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Dude, Where's My Donations? Wikimedia Foundation announces another million in grants for non-Wikimedia-related projects

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By Andreas Kolbe, HaeB, Sdkb and JPxG

Wikimedia Foundation gives away about $1 million in grants to counter racial bias and discrimination

Black and white Wikimedia Foundation logo

In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the first grants of a "Knowledge Equity Fund" created in June of the previous year. This involved about a million dollars of WMF funds being given, in the form of grants, to a number of external charitable and advocacy organizations.

This proved controversial; as we covered last October, a "somewhat-viral Twitter thread" questioned the relevance of these organizations to Wikimedia projects and values, and while some of the controversy was certainly political in nature, many of the grant recipients seemed unrelated to Wikimedia projects, prompting further discussion on mailing lists. One concern was the lack of community input into the process that led to the fund's creation. Another was the use of money which was generally solicited on the grounds of being necessary to fund Wikimedia projects, meaning that many donors likely did not know or intend for their funds to be given to unrelated organizations. Two of the grant recipients from the first round seem to have not shared financial reports detailing how the money was spent.

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a second round of grantees this month, saying in its announcement:

Equity – more specifically, knowledge equity – underpins our movement's vision of a world in which every human can share in the sum of all knowledge. It encourages us to consider the knowledge and communities that have been left out of the historical record, both intentionally and unintentionally. This is an important pillar of the Wikimedia movement’s strategic direction, our forward-looking approach to prepare for the Wikimedia of 2030.

There can be many reasons behind these gaps in knowledge, derived from systemic social, political and technical challenges that prevent all people from being able to access and contribute to free knowledge projects like Wikimedia equally. In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation launched the Knowledge Equity Fund specifically to address gaps in the Wikimedia movement's vision of free knowledge caused by racial bias and discrimination, that have prevented populations around the world from participating equally. The fund is a part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Annual Plan for the 2023-24 fiscal year to support knowledge equity by supporting regional and thematic strategies, and helping close knowledge gaps. Building on learnings from its first round of grants, today the Equity Fund is welcoming its second round of grantees.

This second round includes seven grantees that span four regions, including the Fund's first-ever grantees in Asia. This diverse group of grantees was chosen from an initial pool of 42 nominations, which were received from across the Wikimedia movement through an open survey in 2022 and 2023. Each grantee aligns with one of Fund's five focus areas, identified to address persistent structural barriers that prevent equitable access and participation in open knowledge. They are also recognized nonprofits with a proven track record of impact in their region. The Knowledge Equity Fund was initially conceived in response to global demands for racial equity, and the global reach of these new grantees is testament to and in recognition of the systemic impact of racial inequity in affecting participation in knowledge across the world.

The grants announced are as follows:

$290,000 USD to Black Cultural Archives, United Kingdom

Black Cultural Archives is a Black-led archive and heritage center that preserves and gives access to the histories of African and Caribbean people in the UK. Their goals with this grant for the coming year include increasing research into their collections, as well as increasing the breadth of their collections for research.

$200,000 USD to Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara, Indonesia

The Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara, or the Alliance of the Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago (AMAN for short), is a non-profit organization based in Indonesia that works on human rights and advocacy issues for indigenous people.

$160,000 USD to Criola, Brazil

Criola is a civil society organization, based in Rio de Janeiro, dedicated to advocating for the rights of Black women in Brazilian society. They prioritize knowledge production, research, and skills development as part of their work. They are also part of a national and international network of human rights, justice and advocacy organization focused on promoting racial equity.

$100,000 USD to Data for Black Lives, United States

Data for Black Lives is a movement of activists, organizers, and scientists committed to the mission of using data to create concrete and measurable change in the lives of Black people. They will use the grant in part to launch a Movement Scientists Fellowship matching racial justice leaders with machine learning research engineers to develop data-based machine learning applications to drive change in the areas of climate, genetics, and economic justice.

$75,000 USD to Create Caribbean Research Institute, Commonwealth of Dominica

Create Caribbean Research Institute is the first digital humanities center in the Caribbean. The grant will be used to expand Create Caribbean’s Create and Code technology education program to enable children ages 5-16 to develop information and digital literacy as well as coding skills.

