On 21 May 2017 at 20:12, Pine W <wiki.pine@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 3:34 PM, Risker <risker.wp@gmail.com> wrote:

I'm sorry, Pine....but no.  It's naming and shaming.  If Praveen had wanted to highlight the frequency of Wikimedians being granted Wikimania scholarsips, they could have done exactly what Mike Peel did - compare the relevant lists and highlight the frequency of users receiving one, two or three grants over the four years for which data is available.  That would have been - and is - a reasonable point of discussion.  It turns out that Praveen's information was incomplete at best, and incorrect at worst. 

It's possible that I misread something, but the question that I read in Praveen's original email was, "Then, what is the advantage of selecting same persons again and again for scholarship? Isn't it better to let more different people to share and experience global community?" I don't see how citing a specific example amounts to naming and shaming. Unless I'm overlooking something, there was an honest question of whether current system of selecting awardees should be modified and examples of the outcomes of the current award system were provided. I think it is risky to read negatively into others' motives, and at this point I don't see evidence that would support a view that there was malicious intent in the examples being provided. The examples may be uncomfortable, but that's a very long way from being malicious.

I think you may have missed some comments from the later part of the thread.  I found them highly disturbing.  Frankly, they were disturbing enough that many other Wikimedians I know would have walked away from the projects entirely; we cannot afford to allow people to be browbeaten for being able to demonstrate on a repeated basis that they're productive and valuable members of our community. 

 

 

That one specific individual has received more than one of them, and someone is implying that the grantee failed to live up to their undertaken responsibilities, is not a reasonable way of discussing those points.

I disagree. If there are examples of grantees not fulfilling their obligations but being awarded subsequent grants, that would be a problem. I don't want people to be fearful of being attacked for discussing situations in which they reasonably think that there may be a problem. I think that an underlying issue may be the lack of transparency in the awards applications. If there was more transparency then venerability would be less of a challenge. I realize that this is a complex problem, and hopefully there can be constructive discussions about how to address it.

It may be a reason to draw this to the attention of the Wikimania Scholarship Committee, or the WMF Travel and Supports grants staff.  It is not appropriate to start a thread on a mailing list that has thousands of subscribers. As it turns out, there is good reason to doubt a significant amount of what was said anyway. 

We need to stop enabling behaviour like this.  The Wikimania-L mailing list is not an appropriate place to rail against another Wikimedian.  None of the Wikimedia-related mailing lists are.  This is an excellent example of bullying, and it needs to stop.