Grants talk:Project/Rapid/Igbo Wiktionary Edit-a-thon in Federal Government Girls’ College, Bwari, FCT, Nigeria

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Comment[edit]

Hi Oby Ezeilo, I am happy that you will be engaging students of senior secondary schools in Abuja. We really need to engage young people who might later be an asset to the Wikimedia projects.That being said, I would like to ask few questions. Please, see them below:

  1. Can you provide a link to the project, the Igbo Wikitionary?
  2. Why did you choose Igbo Wiktionary, a proposed project that is not yet operational?
  3. Why not Igbo Wikipedia?
  4. Your budget is not clear. Why not put your budget in a tabular form to show clearly what you are spending funds on?
  5. In your budget, you wrote "Post event cleanup = $50 x 4 events = $200". What does this imply? What do you need this for? Please, note that WMF does not and will never pay people to edit.
  6. How many people will participate per event and what is the unit cost?

In general, while it's good to have more Wikimedia projects, I think it would be a brilliant idea to channel this energy on existing Igbo Wikipedia that has no active community rather than on a project that is not already in use. There is no emergency for new projects in Igbo language. Looking at Igbo Wikipedia and the contribution made to the project in the last 7 days, the total edit made to that project in the last 7 days were less than 30 edits, 2 of the edits were global sysop action and 9 edits by an ip address. Thus, if a project needs new editors, it is Igbo Wikipedia and not Igbo Wikltionary that is in Incubator. May I suggest that you focus your energy on Igbo Wikipedia? If there is significant improvement after few months or years, you can look at Igbo Wiktionary. By then you will have enough active Igbo community members to help develop the project in Incubator. Regards. T Cells (talk) 11:54, 4 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Responding to Olatunde Isaac[edit]

Thank you for your kind comment, Olatunde Isaac. I believe the Rapid Grant team will direct on what should suffice upon review of the application. Have a pleasant day. Oby Ezeilo (talk) 5:30, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

Please, address me as User:T Cells. That being said, I find your remarks utterly disrespectful. Community, WMF staff and grantee engagement in grants request process is important and valuable. Thinking the WMF staff will encourage you to ignore valid question and concerns raised by community members is improvident. Your response also do not show that you have the temperament to manage people which is concerning. T Cells (talk) 20:28, 13 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Response from WMF to Oby Ezeilo[edit]

Hello Oby Ezeilo, thank you for submitting your first grant request to rapid grants. I understand that this is your first time applying for a grant with us so you're not familiar with community feedback. Many of the grant requests we receive get comments from the community. This is how we know if the project has endorsements, support or in some cases challenges. It's important to be responsive to community requests. Having said that I feel that T Cells' response to your response could have been kinder. I will address that in the next section. Meanwhile, I do believe he had valid points. I have similar and additional questions for you below:

  1. Can you let us know why you've made the decision to focus on Igbo wiktionary as opposed to Igbo Wikipedia? I am asking this question not to direct you to choose one over the other but because I see that one of your goals is to increase skills for existing editors participating in the Wikipedia Igbo Women Edit-a-thon Project. Given that they are working on Igbo Wikipedia I wanted to get some clarification.
  2. Are you expecting 40 participants total? If so, $200 for 10 participants at each event for food and refreshments is a high estimate. Can you please clarify?
  3. I would like to remove or reduce item #4 in your budget. We do not offer t-shirts for every participant in a workshop. Can you please remove the $600 from your budget? Alternatively, you can offer select volunteers or those who have edited the most articles t-shirts as prize. For e.g one t-shirt per event or something like that.
  4. Please clarify what you mean by post-event clean-up. Do you mean that you will have volunteers cleaning up edits/articles or do you mean the physical clean up of the space you're using for the edit-a-thon?

Please let me know your responses to these questions and I will proceed accordingly. Best regards, WJifar (WMF) (talk) 02:30, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Response from WMF to T Cells[edit]

Hello T Cells, while I appreciate your initial remarks/questions on this grant request, I found your response to Oby Ezeilo's response to be unnecessarily confrontational. I didn't find their initial response to be disrespectful although naive about community members' role in proposal input. I would like to refer you to our friendly space policy for future comments. Your comments were not considerate of the applicant's experience nor supportive. Furthermore, your comment on their "temperament to manage people" was out of context and uncalled for. Best regards, WJifar (WMF) (talk) 02:30, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the feedback. It wasn't my intention to be harsh and I apologize for the harsh comment. Regards. T Cells (talk) 06:25, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you T Cells for acknowledging my feedback. Best regards, WJifar (WMF) (talk) 07:05, 25 May 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Responding to WJifar (WMF)[edit]

Hello WJifar (WMF). Apologies for the late response, please forgive me. Find below, my responses to the questions.

Can you let us know why you've made the decision to focus on Igbo wiktionary as opposed to Igbo Wikipedia? I am asking this question not to direct you to choose one over the other but because I see that one of your goals is to increase skills for existing editors participating in the Wikipedia Igbo Women Edit-a-thon Project. Given that they are working on Igbo Wikipedia I wanted to get some clarification.

I did so because people find it difficult to get the meaning or translation of words from English to Igbo Language. It will be great to go to wikitionary to find the translation of words, easily. As an Igbo language educationist in a secondary school, my target new editors are secondary school students, so I believe that a Wiktionary edit-a-thon will be a far easier project for them considering that they are students. About increasing skills for existing editors, Wiktionary is a different project that has peculiar features and interface; editors from the Wikipedia Igbo Women Edit-a-thon project that will be involved in this project will increase their skills in another Wikimedia project.

Are you expecting 40 participants total? If so, $200 for 10 participants at each event for food and refreshments is a high estimate. Can you please clarify?

I am expecting 40 participants per event and not 10 per event which makes it about $5 per head.

I would like to remove or reduce item #4 in your budget. We do not offer t-shirts for every participant in a workshop. Can you please remove the $600 from your budget? Alternatively, you can offer select volunteers or those who have edited the most articles t-shirts as prize. For e.g one t-shirt per event or something like that.

This is well noted. Can I propose that I give 2 T-shirts to exceptional participants for every event which would bring it to a total of 10 T-shirts?

Please clarify what you mean by post-event clean-up. Do you mean that you will have volunteers cleaning up edits/articles or do you mean the physical clean up of the space you're using for the edit-a-thon?

Hall usage is free but a token payment for cleaning up the space is required hence the cost item.

Thank you so much. Oby Ezeilo (talk) 13:10, 9 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Approval[edit]

Hello Oby Ezeilo, thank you for answering my questions regarding your proposal. I have updated some numbers in your proposal based on your answers here. I changed the t-shirt amount to 8 as opposed to 10 since you said you would like 2 per event and you have four events. I have also updated the overall budget based on those numbers. Thank you also for clarifying what the clean-up was for. I have approved your grant request. Best regards, WJifar (WMF) (talk) 20:46, 13 June 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Change of project date.[edit]

I request to change my project date from July to October 2018. This change is due to some delays. However the funds did not come within the time i specified in my proposal to carry out the Edit a thon in Federal Government Girls College Bwari, I received the grant on 15th of August. Presently the school is not in session, the students are on vacation and will resume September. Consequently i will now carry out the project by third week of September which is 22nd and end by October 2018. Oby Ezeilo (talk) 19:46, 20 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

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