Grants talk:IEG/PlanetMath Books Project

aligning the Wikipedia and PlanetMath encyclopedia coverage

In Measures of success you speak of "aligning the Wikipedia and PlanetMath encyclopedia coverage". What does this mean? More Wikipedia articles linking to PlanetMath articles and vice versa, or actually copying and reformatting content between both systems?

I mean a unified "index" that explains what's available where. Sorry, the current language is confusing! Will revise. Thank you! Arided (talk) 14:50, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

I think the main goal should be to assist Math teachers

I think the reason the Math pages on Wikipedia are a bit neglected is because there is so much going on in this area. A unified index would be a great source of reusable material for Math teachers, but they need to be able to quickly tailor this to their own classrooms. Any money invested in this area should be going to multi-language mediawiki efforts, I think, not just to Wikibooks. I will respond to your set of overview points:

1) Technical platform improvements to PlanetMath's user interface to streamline the production of books.

I think improvements to non-Wikipedia projects are out of scope for IEG funding.

2) Work with off-the-shelf Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems and custom enhancements to re-typeset several public domain texts, incorporating that material piecemeal into PlanetMath and wholesale into WikiSource.

Though it sounds highly technical, this is editing, which traditionally is done by Wikipedia editors, who are traditionally not funded to edit

3) Crawling and light-weight semantic linking to connect up other existing free materials across the Web (e.g. questions and answers, problem sets, encyclopedia articles).

I think this is the crux of your proposal, as this is your proposed "unified index" of educational materials. Publishing this onwiki somewhere (Wikidata?) will enable you to crowdsource your second point above.

4) Writing and editing work to transform this raw material into expository prose.

I think paid editing work is out of scope for IEG funding, so you can better say project management for creating and monitoring a list of specific tasks to be done by volunteers in a WikiProject that you set up. Any hours booked for doing the editing work should be unpaid. In order to get project management funding though, you first have to prove the need - I believe this would be the index-creation?

5) Transformation tools necessary for exporting PlanetMath books and collections to Wikibooks.

I am not sure what you mean here. Creation of tooling? Use of tooling?

Hope it helps. Jane023 (talk) 10:12, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi Jane023 -- Thank you very much for your comments! Certainly, the focus of the project is not on content editing (even machine-assisted content editing) -- but rather, on building tools that will support others in technical editing work. I'm attempting to clarify the language in the proposal. We plan to build a small number of "demonstrator texts" only for the purposes of testing, debugging, and evaluating the platform. Also: I believe it's OK to target any Wikimedia project... --Arided (talk) 20:31, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Building tools is great, but then you really need to spend time demonstrating the need for the tools. You can say how much time the tools will save or what kind of users you hope to attract with them. If no one feels the need, no one will vote for your budget. I think you should stick to actual free texts to use for testing and demonstrations. Just select single pages that you can use for demos. After all, part of establishing the "need" for the tools you want to build is to demonstrate the results using live material. There are plenty of math texts published that are out of copyright that you can use, so I would not see development of new ones, unless your goal is to create some revolutionary new teaching method. Good luck on firming up your proposal, and if you don't get it done this time around, feel free to keep working on it for the next round. Jane023 (talk) 22:44, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi Jane023. There are (at least) two dimensions to this. A key focus of the proposal is indeed on re-using out-of-copyright texts -- hence the investment in OCR and proofreading support, approximately half of the budget. At the same time, the proposal also looks at ways to re-use other freely licenced materials that have already been typed in by hand -- e.g. material from Wikipedia and StackExchange. I'd say that the Q&A on StackExchange is a rather revolutionary new teaching method -- but this material is not organized in a familiar textbook format, which may make it harder for teachers and students to follow. It's also not clear that Q&A, by itself, is pedagogically "correct" for math teaching -- but it is a good source of material that we can re-use in textbooks and outlines. Working only with OCR would miss all of the contemporary material from WP, SXE, and PM -- and it would also miss advantages to be had by inter-linking and remixing out-of-copyright texts. As we indicate in the proposal, the "half-finished" coverage of many important topics from the undergraduate math(s) curriculum on Wikibooks supports our claim that a new approach is needed. Project Gutenberg has a few more complete math texts, but not many, and as you'd imagine, most are rather old. The blend of new and old material (and tools that are "agnostic" about the source of the material) is, I think, a big strength in the proposal. Arided (talk) 17:26, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

Antecedents and questions

Hi, I just wanted to point out that this project follows up on (and could help revive) an WikiProject Mathematics initiative that was highly active for several years, but has been dormant for a long time. In the interim, both Wikipedia's mathematics coverage and PlanetMath's have increased substantially, but have grown independent of one another, so it seems like an ideal time to revive the exchange of content between the two sites.

Two other questions:

• WikiProject Mathematics is still a very active WikiProject. If funded, how would this project involve the members of that WikiProject in its work? How could the infrastructure (tools, workflows, etc) be used to sustain an active, volunteer-based collaboration between PlanetMath and (for example) WikiProject Mathematics after the grant itself has been completed?
• Does this project have the capacity to translate math resources into other languages? How can the infrastructure developed by this project (workflows, documentation, cross-community partnerships) be used to translate math content to other languages?

Cheers, Jtmorgan (talk) 18:59, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Hi User:Jtmorgan: I'm not sure (yet) if what we're doing would impact ability to translate mathematics content, but OCR is relatively language agnostic, so if what we do here works in English, it should at least work in other languages that use a Latin alphabet (and perhaps with some modifications, in CJK languages and others). Also, regarding WikiProject Mathematics, please see my comment to Siko below (in short: they would be the primary recipients of the "technology transfer" aspect of the work). Arided (talk) 00:43, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Direct impact to Wikipedia/Wikibooks/Wikisource?

Hi Joseph and all,

Thanks for submitting this proposal and congratulations on having built such a cool OER community focused on mathematics. Along the lines of some of the questions above, I'd really like to hear more about your planned activities that will lead to direct impact to Wikipedia or Wikibooks (part of goals #2 and #5 in your overview), to help us determine whether your project idea meets the eligibility criteria for this round. Although I can certainly understand the indirect impact and long-term value proposition that building these tools for PlanetMath Books could eventually have for projects like Wikibooks or Wikipedia, at the end of a 6-month grant it seems quite likely to me that this project would bring a lot of direct improvements to PlanetMath, but demonstrate little actionably direct improvements to the Wikimedia sites. Any inputs or clarification you can quickly provide would be most welcome. Cheers, Siko (WMF) (talk) 18:56, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

The aim is to explore an avenue of work that we think is is likely lead to vastly more free (CC-By-SA and/or Public Domain) content being available in transparent usable form worldwide -- to Wikibooks, Wikisource and other Wikimedia projects (and others). Although I certainly agree with Sue Gardner's vision of "an ecosystem of parks and libraries and schools online", the aim of building free content is paramount, and once it's online it can and should circulate widely. Indeed: the reason for doing this phase of work in a web-based approach with special-purpose software is that it will take significant human effort as well as novel tools to prepare and assemble the content. Toward the end of building the requisite human factors: one of the points that we've discussed informally, but that's not fully covered in the current draft of the proposal, is that we plan to recruit people from WikiProject Mathematics into the user trial. This way, current Wikipedia users will be "trained in" on the system we build, i.e. this strategy would simultaneously achieve evaluation and "knowledge transfer" targets. That doesn't directly affect the wiki content as much as it affects the wiki community -- offering current users new strategies for building technical content. Also, note that in the Gantt chart, we have left a month "blank" at the end, so after the user trial we could also put in some effort to recruit more volunteers to do content building (with Wikibooks and Wikisource as the downstream "targets"). We'd quite like to do this, but "content building" isn't something that can be funded under the grant -- still, it seems like part of a valuable technology transfer strategy, and since this is something that Ray and I would plan to work on anyway, we'd be happy to contribute that month of more content-focused work pro bono. As already hinted at, a few new complete books at the undergraduate level would have a big impact on Wikibooks' mathematics coverage. If we're successful with our OCR and proofreading speedup goals, we might even see newly-digitized public domain books rolling in at a rate of one a day during the final month of the project. These would be big, direct, and immediate benefits for Wikisource, and would have important derived benefits for other sites downstream from it (e.g. Wikibooks, Wikipedia). Arided (talk) 00:39, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Note: I added a briefer paraphrase of that to a new "technology transfer" section in the proposal. Arided (talk) 00:57, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the speedy answers, Arided. I find the new section to be quite helpful as well. Although directly creating content yourself is ineligible for a grant (and thanks for recognizing this), activities to recruit/facilitate/encourage other volunteers to contribute content is very much welcome for IEG projects. Siko (WMF) (talk) 02:42, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

