Grants talk:Project/Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory (WCDO)

Eligibility confirmed, round 2 2017

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 2 2017 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through 17 October 2017.

The committee's formal review for round 2 2017 begins on 18 October 2017, and grants will be announced 1 December. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 21:39, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

How the dashboard will help close culture gaps, and how it will be maintained

I think this is an exceptionally well-planned research study. However, the proposal to build the WCDO needs additional justification, in my opinion. The authors say "Based on the experience with the gender bias or gap (Klein et al., 2015) it is reasonable to think that if there were research quantifying the extent of the problem, communities would be more aware of it and would organize effective actions to fight it." While this is true, it's not clear to me that this rationale in and of itself motivates the creation of a dashboard/web app. For example, why could good research paper + blog posts and social media outreach, public static visualizations, and a well-documented open datasets not accomplish the same end (making communities aware so that they fix they are motivated to address the problem) as an application)?

My concerns are that new tools are complex and costly, they are not guarenteed to motivate editors to perform certain behaviors, and that they need to be maintained to be useful. The long-term maintenance strategy for this project is not well defined yet: "Considering that the statistics and data visualizations are proposed to be automated, the project, as a website and dataset will continue operative after the grant ends. Some maintenance is required to keep it running, however, the website and datasets will be hosted on Tool Labs, and open source repositories such as FigShare. It is expected that the project will grow by receiving support by other community or academic peers which want to implement their visualization derived from cultural diversity data." Most tool developers in the Wikimedia Movement would love others to jump onboard and maintain the software we create. But often, that doesn't happen. How/why will this project be different?

I would recommend that the project focus on performing the research necessary to quantify existing culture gaps among articles, and making those data openly available and broadly accessible (through spreading the word widely; publishing and documenting code, data, and research outcomes openly; and making easy-to-read-and-understand representations of the data and conclusions available online, in perpetuity). Dashboards/web apps/clever interactive visualizations can be good things, and can help motivate people to action, but it is not a given that building such tools will have that outcome. And building and maintaining such tools is significantly more expensive in time and money than many other mechanisms for making research & data available, accessible, and usable. Jtmorgan (talk) 16:08, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you so much for your kind words, Jtmorgan. Your advice is very valuable to me so I can focus my efforts on some particular aspects. I will try to answer your different points.

Firstly, you question the usefulness of a dashboard/web app as a method/tool in comparison to other iniatives (social media outreach, blog posts,...) which would also raise awareness. I totally agree that an interactive dashboard cannot be (and is not) the core of the project. In fact, I have written dynamic or 'updated', which is a bit different.

I already have obtained some of the results I am planning to deliver here but only for 40 language editions. I want to bring this process forward improving the method and extending it to all the language and visualize the results in a site as a way of spreading it, but of course I also plan to complement the visualizations with blog posts, documented open datasets among others. I named it 'observatory' so it could include these several things.

Dynamic does not always imply 'interactive' in a playful way (expecting that the fun is helpful per se), it just means that the graphs necessarily change because Wikipedia language editions change. For example, one my solutions is to provide a list of 100 articles from each language edition context (geography, biographies, etc.) that should be in every other language (kind of the priority part of the gap). This may be useful as 'static', but why not updating them it when language editions get to cover these articles?

Secondly, you also mention the maintenance issue as an aspect to take into account. I will automatize the code so it can continue generating the site, the visualizations and the datasets. I am sure that it will bring valuable results for the communities, so it pays the effort to continue the project and extend it either inside or outside WMF. In fact, I must say that I have first started studying Wikipedia language editions cultural content 6 years ago, and I plan to watch for its functioning after the project end.

I would certaintly love others to join the project and the truth is that I do not know if this will happen. I have seen beautiful research projects/sites based on Wikipedia like Manypedia, Contropedia, etc. and they all provide insights about how Wikipedia is contextualized, but they hardly ever aim at helping editors at providing them something to improve their language editions. Since this is a research project aimed at the communities (a further step than my PhD thesis), I plan to stablish communication channels with every community. I will necessarily wear an activist hat.

