



Today we’re pleased to announce a new group of grantees working to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects. In early March, we announced the Inspire campaign, an initiative to generate new ideas to address Wikimedia’s gender gap. Now we’re following up on our commitment to fund a first set of actionable projects coming out of the campaign. From 266 ideas came 42 grant proposals eligible for consideration. After careful review by a committee of volunteer Wikimedians and gender-focused experts, 16 projects have been recommended and approved for funding.

Several of these projects will focus on organizing events and leveraging social and professional communities, institutions and partnerships to increase content about women on Wikipedia. Other projects will aim to engage women from New Zealand to Ghana to contribute to Wikimedia projects, test approaches for training allies to better support gender diversity on-wiki, and create mentorship systems for women.

Meanwhile, recognizing that there’s always more to learn, two research initiatives will work to increase our knowledge about women who aren’t yet contributing, and to understand more about trends in Wikimedia’s gendered biographical content. We’re particularly pleased to see so many projects considering intersectionality, as they work to improve Wikipedia’s gender diversity across various contexts, and to be supporting so many new project leaders who identify as women.

The Inspire grantees are:

We’re excited to see these 16 initiatives kick off over the next few weeks. As they go forward, project teams will be blogging and sharing updates on their grant project pages. We hope you’ll continue to engage with them and offer your experience and ideas!

A number of ideas and grant proposals from the campaign are still in development and will need more time before they’re ready for implementation or funding. Over the coming year, we’ll continue to welcome and advise the creators to sharpen their plans based on community feedback. Our Project and Event Grants and Individual Engagement Grants programs will be happy to continue to receive new or adjusted proposals aimed at increasing gender diversity during regular funding cycles along with all other topics.

Gender diversity is a complex issue and gaps aren’t likely to be solved in 1 or 2 months, but we look forward to having an impact by focusing together, seeding ideas to grow into actionable plans over time, and continuing to experiment with new solutions.

This campaign itself began as an experiment in proactive grantmaking, and as with all good experiments, we’re learning a lot as we go. A full analysis of the campaign is in progress, and in coming weeks we’ll be sharing findings from a traffic analysis and a participant survey. Stay tuned for another post in mid-May on what we learned from Inspire, what worked, what didn’t, and recommended next steps, as we continue to seek ways to innovate, support, engage and have collective impact on strategic issues across the Wikimedia movement.

Siko Bouterse, Director of Community Resources, Wikimedia Foundation

Alex Wang, Program Officer, Wikimedia Foundation

Inspire graphic by Vpseudo, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0.