Grants:Project/Ле Лой/Fountain/Midpoint

Welcome to this project's midpoint report! This report shares progress and learning from the grantee's first 3 months.

In a few short sentences or bullet points, give the main highlights of what happened with your project so far.

Internationalisation/localisation of the UI	Done
Personal cabinet for participants
Personal cabinet for jury members
Automated invitation process
Automated awarding process
Edit-a-thon calendar	In progress…
Edit-a-thon management by admins (approve edit-a-thons etc.)
Edit-a-thon management by jury members (add/del articles)
Actions logging for audit purposes	Done
Edit-a-thon configuration wizard
General UI	Done
Edit-a-thon rules config	Done
Template adding configuration	Done
Jury members management	Done

The grant project is about improving an existing tool, the Fountain, which has already been in development for some time, so I just continued my normal workflow. I've started with the most time-consuming features, leaving smaller features for the second half of the project.

What are the results of your project or any experiments you’ve worked on so far?

Please discuss anything you have created or changed (organized, built, grown, etc) as a result of your project to date.

• edit-a-thon creating Done
  • rules config, template adding configuration, jury members management
  • File:Fountain create an editathon.ogv Video: how to create an editathon. Test it on the test server!
    • I developed several new UI elements: drop-down list with lookup, pop-up, datepicker. You can see them on the video ↑
• Several in-depth discussions with users and organisers concerning the ideal workflow for: Done
  1. edit-a-thon creation
  2. roles and permissions to manage the edit-a-thons
  3. tackling possible vandalism
  4. UI.

  I was concerned about possible vandalism and creation of offensively named edit-a-thons after the edit-a-thon creating feature goes live. The discussions revealed the following policies circumventing the possible threats:

  • Edit-a-thons can be created by any user, but edit-a-thons created by non-admins will stay invisible until a Meta administrator/steward or an administrator from the project in question publishes it. For example an edit-a-thon for Catalan Wikiquote must be published by a Meta admin, a steward, or an admin from Catalan Wikiquote.
  • Admins can see all the drafts, edit, delete and publish them.
  • Only the creator and admins see the drafts, everyone can see published editathons.
  • Only one draft can exist in 'user space': you can't create another draft if you already have one pending review. It should discourage users from creating hundreds of drafts and encourage them to ask for help.
  • Any jury member can add and delete jury members after the editathon had been published.
  • In case of an investigation the audit log can be used to prove that a user had created a draft that violated content, but got deleted by an admin.
  • Local projects should hold discussions if someone repeatedly creates offensive edit-a-thons.
  • Added some new UI features to the project backlog.

  The implementation of these policies depends on having a 'personal cabinet' feature and will be implemented during the second stage of the project.

• Edit-a-thon audit Done
  • I implemented an audit subsystem which captures all possible user actions in an automated manner and saves the changes being made during these actions in the database. Currently there's no UI for this feature, because the audit logs can potentially reveal sensitive info (e.g. jury votes in edit-a-thons with hidden or consensual vote enabled). Thus this feature will only be limitedly exposed based on the user role and depends on the 'personal cabinet' feature implementation.
  • DB schema
• Internationalisation Done
  • I have re-implemented the internationalisation feature, it is now separated from the rest of UI code and allows more flexibility and robustness during the development process.
• Calendar:
  • Calendar: filtered results for edit-a-thons in Russian Wikipedia (this feature is almost ready, some finishing touches required)

Please take some time to update the table in your project finances page. Check that you’ve listed all approved and actual expenditures as instructed. If there are differences between the planned and actual use of funds, please use the column provided there to explain them.

Then, answer the following question here: Have you spent your funds according to plan so far? Please briefly describe any major changes to budget or expenditures that you anticipate for the second half of your project.

Budget spending didn't change, but I have slowed down considerably due to bad understanding of the review process, and I'm spending less time on Fountain per week then planned. It won't affect the outcome, only the duration.

I've paid the personal income tax on the grant money, will send a confirmation from the Inland Revenue on request.

What challenges or obstacles have you encountered? What will you do differently going forward? Please list these as short bullet points.

• Not understanding the Grant workflow! I was waiting for reviews when I should have worked on achieving my goal instead. After having lots of detailed conversations about the Grant I felt a little like I'm being abandoned due to some complications. In my 'home community' (Russian Wikipedia) each technical change is heavily discussed in fine detail, so if nobody talks about it, no one is interested in it...
• My time estimate was wrong, since February I've only been spending less time on development then expected, and support of new massive long-term editathons in RuWiki and other language editions took more time than I expected (created 19 editathons that sometimes needed my help in adding articles: in total, I've added over 5,600 articles...)

What have you found works best so far? To help spread successful strategies so that they can be of use to others in the movement, rather than writing lots of text here, we'd like you to share your finding in the form of a link to a learning pattern.

• Grants:Learning patterns/Edit-a-thon worklists -- a couple of examples
• Question: I'd love to help out with Grants:Learning patterns/How to prepare and plan for Online Edit-a-thons, I have plenty of relevant experience. Whom should I talk to in order to complete an existing pattern that hasn't been finished?

What are the next steps and opportunities you’ll be focusing on for the second half of your project? Please list these as short bullet points. If you're considering applying for a 6-month renewal of this grant at the end of your project, please also mention this here.

• The edit-a-thon calendar and edit-a-thon list filter features are almost ready, I'm planning to deploy them for testing soon.
• The rest of features are coming in a timely manner :-)

We’d love to hear any thoughts you have on how the experience of being an grantee has been so far. What is one thing that surprised you, or that you particularly enjoyed from the past 3 months?

• It is a lovely experience! I'm spending my time improving things that help WMF projects to gather as much knowledge as possible, it's a fantastic feeling. I enjoyed seeing the Fountain as an example of a funded project in an email broadcast about the Grants, and I love to see how the committee is open to change, taking every opportunity to improve the flow and user's experiences.