Thirdly and lastly, you insist on focusing on specific results, making the data and research available and communicating it properly. I appreciate your insistance on creating less expensive tools in terms of maintenance, since you have a lot of experience on that. I will also try to balance my efforts so I can take the actions which guarantee the most impact in terms of community spread. Thanks again for your comments. --Marcmiquel (talk) 20:00, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Most popular medical articles by language

We did this back in 2013 for medical articles.

We published this table on similarity of medical readership between major languages.[1] Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 03:36, 12 October 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for your contribution, Doc James. I believe interlanguage collaboration is one of the most important directions to work on in the entire Wikimedia (and I am just pointing out the cultural and unique aspects). Sharing knowledge and efforts across languages has only benefits! :) --Marcmiquel (talk) 14:59, 15 October 2017 (UTC)

General comment

Hi and thank you for your work, both in this grant submission and before. It is very interesting and I look forward to see you at the diversity conference :) I have several questions, feel free to reorganize them if needed Léna (talk) 17:16, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Dear Léna, my apologies for not replying earlier but I had a very busy week. I will reply to your questions in their corresponding subsections. Thanks a lot for your questions, as they help me and allow me to explain myself a bit better. --Marcmiquel (talk) 23:12, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Outreach

Relationship with other initiatives

Could you tell us how you intend to relate to Wikimedia projects such as Who's Knowledge and Las Imprescindibles ? Léna (talk) 17:16, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Honestly, I did not know about Who's Knowledge since in my condition of researcher I do not follow every initiative. As far as I've seen, I consider it is very aligned, so I think there are some things to learn about it in terms of activism (to see what work, etc.). I see that its scope is quite wide (it wants to focus on points of view and diversity in very different senses, from LGTBQI to indigenous), so I am sure that the project that I am presenting could be of interest to its members. I will contact them.

In regards of Las Imprescindibles, I am in touch with members of Wikimujeres (Spanish and Catalan Wikipedia) and they told me about it. Addressing the gender gap is not the priority of this project. However, when I knew about it, I thought that identifying the articles about women (with WikiData or by other means) and analyzing their prominence (in number of incoming links, etc.) could be helpful to create lists from every language. Many solutions could apply...We can talk about it in Diversity Conference. --Marcmiquel (talk) 23:19, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

General outreach strategy

Reading your proposal, I am under the impression that you focus on individual wikipedian contributors and/or small wikipedian communities (and you received a lot of support/engagement in this area which is really great !). On the other hand, your visits to chapters/user groups is late in your projects, and your plan does not include outreach to existing communities outside of the Wikimedia movement (what Les Sans PagEs is doing for instance : looking for communities of women and teaching them how to edit). If it a conscious choice, could you explain the reasons behind it ? Léna (talk) 17:16, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I think that you are correct that outreach is not planned with many visits - instead, as you have seen, I received many collaborators. I want to have one stakeholder at each community so they are able to spread the results, the tools, and the project in general, in their native language in their channels (Facebook, mailing list, etc.) for a matter of practicity. This is a limited project of 6 months. For this reason I need to 1) priority energies on building the site and tools and 2) leave more outreach for a future extension... By the way, I do not focus on small wikipedian communities but on all of them. Each language edition has one or several contexts... the idea is to exchange among all the languages. Perhaps the smaller languages are more aware of the need to explain themselves to the world. In fact, in my disseratation research I saw that many editors 'export' their local articles to other languages. This confirms it somehow. --Marcmiquel (talk) 23:28, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Budget

Taxes

You speak about 30% of taxes. Is it part of the taxation that is paid by your employer and you have to pay yourself since you are self-employed and thus should not be counted as a salary ? Léna (talk) 17:16, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

That's correct. I would be self-employed. Therefore, I would count on the fees for being self-employed, the taxes and the procedures to pay them.--Marcmiquel (talk) 23:30, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Travel costs

You included the travel costs to go to Wikimania in the budget, which I think is a really good things. However you didn't included the costs for the Diversity Conference, nor the Hackathon (at least the registration costs ;)) and the visits to the chapters. Why these travels/events are not in budget ? Léna (talk) 17:16, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

