grantmaker budget was $2.37 million in 2012. In sharp contrast, the Wikimedia Foundation 2014-2015 grantmaking budget is over $7 million[1].
- The Wikimedia Foundation Grantmaking process is uniquely designed to reflect the ethics, methods, and agreements that are core to the overall Wikipedia model. Proposals are workshopped on public wikis and improved by volunteer editors. Decisions about which proposals to fund and how much funding to offer are made publicly on wikis, in cooperation with volunteer committee members, Board members, and staff, and with input from the larger community.
- Wikimedia Foundation Grantmaking has the largest peer-review participation of any funder of its kind in the world. As of June 2014, 54 community members were involved in the IEG, PEG, and APG committees. These committees are intentionally designed to be geographically and gender diverse, and include community members involved in different Wikimedia projects. In addition to committee members, grantmaking processes include open comment periods, and as of December 2014, over 1,500 unique Meta-wiki users have contributed by submitting requests, commenting, editing, etc.[2]
- Just as anyone can become a Wikipedia editor, anyone who edits Wikipedia can make a proposal to the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation seeks to support good ideas from anywhere in the movement including individuals, informal groups, and formal Wikimedia organizations. This flexibility and accessibility stands out as unique in our research. The opportunity to receive individual project or small group funding from an international Participatory Grantmaking Fund is unusual, and will likely generate attention, interest, and further research within the larger philanthropic field.
- The Grantmaking team serves as an amplifier, facilitator, and connector of ideas, experimentation, and programs across the Wikimedia movement, and a critical entry point for the entire organization to learn from and serve multiple communities better. In 2013-2014, the Grantmaking team supported the growth of knowledge content and communities through more than 200 grants and other resources, in 66 countries, over 30 language Wikipedias and sister projects, working directly with over 300 community leaders and supporting over 4000 people across the global movement.
- At Wikimedia Foundation, a large percentage of total funds are raised from readers and contributors to Wikimedia projects, and therefore require a high level of community-wide accountability, transparency, and visibility - yielding a grantmaking process that is widely participatory from income to expense. Because Wikimedia is one of the top global websites, the Foundation is able to actualize the vision of a social justice movement funded and supported by its community. Witness the 2013-14 online fundraising campaign which generated a donation total of $37 million from over 2.5 million individual Wikipedia readers around the world.[3] In this way, the Wikimedia Foundation's fundraising model reflects and aligns with the intentions of the early Participatory Grantmaking movement, while representing an exciting, stand-out example within the field.
We hope that this report allows the reader to not only learn about the unique grantmaking and decision-making practices of the Wikimedia Foundation, but also to contextualize the values that drive this work, and to situate the Wikimedia Foundation within long-established efforts to democratize grantmaking in the service of movements for social justice and human rights.
- ↑ Grantmaking Overview, June 2014. Page 5.
- ↑ http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e0/2014-15_Wikimedia_Foundation_Plan.pdf. Page 37.
- ↑ http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fundraising_reports
3
