On 10/10/14, Patrick Earley pearley@wikimedia.org wrote:
*(cross-posted to wikimedia-l)*
Hello all,
For our second round of Individual Engagement Grant applications in 2014, we have a great crop of ideas. Wikimedians have dropped by to offer feedback, support, or expertise to some of the proposals, but many proposals have not been reviewed by community members. Over half of these proposals involve new tools, new uses of our databases, or have other technical elements. Some will be hosted on Labs if approved.
Members of this list may have key insights for our proposers. If there is an open proposal that interests you, that you have concerns about, or that involves an area where you have experience or expertise, please drop by the proposal page to share your views. This will help the proposers better hone their strategies, and will assist the IEG Committee in evaluating some of these fresh new ideas to improve the Wikimedia projects. Working with an IEG proposal may even inspire you to serve as a project advisor, or to propose one of your own for the next cycle! Comments are requested until October 20th.
Tools IEG proposals:
- IEG/Semi-automatically generate Categories for some small-scale &
medium-scale Wikis
- IEG/WikiBrainTools
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/WikiBrainTools
- IEG/Dedicated Programming Compiler
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Dedicated_Programming_Compiler
- IEG/Gamified Microcontributions
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Gamified_Microcontributions
- IEG/Enhance Proofreading for Dutch
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Enhance_Proofreading_for_Dutch
- IEG/Tamil OCR to recognize content from printed books
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Tamil_OCR_to_recognize_content_from_printed_books
- IEG/Easy Micro Contributions for Wiki Source
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Easy_Micro_Contributions_for_Wiki_Source
- IEG/Citation data acquisition framework
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Citation_data_acquisition_framework
- IEG/Global Watchlist
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Global_Watchlist
- IEG/Automated Notability Detection
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Automated_Notability_Detection
- IEG/Piłsudski Institute of America GLAM-Wiki Scalable Archive Project
- IEG/Revision scoring as a service
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service
Full list:
- IEG Grants/Review
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG#ieg-reviewing
Regards,
-- Patrick Earley Community Advocate Wikimedia Foundation pearley@wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
A lot of these proposals seem poorly written from the perspective of a technical proposal. Many appear to be more like sales pitches intended for a non-technical audience (Which I suppose kind of makes sense, the people who get lots of wikimedians to endorse them, "win").
I'm generalizing here, as it seems there's a lot of variation, but there's a lot of "what I am going to fix", not "how am I going to do it". They mostly don't have mock-up screenshots for the one's who propose new user facing things, there is largely no schedule of milestones, or even concrete minimum viable product specifications. If they were GSOC proposals, they would largely be rejected gsoc proposals.
For example [[meta:Grants:IEG/Tamil_OCR_to_recognize_content_from_printed_books]] you can't even tell that they intend to create a website instead of a desktop app, unless you read the talk page.
Second, its hard to comment on the appropriateness of scope, since there's not really any set criteria (That I've seen). In particular its unclear what is considered an appropriate asking amount for a given amount of work. For example, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Global_Watchlist asks for $7000, which seems excessive to essentially make a user script that has a for loop to get the user's watchlist on various wikis. That's the sort of thing which I would expect to take about a week. A very experienced developer might be able to pull it off in a day provided the interface elements were minimalist. (Although that proposal has a small little note about being able to mute/unmute (non-flow) threads on a per thread basis, which depending where you go with that, could be the hardest aspect of the project).
Similarly, people asking thousands of dollars so they can get computers to test the user script in different OS environments seems like an odd use of resources. No libraries available that have both Mac and windows available (Guess there's a lot of libs that only have windows computers). Even still, is multiple OS's really necessary to do browser testing? Almost all modern browsers are cross platform. Even IE can be run in wine on linux afaik.
Then there's proposals like https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Dedicated_Programming_Compiler, where it appears the grant requester isn't entirely familiar with the meaning of the technical jargon that is in use in the proposal. Which should raise instant red flags.
Now that I've complained a lot, I should say its not all bad. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Revision_scoring_as_a_service for example is a fairly well written proposal.
Hmm, not entirely sure where I was going with all this. Looking at all the proposals takes time. Maybe there should be some sort of minimum quality standard (e.g. Having a roadmap) to advance to the next step of proposal selection, and only ask the larger Wikimedia community to review those proposals that were sanity checked to have at least enough information on them that one could reasonably evaluate the proposal.
--bawolff