Grants:Wikimania scholars/2015 Outcomes

Preliminary Outcomes

2015

The 2015 Wikimania Scholarships Program was designed after collecting, synthesizing and incorporating feedback from across the movement. While the outcomes of this new program won't be fully evaluated until after Wikimania 2016, there are some outcomes we have already observed of the 2015 scholars:

Of the 110 full scholarships awarded:

• ~28% identified as Female
• ~73% indicated they were from the Global South
• ~26% received a scholarship to attend Wikimania 2014
  • Of these repeat applicants, most submitted good/great 2014 post-conference reports
• The average Phase 2 score for recipients was 8.9, with 70% of recipients scoring a 9 or above

The following regions were represented:

• 3 from Africa
• 6 from the Arab States
• 31 from Asia & Pacific
• 10 from CIS
• 40 from Europe
• 7 from North America
• 13 from South America

As always, there are opportunities to improve our process and structure; selecting ~100 scholarship recipients from a pool of 600+ is an ever evolving experiment. Below are a few potential areas for investigation next year:

• How can the Scholarship Program (i.e. the Scholarship Committee and relevant WMF staff) provide better coaching and mentorship on application writing?
• How can the Scholarship Program perform better outreach out to small language communities and contributors to wiki projects other than Wikipedia?
• There are very limited avenues for an individual to find sponsorship to attend Wikimania. Why? What could be other potential avenues for sponsorship? (Not just from WMF, but other from Wikimedia organizations as well)

This list will continue to evolve as we understand more, particularly after Wikimania. However, we invite your feedback on potential areas for investigation next year; please add your comments/questions to the talk page.

2016

As we continue gathering learnings and experiences from Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario, here are some preliminary outcomes from this year’s scholarship program. 504 people applied for scholarships. Of those 84 did not pass the Phase 1; 421 went onto Phase 2. From that pool, of the initial 124 who were offered scholarships in March 2016:

• ~59% indicated they were from the Global South
• ~28% identified as Female
• Of the 96 people who accepted a full scholarship
  • ~71% are from the Global South
• Of the 28 people who accepted a partial scholarship
  • ~82% are from the Global North

Post-Conference Outcomes

To come after Wikimania 2016