Grants talk:Project/AminMDMA/Promoting health literacy globally through Wikipedia-editing assignments in health professional schools

Outputs

The goals are extremely generic, I can't tell what is actually coming out of this. --Nemo 14:17, 16 February 2018 (UTC)

Eligibility confirmed, round 1 2018

This Project Grants proposal is under review!

We've confirmed your proposal is eligible for round 1 2018 review. Please feel free to ask questions and make changes to this proposal as discussions continue during the community comments period, through March 12, 2018.

The committee's formal review for round 1 2018 will occur March 13-March 26, 2018. New grants will be announced April 27, 2018. See the schedule for more details.

Questions? Contact us.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 02:19, 17 February 2018 (UTC)

RfC about Osmosis videos

Hi Marti, some concern has been expressed on the English Wikipedia about Osmosis videos, and how it came about that they were added to articles. Discussions at WikiProject Medicine (permalink); RfC; Jimbo talk. Pinging SandyGeorgia and Colin to make them aware of this grant request for $100,000 from Osmosis and AminMDMA. SarahSV ^talk 16:30, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Some serious problems have been revealed in this partnership, and a number of their videos uploaded to Commons and linked so far on en.wikipedia have factual errors, poor sourcing, and limited evidence of expert medical review. The emerging view of their work so far is that they have benefitted more from using Wikipedia than Wikipedia has benefitted from partnering with them. Considering the errors that have been uncovered in reviewing some of their work, it is not clear that they are an appropriate resource for "editing assignments in health professional schools". SandyGeorgia (talk) 17:21, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Instructional videos are extremely hard to get right, especially for a multilingual and neutral project like Wikipedia. You'd need to prepare the script on a wiki, have it go through multiple rounds of checks for content, structure, language and overall message; then make the subtitles usable and translatable; then everything else that you'd normally think of.

This other project seems to be about something easier to get right that videos, but I'm not sure because it's very unclear what it is about. It might just be about submitting 50 articles to some experts for review and editing, or it might be about something completely different that I've not understood. --Nemo 17:52, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Grant wording

"We intend to grow the pool of editors of Wikipedia’s health-related topics by expanding Wikipedia-editing opportunities for health professional students in their educational settings. We will also study these activities to: 1) identify best practices for Wikipedia editing in health professions, and 2) advance the science of creating open-access health content through crowd-sourcing approaches."

I have yet to see evidence at en.Wikipedia that students remain invested in editing Wikipedia once their courses end, and established Wikipedia editors expend effort on improving edits from students who do not remain as long-term editors (and rarely make enough valuable contributors to offset the effort expended to correct their edits).

I also do not see how a group (Osmosis) that scarcely participates in editing Wikipedia, and that evidences little understanding of core policies, guidelines and sourcing requirements can help advance best practices for editing Wikipedia. I do see the benefit to them, in terms of moneymaking potential, but I do not see the benefit to Wikipedia of advancing a partnership where inexperienced editors guide other inexperienced editors. SandyGeorgia (talk) 19:09, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

AminMDMA has 33 edits in mainspace, and examination reveals that many of them are reverted or require correction. SandyGeorgia (talk) 19:32, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

The education program established that student editors don't stick around when their courses end. SarahSV ^talk 19:42, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Out of scope?

I would decline this proposal because it wanders outside the scope of the grants program by seeking payment for content creation. The reasoning is subtle.

WMF does not give grants for providing content. If Alice sought a grant to improve the article about w:Poliomyelitis, that grant should be turned down. WMF does not pay for content; it wants content from volunteers. The result should not be different if Bob sought a grant where Bob would exhort his friends, coworkers, students, and employees to volunteer their time to improve Poliomyelitis. WMF would not be paying the volunteers, but it would be paying Bob for the content. That should not fly. The situation should not change if the target content is indirectly specified. Alice should not be successful in getting a grant to improve one, two, or five articles about debilitating diseases. Neither should Bob.