I did include a budget for Wikimania as I consider it is a very important venue to present the project results and stimulate their use. I did not include Diversity conference in the budget because it is not within the project calendar (it is this week), and I did not include the Hackhaton because it is quite close to where I live in Barcelona and I am part of the Chapter organizing it (Wikimedia Cat). Visiting more chapters is something that would help in the outreach but as I said it cannot be done within this calendar. Hence, it is not planned yet. --Marcmiquel (talk) 23:37, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Different structures of Wikipedias

Sometimes (often ?), different wikipedias have different ways to present the same content. For instance, some will have one article per episode of a TV Show, while others will have one article per season, with the same content. Is this "structural noise" going to be adressed and how ? Léna (talk) 17:16, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

This is an interesting point. Different languages structure the content in a different way. But I do not see this as something problematic for the goal of exchanging cultural context content across languages... When I collect articles representing each language cultural context, I do it according to its content (meanings). Perhaps one language divides their content into more and shorter articles, while another prefers longer articles. In the end, when an article is worth to be translated to other languages (because it addresses something specific and key to understand a context) it does not matter if it has a normal length or it is extremely long. Perhaps there is another way to look at this cultural aspect of structuring content that makes it more useful, but at the moment I do not see it. Thanks. --Marcmiquel (talk) 23:44, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Website

Finally :) I have several technical questions regarding the website : will it be mono- or multilingual ? Under which licence its code and the data it produced with be shared ? Léna (talk) 17:16, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

It will be multilingual, although I cannot say how many languages. Some of the website content should be in meta and maybe in a Wikiproject (this is something I am really thinking about it). I am also confident that the project participants might want to help in translating the main text from the website or metapages, while the results are automatized. The website will be in CC By-SA 4.0 (Share and Adapt).--Marcmiquel (talk) 23:49, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

By "website", do you just mean a Toolforge webpage which will interact with the abovementioned Meta-Wiki pages? I'm worried that if yet another domain is created it will be hard to work on it, find it or even keep it online after the grant ends, as so often happens. Alternatively, you can get a wmflabs.org instance/domain like http://whgi.wmflabs.org/ if you're comfortable with sysadmin work. --Nemo 11:33, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

This is something to take into account. My goal is make everything as visible and accessible as possible. This is why I think that an instance in .wmflabs.org is a good idea. I am thinking about three spaces: a) wmflabs, b) meta, c) wikiprojects. I am going to think about it during the next days. Thank you very much for your contribution, Nemo. --Marcmiquel (talk) 19:05, 1 November 2017 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Wikipedia Cultural Diversity Observatory (WCDO)

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?	7.2
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	7.6
(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?	7.4
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	8.4
Additional comments from the Committee: The idea of the observatory to support the diversity seems a good approach to the problem. The project fits with Wikimedia's strategic priorities by promoting cultural diversity of the Wikimedia hosted content. It has a significant potential for online impact. The sustainability is more of question. Good fit with strategy as diversity is becoming a more important priority, moderate impact potential, but concern on sustainability I consider the project innovative and its potential is greater than risks. The success can be measured. An innovative solution with rather high risk (good idea but should be used by local organisers) and reasonable targets The scope can be probably accomplished in the requested 6 months time. The budget looks realistic. Although the skills of participant should be checked during the due diligence review - they have limited experience with the Wikimedia projects. The budget is really well thought and detailed. It is feasible, organisers have necessary skills, budget is OK for a project in Europe The community support and engagement are sufficient and the project supports diversity. Excellent community engagement and support of diversity I am inclined to support it though the project should be considered experimental - its results are difficult to predict as everything will depend on the reaction of the community. Since the budget is low and the project is of high value, maybe work with the grantee for a one-year plan instead of a six-month plan. Good innovative idea with high potential and moderate risks

This proposal has been recommended for due diligence review.

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal and recommended it for due diligence review. This means that a majority of the committee reviewers favorably assessed this proposal and have requested further investigation by Wikimedia Foundation staff.

