Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Research & Technology Fund/Wikimedia Research Fund

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Wikimedia Research Fund

Who?

Groups, individuals or organisations with research interests about Wikimedia movement

What?

Research proposals to contribute to generalizable knowledge or to strengthen the Wikimedia research community

When?

Less than 5 months processing time, one round in a year

How much?

2,000–50,000 USD

Please note: submissions for the Research Fund are currently closed. Check out this year's funded projects below and stay tuned for announcements about next year's fund.

Who we fund

The Research Fund provides support to individuals, groups, and organizations with interest in conducting research on or about Wikimedia projects. We encourage submissions from across research disciplines including but not limited to the humanities, social sciences, computer science, education, and law.

We prioritize supporting applicants who have limited access to research funding, are in regions of the world where the Wikimedia research community has less representation, are proposing work in coordination or collaboration with Wikimedia affiliates, and/or are proposing work that has potential for direct, positive impact on their local communities or the global Wikimedia communities.

What we fund

We welcome two types of submissions:

In-depth research proposals to contribute to generalizable knowledge that has the potential to improve and expand our understanding of the Wikimedia projects and their impact, introduce technical and socio-technical solutions that can enhance the technology in support of the Wikimedia projects, and advance the Wikimedia Movement towards the 2030 strategic direction.
Proposals that focus on strengthening, expanding and diversifying the community of researchers studying Wikimedia projects.

For other proposal types, please see other sources of funding, including the Wikimedia Community Fund and the Wikimedia Alliances Fund.

Eligibility criteria

Individuals, groups, and organizations may apply. Any individual is allowed three open grants at any one time. This includes Rapid Funds. Groups or organizations can have up to five open grants at any one time.
Requests must be over USD 2,000. Maximum request is USD 50,000.
Funding periods can be up to 12 months in length. Proposed work should start no sooner than June 1, 2024 and end no later than June 30, 2025.
Recipients must agree to the reporting requirements, be willing to sign a grant agreement, and provide the Wikimedia Foundation with information needed to process funding. You can read more about eligibility requirements.
We expect all recipients of the Research Funds to adhere to the Friendly space policy and Wikimedia’s Universal Code of Conduct.
Applications and reports are accepted in English and Spanish.
Potential applicants should not submit a proposal if at least one of the following holds true:
1. At least one applicant has been an employee or contractor at the Wikimedia Foundation in the last 24 months;
2. At least one applicant has had an advisee/advisor relationship with one or more of the Research Fund Committee Chairs or members of the Wikimedia Research team;
3. At least one of the applicants is a current or has been a former Formal Collaborator of the Research team at the Wikimedia Foundation in the last 24 months;
4. At least one applicant has co-authored a scientific publication with the Research Fund Committee Chairs within the last 24 months.

For country eligibility, refer to the list of countries that have previously been funded.

Application forms and guides

Please review our privacy statement prior to submitting your application.

Please use our Stage I submission template to prepare your submission. Please carefully read the document before preparing your final Stage I proposal.

The deadline for submissions to this year's Research Fund has now passed.

For proposals that have advanced to Stage II, please use our Stage II submission template to prepare your submission.

How we fund

Application process

Stage I: Applicants submit proposals in response to the call for Research Fund Proposals.All proposals will be publicly available to allow the Wikimedia community to share feedback and suggest improvements. The Research Fund Committee and reviewers will evaluate all proposals, taking into account the community input. At the end of this process, Research Fund chairs make the final decisions as to whether to accept or reject an application. All accepted applications will receive an additional meta-review and will be invited to Stage Ⅱ. All other applications are rejected at this point.
Stage Ⅱ: Applicants whose proposals are invited for Stage Ⅱ submissions submit their full proposal. These proposals will be made publicly available and are significantly more elaborate than Stage Ⅰ proposals and will include a full budget. They will also need to include responses to meta-reviews from Stage I.

