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
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