WMF does allow grants that "foster conditions to encourage editing by volunteers (e.g. editor recruitment campaigns)". The goal of such grants is to find people interested in editing articles on a project and get them started doing it. There's a difference between people showing up for such an event and medical students being told that today's assignment is to edit the WP article on polio. School assignments are not seeking volunteers. When the assignment is turned in, then it is over. I'm skeptical of editor retention once the class ends.

I do not see the same problems with WMF funding editor recruitment campaigns on medical school campuses. Such campaigns are looking for volunteers rather than conscripted students.

The proposal seems to fail "Funds for people’s time for short-term project activities that can't be completed by volunteers and does not involve content creation". The proposal wants to pay faculty to have their students edit wiki articles.

I don't see the "science of crowdsourcing" as a reasonable research topic. What is the goal? What will be learned? The proposed measurements are too narrow, and the $47K pricetag too high. What would WMF gain from such research? I have little interest in research that tells me, "in 2017 in the US alone, 117 medical students across 4 medical schools made 3,150 edits to 73 English Wikipedia pages, adding 128,200 words and 18 images to pages viewed over 2 million times". The goal of the research seems to be more about improving a CV stat than a WMF project.

I'm mystified why the project would "focus on creating partnerships with ... schools in low/middle-income countries". How would such a partnership improve the chance of a successful project? Wouldn't schools in high-income countries have better resources to support editing esoteric WMF articles?

I don't think medical articles should carry any special weight. What if the English Department at Harvard wanted funds to include WMF projects in its curricula? Should WMF give money to the Transylvanian Plumbing Society to get its members to improve plumbing articles?

Yes, it would be nice if WMF had more and better medical editors. WP editing assignments may be a way to get them, but that editor acquisition method falls outside the scope of project grants. Glrx (talk) 22:38, 29 March 2018 (UTC)

Oppose grant

As noted above AminMDMA has made few edits to Wikipedia articles. These can generously be described as test edits by a newbie. I strongly feel that nobody should be formally teaching a class how to edit Wikipedia unless they have a GA under their belt. Qualifications and experience required. Additionally, Wikipedia is a collaborative project, and I fully expect any teacher to have demonstrated they can collaborate with existing Wikipedians and understand the community.

I'm also deeply suspicious of the huge list of endorsements overleaf. I checked the first name on the list and their endorsement was their only edit to any WMF site. I shall not waste my time checking the others, as I fear the same. If this has in fact been canvassed off-site and supported by friends/family/employees then I think some kind of formal warning is required.

I'm not clear on Osmosis involvement. They have already produced videos for many articles, so which are they planning to add? WMF should not get into the business of agreeing a contract that requires the placement of content on WP, as that is a job for the community.

I'm also concerned about the "How to edit Wikipedia video that was created apparently in partnership with Wiki Education Foundation. This teaches the worse kind of editing: pick a random medical article, locate a random recent medical journal review/meta-analysis, extract factoid from journal article and insert into WP article. This is not the kind of editing we should be teaching. It creates articles that are simply an incoherent collection of random facts. In addition, there's no advice on avoiding plagiarism other than "don't copy paste". Previous student assignments involved exactly this: plagiarised facts randomly inserted into random articles.

I'm also concerned about the focus on the top 50 medical articles. These are by their nature likely to have received the most community work already, with some at GA and FA level. The low hanging fruit has already been eaten. Adding value to them is harder and much more likely to annoy the regulars. In contrast, students could make a real impact if, as a class, their learned about a rare disease, gatherer literature on that disease, planned the article content, and collaborated to expand the article. Our best class assignments in the past involved very experienced wikipedians leading their class toward GA quality work. The worst involved newbie lecturers setting trivial edit assignments for a thousand students, and then expecting other wikipedians to "mark" the work by reverting the crap.

I should note that today it seems the existing Osmosis collaboration to produce videos has ended, and all the videos removed from Wikipedia.

