As is evident in the selection criteria the scholarship committee puts forth, contributions on our wiki projects is the key component to receiving a scholarship. The scores are so close, it is really difficult (impossible?) to receive a scholarship from WMF without having contributions on wiki. The committee also tries to look at someone's contributions in relation to his/her local-wiki context. One specific example of this is a former scholar from the Kyrgyz Wikipedia. On first glance, it looked like her aggregate edit count was low, but on further digging the committee realized she had only been editing for a year, and was already a top 5 contributor on that wiki!

Just so I understand, are you saying that scholarship applicants are rated based on a score, and that this score is primarily derived from edit count?