Fluxx is the system which the Wikimedia Foundation uses to manage foundation grants of money.

There is a top-level classification system applied to each grant with status labels including "proposed", "not selected", "withdrawn", and "approved". Sometimes the status of a grant changes, but the system disallows WMF staff from changing the status label.

What happens?:
In top right of this page
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Community_Fund/Conversation_series_-_LGBT%2B

the grant which should be labeled as "not selected", rather than "withdrawn". Confirmation from the WMF grant officer is on the talk page, and states "for technical reasons, the status on the proposal of "withdrawn" is inaccurate and is due to limitations in Fluxx platforms we use to process proposals after acceptance".

The problem is that if Wikimedia Foundation staff marks a grant as "approved", but then later changes the status to "not selected", the system disallows this status change. Instead Wikimedia Foundation staff must mark the grant as "withdrawn", which communicates that the proposer declined to receive the grant rather than the Wikimedia Foundation declining to advance it.

What should have happened instead?:

The desired fix is the ability to label any grant with any of the standard outcome labels, and to remove the restrictive labeling system which prohibits change. In this case the fluxx system should label this grant as "not selected".

Software version (skip for WMF-hosted wikis like Wikipedia):

Other information (browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):

The incorrect label has been problematic in this case, and since this is not a one-time problem, fixing this has value especially considering the high stakes of having accurate financial data.

When the grant system applies incorrect labels then significant confusion to community and other Wikimedia Foundation staff results. Also this disrupts the aggregated automated grant reports such as the one at
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources/Reports/Funding_Report_2021-2022
which reports that "92% of the requested funding approved", when the statistics may exclude declined proposals by incorrectly labeling them as withdrawn. Getting accurate data is critical for matters of Wikimedia community internal governance and discussions of Wikimedia Movement Strategy. The Wikimedia Foundation makes massive financial decisions based on data, and there can be communities numbering to in the 100s of millions who only get a few grants a year. If even one grant is mislabled, the data is greatly skewed and strategic decisions relying on grant data undoubtedly become misguided.