Pine, have you noticed how we're seeing fewer and fewer well-qualified
community members actively seeking out the responsibility of various
committee roles? (I'll point out that this is particularly noticeable
amongst women within the community.) It's because they are being
bombarded, more and more, by unreasonable levels of criticism. I can say
this with a fair bit of authority because I've been involved inhigh-profile
committees, task forces, steering groups and responsible roles for 8 years,
and the level of criticism has definitely affected where I'm willing to
invest my volunteer efforts. I turn down 10 attempts to recruit me for
various tasks for every one I accept, and I'm not alone.
The Wikimania Scholarship Committee does work that will never satisfy
everyone, and all of their decisions will be found wanting by some segment
of the community. It is a very difficult job - there are so many factors
to weigh that, even though there are some basic minimal levels of activity
expected, deciding between a candidate with a few thousand edits who is one
of the most proliferate editors of a small wiki (e.g., the editor mainly
translates high-value articles and posts them in a single edit) against one
who specializes in high quality images (but only uploads 50 a year) against
one who averages 15,000 edits but mainly works in anti-vandalism, against
one who has few on-wiki contributions but has trained and educated dozens
of very productive editors....well, you see the challenge. These are all
valuable contributors - but their contribution to the movement is very
different, and those who value some of those contributions over others will
find personal justification in complaining about the decisions the
committee makes.
There may be some reasonable arguments about providing some aggregate
information such as the number of applicants from different regions and the
percentage that were successful....but again, there are other routes to
Wikimania including scholarships from large chapters, which often sponsor
community members from other regions, and often select recipients from the
pool of WMF-sponsored scholarship applicants.
Of course, there is an easier way to affect the outcome of these
discussions. Sign up in late 2017/early 2018 to become a member of the
scholarship committee.
Risker/Anne
On 18 April 2017 at 23:32, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Risker: it seems to me that there are two two
different issues.
First, fear of criticism or controversy are not justifications for
withholding information.
That said, I tend to agree you about the privacy issue for applicants. Any
information releases should be compliant with what applicants were told at
the time that they applied, and perhaps in future years there can be more
specific considerations of what kinds of information should be released.
Perhaps not much information will be released this year if users weren't
told that the fact that they applied would be published (and my guess is
that they weren't), but perhaps in future years this can be done along with
other information that is not particularly sensitive, e.g. public
contribution histories and public roles such as board or committee
memberships.
(Note: I have not applied for a Wikimania scholarship and I don't plan to
do so in the foreseeable future.)
Pine
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