Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-08-15/News and notes
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Wikimedia Foundation gives away about $1 million in grants to counter racial bias and discrimination
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the second round of grantees from its Knowledge Equity Fund. The fund has been controversial in the past because donors may not be aware that millions of the dollars they donate to Wikipedia will be used to support organizations that have no direct relationship with Wikipedia (see previous Signpost coverage). In its announcement, the Wikimedia Foundation states:
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
Wikimedia Endowment's financial transparency falls short, Jimmy Wales promises improvements
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 meeting's page on Meta-Wiki. The minutes were remarkable for not adding any substantial new information at all – apart from noting the approval of the Endowment grants announced back in April, they essentially just repeated the generic meeting agenda posted months ago.
For example, the meeting 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 meeting minutes approved by the Endowment's board, led by Jimmy Wales, repeated the same point almost verbatim:
Fundraising Update (Amy Parker)
- FY22-23 year to date update
- Presentation of campaign strategy
Contrast this to the minutes of the January 2022 Board Meeting. They were not exactly detailed either, but did at least contain 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.
In fact, this summary marked 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 remained unanswered.
Following a query on his user talk page about the Endowment's apparent secrecy, Jimmy Wales appeared to criticise the minutes approved by him and his board as "not good enough" and said that everybody at the meeting where the minutes were approved had actually been in favor of publishing more information:
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.
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 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 envisages the Endowment standing at $130.4 million by the end of the 2023–2024 fiscal year. For further details see this section on Meta-Wiki.
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. – AK
Wikifunctions goes live
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
Brief notes
- New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, User:Pppery.
- Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement (beginning 14 August) is Miss. It will be followed the week after by Physiology. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
Discuss this story
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]
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]