Money, milestones, and Wikimania: Major grants announced, a new milestone for Afrikaans Wikipedia, a new WMF technical engagement team, an effort to start up a new library, two new admins – or maybe three fewer depending on your math.
The announcement of Wikimania scholarships for 2018 provoked complaints on a Foundation mailing list. Among the raised issues was that of some editors repeatedly being awarded scholarships while others are denied, who claim to have important presentations to make or a real need to meet people with whom they collaborate on significant developments. Indeed, some who fairly regularly attend Wikimania at their own cost mention that they see the same faces every time. There was also a call for more coordination between scholarship committee and programme planners as well as the repeated complaint that the presentations were WMF-top heavy.
A member of this year's scholarship committee replied with changes made to the scholarship process already:
| “ | Repeated funding of the same people is a concern. This year, we introduced a rule where those who had been funded in the past year would receive a point deduction on their score this year. This has leveled the playing field a bit, and may be magnified a bit next year. | ” |
This year's Wikimania will take place in Cape Town from July 18 to 22. The Signpost will provide further coverage.
The WMF Project Grants Committee has announced eleven new projects that will be founded in this round of grants. In total, these projects will receive over $320,000.
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There have also been several changes to the process of WMF Grants. Rapid Grants will now need a minimum amount of $500, in order to reduce administrative work at the Foundation. Application openings will be from the 1st to the 15th of each month. New Project Grants will "likely" be accepted during a single grant cycle in November 2018 for amounts between $2,000 and $100,000. Conference grants will get two rounds of funding, with existing regional and thematic conferences staying funded. New applications for local or national conferences will be considered up to an amount of $10,000.
Grants are currently in a phase of "major changes to our funding processes in the long term [...] these changes will reengineer the roles of participating organizations (the Wikimedia Foundation, committees, and grantees alike)", according to a Wikimedia announcement. Discussion of these and further changes is welcomed at the Annual plan talk page.
Women in Red (WIR) is seeking coders to help adapt the Koha integrated library system to eBook lending for the project. According to a short interview with members of the project, the project so far attracted funding via World Contest winners' donations to the Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/The World Contest#Women in Red Book/WIR Subscription Fund, and is now planning to create a eBook and open access book lending library with Koha managing circulation and catalog functions. This effort is spearheaded by WIR members with professional library knowledge, namely Megalibrarygirl, Rosiestep, and SusunW. After an initial beta phase, model and software may be extended to other WikiProjects if they prove successful.
According to a Foundation announcement, this new team will report to the Foundation's CTO (Chief Technology Officer) and include a Cloud Services group and a Technical Advocacy group. Cloud Services will continue maintaining current services, while Advocacy will encourage API adoption through example software, tutorials, and other documentation and work with "groups at affiliate organizations and the larger Wikimedia volunteer community". The Foundation will also hire a new engineer and create the position of Developer Advocacy Manager. Initial reaction has been highly positive, with some expressing hope that the new team would fulfill a current need for code review.
Discuss this story
I'm a little confused by the opening sentence: "" The linked mailing list thread, while very relevant and interesting, was a May 2017 thread discussing the scholarships to Wikimania 2017 in Montreal. Is there a more recent thread discussing scholarships to Wikimania 2018 in Cape Town? Noting the contrast between the way Wikipedians apply for "scholarships" and adminship and ArbCom, and the accusations of bullying in that mailing list thread. Perhaps we could apply for scholarships by some community-driven process that was some variant of how we apply for adminship and ArbCom. Of course, applicants for those positions never are bullied during the process. LOL. wbm1058 (talk) 03:44, 2 July 2018 (UTC)[reply]