Grants talk:APG/Proposals/2013-2014 round2/Wikimedia Foundation/Proposal form/Ongoing work areas

Suggestions from Tony1

Could I make a suggestion in terms of readability and the functionality of the titles?

1. At the moment the titles are nearly an eighth of the word length of the main text. Some lower-level titles are nearly as long as the text they introduce.
2. The grammar of many of the titles is unusual, to say the least. Not only does the continual opening with the agent We add to length; it calls into question exactly who "we" is in each case (the Board of Trustees? the engineering team? the movement?). Why raise this question?
3. "We" is followed by an indicative present-tense proposition, again, long: are these propositions what is being done now, or what is planned for the upcoming year, or both? Why raise this question in titles?

A standard way of expressing such titles would be to provide unique, brief themes: far less information using just a noun group for each. That is the normal function of titles—not to include the opening sentence of the main text as part of the title (which should be toned down, I think).

Not: "Code review: We enable code contributions from community and staff while protecting the quality and security of MediaWiki as it supports our projects."

But: "MediaWiki code review".

(And is that a because "as" or a while "as"?)

The subtitles (after colons) are in the manner of push-text: selling. I think you can expect that readers are on-side without this, or that at least they will form their opinions from reading each section properly, not by persuasion-through-ad-banners.

I can't even start reading this with the encyclopedic ToC. Tony (talk) 10:02, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Reverting changes made after 1 April

Greetings to all! Thanks for your attention to this page. We have reverted all edits made after 1 April, since this supplementary document is currently a subpage of the proposal form and should only be edited at the request of the proposing organization (in this case, WMF) when the proposing organization posts a request for each change on the discussion page that is subsequently approved by FDC staff in advance.

While we note that these were all helpful changes, including fixing links and providing clarifying details, we can still only include them at the proposing organization's request. While we do appreciate everyone's efforts to improve the page and realize this might be a frustrating response, we do believe it is important that we keep the process fair and consistent for all entities and across all proposal form documents, including supplementary documents. Our apologies for not noticing these changes sooner (we were not diligent enough in monitoring the proposal subpages!), and for any chagrin caused by reverting these good edits.

As a reminder to all, FDC staff can approve edits after the proposal deadline that correct misinformation or greatly enhance the readability of a proposal form if they are requested on the discussion page of the document in question by a representative of the proposing entity. This applies to all proposal forms and supplementary documents submitted as subpages of proposal forms, which are considered part of the proposal forms. We do realize that it may not have been obvious how this applies to this supplementary document, and so we apologize for any confusion around that. The purpose of this policy is to make sure that proposals remain consistent after the proposal form submission deadline passes, and to make sure proposing entities are the only ones requesting and making changes to their documents.

Thank you for your understanding and your patience with the process! Best regards, Winifred Olliff (FDC Support Team) talk 23:12, 21 April 2014 (UTC)