Talk:Submissions

Bad link

The projects liaisons 2016 link is a bad link... TMagen (talk) 15:33, 16 December 2015 (UTC)

Done I JethroBT (talk) 00:25, 17 December 2015 (UTC)

Evaluation

easychair.org

Hi, while I do understand that using an external system may facilitate your work, I do feel that that particular easychair.org form is, unfortunately, not very user-friendly. First of all, I'm not exactly sure why a submitter has to enter their address and phone number to merely create an account on that third-party site; that does seem somewhat excessive. Second, I've always found it nice to be able to browse through submissions by others. That might prompt you to missing topics you find important to be addressed, and allows you to check first if someone elase already covers a similar topic (and perhaps want to join them?), etc. Either way, it's often the first step to your own quality submission. Pajz (talk) 12:58, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

Browsing the submissions. I agree that it is nice to browse the submissions by others. Please consider though that only 42 presentations are selected through the peer-review process and we can not create a blid-review system and publish at the same time the submissions (either one thing or the other), but there is much more in the program. You can have a look at the structure of the program and you can suggest topics, discussions, the best speakers, posters through the liaison page... --iopensa (talk) 17:55, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

About the amount of information asked by the EasyChair account creation form, I can just add that the site has, of course, a privacy policy; if someone interested in submitting a proposal is not willing to accept it, he can easily contact the chair or deputy of the Programme Committee, who are entirely available for all kind of help; this person, in turn, could hand the submission over to PC members after anonymising it. --MLWatts (talk) 19:29, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Hello, my usual user name was "already taken", and when I tried to use my full name as user name, I was told that blank spaces are not accepted - and everything I had entered was gone. Also, I may want to add different affiliations per submission, not one and for all. Ziko (talk) 16:28, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Hello. About the user name, I suggest you try using your full name without blank spaces, substituting blank spaces with underscores or adding some arbitrary numeric string to your usual username. About the affiliation, please consider that, given the double-blind peer-review process, Programme Committee members do not, at any rate, see the affiliation you enter; the "organisation" field is only relevant because Programme Committee chairs need to know who is affiliated to the WMF in order to implement the quota. --MLWatts (talk) 19:54, 8 January 2016 (UTC)

review and ranking within quota

Hi. Can you explain more about the evaluation process? I understand that two people will blind-review the submissions. From "If there are strong divergences among the two evaluations, at least one other review will be made." I understand that if the two people say "accept" or "strong accept", the proposal is accepted. How do the votes from the reviewers get combined with the quota limit? Assume as an example that 15 submissions from the WMF get strong accept from both reviewers. Then, how are you planning to break the ties? or you are planning to rate the submissions, for example, between 1-10, and then rank according to the average rating for each WMF and non-WMF submissions separately? --LZia (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for the delay. We will evaluate all submissions on a 1-10 scale. By "strong divergences" we mean differences of more than 2 points (e.g. 6 and 9). About the quota: let's say x WMF submissions will be among the top 42 proposals (ordered by the average numeric evaluation); if, and only if, x > 10, we will exclude the lowest-graded (x − 10) submissions (e.g. if 15 WMF sumbissions are among the top 42, we will exclude the bottom 5 of those 15; if only 9 WMF submissions are among the top 42, we will take no action). Any time we should need to break ties, we will have one extra person evaluate the relevant sumbissions. Let me know if I can help with any further information, --MLWatts (talk) 20:03, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for your response, MLWatts. It addressed all my questions. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 22:14, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

blind-review

The blind-review process may not work in the Wikimedia context well as many of the submissions are documented online somewhere. For example in my case, any research that I do or I plan to do is documented on meta, so the reviewers can easily look up the potential author(s) behind a submission. If some submissions are completely blind, and some are not, the process breaks. What are your plans for this issue? Thanks! --LZia (WMF) (talk) 22:07, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