Review process

We will use a single-blind review process in which the identities of the applicants are known, but the Research Fund Committee reviewers are anonymous. Technical reviewers will self-declare their expertise for each proposal and disclose any potential conflicts of interest to Technical Review chairs. Each proposal will receive at least three technical reviews. The proposals will be discussed among the reviewers and the Technical Committee chairs. Each submission will receive a composite score based on this assessment and comprehensive reviews from the Technical Committee unit. Proposals may also receive input from the relevant Wikimedia affiliates or user groups. Each proposal can also receive public input from the Wikimedia volunteer communities through a structured feedback process on Meta-Wiki. The final decision will be made by the Research Fund Committee chairs considering the recommendations from the Technical Review chairs as well as the feedback and input from the Wikimedia Affiliates and the broader Wikimedia communities.

Selection criteria

We will assess submissions based on the following criteria:

Research. The primary focus of the proposed work must be either to conduct research designed to contribute to generalizable knowledge or research community building. Because they are not focused on generalizable knowledge, research efforts on understanding the specific needs of an organization or community will not be considered. Note that proposals with primary focus on outreach, technology development/deployment, institutional support, or other non-research activities, or research focused on specific organizations are funded through other funds offered by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Relevance. The research must be on or about Wikimedia projects or of significant importance to the Wikimedia projects.
Impact. We aim to prioritize proposals that aim to enable the Wikimedia communities in making decisions or taking actions of significant impact as a result of the research conducted. We will give special consideration to proposals that directly address the Wikimedia 2030 Strategic Direction (including but not limited to the Movement Recommendations) as well as proposals that attempt to answer research questions in less commonly studied languages of Wikipedia.
Geography of the applicants and their corresponding institutions. Because we aim to increase the geographical diversity of researchers who contribute to the Wikimedia projects, we encourage submissions from Central and South America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia and will give these applications special consideration.
Community. We aim to fund work that helps the Wikimedia communities take the next step. We will prioritize proposals that support or work with Wikimedia user groups, affiliates, and developer communities. We encourage applicants to include one or more members of these communities in your team and consult Community Wishlists from 2019, 2020, and 2021 for ideas of problems raised by these groups.
Prior contributions to related academic and/or research projects and/or the Wikimedia and free culture communities. We will review self-reported contributions by the applicants to gain a deeper understanding of applicants’ interests, skills and abilities.

Budgets

Requests can be up to USD 50,000 and we intend to give a minimum of six grants during this funding cycle. Detailed budgets are not required as part of initial submissions but we request rough estimates in the following categories (if applicable) along with a brief explanation:

Salary or stipend
Benefits
Equipment
Software
Open access publishing costs
Institutional overhead (up to 15% of total budget requested)
Other (as specified)

Because the WMF mission is focused on education, budgets should not include faculty teaching “buyouts”—i.e., any budgeting for salary or effort that will result in a reduction of teaching. If the research project being proposed is absolutely not possible without a buyout, please provide context in your budget request and an exception will be considered by the Research Fund Committee.

Final grant amounts are up to the discretion of the Research Fund Committee, who may reach out to finalists to ask for a reduced budget and a proportionally reduced scope of work. Funds will be disbursed in one payment at the beginning of the funding period (As early as May 2024).

Ethics

All proposals should follow principles of ethical research and rules and guidelines related to human subjects research. We encourage authors to read the Menlo Report for further information on ethical principles, the Allman/Paxson IMC ‘07 paper for guidance on ethical data sharing, and the Sandvig et al. ‘14 paper on the ethics of algorithm audits. Finalists must address possible ethical challenges and how they will address them in their proposal. Institutional Review Board review (if applicable) needs to be completed before funds are distributed.

Research outputs

To make the results of the research actionable and reusable by the Wikimedia volunteer communities, affiliates and Foundation, applicants must ensure that any output of your research complies with the Wikimedia Foundation Open Access Policy. Applicants are encouraged to include open access publication costs as part of your budget.

Grantees are expected to create project pages on MetaWiki:Research documenting the progress of their work once a month. In addition, they are expected to complete final financial and project reports using provided templates, and present at a future Wikimedia Research event as well as at least at one event within their research community.

