Dear everyone I agree with Pine. I applied for a scholarship to attend a recent Wikimania and was successful. The committee (let’s call it the left hand), I believe was influenced by the extent to which I met the criteria and I thought that I would have scored quite well on criteria. The problem was I received notification of the scholarship a week after the other committee (the right hand), had written to decline my proposal to present. It was voted on by three members, one gave it a high ranking, the second gave the lowest, considering it to be too academic, and the third gave a mediocre rank. I declined the scholarship to give the opportunity to someone who had been accepted to travel with funding. At the time, I lamented the fact that the same criteria that secured a scholarship was eliminated me as a presenter. In hindsight though, the fact that two branches weren’t talking to each other indicates that both committees worked on independent objective and subjective standards and that degree of separation might in reflect transparency.
Regards Frances From: Wikimania-l <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> on behalf of WereSpielChequers <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Reply-To: "Wikimania general list (open subscription)" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Thursday, 20 April 2017 at 11:43 pm To: "Wikimania general list (open subscription)" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [Wikimania-l] WMF Scholarships to attend Wikimania 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<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Time_Between_Edits>, 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 <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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 <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimania-l mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimania-l
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