We have been suggested to use a blind-review system. The reason is that for several attendees (and I am one of them) the impression is that there are often the same people involved in presenting at Wikimania and that the name and the reputation is a dominant element in the evaluation. Personally I think if a person has a great reputation and people want to listen to him/her is important to make sure he/she presents (we create the user digest track to involve these great speakers and we can invite them directly or having people suggesting them - but not with the submission process); our problem here is how to give space to the people who do not necessarily already have a reputation; we also want to include in the program people who have great ideas but not necessarily are great speakers: we trust the blind-review process is a way to do or to test this. Now, it is obvious that there are going to be some problems (in general blind-review is not perfect and surely our movement works with its specific dynamics and with online documentation); but what we hope is to focus on the content rather than name and to provide 42 opportunities (this is the number of slots we have) to people who have something to say. I do trust - even with some mistakes - the blind-review process can at least suggest reviewer to focus not on names and reputation but on what they read and the issue presented. Of course if you have other suggestions to rebalance the program we are more than interested in hearing them. thanks and good luck with the submission! --iopensa (talk) 17:46, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Who suggested blind review? — Fnielsen (talk) 17:53, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Peter Gallert was the first person to suggest to use a blind review process in July 2015 in Mexico City; we presented the idea in the Wikimania 2016 session and it received positive feedback from several other people and no oppositions. In reality it was already used: Liam Wyatt told us about it and he told us there have been difficulties. --iopensa (talk) 18:10, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

iopensa, thanks for your response. Testing makes sense to me. I'm not sure if you can change the review process for this year. If you still have some flexibility to do so and you find it interesting, you may want to have 4 reviewers per submission: assign 2 submissions under double-blind or single-blind to those reviewers, assign to the other two reviewers following a non-blind process. Later, you can test to see if there are significant differences between double-blind and non-blind reviews. If you need help with reviewing and you're short in resources, I'd be happy to help (obviously, I shouldn't be assigned submissions from the WMF because of potential COI). If you need help with the analysis of the data post decision (to see if the results are significantly different or not), I'm happy to help as well. Thank you for all the work you do for Wikimania 2016. --LZia (WMF) (talk) 22:33, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

---

I was surprised at the double-blind review process. To me that is something used in academia to attempt to avoid bias towards big shots and it is unclear if that is necessary for Wikimania. I think the community is sufficiently open and critical so that neither double-blind or single-blind review are necessary. I have heard of one conference using double blind review but still allowing upload to ArXiv making the reviewer able to unblind the author, so it seems that other conference simply ignores the Leila Zia issue. — Fnielsen (talk) 17:52, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

The system is applied to only 42 submissions, and there is much more in the program. Just as an example, we also devoted more time and good locations for meetups because we know that people really enjoy to simply organize informal meetings and to propose them last minute. I do not think the blind-review process will dominate the entire conference but it does make sense to test different systems of submitting proposals. If everything passes through the submission system (this is how it has been working for some years now), it means that only the presentations with extremely high scores are selected and often the difference between a 9 and a 10 is that you know the person (even if the submissions are both great) and the selection is not made by the community but - of course - by few people and the same people for the entire program. We trust by using different systems (liaisons, submissions, invitations, meetups self organized, community village...) we can be more inclusive and we can actually give a space to different kind of things selected in different ways. Please, do not hesitate to suggest other systems. --iopensa (talk) 18:10, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

I agree that the "blindness" might not work as by the submission content it might become very obvious who turned it in. Ziko (talk) 16:29, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

single or double-blind?

It would be great if you specify in Evaluation section of the main page whether by blind we mean single-blind or double-blind. Thanks! --LZia (WMF) (talk) 22:36, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Done, thank you for the suggestion! --MLWatts (talk) 19:57, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Submissions for preconference

The preconference is a great time for workgroups and meetups, but in the past, scheduling space in the preconference has not been a formal process.

Right now the Wikimedia Foundation and some other well-funded projects have time and space reserved in the preconference. I want some volunteers space during the preconference also.

I went through the abstract submission process and made one-sentence requests for space and slots during the preconference. I want space for the following things -

• OTRS administrator meetup
• United States regional meetup
• LGBT+ meetup
• medicine meetup

I expect that if asked, many other groups would like to make a space reservation during the preconference also. In past Wikimanias the preconference has always been a time for volunteer groups to have deep discussions among its participants, as Wikimania is the time when we all come together.