$70,000 USD to Filipino American National Historical Society, United States

The Filipino American National Historical Society, or FANHS, has a mission to gather, document and share Filipino American history through its 42 community based chapters. The grant will support continuing and growing FANHS’ scholarship and advocacy on accurate historical representations of Filipino Americans and counter distorted and effaced ethnic history.

$50,000 USD to Project Multatuli, Indonesia

Project Multatuli is an organization dedicated to non-profit journalism, especially for underreported topics, ranging from indigenous people to marginalized issues. Their goal is to produce data-based, deeply researched news stories to promote inclusive journalism and amplify the voices of marginalized communities.

For further background on the grantees, see the Wikimedia announcement. – AK, JG

Jimbo promises improvements for Wikimedia Endowment's lackluster transparency

On the subject of financial transparency regarding the Wikimedia Endowment: here is what the minutes of the January 2022 board meeting had to say about it. Not exactly a wealth of detail, but we do at least get a financial summary:

8) Fundraising update

  • Overview, lead by Caitlin Virtue
  • Review of Fundraising Report, lead by Amy Parker
  • Summary: As of December 31, 2021, the Endowment held $105.4 million. There is currently $99.33 million in the investment account and $6.07 million in cash. An additional $8 million raised in December will be transferred to the Endowment in January 2022.

This summary was the last time the Endowment Board meeting minutes contained a dollar figure for the Endowment's total value (cash plus investments). Requests for an updated figure in February remained unanswered in July.

A couple of weeks ago, the Wikimedia Foundation's Jayde Antonio posted the approved minutes for the January 19, 2023 Endowment Board meeting to the its page on Meta. Noticeable here is the lack of any substantial new information – apart from noting the approval of the Endowment grants which were announced publicly back in April, they essentially just repeat the boilerplate meeting agenda posted months ago.

For example, the meeting's agenda (posted in February 2023) contained the following item:

6:25 - 6:55 pm UTC: Fundraising Update (Board Chair, Jimmy Wales and Endowment Director, Amy Parker)

  • FY22-23 year to date update
  • Campaign strategy

The minutes approved by the Endowment's board, led by Jimbo Wales, repeated the same point almost verbatim when they were added in July:

Fundraising Update (Amy Parker)

  • FY22-23 year to date update
  • Presentation of campaign strategy

Following a query on his user talk page about the Endowment's apparent secrecy, Jimbo appeared to criticize the minutes approved by him and his board:

At the meeting we discussed, to universal agreement, that we should publish more information and more often [...] the discussion about publishing more information and more often came about in no small part because the January minutes were something that I felt were not good enough in terms of being open and informative. (A financial report is forthccoming – I haven't seen it yet – but delayed because the relevant person creating it has taken a bit of family leave.)

This is a strange comment, as it would seem entirely within the power of the board to determine what information the minutes of its own meetings should contain. He later clarified: "The minutes of the previous board meetings are not written in realtime in the board meeting. They are a legal document prepared in advance and reviewed by the legal team and staff."

Following that discussion, however, Wales did provide a more meaningful update on Meta-Wiki:

In official business, the Board moved to hire KPMG as our independent auditor for the new entity, approved a spending policy for the Endowment, approved an operational budget of $2.09 million, and approved a grantmaking budget of $2.91 million for FY 2023-24. We also set the target of $11.5 million in revenue between fundraising and investment income this fiscal year. We ended the last fiscal year with $118 million in the Wikimedia Endowment and are projecting to grow the corpus by approximately $6.5 million depending on market performance and after expenses.

How much of this $118 million is held by the Tides Foundation, and how much by the new 501(c)(3) organization, is unknown. The Wikimedia Foundation has been keen to emphasize that the Endowment is now a transparent 501(c)(3) non-profit, fulfilling a promise first made in 2017, but the Endowment website itself continues to say:

The Endowment has been established, with an initial contribution by Wikimedia Foundation, as a Collective Action Fund at Tides Foundation (Tax ID# 51-0198509).