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 and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page.
2. Following due diligence review, a final funding decision will be announced on Thursday, May 27, 2021.

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Thank you very much for the comments and feedback. I am glad the project is moving forward. I keep working on it to take care of every detail and improve its planning. I would like to specifically address two comments from the committee, as they raise different relevant concerns.

(1) "An innovative solution with rather high risk (good idea but should be used by local organisers) and reasonable targets"

I understand that the risk is that the language communities will not embrace the need for creating content related to other cultural contexts than theirs (or their neighbours', according to some of the results of my research). The project I am proposing has several goals, one of them raising awareness on the problem, but obviously, the most important goal is to help bridging the culture gap.

I would say that research findings, datasets and tools are measurable and, in my opinion, very necessary contributions. But the impact in terms of articles created depends mostly on the community engagement, i.e. on the editors. This is why I am proposing a very honest strategy. I plan to invest my energies in my activity as a researcher, developer and project manager (phase 1 and 2 of the project), as these are my strengths, while I aim at finding collaborators to complement me in the outreach and communication (phase 3). In this sense, I created a database with more than 25 volunteers (one per language) with e-mail addresses and usernames, so they can act as key stakeholders in spreading the project and creating synergies with the existing initiatives that may benefit from it (e.g. CEE Spring, Intercultur, Bridges across Cultures, Wikiproject Systemic Bias, among others). Most of these volunteers are already community leaders in their language editions and have been (or still are) involved in relevant projects. Likewise, some existing tools such as Gap Finder and Content Translation could also benefit from specific culturally related data.

(2) "Since the budget is low and the project is of high value, maybe work with the grantee for a one-year plan instead of a six-month plan."

I believe that the period of time I am proposing (6 months) is correct. But I must admit that, as suggested by one of the reviewers, it would be better to have one year at my disposal. I know very well this project, as I conceptualized it during my 4-year PhD research on cultural diversity in Wikipedia, so I have a clear picture of what to expect in terms of data results and tool functioning. I also observed succesful Wikimedia projects that resulted in the creation of successful tools. If I include in the project all the 288 languages, as I consider it should be done, I may have to increase the time dedicated to communication with the community leaders (the present 25 volunteers may increase up to 288) and that may be more time consuming than initially expected. In its present state, the project has been compressed to fit a 6-month period focusing on the most important tasks in order to improve its "acceptability". Nonetheless, I am willing to consider extending it to one year if it is possible. This would also allow me to guarantee a better dissemination of the project to the communities.

(3) "The scope can be probably accomplished in the requested 6 months time. The budget looks realistic. Although the skills of participant should be checked during the due diligence review - they have limited experience with the Wikimedia projects."

I want to show my predisposition to talk openly about participants' skills, either in this page or on any other channel, as I am very committed to the success of the project. The very first moment I was engaged in studying cultural aspects on Wikipedia was 7 years ago (when I joined the Catalan Wikipedia Community association, Amical). Some of the activities that demonstrate my involvement with the movement are listed in my Userpage. But in short: I have been editing and developing readers-editors polls for the Catalan Community, and I have attended several international Wikimedia events (Wikimanias, Wikimedia Diversity, WikiAcademy, Amical gatherings,...), where I presented research and discussed all kinds of projects. This is my first Wikimedia project as a project leader, but I am fortunate to count on many advisers and their experience.

As I already mentioned, I directed my PhD research on studying the cultural diversity of the Wikipedia language editions. This has been a long commitment. I had the chance to publish some results that explain how important it is for editors to write about their context. Besides doing this research, during these years I have studied the available tools and I have been a user of wmflabs. I think this makes me a suitable researcher for the project I am proposing, but at the same time, I am open to suggestions from those who have advice on technical aspects of the project (for instance, whether the website should be in a separate domain or not, the datasets syntaxis and documentation, or how wikidata could be used for proposing article creation across languages...).

I look forward to hearing from you. --Marcmiquel (talk) 15:48, 17 November 2017 (UTC)

Round 2 2017 decision

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for a Project Grant.

The committee has recommended this proposal and WMF has approved funding for the full amount of your request, 16800 EUR

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