On 10/10/14, Patrick Earley <pearley(a)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
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Semi-automatically_generate_Categories_for_some_small-scale_%26_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
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Pi%C5%82sudski_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,
<wikitech-l(a)wikipedia.org>
--
Patrick Earley
Community Advocate
Wikimedia Foundation
pearley(a)wikimedia.org
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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