On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Jessie Wild jwild@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 11:02 AM, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
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?
Applications are scored on different dimensions (see selection criteria), and these scores are weighted. One score has to do explicitly participation in WIkimedia projects, and this carries the biggest weight. Edit count is a factor taken into consideration with participation.
...except the geographic quotas (I believe we had those in 2012, at least?) combined with paucity of candidates did result in some scholars who were not active editors (i.e. edited less than 5 times a month). Of the 7 scholarships accepted by people from sub-Saharan Africa in 2012, only 3 went to active editors.
Asaf