Rehman wasn't saying it's impossible, or even hard, to calculate.  He was pointing out a potential psychological benefit that would accrue to some participants (and I can attest they exist) who may *not* have given much thought to the magnitude of the investment in awarding them a scholarship.  As Lodewijk pointed out, however, it can only have an opposite, chilling effect.

   A.

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 4:25 PM Deryck Chan <deryckchan@gmail.com> wrote:
Interesting thoughts. I received a WMF Wikimania scholarship in 2017. WMF's travel agent didn't redact the prices when they sent me the flight tickets and accommodation that they gave me. So I could calculate the exact price tag of my scholarship (flight price + accommodation price + registration price).

Is this a useful quantity to know? Yes - it does give some meat to one's gratitude, and it makes for a good argument for those of us academics who are eligible for multiple sources of funding ("hey, last time WMF sponsored me CA$1400 to go to Wikimania, so I'm a worthy applicant of this university's €500 travel award this year" etc). But I wouldn't place a burden on WMF to calculate this figure in cases where the amount isn't obvious, and we certainly shouldn't ask anyone to calculate the value of the award until the travel and accommodation have been purchased.

--Deryck

On Wed, 17 Apr 2019, 10:11 Rehman Abubakr, <rehman.wikimedia@live.com> wrote:
Hello,

I was a former Wikimania scholarship recipient. To put it briefly, the Wikimania experience was something that I deeply value and will forever cherish. Somewhat sadly though, it is only after quite some years after Wikimania that I actually realised the value of the scholarship award (in monetary terms), that too with loose estimates done by myself purely out of curiosity.

Would it make sense to include the approximate total monetary value of the scholarship award (airfare, lodging, insurance, logistics, etc) within the scholarship award emails to the recipients? I feel this would give much deserving weight in the award itself, as I'm sure many of us isn't aware of the actual amount of resources that is put in a given person's award.


Yours truly,


Rehman Abubakr (Roy)

OTRS agent, Admin (English Wikipedia, Commons), Contributor (Wikidata, Meta)

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