project page. Could you please share this list with us or if it’s still under development — a few examples of articles that you plan to improve and edit?
• Given the project scope and number of participants, we think that the prize budget is high. We kindly request to reduce the prize budget to 400 USD (including merchandise for top participants).
• We now require all grantees to announce their projects and receive the Wikimedia community feedback in advance. Could you please announce this project and grant on the relevant community pages on the target wikis? Community notification may be most appropriate on a village pump, talk page, or mailing list. Please paste a link into the proposal page to where the relevant communities have been notified of this proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions.

Looking forward to hearing from you soon. All the best, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 11:08, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

DSaroyan (WMF): I will let Flavia answer the questions, but I ask you to visit the project's page, as I believe you will be able to clear up many of your doubts: Wikisul User Group/Projects/Theory of History on Wikipedia. Best,--Felipe da Fonseca (talk) 11:17, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

@Felipe da Fonseca: thank you! The project page clarifies the first two questions. I'm looking forward to hearing from Flávia regarding the last two requests. Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 15:02, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Hello DSaroyan (WMF)! I am also excited with my first Rapid Grant proposal. I hope everything runs well! I answer your questions bellow. Please, feel free to contact me if they do not clarify your doubts.

• In the proposal you mentioned that Wikisul has developed a strong program about research in the theory of history. Could you please provide more details about this research?

Of course. Since 2018, we develop the project Theory of History on Wikipedia which have created 7 featured articles in a topic very dry to wikimedians, and another 3 articles that are good contributions, but we think that a not so high to be a featured article. We also created more than 100 articles to complement the readership of our "main articles". I can affirm to you that Wiki.pt has the best content on theory of history, and I am proud to be part of it. I would like to highlight that we are also recruiting particularly good editors to the platform. In the middle of 2020, I took a break of the project because I gave birth to my second child, and, of course, the pandemic situation makes a really mess in the life of all of us. Anyway, now I think that is a good time to continue with the project on wiki.

• You also mentioned that you would provide a list of suggested articles in the project page. Could you please share this list with us or if it’s still under development — a few examples of articles that you plan to improve and edit?

Sure! We are planning to use in the contest some articles of the category Theory of History, as Microhistory and Anachronism. As you can see in the history of the category, we already have done a lot of work including entries on it. I think that now it is possible to spread this movement to include more entries that exist in Wiki.pt but are not categorized. We will not select all the articles in the category to the contest because some of them are a little bit complicated, I mean we will not work on extremely sensitive articles, as Karl Marx. We are also planning to make some suggestions of inexistent articles in Portuguese, I can give to you as an example historia magistra vitae.

• Given the project scope and number of participants, we think that the prize budget is high. We kindly request to reduce the prize budget to 400 USD (including merchandise for top participants).

I agree with you that the prize budget is high, but we must be aware that the contest topic is a very dry one and that as a first contest we must captivate our audience. I also have chatted on Parzeus and Hedestad by email, who have some expertise in grant topic, and they have advised me to start with a low expectation. They have run the first História na Wiki edit-a-thon, and have realized that the first event is always more difficult to engage participants. We also must consider that we are talking about featured articles, which take a lot of time and research to be done. If, as you suggest, we reduce the prize budget for 400 USD I think that we will not achieve our goals and will have to reduce the prize for the top 3, including merchandise. I am not sure if the savings are worth it.

• We now require all grantees to announce their projects and receive the Wikimedia community feedback in advance. Could you please announce this project and grant on the relevant community pages on the target wikis? Community notification may be most appropriate on a village pump, talk page, or mailing list. Please paste a link into the proposal page to where the relevant communities have been notified of this proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions.

I will do this today.

All the best Flávia Varella (talk) 15:25, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Comments from past experiences

Hello all!

I am excited to see this proposal emerge. The program Flávia Varella leads on ptwiki is impressive, and it is great to see it growing and getting more ambitious!

I have some experience with leading wikicontests in our community, as Wiki Movimento Brasil has organized six of them in the last two years (four on Wikipedia; two on Commons). I thought it might be good to provide some points on what we have learned so far:

• If there is a real investment in communication, as there should, given the budget that we normally work with for prizes, and assuming a wikicontest is open to all, we expect around 500 to 1,000 participants. Our last contest on Wikipedia had 640 participants;
• Newbies we attract have real challenges to edit complicated topics and will normally make tons of smaller edits on many articles, instead of developing one full article. To prevent frustration from newbies, who are normally ~90% of the participants, we have relied on a group of three or four editors to supervise edits, sharing daily time slots. The rate and pace of edits is really accelerated in the first and last weeks of the contest;
• Tools and resources that exist are not great for close, simultaneous supervision of wikicontests that attract many participants. We rely on the Outreach Dashboard for participant registration but on the tool analytics are not updated fast enough. We are currently developing a new tool to improve supervision, that will be made available next year. We also plan to document better how we have organized our contests;
• It was very important to set up webinars to teach editing for the newbies: we normally have them every other week. In these webinars, it is also important to present contest rules --that should be very clearly laid out, as you will receive many emails and on-wiki questions about them.

I think the aforementioned points should really be taken into consideration to prevent frustration from participants and the organizing team, and the community that will also be watching edits from newbies in a really fast pace and might get overwhelmed. My intuition would be you might want to make the topic broader and have some extra points to assess article development. This is what we did: here. It is also important to note this is a lot of work!

