We have many years of running these very similar projects. It should be possible to compare the value of outcomes against each other to see if some use better practices than others, and then to help assess future grant proposals for their potential value against estimated costs.
I agree that outcomes are more than quantity of images, and the large WMF programme evaluation training had precisely the aim of ensuring that all funded projects would apply non-subjective measures of value (i.e. investment per image, investment per new editor, investment per new article are all measurable). One issue raised was the poor quality of a significant number of images, and quality should be part of the measurability of claimed outcomes. The original post in this thread mentioned that 86 photographs have been used on Wikipedia, this is a reasonable measure of quality, though investing $11,000 for this outcome is probably an unfair comparison, so others are needed.
When programmes include competitions with prizes, then this requires special attention at the grant stage due as, again, we have experienced several controversies around programmes reliant on this method.
We may wish to change the thread title, but the governance questions raised are relevant and are best not dismissed with "stop wasting our time on an email thread which should be about good PR".
Fae
On 31 October 2015 at 11:28, Ilario Valdelli valdelli@gmail.com wrote:
On 31.10.2015 12:12, Fæ wrote:
On 31 Oct 2015 11:00, "Ilario Valdelli" valdelli@gmail.com wrote:
On 31.10.2015 11:46, Fæ wrote:
Hang on. Could I have an independent reality check; is that really $7 per photograph?
Fae
30.000 is exact, but they are 30.000 Real which means 11.000 USD.
Cool. So about $2.50 per image.
This looks expensive compared to my upload projects (the last 500,000 images have cost $0.00 in total) but perhaps the benchmark is better when measures against other WLM projects.
Anyone have the numbers to show comparative value?
Fae
Using a bot to collect images in internet probably would have been lesser than 0$ per image.
Anyway the real calculation of an impact of a project is not so simple.
Because if we would use the same parameters, people reading this thread have spent more than 5 minutes, and calculating the sum of people reading this thread we can calculate a big time waste.
We can say that this thread is really time-expensive without producing a real impact. But we know that this mailing list is done to help the communication and not to calculate the time waste, so a thread like this is accepted.
I have put the links, it's sufficient to read the measures of the success to know that the aim of the project is not to produce only images.
Kind regards
-- Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH