Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Mereology Task Force (ID: 23651753)

Comments from I JethroBT (WMF)

Hello Egezort and thanks for this proposal and revisions from your previous proposal for a similar set of activities supporting Wikidata and improvements around the quality of statements and item relationships. I am approving the proposal for partial funding with the following comments:

• Some key points of feedback from the previous proposals have been addressed-- the task force has greater volunteer support than before, and there is a clear pathway to specific work that will result in concrete improvements to Wikidata content based on your investigative work. This strengthens the proposal and its potential for impact in very clear ways, while also allowing for some community engagement on proposed changes and improvements to Wikidata properties.
• The proposed impact of improving 100,000 Wikidata items during the funding period is difficult to assess, as the Task Force has not completed prior work on a voluntary basis. Furthermore, this is a substantial increase from the previous proposal (10,000 improved items via statements), though the size of the team and task force has only increased modestly since the last proposal. Because of these factors and uncertainty, I am not willing to support full funding for a project that depends primarily on individual compensation. A larger budget can be requested when there is a clearer record and evidence of impact from the task force on Wikidata through the outcomes of this project.
• The proposal did not provide a clear rationale for unanticipated expenses nor the need for illustrations / logos.
• Finally, because of your new location, you will generally need to submit future Rapid Fund proposals in the Northern/Western Europe region if you are the applicant. However, if future task force activities or events are mostly taking placing within the CEE/Central Asia region, you may be able to still apply under this region. Please contact me if you have questions or need clarification on our regional policies.

With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 19:57, 22 December 2025 (UTC)

Hello @I JethroBT (WMF),

Thank you very much! I'll try to respond to some of the points to make some points clearer. (This is just to explain the situation, I'm not asking for any further action from you.)

• The reason for the increase from 10k to 100k items is due to the increased timeframe of the project. The previous application was a 2 month effort, this one is of a longer timeframe, plus some "more theory, less work" efforts beforehand. So while the project's scope didn't change much, the quantity potential increased.
  • This increase is also related to the change in approach of focusing less on getting properties passed, and instead using qualifiers.
  • The number seems big, but in terms of batch edits, it's not too big. One of the efforts in improving parthood relations in the food domain, (Effort 2) "touched" around 400 items. Doing similar work on a bigger domain (like music) can easily get very big numbers.
  • Of course, the main idea is qualitative change instead of quantitative, and 100k is just a ballpark number, it may be much more, similar, or much less than this in the end. Perhaps a different metric could be how many "efforts" there are, I am aiming for around 50 in this grant period. (But this wouldn't have been a good metric, because it's hard to measure, and is much more prone to Goodhart's law)
• You're right that I didn't explicitly state the need for illustrations/logos, in our Wikidata Ontology Course project, it was for the course itself and for the projects of the participants. With this one, I myself was not sure of exactly where to use them, but I assumed that it would be useful at some point.
  • With that said, I think that I'll need to get around 4 logos (A logo for the Mereology Task Force itself, for example.) and I'll be using some of the budget for that (cutting it from the money that would have otherwise been my compensation)

Thank you, Egezort (talk) 21:50, 22 December 2025 (UTC)