I feel more informed now after reading the changes to the proposal, so thanks for those changes. I am concerned about the ability to attract community members for the content ingestion. I have seen a similar attempt fail in the past for the CoSyne project, which the project members in theory believed would be received favourably by the community. The type of person you seek to attract is someone with a warm heart for the future of Mathematics teaching, which is not necessarily what the members of the WikiProject Mathematics have. I would feel more comfortable funding this proposal if there was a specific example where community members actually used the material produced for a Wikimedia project like Wikipedia/Wikibooks/Wikisource. Jane023 (talk) 22:02, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Jane023: A full demonstration of the workflow (including export of completed demo books to Wikibooks and Wikisource) will be completed and funded within the project itself. This workflow/toolchain will be available on PlanetMath for the forseeable future, and we are very interested in building the PlanetMath collection of books. If "Export to Wikibooks" and "Export to Wikisource" are one click away, I think others will have a relatively easy time re-using the work that we'll be doing on PlanetMath. As a very early demo, here's one contemporary CC-By book that we're working on importing into PlanetMath, and here's a 100 year old calculus book that has had similar progress behind the scenes, although it's not published right now. Of course we're interested in recruiting people to help, but part of our current effort is to make it possible to easily ingest any suitably licensed and suitably formatted book into PlanetMath. If we get all of these technical pieces in place, then that means we'll have a pipeline ready and waiting any time anyone creates a book with content that's compatible with the CC-By-SA license (or any time anyone successfully scans and OCRs a book that's in the public domain). Writing is the hard part -- let's hope we can convince more mathematicians and scientists to release content under a suitable license, for the good of all. (The technical aim is to make sure that the benefit really does spread widely.) --Arided (talk) 00:16, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, round 2 2013

This Individual Engagement Grant proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 2 review. Please feel free to ask questions here on the talk page and make changes to your proposal as discussions continue during this community comments period.

The committee's formal review for round 2 begins on 23 October 2013, and grants will be announced in December. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

Budget breakdown — funding licenses for commercial software

Some share of the budget goes to fund licenses for commercial OCR software such as ABBY Fine Reader. However having all book processing tools available freely to a wide audience is important for long-term impact. To understand how important such concern is, I need more information:

What role does the mentioned OCR software play in this proposal? Gryllida 10:19, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

Gryllida: Infty is the only really effective mathematics OCR system that's available currently. It is, indeed, proprietary software, and it works together with ABBY (also proprietary). Without any existing free/open alternative that can do math OCR, InftyReader is crucial for the proposed project. However, one of the key features of buying a license is that there are no limit to the amount of texts we can process, and the system is relatively fast. OCR itself would not be a bottleneck during the project, rather, proofreading will be the significant burden. We intend to set up a public queue of texts to process, and other people will be able to submit texts (within reason) to this queue. Furthermore, the proofreading platform and "OCR helper" tools that we will develop will be free/open software, and to a reasonable degree, useful independently of the underlying OCR platform. They can potentially form the basis of the first effective and fully free math OCR package - although developing this would require significant investment that is beyond the scope of the current proposal. To sum up, if we don't invest in Infty now, the project as a whole is not in any way likely to move forward. Since I first learned about Infty (in 2005), we have made many other investments in free/open software development, but more focused on the social computing and text processing side of things (e.g. the groundwork for a proofreading platform). This would be the first time we would be able to use the licensed version of the Infty software, which doesn't have the restrictions that the trial version has. I hope that this answers the question fully, but please ping me again if there are other aspects of this that we need to discuss. If Infty is something that WMF simply can't fund, but you are interested in the other aspects of the project, we may be able to get that line item funded through other channels, but, yes, the system itself is critical to the success of the proposal. Thanks! Arided (talk) 15:30, 13 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm not particularly concerned with funding OCR licenses (Wikisource uses archive.org's ABBYY all the time and I bought a license myself for a Wikisource-Wiktionary joint project on a public domain dictionary which requires a lot of proofreading). However, quickly skimming the request I didn't find considerations about how others will be able to benefit from the improvements you propose: for instance, if a Wikisource user needed to spend 1000 $ for a license in order to benefit from them, then your improvements would be basically useless. --Nemo 22:13, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Nemo: the main benefits are: (1) An open, public, free (as in beer) toolchain for creating new transparent public domain and free (as in freedom) texts; (2) Some demo texts illustrating how this toolchain can be used; (3) a user study indicating how it can be improved and made more useful for the general public. No one else would have to pay a license fee to use this system as it will be instantiated on PlanetMath -- and all the software we develop will be free (as in freedom) software so other people could use those separately. Clearly, if someone else wanted to use this stuff in combination with their own instance of Infty, they would either have to pay the license fee or use a trial version of the software. These downstream benefits are in some sense an "extra", above and beyond the main benefits (1)-(3). However, they are NOT in my opinion "useless" and in the long term they may be more important than (1)-(3). As we discussed above, the project makes concrete steps in the direction of a fully free OCR for math system: that is important if we're ever going to overcome the bottleneck that Infty currently poses. It's not realistic to actually build that system with a six month grant of this nature, but, indeed, progress will be made. At the same time, it seems perfectly realistic for medium-sized organizations to be able to pay a $1000 licensing fee for a non-free software system, if they want to do so -- and if ten interested users wanted to band together and share a computer that provides this service, that's allowed within the rules from the Infty people. Effectively, that's what we'll be doing with PlanetMath: creating a free (as in beer) public terminal to an otherwise very expensive system. IMO these benefits are described concretely in the proposal but if they didn't come across I'd be happy at first read, I'd be happy to add further explanatory text. Arided (talk) 23:58, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

