Grants given to Wikimedia Foundation

This page documents grants given to the Wikimedia Foundation.

For older grant discussions, see 2005 grants
For grants distributed to individual projects through chapters, see Grants:Index
For a discussion of types of sponsorship, see also corporate sponsorship
For gifts given to the Wikimedia Endowment, see Wikimedia Endowment#Funding.

Other pages dealing with grants are in Category:Grants.

Supporting grant applications by community members

WMF supports community grant applications in a few ways:

Letters of support, especially for research proposals
Support with grant-writing itself

WMF can also serve as the distributor of a grant to individuals, as was done with a 2008 Mozilla grant to support free video development.

Grants

This is a compilation of grants received by the Wikimedia Foundation. It includes only grants that have been publicly disclosed by the WMF, the grantmaker or the US Government (through tax reports).

Funder	Amount	Period	Purpose	Relevant links
Lounsbery Foundation	$40,000	2005	to cover our daily operations, to enable us to launch our new Wikispecies project, and to continue to improve our existing projects.
Open Society Institute	$40,000	2008	"to obtain high quality print and word processor copies of articles from Wikipedia and other wiki educational resources."	press release
Stanton Foundation	$262,000	2008	"to support the purchase of database servers, application servers, network equipment and other hardware."	Fundraising_2008/benefactors
Amar Foundation (Vinod and Neeru Khosla)	$500,000	2008	Unrestricted	press release, Form 990
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation	$3,000,000	2008-2010	"support Wikimedia's organizational development and help to increase the quality of its content and the reach of its services."	press release
Arcadia (Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin)	$177,376 (£100,000)	2008	"to help with Wikipedia's costs"	Fundraising_2008/benefactors
Stanton Foundation	$890,000	2008	"to help study and simplify user interface for first-time authors"	press release
Ford Foundation	$300,000	2009	"to make it easier for people around the world to participate in Wikimedia Commons"	press release
Hewlett Foundation	$500,000	2009	"to expand its work bringing free educational content to everyone on the planet"	press release
Omidyar Network	$2,000,000	2009-2010	"to bring free educational content to every person on the planet, to engage and empower more people to author that content and to continually increase the quality and breadth of the information provided through Wikimedia’s projects."	press release
Stanton Foundation	$1,200,000	2010-2011	"a new project designed to improve the quality of public policy-related articles on Wikipedia."	press release, Public Policy Initiative
Google	$2,000,000	2010	"The funds will support core operational costs of the Wikimedia Foundation, including investments in technical infrastructure to support rapidly-increasing global traffic and capacity demands. The funds will also be used to support the organization's efforts to make Wikipedia easier to use and more accessible."	press release
Indigo Trust	£10,000	2011	"upgrading Wikimedia’s mobile platform"	press release
Stanton Foundation	$3,600,000	2011-2012	"The grant will fund development of a new editing interface that will make it possible for people to easily edit Wikipedia without needing to learn special wiki syntax. It will also support development of new technical features to make Wikimedia a friendlier and more understandable environment for new editors, and an improved mobile experience for readers and editors."	press release, Fundraising 2011/Foundation Grants
Brin Wojcicki Foundation	$500,000	2011	Unrestricted	press release, Fundraising 2011/Foundation Grants
Pavel Durov	$1,000,000	2011	Unrestricted	Fundraising 2011/Foundation Grants
Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin	$1,250,000	2011-2015	Unrestricted	Fundraising 2011/Foundation Grants
Kaphan Foundation	$100,000	2011	Unrestricted	Fundraising 2011/Foundation Grants
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation	$3,000,000	2011-2013		press release
Knight Foundation	$250,000	2012-2013	"To support Wikimedia Foundation's operation of Wikipedia and other knowledge sharing platforms"	grant details 990 Form
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation	$449,636	2012	Wikidata development	grant details, Fundraising 2011/Foundation Grants
Charina Endowment Fund	$100,000	2012	Unrestricted	Benefactors/2016-2017, 2012 Form 990
Boris and Inara Teterev Foundation	Undisclosed	2012-?	Unrestricted	page at Boris and Inara Teterev Foundation
Knight Foundation	$600,000	2013-2015	Wikipedia Mobile	grant details
Arcadia (Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin)	$100,000	2014	Wikipedia Zero	Arcadia pamphlet
Stavros Niarchos Foundation	Undisclosed	2014	Wikipedia Zero	SNF grant details
Two Sigma Investments	Undisclosed	2014-2015?	Unrestricted	Benefactors/2014-2015
Laura and John Arnold	Undisclosed	2014-2015?	Unrestricted	Benefactors/2014-2015
Charina Endowment Fund	$150,000	2015?	Unrestricted	Benefactors/2016-2017, 2015 Form 990
Monarch Fund (Mary Graham)	$500,000	2015	Wikipedia Zero
The Rothschild Foundation	Undisclosed	2015-2016?	Unrestricted	Benefactors/2015-2016
Boris and Inara Teterev Foundation	Undisclosed	2015-?	Wikipedia Education Program	page at Boris and Inara Teterev Foundation
Knight Foundation	$250,000	2015-2016	Knowledge Engine	grant details
Kaphan Foundation	$75,000	2016?		Form 990
Siegel Family Endowment	Undisclosed	2016-2017?	Unrestricted	Benefactors/2016-2017
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation	$3,000,000	2017-2019	"The project will support contributors’ efforts to integrate Commons’ media more readily into the rest of the web, making it easier for people and institutions to share, access, and reuse high-quality and free educational content."	press release
Craig Newmark Foundation and craigslist Charitable Fund	$500,000	2017	"support the development of tools for volunteer editors and staff to reduce harassment on Wikipedia and block harassers."	press release
Craig Newmark Foundation	$2,500,000	2019	"Security Governance and Engineering"	press release