So I don't see why a newbie who has made a handful of test edits, and an organisation who has had all their work removed from WP articles, deserve $100,000 of funds. -- Colin (talk) 10:25, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

There is not one blue link among the endorsements. I hope the people behind these editing assignments will recognize the damage done to health content by the blind leading the blind. SandyGeorgia (talk) 13:43, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

I, however, did waste my time checking the other names. Of 32 endorsements, something on the order of 90% of them have a single global edit to any WMF wiki, and that is their endorsement of this grant application. Of the remaining three-ish, none of them would be able to edit an extended-confirmed article on enwp (they have around 20–150 edits). --Xover (talk) 16:41, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

Xover thanks for confirming. SandyGeorgia, most people are red-links on Meta. I'm only not a redlink because some IP wrote something on my page! The tiresome bit is you have to look at global edits, and I'm not aware of a quick way to get to that for each user. Perhaps Xover does. Typing each person's name into a box seems very slow. I would think this is the sort of thing that WMF should check, though. -- Colin (talk) 18:34, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

Yes, I did that. I think, actually, if you read the post under endorsements, we find that the fellow was using this page to teach students their first edit. Quite inappropriate. SandyGeorgia (talk) 18:38, 30 March 2018 (UTC)

Aggregated feedback from the committee for Promoting health literacy globally through Wikipedia-editing assignments in health professional schools

Scoring rubric	Score
(A) Impact potential Does it have the potential to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects, either in terms of content, contributors, or both? Does it have the potential for online impact? Can it be sustained, scaled, or adapted elsewhere after the grant ends?	6.2
(B) Community engagement Does it have a specific target community and plan to engage it often? Does it have community support?	5.2
(C) Ability to execute Can the scope be accomplished in the proposed timeframe? Is the budget realistic/efficient ? Do the participants have the necessary skills/experience?	3.0
(D) Measures of success Are there both quantitative and qualitative measures of success? Are they realistic? Can they be measured?	4.0
Additional comments from the Committee: Fits with strategic direction of knowledge service by enabling partners to share and contribute knowledge. Also indirectly fits with strategic direction of knowledge equity, as we know that globally Wikipedia is a valued source of health information. There is good potential for impact by leveraging the knowledge of health professionals in a more systematic way. Would also be useful to have insight from research on barriers for Wikipedia-editing in the health professional educational context. The impact potential in itself is good. The proposal intends to make significant positive impact on Wikipedias in a number of languages and can be more or less sustainable. This project fills a highly important need in providing medical information to the world’s community. I do feel like this group might do well to connect with current efforts instead of creating an additional group, thus having to build a community, resources, etc.. There is risk but it is mitigated to some extent by existing relationships between Osmosis and its 22 partner institutions. However, it’s not clear what the exact approach will be for working with partners; the project team needs to provide more details and proposed timelines around engagement, training needs, etc. Learning is neither strength or weakness. On the positive side, there is a reasonably good summary of learnings from previous projects and a meaningful explanation of what the next iteration will be. On the negative side, there are significant risks of low quality content being generated and lack of any content generation measures. This project has outcomes, which are important and would benefit the world’s knowledge about medicine and other health related subjects. I do feel they are rather broad outcomes and seem to have more impact on the individual than on the project or the Wikimedia movement. I would encourage them to work with WikiEducation Foundation and WikiProject Medicine to develop goals and appropriate outcomes. Need more details for budget request of $52K for “protected release time for medical school faculty.” Does this mean the project team will re-distribute funds to partner institutions? Or will those funds just go to the project team? Please provide further details on these amounts with breakdown of estimated hours of work. With regards to scope, it may also be better for the team to scale back the work and first focus on implementation/uptake by new institutions, and then submit a renewal request for the research. I think the request for publishing funds also goes against WMF’s open access policy. Even thought the video created by Osmosis shows a good and subtle understanding about references and Wikipedia, the lack of substantial edits by the team makes me fear they will not be armed enough to guide new comers who'll face community disagreement. The budget also lacks details Red flags only here: participants are clearly lacking necessary skills and experience (very limited Wikipedia experience, the medical content they generated was questioned by other editors on this topic), the budget is neither realistic nor efficient, and it is not clear how their efforts will result in growth of Wikipedia assignments for medical students (they are not planning any trainings). I have no doubt the activities could be completed. I see the project activities and outcomes, and then the budget. All are detailed, but I fail to see how they are connected. It seems like a portion of the funding is for open access journals. Current research criticizes the actual reach of open access journal and the rigor, so I worry this might not have as much impact as hoped. Further, the amounts for staff and faculty seem a little unjustified. What would these people be doing? The research on Wikipedia in a classroom setting has been exhausted at this point. What would you all be doing to build on the existing scholarship? I feel the goals of your research have been established in previous studies, including the most recent study by Zachary McDowell (https://wikiedu.org/blog/2016/08/29/evaluating-student-learning-through-wikipedia/) regardling learning outcomes. Is a medical classroom setting much different than other higher education classroom settings (maybe examine learning theory here to see where differences and similarities exist)? I would argue they would be rather similar, at least in the benefits of Wikipedia in the classroom established in prior studies of Wikipedia in an education setting. Many endorsements but they mainly seem to be from new editor accounts and none I can see are from Wikiproject Medicine. Strange community engagement: there is a wide support from people making their first edit and a significant and justified opposition from experienced medical editors. The only positive issue is a focus on low/middle-income countries to support diversity. I do see you all say you have connected with WikiProject Medicine and the Wiki Education Foundation, which is great considering they are already established here. I do wonder why I do not see the biggest supporters of Wiki Project Medicine and Wiki Education Foundation commenting on the grant proposal. Are you aware of them, worked with them, or have you connected with them about this project grant proposal in a meaningful, collaborative way? Justify certain budget items, provide more details on plan for engaging and supporting institutions, and consider scaling back work. Sorry, probably it's me but I don't understand the deliveries of the project and the budget. Mainly how the costs are calculated? More detailds about the budget would help to understand if the cost is over or under- estimated. This proposal seems to be a big challenge to carry on, and grantees have too little contributions on Wikipedia, one of them only 10 edits. I doubt in their necessary skills/experience Honestly I don't see any feasible changes that can make this project worth funding in the current state. The whole approach needs to be reconsidered, in particular more focus on work with staff and faculty of institutions you want to encourage to work on Wikipedia, as just reaching partners is not enough to generate quality content. I do love this project’s passion and really do see the importance for getting more medical content on Wikipedia and increasing the editor base of qualified medical professionals. I feel like this group could be best served by collaborating with existing organizations further. This would ensure efforts are not duplicated and are instead focused, thus more impactful. I do love how this group would like to get the information published and shared at conferences, but I fail to see how this scholarship they are proposing would lend to the existing knowledge on Wikipedia in the classroom. If the only difference is it would be a medical classroom and content under study, I feel Iike this might not be enough of a difference to establish a research need. Looking into the impact of existing efforts and how those could go further might be neat, but I think the current known opportunities for going further has not yet been exhausted. I would encourage this group to connect and meaningfully collaborate with the aforementioned organizations and resubmit for a future grant.