Jimmy Wales also uploaded a document to Meta-Wiki titled "Wikimedia Endowment 2023-24 Plan". This provides information on fundraising goals, an operational timeline, and the Endowment's budget for 2023–2024. It mentions $1.8 million in annual expenses in the most recent financial year (similar to the figure mentioned in the minutes for the July 2022 board meeting), including $400,000 for unspecified professional services. It envisages the Endowment standing at $130.4 million by the end of the 2023–2024 fiscal year.

Even with the information now provided, the Wikimedia Endowment has never published a statement detailing its revenue and expenses for any year of its existence. Its actual receipts and spending from 2016 to the present day, including the fees paid to Tides, are completely opaque. The Wikimedia Endowment, the Wikimedia movement's richest affiliate, remains some way away from delivering the level of transparency ordinarily expected of Wikimedia affiliates.

See also:

– AK

Wikifunctions goes live

Wikifunctions logo

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced that after three years of development, its Wikifunctions project is slowly beginning to roll out.

Wikifunctions, the newest Wikimedia project, is a new space to collaboratively create and maintain a library of functions. You can think of these functions like recipes for a meal—they take inputs and produce an output (a reliable answer). You might have experienced something similar when using a search engine to find the distance between two locations, the volume of an object, converting two units, and more.

The announcement describes Wikifunctions as "a core component of the larger" Abstract Wikipedia, a project designed to have volunteers writing simple Wikipedia articles in code that can then be translated into human languages. Both projects are spearheaded by Denny Vrandečić, the former project lead of Wikidata and a past Google employee. You can learn more about how Wikifunctions works in this short video on Commons and YouTube.

A technical evaluation published in December 2022 had criticized this "decision to make Abstract Wikipedia depend on Wikifunctions, a new programming language and runtime environment, invented by the Abstract Wikipedia team, with design goals that exceed the scope of Abstract Wikipedia itself, and architectural issues that are incompatible with the standards of correctness, performance, and usability that Abstract Wikipedia requires." However, Vrandečić's team disputed such criticisms and rejected the evaluation's recommendations, which had included decoupling Wikifunctions from Abstract Wikipedia, and having it based on the existing Lua programming language that is already integrated into MediaWiki and widely used by Wikipedia editors (see detailed Signpost coverage). – AK, H

Wikimania Singapore

Wikimania 2023 is taking place in Singapore this week, from 16 to 19 August, with some workshop, hackathon and pre-conference activities happening on 15 August. Event partners include UNESCO, Google, Creative Commons and Mozilla as well as a number of Singaporean partners like NETS and the National Library Board.

While this year is the first time since 2019 that the Wikimedia movement's annual conference is happening as an in-person event again, it is also open to remote participation. The full schedule can be found here.

The Signpost wishes all those who travel to Wikimania safe journey and a great conference!