In case it wasn't clear: above I meant "basically useless for them (that hypothetical average Wikisource user). --Nemo 01:03, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

Wikibooks and Wikisource notifications

Hello, you list Wikibooks and Wikisource in the affected/interested projects but you didn't notify them (= their central venues), only one language edition; please remedy. --Nemo 22:09, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

Dear Nemo: We did notify the English WikiBooks and Wikisource projects, although the link on the Wikibooks Reading Room Proposals page has disappeared -- here is a link to an old version of the page and other category-level notifications about university level math books and mathematics in general as well as a link in the Wikisource Scriptorium. These are all indicated on the main grant page (I just added the old version link for Wikibooks, which I've only just tracked down -- do you know if there more persistent link apart from the old version links?). To be honest I don't know where the "central venues" are, could you point a direct link to the places we should add a notice? We could potentially also add links in Polish language sites (since Ray speaks and reads Polish) but apart from that, I really do think it would be best to focus on English for now. Thanks for your help! --Arided (talk) 23:23, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

OK, I found the general mailing list for textbook projects, which is linked in the Wikibooks IRC as the mailing list and added an announcement there. Will aim to do similarly for Wikisource. --Arided (talk) 23:39, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

OK, that's done! Please let me know if you have other suggestions about places to announce and get feedback. Arided (talk) 23:50, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! There's also oldwikisource:Wikisource:Scriptorium if you want. --Nemo 01:03, 3 November 2013 (UTC)

I have some CC by SA French textbooks

I am a Swiss math teacher, and I am working with the Sesamath association which produces free math text books under free licenses (G.P.L. or CC by-SA or the French "Art Libre")[1]. These math books are mostly junior high school level, and they were used by 20% of the French schools in 2010. The French opinion site Rue89 talked about the Sesamath Free License School books[2].

This proposed project would be a great way to share such knowledge. The books are freely downloadable in ODF format from the association website. I am currently the president of the Swiss Sesamath association[3]. If you are looking for help with a French language version, I will do whatever I can! GastelEtzwane (talk) 15:23, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Many thanks GastelEtzwane, that's definitely the sort of thing we'd like to follow up on. I'll have another look and contact you again. Arided (talk) 01:31, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Proposed amendments

Thanks a lot for the proposal and for the notifications (I wouldn't have known about this project otherwise). I'm writing this message in response to the notification sent to the Wikisource mailing list on Nov 3rd (yesterday). This project has a potential to improve Wikisource that has not been explored fully, and I trust that with some modifications it could become a proposal that I could fully endorse as Wikisource user. This project has been conceived as a "PlanetMath-centric project that could benefit Wikimedia projects" and I think the benefits would be greater if the effort was directed to improve Wikisource math transcription and export capabilities, which in the end will result in more output materials for PlanetMath. My proposed amendments to achieve this are as follows:

Wikisource enhancements

Wikisource already supports the transcription of math books (see: The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1729)), however it lacks some features to be able add structure to the books and export this structure to other external sites (like PlanetMath). There was a GsoC that tried to solve this and the MW extension is half-finished (see Book management). With this extension finished, you could use Wikisource to transcribe the books and then export them (text and structure) to PlanetMath. However you should clarify that code review won't be needed, or that the person that was reviewing it will take care of the process.

