Since you raise chapter scholarships, it would be nice to see some of the other big chapters (and to some extent the WMF) spending more on scholarships for rank-and-file Wikimedians rather than staff and board members. That might help with the perception that Wikimania is the same old faces year in, year out. 

Harry Mitchell
http://enwp.org/User:HJ
+44 (0) 7507 536 971
Skype: harry_j_mitchell

On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 1:50 PM, Chris Keating <chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com> wrote:
Let's imagine a totally fair, but not very good process: Scholarships
get allocated completely at random. Some people would keep getting
allocated scholarships, entirely randomly.

Therefore, the observation that some people get scholarships several
years in a row is not strong evidence that the selection process is
somehow biased towards a select few...

(I mean, it is biased, towards people mainly active in smaller
language projects and from the Global South - that's quite deliberate
- and then it's biased towards Germans, because WMDE offers dozens of
scholarships for Germans outside of the WMF scheme. But those are
separate issues....)

Chris

On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 1:25 PM, Vira Motorko <vira.motorko@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all, I'd like to add a few words.
> Applicants tend to forget that same people are likely to be selected if same
> people are applying.
> I do not think that it is a first job of scholarship committee to check that
> every year there are new people. If certain community has a problem that
> Wikimedians go to Wikimania but fail to report back to the community and do
> not bring back new knowledge, then it should be discussed within the
> community. I do believe that local community can find a way to encourage or
> discourage people to apply for a scholarship.
> If there is trust in the community, discussions within it will bring ease.
> For example, different applicants can gather and compare their applications,
> and decide for themselves why scholarship committee liked this one better
> than that one. And write better application next time. Talk to each other,
> people.
>
> Best regards,
> user:Ата,
> applied but did not receive scholarship in 2012, 2013, and 2014; received
> scholarship in 2015 and 2016; haven't apply since; gave advice to several
> other people with their applications
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimania-l mailing list
> Wikimania-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l
>

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