Opportunity to respond to committee comments in the next week

The Project Grants Committee has conducted a preliminary assessment of your proposal. Based on their initial review, a majority of committee reviewers have not recommended your proposal for funding. You can read more about their reasons for this decision in their comments above. Before the committee finalizes this decision, they would like to provide you with an opportunity to respond to their comments.

Next steps:

1. Aggregated committee comments from the committee are posted above. Note that these comments may vary, or even contradict each other, since they reflect the conclusions of multiple individual committee members who independently reviewed this proposal. We recommend that you review all the feedback carefully and post any responses, clarifications or questions on this talk page by 5pm UTC on Tuesday, May 11, 2021. If you make any revisions to your proposal based on committee feedback, we recommend that you also summarize the changes on your talkpage.
2. The committee will review any additional feedback you post on your talkpage before making a final funding decision. A decision will be announced Thursday, May 27, 2021.

Questions? Contact us at projectgrants wikimedia  · org.

Round 1 2018 decision

This project has not been selected for a Project 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. This was a very competitive round with many good ideas, not all of which could be funded in spite of many merits. We appreciate your participation, and we hope you'll continue to stay engaged in the Wikimedia context.

Next steps: Applicants whose proposals are declined are welcome to consider resubmitting your application again in the future. You are welcome to request a consultation with staff to review any concerns with your proposal that contributed to a decline decision, and help you determine whether resubmission makes sense for your proposal.

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