Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Western Armenian Wiki/Armenian Diaspora High Schools' Training for Wiki Research & Editing

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hello Շահէն, and thanks for this proposal supporting training and an article writing contest for students with a focus on Western Armenian Wikipedia. Apologies for the long delay in our review of your proposal, but we will still be able to move forward with our review process at this stage. Here are my comments and questions:

• What training materials or resources will you be using to support students learning on editing, translating, and generally working on Western Armenian Wikipedia?
• It's great to see that you will be able to do outreach to students communities across a number of countries, and that you will be preparing to meet with students virtually to have more face-to-face discussions about the program.
• The prize budget is substantially higher than what we normally are able to support for contests in general in the Rapid Fund program across communities. In general, budgets for contest prizes are usually around 500 USD, sometimes a little more or less. While we encourage communities to conduct contests and request funding to support some incentives that can attract participants and encourage their engagement, we also want to make sure that Wikimedia projects are primarily supported on a voluntary basis, as we're not able to sustainably support contests that rely on larger or continually growing prize budgets. In order to move forward with this proposal, please reduce the prize budget to 600 USD, though you have discretion over how many prizes you want to distribute this budget.
• Could you provide some more context around the Miscellaneous/unexpected expenses, given that most of the budget is focused on monetary prizes? Are there fees or other costs that may be hard to anticipate around any of your activities?

Please let me know if you have any questions or need any clarity around my comments. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 06:24, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

Dear I JethroBT (WMF), thank you for getting back to us with our rapid grant proposal. Below are the responses for your inquiries.

• The training materials and resources to be used for this contest will include previous material we've used for our presentations and editing workshops. They include slides, PowerPoint presentations, and guideline videos.
• Yes, the main goal of our contest is to first meet with the participants online, joining from different countries and communities. This will come before they embark on the contest.
• The budget reduction sounds reasonable. Considering that, we may resort to decreasing the number of participants to around 50-60, and increase the quantity of the prizes by decreasing their price values. We might also shift from monetary prizes to prizes such as USBs, hard drives, etc. This is not a problem from our side and is totally doable.
• Misc expenses were simply included in the grant proposal in case of any emergency or unanticipated expenses that may arise throughout the whole thing (with certificate printing, prize shipping, design issues, etc.). Considering the amount has been decreased – and naturally the number of participants we'll be reaching out to – we might not need a large budget for misc, if any at all. In case of any unexpected expenses, we'll simply resort to the $600 USD we'll be receiving. It's worth noting that we will have to pay an approximate 15-20% tax on the received amount, reportable with gov-issued proof post-contest.

Please let me know if you have any type of questions for us, we'll be more than glad to provide answers. Best, --Շահէն (talk) 15:10, 12 April 2022 (UTC)

@Շահէն: Thanks for these responses. In order to move forward with funding the proposal, could you revise the budget and budget information on the {{Probox}} template on the proposal page with the following changes:

• Reducing the prize budget to 600 USD overall
• You are welcome to add the 15-20% expected tax burden to the budget as well, as we are able to cover these expenses up to certain level.

Once you've made these changes, please ping me and I'll be happy to approve the proposal right away. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 16:15, 12 April 2022 (UTC)