OCR

While I do not oppose the acquisition of commercial OCR systems, I believe that these licenses should be managed by the Wikisource Community User Group and permission should be sought to run the software as a web service on Tool Labs to enhance the math ocr quality on Wikisource hosted materials. PlanetMath would benefit from this too, since it would be possible to export the files once they are proofread. Same about the image pre-processing and highlighting possible errors, it could be a tool on the wikimedia servers and it could also rely on open software (like Tesseract).

Named-entity recognition

This is something that could benefit the math books hosted on wikisource and all other books in general. Do you think you could adapt the NNexus software to run as a web service and use Wikidata concepts to annotate any text like DBpedia spotlight does? In Wikidata I haven't seen any "math task force", have you considered creating one to study which properties are required to represent semantic information about math concepts in wikidata and then reuse that information on PlanetMath?

Export tools

Wikisource currently has an external epub and odf export tool, however it would be a nice addition to expand it to export Latex (directly, or through TEI). In addition to latex2wiki, do you think it would be possible to have a wiki2latex?

Final comments

Even if all these modifications depart quite considerably from the original proposal, I believe the benefits will be more clear to the evaluation commitee and avoid this proposal to be seen as a duplicate effort (considering that Wikisource aims are very similar if not the same).--Micru (talk) 19:53, 4 November 2013 (UTC)

Discussing Micru's feedback

Micru: that is a very long list of suggestions, many very interesting. Let me start by saying I haven't ever written code for MediaWiki, although I was responsible for a large amount of the work done on the PlanetMath/Planetary software rebuild, and I work with Drupal in my current job. I'm a good candidate for the basic programming aspects of the description of work I proposed (in my own estimation), but probably wouldn't be the right person to take up the revised project as you described it. I'd like very much to discuss with other developers interested in this kind of work, however! (BTW, I also think Drupal is a good platform for the kind of processing we're going to want to do in this project; as a MediaWiki novice, I can't really comment on whether or not it would be useful for the sorts of things we proposed; maybe you or someone else could add more detail on that.)

Regarding some of the other specific points you brought up:

(1) The license fee we mentioned was for one copy of the program, which really needs to be directly available to the development team during the course of the project. At the end of the project, we could move the instance over. Infty does have a group licensing option, but that's somewhat out of scope with what we're proposing to do. (2) I mentioned the Wikidata idea to the main NNexus developer. NNexus already runs as a web service and can annotate various pages (using various sources of terms) via a demo Firefox plugin. So, the basic answer here is "yes". (3) Regarding wiki2latex exporting: this is something we plan to use, although not fancy Pediapress-style exporting as books, just simple minimal tools.

Basically, I'm not very worried about PlanetMath or this project in particular duplicating the efforts of Wikisource, although we definitely have some ideas in common (e.g. the book management interactions you pointed out), and we're happy to share ideas and design work (and, where relevant, code) back and forth. In particular, I can well imagine that many of the things we prototype here could be converted to work on MediaWiki systems with considerably less effort than it takes to build them in the first place - maybe that's part of a follow-up grant that could also cover some of the other points you brought up.... The result would still be different from what we're doing on PlanetMath, and I think everyone benefits from this kind of diversity. --Arided (talk) 01:22, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Arided: It is not only that there are many things in common with an existing project, it is that one of the grant elegibility requirements is that the project should be aimed at improving one or more of Wikimedia's existing websites. If you don't feel capable of working with mediawiki there are projects that can exist outside it, and still be benefical for both.

For instance, instead of building the set of tools integrated into PlanetMath, you can build them as web services. One of them could be a page where you upload a djvu for ocr'ing and embedding latex into it with Infty. When the file is ready, moving it either to PlanetMath or to Commons should be easy, there are plenty of examples about how to do it. Or even better you could get mw:InstantCommons to work with Drupal, and then you wouldn't have to worry about hosting the files and you can integrate Wikimedia Commons into your toolchain. And the same goes for your (really interesting) post-processing tools. If you consider them as services, then other developers can write a simple gadget to make it work on Wikisource too.