The Wiki Education Foundation, a WMF spin-off, received another $500,000 grant from Monarch Fund in 2014.

Undisclosed

According to the WMF, the amount of anonymous major gifts (+$50,000) done so far is:

Old information (2009)

Successful applications

Topical grants

for WikiJunior creation
for Theora improvement & integration with MediaWiki (Mozilla)

Grants without application process

Philip Greenspun illustration project to improve the quality of animation: (Philip Greenspun)
personal grants, sometimes anonymous

Grants in progress

Archived grant ideas

these may still be valid for future proposals

Soros foundation grant (from 2004) - OSI has since funded travel scholarships to most Wikimania conferences
Wikiversität - request sent in 2004. Results?
Free Knowledge Communities - not sent
The Africa Project - not sent?

Older discussion and process (2005)

Proposal:

Gather a team of motivated people, who will later on form a cross-project committee. (See Grants department.)
Develop and budget precise and well thought out project plans. (1. A plan for attracting consultants for future projects, orgs who want to collaborate with us, and a board of advisors. 2. A plan for a longer-scale project focused on world history, for instance...)
- Projects, its history, its size and mission, and its current activities.
- Resumes for its board members, and for active contributors who are potential project coordinators for specific projects.
- Resumes for contributors who are potential consultants for various projects (technical & software consultants, translation consultants &c.)
- Resumes for other potential project-related employees (e.g., a librarian)

Research standard practices for editing, peer review, archival storage, dissemination, &c.
Research competing and complementary resources -- encyclopedias, textbooks, online references...
- Make a running comparison of Wikimedia projects with these related projects, to clarify our role in the grander scheme of things to potential grantors.

Appoint a grant coordinator from the committee. This official position will coordinate grant writing. Users with experience of grant writing in various countries will be beneficial.
Develop a formal budget to show what we intend to do with the grant money.
- Build the costs of overhead into the grant proposals.