Can someone please comment on the availability of space and 1-2 hour timeslots for volunteer groups in the preconference schedule? How should this space be requested? Is going through the abstract submission process best, or is there another way? Thanks. I just want some safe space for volunteers to meet during the two days before the main conference. Bluerasberry (talk) 15:08, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Hello Bluerasberry! The scheduling process for meetups and other preconference activities is not going to be a formal process this year either. This Submissions page and the relative off-wiki evaluation process are only meant for "Critical issues" presentations. We have planned to grant a definite space to the meetups during the conference, because we strongly believe in the importance of this kind of informal confrontation between community members: if you have a look at our Programme draft, you will see meetup slots reserved in Esino's bars before and after the main working sessions during the three days of the conference. However, I don't think there would be any problem organising some meetups during the preconference (as you see, there is plenty of space which only needs to be conveniently assigned). We would like not to pose any filter to proposed meetups, and we are only going to organise them in order to avoid having different meetups about the same topics.

Given the non-formal nature of the organisation of meetups, we plan to do it after completing the evaluation of the submissions for Critical issues presentations. We will make sure to let you (and anyone who may be interested in reserving spaces) know about how to request these spaces. I hope I have answered all your questions, let me know if you need further or different information. --MLWatts (talk) 12:48, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

300 to 600 words

Hello, I find it good that presentations are limited to 18 minutes - more different people to listen to. But is it really appropriate to ask for a description of 300 to 600 words, for such a short presentation? At the WCN, we had presentations of 30 minutes (10 minutes question time) and asked a description of 100-150 words. I also doubt whether participants want to read so much text. Ziko (talk) 16:31, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Hello, personally I think that at least 300 words (which are, after all, only about 15 lines) are necessary to get a good understanding of the scope and importance of a proposed presentation from the point of view of those who review the submission; also, asking people to write a little more, rather than a little less, reduces the risk of having a good abstract but a bad presentation. For the past editions of Wikimania it was also asked to write abstracts no shorter than 300 words. --MLWatts (talk) 22:10, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Licensing: why CC 3.0 not 4.0?

Why is it only acceptable to use CC 3.0 while for quite some time now, the new standard has been 4.0? --Oop (talk) 10:05, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Would 4.0 text be importable into our 3.0 wikis? Even if the answer is "yes", it makes sense to require people to learn only one license to participate. I don't know if that was the reason though. :) Nemo 10:15, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Special guests

We are involving a series of Special guests at Wikimania 2016. --iopensa (talk) 13:52, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Any information yet on training sessions and discussions?

Wondering if information has been shared somewhere about these other two types of submissions during the conference? It would be great to also know an estimate about when the deadline is will be for these. Thanks! --EGalvez (WMF) (talk) 22:49, 16 February 2016 (UTC)

Hi EGalvez (WMF). In reality you can already request training and propose training through the laisons (according to what the training is about: research, tech, edu, glam, Wikimedia Foundation...). The idea is to have training sessions of 1h30 minutes with limited participants; we were thinking of simply accepting all training sessions which have the confirmation of at least 5 participants (you need to have 5 people not supporting the idea of the training, but interested in attending it) - we can host the training in the specific track but also in a small room at the community village and in the pre conference (if your training is related to surveys maybe it makes sense to link it to the learning day and if there is need we can extend the learning day to 2 days). Updates on the discussions and training will be in this page Submissions and we are opening the call for posters the 25th. Maybe the issue of evaluation-surveys (or any topic you are interested in proposing) could be also a poster and we have quite a lot of space also for these. thanks --iopensa (talk) 08:41, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Preferred language for training???

If Wikisource was to put forward suggestions for basic training, is there a preference for the language of that training? Is it Italian? Is it English? Or is it a matter that maybe we would do two, one in each language? Not knowing the expected language spread some guidance would be helpful. Billinghurst (talk) 05:47, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

The proposers are supposed to know their audience, so they should know better what language is most effective. It might even be Hindi, as far as I know. :) Nemo 08:45, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Yes, any language is good. We can accomodate any training but we ask you to make sure you really have at least 3-5 attendees (not people supporting your proposal, but people who express the need of that training and they are planning to attend). Buon lavoro! --iopensa (talk) 12:58, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

@Nemo_bis: I think that I know my audience, though having the itWM community to be able to express their expectations on numbers, language mix, etc. is useful. From WM2014 I saw a significant interest in Wikisource, though that was English language in English place so will have a certain bias. WS talk could be given in Italian or in English, so hearing the pertinent detail from the (informed) organising committee would be useful. Billinghurst (talk) 10:35, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Translation

The translation of this page, does not work from this page. Something wrong in the code.--Juandev (talk) 21:35, 8 March 2016 (UTC)