We are about to launch a new wikicontest, from July 10 to August 31, in the context of a program of ours called Wiki Loves Bahia: official page. The page framework might be useful as a model.

I hope this was helpful. Good luck and have fun! --Joalpe (talk) 17:01, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

Hello Joalpe! Good to see you here! Many thanks for the tips which will be of great help. I also would like to thank you for leading the wikicontest Casa Brasileira which I took part and have been an inspiration for this grant proposal.

I didn’t notice that the wikicontest Museu do Ipiranga has had a bonus to featured and good articles. Excellent idea! We should do the same to attract more participants, but it involves changes in our timeline because the user will take at least 42 days to have the answer about the nomination. It is a particularly good way to stimulate the participants to do the nomination by themselves.

I look forward to being accepted as a guinea pig for the new tool to improve supervision on contests! Flávia Varella (talk) 23:21, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

@Flávia Varella: Hey. We are happy to grant you access to the tool if you would like to check it out. Information on access request is available on the tool page: here. As I said, this is still a work-in-progress, so, on the one hand, I apologize for possible bugs and, on the other hand, I am grateful if you report bugs and other issues, so we can further develop it. Cheers. --Joalpe (talk) 14:49, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Hi Joalpe! Now I don't have all the information requested for use the tool, but when I have, I certainly will be in touch. It will be a pleasure to help in its development. Thank you! Flávia Varella (talk) 01:20, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

@Flávia Varella: Cool! I wish you luck, though you do not really need it: projects you lead are always great! Talk soon. --Joalpe (talk) 02:12, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

@Flávia Varella I reiterate. I and others at WMB are available to help with understanding and using the tool, as well as generally helping with any task.

Please contact me or others in WMB, through any channels you find convenient. I see you're still in our slack workspace, I'm generally very responsive in telegram and e-mail or Wiki talk pages will also work. Chico Venancio (talk) 19:59, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Hello @Chicocvenancio: Thank you very much for your willingness to help. All of you of WMB have much more experience in Wikimedia matters than I and your help is always greatly appreciated. Flávia Varella (talk) 01:56, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

• Hi Flávia Varella, Hi Joalpe, I requested information about the platform on pt.wiki (here), where it was announced, but they didn't make room for questions. As I have posted elsewhere, I understand that the last platform was too complicated, evaluated only quantitatively and had security issues, so if there is no possibility to make questions on this one from WMB, I suggest not using it. --Felipe da Fonseca (talk) 19:59, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Felipe da Fonseca. You are of course free not to use the tool if you think it does not meet your expectations and needs. It is nonetheless available if you decide to give it a try. Cheers. --Joalpe (talk) 22:11, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Flávia Varella, as you can see, they are not open to questions and real help. Well, I not only do not recommend using the platform, I am against it until its creators are willing to talk about it.--Felipe da Fonseca (talk) 23:33, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

@Flávia Varella, don't worry. @Albertoleoncio is pretty responsive to bug reports. And if somehow he does not respond I can overcome my aversion to PHP just to make sure the tool works well for you. Chico Venancio (talk) 02:05, 30 June 2021 (UTC)

Thanks @Chicocvenancio:! If I need a hand I will certainly talk with @Albertoleoncio: ;) Flávia Varella (talk) 01:56, 1 July 2021 (UTC)

Additional comments

Dear Flávia Varella, thanks for your comprehensive responses. Your project plan sounds great to us! Our only concern is still the amount of prize budget. While we recognize the quality work you have done and will do, as well as the topic difficulty, we cannot support 900 USD for the prizes and merchandize. We discussed and decided to support 500 USD for the prizes and merchandize; this is the maximum amount we'll fund for these expenses. Please kindly update your proposed budget and let us know. I'm really sorry for any inconvenience caused. All the best, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 10:09, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Dear DSaroyan (WMF) No worries. I really appreciate Wikimedia support and trust in this project. I have changed the prizes and merchandize budget. I chose to delete the merchandize budget because it might have less impact in the contest. Could you answer one more question? Is there any limit for prizes budget in rapid grants or the limit of 400-500 USD is for newbies? All the best Flávia Varella (talk) 22:33, 28 June 2021 (UTC)

Hi Flávia Varella, thank you so much! Based on the project scale, we would recommend differnt prize budgets. For example, if the project is an international one with different communities and high number of participants, we can approve higher prize budgets. But for the local events, we usually support 100-600 USD budget — based on the number of participants and project type. We do this because the budget for Rapid Grants is also limited. Additionaly, we don't want to make prizes the only motivating factor for event participants. Experience with Wikimedia Foundation grants usually don't impact on this decision. Please let me know if you have any other questions. We'll get back to you soon. Good luck, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 07:47, 29 June 2021 (UTC)

Question about gifts

Hello DSaroyan (WMF), I have started my report and since I have some time to finish it and we have a remaining budget, I would like to ask you if could be possible to use it to thank the jury for their time and consideration, and to recognize the efforts of the wikicontest team. The budget would be spent in promotional material and shipping. All the best --Flávia Varella (talk) 18:46, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

Hello Flávia Varella, thank you for this question. Yes, please feel free to use the remaining budget to send appreciation gifts for the jury members. Please note that cash gifts are ineligible expenses, so please don't offer cash as gifts; other types of gifts are fine! Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 09:52, 18 October 2021 (UTC)