Brief notes

As described in the Wiki Cemeteries User Group's annual report, the Wikidata contest "Wikidata Takes Cemeteries" was part of the Wikimedia events to celebrate Wikidata's 10th Birthday. It had a special focus on Africa due to the existing data gap in this continent.
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  • WMF monetized the editing community's voluntarism and obsession. Now, WMF will spend their ill-gotten gains however they please. The simple solution is: stop editing articles. Stop perpetuating new content on the Main Page. Let your hard work rust and decay and perhaps someday that edifice can be yours, again. Chris Troutman (talk) 22:50, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • This is getting ridcolous. There are many ways to spend money on Wikimedia community, but WMF is instead wasting $$$ on irrelevant projects and their own salaries. Something needs to be done. But abandining Wikipedia is not the solution, nor is it feasible. Let's try to brainstorm a realistc way on how to "take WMF back", folks. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 23:26, 15 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      Yep. I always kind of roll my eyes at the suggestion that we just *stop* - I write articles because I want to make local history accessible outside of the archives of my small town's museum. If I stopped editing, that history would stay locked away. No thanks! ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 12:15, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      @Piotrus: Allowing editors to revert office actions would be a first step, in my view. Obviously the WMF needs to be able to react to legal threats, but that ability to overrule community consensus is too much potential for abuse, in my view ([1]). Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 20:56, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • @Chris troutman and Piotrus: There is another way, a better way. At the end of last year we forced the WMF to adjust their banners to remove misinformation, under threat of preventing them from fundraising on enwiki. There is no reason we cannot use the same threat to limit their ability to pursue activities that are inappropriate use of donor money; either they stop pursuing those activities, or they pursue them without the tens of millions of dollars that they raise from us each year. BilledMammal (talk) 03:14, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      Right. How did we do it? An RfC? I'd strongly support another one related to this. Having reviewed a few related grant proposals for WMF a year or two ago, I think this is a waste of our money (money we could totally use for the community projects). @Pundit, btw. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 03:18, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      Yep; Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 196#RfC on the banners for the December 2022 fundraising campaign. One major change from that RfC is that we would need to provide more detail about the various potential enforcement mechanisms, as well as placing those details in the main proposal, rather than at the bottom.
      As for the proposal itself, I am not yet certain of how best to word it. I believe what we want is a level of oversight on how the WMF spends the money that they raise through enwiki, but without otherwise curtailing their independence. BilledMammal (talk) 03:27, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      In that RfC, North8000 made a good comment; I think that there are two issues blended together here. One is the broad general one that WMF has overall gone pretty badly astray. The other is the fundraising wording one. To me the latter has a simple fix. The banners HAVE given the (false) impression that that there is a threat to English Wikipedia's survival that needs money to resolve. Reword them to stop giving that impression.
      We addressed the banners issue, but we haven't addressed the broader issue; it is probably time to step up and do so. BilledMammal (talk) 03:31, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      @BilledMammal: What are your thoughts on office actions? I'd like them to be able to be overturned by community consensus or reverted. Right now it's Unauthorized modifications to office actions will not only be reverted, but may lead to sanctions by the Foundation, such as revocation of the rights of the individual involved. Yikes. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 20:50, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
      That's a separate can of worms from the one discussed above, which is wasting WMF's funds on things that have zero relevance to the community. I mean, there are zillion worthy causes out there, but we are a worthy cause, and it is ridcolous we are giving away our funds instead of using them for ourselves (developing new software, hiring people to support community, giving grants to the community members, paying for more stuff for the Wikimedia Library, etc.). Heck, even organizing some legal action in support of freedom of panorama would make much more sense than 95% of the grants discussed here, which are just "feel good in the context of digital divide" actions. Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 00:43, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • Wouldn't this just punish the same readers that the WMF is defrauding? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:42, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    • It doesn't matter if you are the most prolific contributor on the website: the WMF will not notice you leaving. In fact it seems many have not noticed the editors who have already voted with their feet and stopped editing, which has caused the critical volunteer shortage we've faced over the last several years. Instead we need a strike, but strikes have to be coordinated, organised and well-timed. Something like the SOPA/PIPA blackout, but this time the WMF would resist and try to overturn the blackout. — Bilorv (talk) 09:05, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Regardless of any misgivings over longstanding endowment concerns, never expected my own Windward Island homeland to receive a Wikimedia grant; chiming in as practically that country's only wiki aficionado. --Slgrandson (How's my egg-throwing coleslaw?) 03:08, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    It seems like a fantastic project as well! ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 12:13, 16 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    It's hard to argue with the projects' merit, but all we need ask is simply a requirement that their noteworthy aspects be documented on Wikimedia projects. That seems like such an easy requirement that I can only conclude it was assumed but neglected to be put in writing. Certainly asking for it would not be controversial within the Foundation, would it? Sandizer (talk) 07:57, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
That's my sense too, but it would be nice for that to be more explicit. – SJ + 09:13, 17 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Slgrandson You should reach out to them. Maybe you can make sure that at least some of these kids will upload a picture to Commons, or write a little draft article using local sources. Andreas JN466 18:28, 18 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Jayen466: I'd gladly love to, but at this writing, I'm now living in Florida instead. (Though a possible trip back home [during local Independence season ca. early November] is still in the cards; up to my superiors to get things ready, passport issues or no.) --Slgrandson (How's my egg-throwing coleslaw?) 01:42, 19 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Slgrandson: I had read your user page and knew you weren't there any more. I was just thinking of remote help – like reviewing draft articles or suggesting subjects to write about or take pictures of, both of which might benefit from being done by a Wikipedian who grew up there. Best, Andreas JN466 08:05, 19 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hacker News thread