Grant IDs and WMF Acknowledgement in Publications

Each funded project will have a unique Grant ID which will be provided to grantees and posted on each project's corresponding Grant Meta page and Research Meta page. If a project was supported by the WMF Research Fund we suggest using the following acknowledgement in publications: This research is supported [in part] by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Research Fund under Grant No. [grant ID]. The authors would like to thank [specific individuals or teams] at [the Wikimedia Foundation, another Wikimedia affiliate, or the Wikimedia community] for [help provided].

Application cycle

Open call for applications, with office hours for interested applicants
Review of Stage Ⅰ proposals, including desk rejection of proposals that are out of scope, eligibility check, technical review, community review, and regional fund Committee review
Invitation to finalists to submit to Stage Ⅱ
Technical review of Stage Ⅱ proposals
Final decision

Important Dates

2023–24

December 15, 2023

Stage Ⅰ application submission deadline

February 13, 2024

Stage Ⅰ selection result notifications

March 18, 2024

Stage Ⅱ application submission deadline

April 29, 2024

Stage Ⅱ selection result notifications

All deadlines are 23:59 Anywhere on Earth.

Review submissions

Funded proposals

Not funded proposals from FY 2023-24

Office Hours

We invite you to schedule 1:1 consultations with us to ask questions about the Research Fund program or the relevance of your proposed work. Schedule a session with Kinneret Gordon or schedule a session with Leila Zia. When scheduling your appointment, please provide a description of your proposed research topic or question.

Contact us

Please direct questions to research_fund wikimedia.org.

Organizing Committee

Grant committee chairs

Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington)
Leila Zia (Wikimedia Foundation)

Technical Committee chairs

Aaron Shaw (Northwestern University)
Miriam Redi (Wikimedia Foundation)

Workflow Chair

Kinneret Gordon (Wikimedia Foundation)

Reviewers (FY 2023-24)

Pablo Aragón (Wikimedia Foundation)
Akhil Arora (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne)
Pablo Beytía (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile)
Hannah Brueckner (New York University Abu Dhabi)
Ana María Castillo Hinojosa (Universitat Internacional de Catalunya)
Kaylea Champion (University of Washington)
Giovanni Colavizza (University of Bologna)
Gianluca Demartini (University of Queensland)
Djellel Difallah (New York University, Abu Dhabi)
Shani Evenstein Sigalov (Tel Aviv University)
David Garcia (Universität Konstanz)
Martin Gerlach (Wikimedia Foundation)
Kristina Gligoric (Stanford University)
Jérôme Hergueux (CNRS)
Dariusz Jemielniak (Kozminski University)
Isaac Johnson (Northwestern University, Northwestern University)
Steve Jankowski (University of Amsterdam)
Lucie-Aimée Kaffee (Hugging Face)
Isabelle Langrock (Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris (Sciences Po))
Amanda Lawrence (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
Florian Lemmerich (Universität Passau)
Daniele Metilli (University College London, University of London)
Jonathan T. Morgan (CrowdStrike)
Animesh Mukherjee (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur)
Sneha Narayan (Carleton College)
Tiziano Piccardi (Stanford University)
Paolo Papotti (Eurecom)
Diego Sáez Trumper (Wikimedia Foundation)
Cristina Sarasua (Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, University of Zurich)
Rossano Schifanella (University of Turin)
Nicole Schwitter (Universität Mannheim)
Elena Simperl (King's College London)
Markus Strohmaier (Universität Mannheim)
Nathan TeBlunthuis (Northwestern University)
Jacob Thebault-Spieker (University of Wisconsin - Madison)
Carla Toro (Universidad de Chile)
Houcemeddine Turki (Faculty of Sciences of Sfax, University of Sfax, Tunisia)
Nicholas Vincent (Simon Fraser University)
Andreas Vlachos (University of Cambridge)
Katrin Weller (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences)
Jisung Yoon (Northwestern University)