Potential problems

From whom should we accept grants? How do we deal with potentially controversial sources of funding? (e.g. the Gates Foundation, National Lottery, Ted Turner, tax-funded government grants). By consensus? By voting?
Do we accept grants with strings attached? How do we deal with perceived strings, even where there are no formal strings?
We need to be careful about becoming dependent on any one funding source in order to avoid having to compromise our goals, such as NPOV, to meet what a donor asks of us.
We need to know if the Wikimedia Foundation has been granted 501(c)(3) status by the IRS in order to qualify for some grants.
Many US government grants require 1:1 matching funds from non-government sources.

Problems Outside the U.S.

Obtaining grants for the Foundation outside of the U.S. could be difficult. Setting up local Wikimedia chapters could help. For example, Wikimedia Deutschland will be more likely to find funds within Germany. A future British Wikimedia Chapter would have more success of finding funding within the UK.

Possible sources of funding

See Grants/Potential grants for a full list

Ideas to work on

Proposed ideas should be specific projects, not general needs like hardware funding.

Providing schools with Wikipedia on DVDs.
Publishing dead-tree subsets of WM content (e.g., WikiReaders).
- Drawing from Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikisource and Wikibooks
- Defining an ideal corpus for a specific subject, filling in any gaps in current Wikipedia coverage in a few major languages, and publishing in those languages.
Paying a translator to translate articles for a new language Wikipedia.
- To develop critical mass in a language-community.
- To translate a central corpus (which must be defined) into a target language.
- See above (on publishing)
Obtaining computer terminals with an installation of Wikipedia for schools in a developing country.
Teaching students to research and collaborate via Wikipedia -- supporting a subset of Wikipedians geared towards working with students (students of translation, of digital library science, of targeted fields), creation of educational materials to supplement the Wikimedia projects, &c.
Encouraging photographers in rural or war-torn parts of the world to record the world around them (cf. Belizian)

Endowment

Possibly off-topic for this page: While I think grants are more appropriate than corporate sponsorship, what we should really try to do in the long run is set up an endowment fund, a chunk of invested money that gives the foundation a steady income. That way, we'd reduce our dependence on any form of outside income. The problem of course is getting this money in the first place, but when we do acquire any large chunks of money (through grants or donations,) we should think about setting aside some of it to begin an endowment fund. Isomorphic 14:17, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)

I don't think this is off-topic at all. An endowment fund to support a project is one thing that a grant application can be made for, rather than a specific raft of short-term expenditures. +sj+ 06:49, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)

This is actually an excellent idea. Some banks will offer 2% or better on normal savings accounts. We would need $5 million in order to make $100,000/year pre-tax (if there is any on a non-profit like this). Another option is bonds with an annual yield--they tend to have a higher rate than normal savings accounts but are harder to set up/get money out of. If we had a 4% rate from a bond we'd only need $2.5 million, which is somewhat more achievable. We obviously couldn't achieve this with normal fundraising. We could go to the normal benefactors in society: ludicrously rich people with charitable foundations. The Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, DuPont, Heinz foundations are all potentials. The only problem is getting time with these people and convincing them our cause is worthy--a long shot. The other problem is that if the nest-egg is only big enough to cover yearly costs, there will be no growth. The nest egg ought to be big enough so that the annual yield is substantially greater than our costs, allowing for reinvestment of the yield into the endowment, such that the endowment can slowly grow as well. So, if we had a $5 mil. nest-egg, at 4% yield, resulting in $200,000 a year, and spent $100,000 a year, we could reinvest the other $100,000 back into the endowment each year.

Grant-writing assistance and other links

There is a purchasable CD-ROM that lists all relevant information about thousands of charitable foundations in the U.S. that give money to many different causes. I just looked up Interest:Technology and came up with 283 hits. Education is huge, and there are many other categories. We should look in to either purchasing a copy of this disk or at least obtaining as much information as possible from it. Another point to consider is that if we were to send out letters of inquiry with a WP packet (including basic promotional materials) to all of these organizations, postage alone would be prohibitive. ... Danny 23:32, 22 Jun 2004 (UTC)