The majority of commenters at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37179587 seem to express profound unhappiness with how Wikipedia donations are managed. --Andreas JN466 23:04, 18 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Equity Grants were an idea of the previous CEO who is no longer with the Foundation so there isn't a chance of them recurring. The Board has done its main job - changed the CEO. Victoria (talk) 10:39, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
So how come we have this new round of grantees? Andreas JN466 16:08, 19 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I’d like to clarify a few of the misconceptions shared here. First, the Knowledge Equity Fund is a limited fund of $4.5 million from the Foundations 2020-2021 budget. Each round of grantmaking spends down these funds which were set aside two fiscal years ago. The Equity Fund does not come from or compete with the Foundation’s annual plan budget. Our annual plan priorities and budget allocations were discussed with Wikimedia communities through a robust community collaboration process earlier this year. This year alone, the Foundation is spending $17.5 million on grants to the Wikimedia movement.

As a member of the Knowledge Equity Fund selection committee, I can also share that we do not see these grants as tangential to the Wikimedia movement; they are intended to find new ways of supporting knowledge creation on underrepresented topics, so that newly available knowledge resources can be used to strengthen content on the projects themselves.

Howard requested an extension time for their report due to operational delays. We will post the report shortly. We have been working towards a more structured reporting process for the future year. KEchavarriqueen (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I feel like I'm a bit out of loop. What exactly is the Knowledge Equity Fund? Is it the origin these grants? Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 19:37, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@KEchavarriqueen (WMF):And how is a non-profit organization based in Indonesia that works on human rights and advocacy issues for indigenous people in any way related to the project. Nice? Yes. Relevent? No. Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 19:39, 22 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, as you can see if you search the Web (or Meta) for it, the m:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Equity_Fund was a one-time fund set aside two years ago with the stated desire to trial a separate grant pool to support communities whose knowledge resources or language might not yet be represented on the projects, and who might have other barriers to being able to contribute to our form of collaboration. It's a reasonable conceit and countering systemic bias is a long-standing and important WP idea. one can propose better ways to do it or better ratios of investment, but a 20:1 ratio of community grants to this sort of (out-of-community / potential-future-community) grant is a plausible start. Cool concept, deserves more integration and more & better proposals. – SJ + 22:16, 1 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Anyone who knows my history will be aware that I've gotten into it pretty hard with the WMF, but (and the Signpost article suffers the same flaw) at least I didn't do it on the basis of wild-ass conspiracy theories For all the bluster about the WMF, I'm still not seeing how the cited evidence is proof of some grand conspiracy; and if there is one, arguendo, the WMF is conspiring against its volunteers... why? An answer to that doesn't seem to be forthcoming. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:09, 23 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • Speaking for myself, I'm not insinuating that there is some kind of conspiracy here. What I am concerned about is that the Foundation is giving money to groups that have little or no clear benefit to any Wikimedia projects, when there is plenty of need at Wikimedia projects. Not only are we donating our labor for free, some of us are spending money out of our own pockets to benefit Wikipedia, so if there is more money in the Foundation accounts than is needed to run their side of things, why not spend it on us? Or at least some charitable organization that clearly helps us? In short, someone set the wrong priorities, & we (okay I, I'm not speaking for anyone else) would like this decision either revisited or reversed. -- llywrch (talk) 22:06, 23 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Exactly. No-one is saying there's a "grand conspiracy". Edward-Woodrow :) [talk] 22:10, 23 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    You two aren't, but there's a tinge to this article which is definitely coming off as what they don't want you to know. Jimbo addressed some of this on his talkpage in the days before this was published, and noted much the same thing; I have no reason to disbelieve his comments or those of the WMF employee above. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 18:05, 24 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]
The Signpost: doing it for free since 2005.
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