On Thu, Apr 20, 2017 at 6:43 AM,
WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Pine,
You wouldn't get transparency simply by publishing a list of applicants. You would
only get transparency by publishing a list of applications, including any other info being
used by the scholarship committee. For example if they want to give priority to people
who they have previously declined, they could only do that transparently by including
previous applications. Otherwise you have list of applicants and when you query why a
decision was made to give a scholarship to one person and not another all that people can
say is that "judging by the applications we think we made the right choice". OK
you could redact some data they hopefully ignore such as real name and exact contact
details. But simply publishing part of the information used to make a decision does not
enable you to understand how people came to the decisions they did.
As for whether the community is plateauing or growing, from the stats I monitor or help
maintain, the English Wikipedia community at least has rebounded significantly since the
2014 low. More importantly from the perspective of things like Wikimania, the community
seems to be greying and stabilising. Not many editors under 18 attend Wikimania, and
several of the roles that Risker talks of are limited to legal adults; so the decline in
our number of minors at a time of general growth should mean we have many more people
available for such roles or who are likely to attend things like Wikimania.
Regards
WereSpielChequers
On 20 Apr 2017, at 08:31, Pine W
<wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'll respond to Risker and DerHexer in a single email.
Pine, have you noticed how we're seeing fewer
and fewer well-qualified community members actively seeking out the responsibility of
various committee roles?
While I haven't looked at committees' member applications in some time, it
wouldn't surprise me if a dwindling pool of highly qualified applicants is a problem.
My understanding from the information that I see from WMF Analytics is that our population
has somewhat plateaued. I've been thinking for awhile about how to address this
problem, and while I think that there are ways of making incremental progress such as with
the Wikipedia in Education Program and the engagement of more enthusiasts for particular
subjects like cultural heritage or public health, I have yet to imagine a way to make
significant progress. I'd be glad to have an off-list conversation with you about that
subject.
It's because they are being bombarded, more
and more, by unreasonable levels of criticism. I can say this with a fair bit of
authority because I've been involved inhigh-profile committees, task forces, steering
groups and responsible
roles for 8 years, and the level of criticism has definitely affected where I'm
willing to invest my volunteer efforts. I turn down 10 attempts to recruit me for various
tasks for every one I accept, and I'm not alone.
I don't volunteer for Arbcom for similar reasons: too much stress and conflict, and
too little gratitude. WMF is working on some of the civility issues, but that's a long
journey. Again, I'd be glad to have an off-list conversation about that sometime.
The Wikimania Scholarship Committee does work
that will never satisfy everyone, and all of their decisions will be found wanting by some
segment of the community. It is a very difficult job - there are so many factors to weigh
that,
even though there are some basic minimal levels of activity expected, deciding between a
candidate with a few thousand edits who is one of the most proliferate editors of a small
wiki (e.g., the editor mainly translates high-value articles
and posts them in a single edit) against one who specializes in high quality images (but
only uploads 50 a year) against one > who averages 15,000 edits but mainly works in
anti-vandalism, against one who has few on-wiki
contributions but has trained and educated dozens of very productive editors....well, you
see the challenge. These are all valuable contributors - but their contribution to the
movement is very different, and those who value some of those
contributions over others will find personal justification in complaining about the
decisions the committee makes.
There may be some reasonable arguments about
providing some aggregate information such as the number of applicants from different
regions and the percentage that were successful....but again, there are other routes to
Wikimania
including scholarships from large chapters, which often sponsor community members from
other regions, and often select recipients from the pool of WMF-sponsored scholarship
applicants.
I think that publishing the usernames of the applicants, the decisions made by the
committee, and perhaps some other aggregate information would be a good move in the spirit
of transparency, if done in future years when applicants can be told in advance that this
will be done. I anticipate that there will be disagreements, but civil discussions are
beneficial to inform future work of the Committee as well as community and WMF practices
and policies.
Of course, there is an easier way to affect the
outcome of these discussions. Sign up in late 2017/early 2018 to become a member of the
scholarship committee.
No thank you.
On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 12:41 AM, DerHexer
<derhexer(a)wikipedia.de> wrote:
Hi,
transparency on the selection can only work when also the application texts are public
because we have many very active Wikimedians who are not very clear about what they ever
did or actually do, how this is relevant to Wikimania and if they are able to and want to
share this at Wikimania and back in their local communities afterwards. However, if only
the results were published, there could be no useful discussion between the committee and
others without information from the application texts.
I think that partial information is better than none. However, I think there's room
for discussion about what kinds of information should be made public; for example it might
be that individual users' countries aren't published in the scholarships
announcement if the user hasn't themselves already declared that information publicly.
I am mindful of the safety of scholarship applicants who live in countries where their
participation in Wikipedia might place them at risk, and I would take that into
consideration when designing the reports that are published. Also, I think it's
reasonable to withhold the prose application texts that applicants write to the Committee
for privacy and safety reasons.
But when applications are public, it would make absolutely no sense to have a committee
for the selection because every decision by the committe could be easily be debated. When
the expertise of the committee is questioned, people would be hesitant to participate as
already described in this thread. Hence, only a public selection done by the community as
a replacement for the committee would make sense.
Grant applications are public, and we have grants committees, and those committees'
decisions are subject to review and occasional debate. It seems to me that the Wikimania
Scholarship Committee should align itself with the grants committees in publishing
decisions. Discussions and debates, when done civilly, can be informative and lead to
better decisions in the future.
When the community would decide on the applications, we had to define who would be part
of that community: who's eligible to vote on these? should the votes be public? would
large discussions be allowed? etc. As we have lots of experience with public elections, we
can also easily name the disadvantages of these: Popularity contests for only those people
who can stand public criticism, sometimes by few very loud destructive people or even
enemy groups, on everything they every did. Tons of people would be refrain from applying
at all, something we strongy have to face at the moment with elections for adminship or
other committees as pointed out by Risker.
I'm having a little difficulty understanding this paragraph, so please help me
understand. Is the concern about electing the members of the Scholarship Committee, or is
the concern about direct public votes on individual scholarship applications?
Of course, we had transparency as a result and more public discussions around the
selection, but we would have no safe space for applicants at all (also in terms of
sensitive data like personal living conditions and anonymity). I see no third working
model besides these and my preference would clearly be the committee. But if you like, you
can, of course, seek consensus on the other model. I will raise my concerns there as
pointed out here.
As I stated above, I think that publishing some information to enhance transparency and
inform future decisions can be done while withholding other information for the safety and
privacy of applicants.
From my perspective, the purpose of making decisions of the Scholarship Committee more
transparent is *not* to foster controversy or debate for their own sake. My hope is that
more transparency would foster civil discussion, promote learning, and facilitate
improvements in future years for the committee as well as for the WMF and the community in
general.
Pine
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