So my advice, regardless of the suggestions I made, would be that you reconsider the project as a development that is accessible for other projects and not integrated into PlanetMath. If you want we can discuss about it on gtalk or skype, I really hope this project can move forward!--Micru (talk) 12:17, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi Micru: Webservice-izing as much of this as possible is a very good idea! And indeed, I think that clarifies the sentiment that was there in the original proposal, e.g. we were very much thinking that other people would be able to post suitable requests for OCR processing. We'll have to be careful to check the Terms and Conditions for Infty: it may be that having an open OCR web service would be completely OK, or we might have to be a bit more circumspect, and only allow people to post recommendations for texts to process, which the service providers would then curate and run on behalf of users. In general, I think integrating into PlanetMath would be an "AND" rather than an "OR" proposition, but I agree that the emphasis should be on building sub-systems/modules/plugins/libraries that others can re-use (and hopefully directly in many cases, e.g. with the proofreading assistance tools). I think there are some things that would end up being PlanetMath-specific (in particular, the "books" implementation), but is one place where there is a concrete parallel effort going on with MW and where we could benefit from direct collaboration.

To follow up further: We have a monthly developer call on Skype which happens to be tommorow (Nov 9) at 1:30PM EST / 6:30PM GMT. If you'd like to join for some or all of this meeting, me, Ray, and Deyan will be there and we can talk more about how to move this forward in a fruitful way. I'm also happy to set up a separate meeting with you if that time doesn't work well. I'm "holtzermann17" on Skype. Thanks! --Arided (talk) 13:25, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Various links from Micru: Grants:IEG/Elaborate_Wikisource_strategic_vision, Wikisource Community User Group, s:The_Mathematical_Principles_of_Natural_Philosophy_(1729)/Rectilinear_ascent_and_descent_of_bodies. Arided (talk) 18:44, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for PlanetMath Books Project

Scoring criteria (see the rubric for background)	Score 1=weakest 5=strongest
Potential for impact
(A) The project fits with the Wikimedia movement's strategic priorities	3.5
(B) The project has the potential to lead to significant online impact.	3.5
(C) The impact of the project can be sustained after the grant ends.	3
(D) The project has potential to be scaled or adapted for other languages or projects.	3.5
Ability to execute
(E) The project has demonstrated interest from a community it aims to serve.	2
(F) The project can be completed as scoped within 6 months with the requested funds.	3.5
(G) The budget is reasonable and an efficient use of funds.	3
(H) The individual(s) proposing the project have the required skills and experience needed to complete it.	4
Fostering innovation and learning
(I) The project has innovative potential to add new strategies and knowledge for solving important issues in the movement.	3.5
(J) The risk involved in the project's size and approach is appropriately balanced with its potential gain in terms of impact.	3
(K) The proposed measures of success are useful for evaluating whether or not the project was successful.	3
(L) The project supports or grows the diversity of the Wikimedia movement.	3.5
Comments from the committee: OCRing and importing of public domain and freely licensed math material is valuable. Project has the potential to improve the Math pages on Wikipedia and make a dent in the mathematics backlog by re-using existing free materials. Costs may be too high for the expected impact - would like to see more scalable, direct impact to Wikimedia projects. Concerns about how the resulting knowledge and procedures will be passed along to other Wikipedians so that the process could continue after the end of the project. How will writing process or quality be improved to support longer term strategic aims? Might have been nice to see endorsements from members of Wikiproject Mathematics. We would like to ensure the software focuses only on producing open tools. Proposers seem talented and driven. This may be a better project idea for another community, however. Strongly support these folks seeking alternate funding from a different organization focused on math or open science.

Thank you for submitting this proposal. The committee is now deliberating based on these scoring results.

Funding decisions will be announced by December 16. — ΛΧΣ²¹ 00:21, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Status update

This project has not been selected for an Individual Engagement Grant at this time.

We love that you took the chance to creatively improve the Wikimedia movement. The committee has reviewed this proposal and not recommended it for funding, but we hope you'll continue to engage in the program. Please drop by the IdeaLab to share and refine future ideas!

Comments regarding this decision:
Thanks for submitting this proposal and for all of your contributions to Wikimedia, we really enjoyed learning more about you! We hope you’ll review the feedback from the committee posted above, and consider returning to IEG in a future round with a revised or new idea.

Next steps:

1. Review the feedback provided on your proposal and to ask for any clarifications you need using this talk page.
2. Visit the IdeaLab to continue developing this idea and share any new ideas you may have.
3. To reapply with this project in the future, please make updates based on the feedback provided in this round before resubmitting it for review in a new round.
4. Check the schedule for the next open call to submit proposals - we look forward to helping you apply for a grant in a future round.

Questions? Contact us.