Submissions/Microgrants in Bulgarian Wikipedia

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2015 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this July.

Submission no.: 2095

Title of the submission

Microgrants as a way to motivate editors

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Лорд Бъмбъри (talk) (Nikola Kalchev)

E-mail address

nikola.kalchevgmail.com

Username

in Cyrillic: Лорд Бъмбъри (in Latin: Lord Bumbury), typo is intended

Country of origin

Bulgaria

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Wikimedians of Bulgaria

Personal homepage or blog

-

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Following the session on microgrants at Wikimedia CEE 2014 in Kiev, the practice of providing microgrants was started on Bulgarian Wikipedia. In this session, we will present statistics about the impact of the microgrants. Our aim is to motivate both experienced and new editors to add more high-quality content to Wikipedia, the main wiki project of our user group. We also gain experiences in working with a budget - something we will need after we become an NGO according to Bulgarian law.

All three applications until now were for relatively expensive books, although, according to the rules, travel expenses could also be covered by microgrants. The books are a philosophical dictionary (904 pages), an encyclopedia of Bulgarian theater (530 pages A4) and a rare monograph on Bulgarian Renaissance painters, wood carvers and builders, written in 1965 by an art professor, which is nowadays a bibliographic rarity. They are being used as sources for existing articles needing citations, expansion of articles and creation of new articles. We still cannot extract enough information about whether the authors have become more active since getting the microgrants. However, the introduction of microgrants led to the idea of a wikilibrary, where Wikipedians share information about their available offline sources, e.g. books on art, history and science. This way Wikipedians can see who can check a fact for them or lend a book and use it for their work for Wikipedia.

In order to win a microgrant an editor should write a short summary of her/his wishes and aims and the microgrant is voted by the community. Every wikipedian with at least 400 edits, who has registered at least 75 days before the voting is allowed to vote. The microgrant will be accepted if at least four editors voted in support, representing at least 2/3 of all votes. We will discuss the pros and cons of a community vote rather than a special microgrant committee, e.g. the fact that when the whole active community is allowed to vote, the rules can be "rewritten" during a vote, at least when there is a consensus.

We will discuss the reporting and controlling of the usage of the microgrants, qualitative and quantitative, e.g. number of edits and number of new articles, but also quality of the edits.

Track

WikiCulture & Community

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long): 30 minutes

15 Minutes + Discussion

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

Special requests

Interested attendees

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Spiritia (talk) 21:27, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
VladislavNedelev (talk) 10:15, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
--Antanana (talk) 18:23, 29 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Margott (talk) 09:27, 30 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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