Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/WikiPortraits:2026-27 Activities

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Applicant information

Organization name or Wikimedia Username for individuals. (required): Writing Downtown dba WikiPortraits

Do you have any approved General Support Fund requests? (required): Yes, I have already applied and received a General Support Fund

You are applying as a(n). (required): Nonprofit organization with Wikimedia mission

Are your group or organization legally registered in your country? (required): Yes

Do you have a fiscal sponsor?: No

Fiscal organization name.: N/A

Please provide links to the following documents if they are available

These documentation can be provided in your local language(s), no translations required.

Organizational website
Detailed financial reporting and/or audits
Documentation of the governance structure, board list, governance processes
Documentation of the general assembly decision on your plan

WikiPortraits links:

For the Writing Downtown board of directors online, please go to Nevada Secretary of State (https://esos.nv.gov/EntitySearch/OnlineEntitySearch) and search for begins with "Writing Downtown."

Main proposal

1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be a title for the Meta-Wiki page. (required): WikiPortraits: 2026-27 Activities

2. Do you want to apply for the multi-year base funding for 3 years? (required) (only for returning applicants): No

2.1. Provide a brief overview of Year 2 and Year 3 of the proposed plan and how this relates to the current proposal and your strategic plan? (required)

N/A

3. Proposed start date. (required): 2026-05-21

4. Proposed end date. (required): 2027-12-31

5. Does your organization or group have an Affiliate or Organizational Annual Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required): No

6. Does your affiliate, organization or group have a Strategic Plan that can help us understand your proposal? If yes, please provide it. (required): No

7. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required): International (more than one country across continents or regions); Our annual plan includes covering events across the United Kingdom, Norway, Scotland, Benin, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, Norway, India, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, among others. Based on our photographers' interests and availability, we will cover events in more countries than listed, especially in Africa. Our continuously-growing network of photographers come from countries including but not limited to Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Australia, Benin, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia, Turkey, United Kingdom, and Tanzania. Within the United States, our photographers are based out of Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Washington, D.C., Wisconsin, and Wyoming. We have a soft goal of getting a photographer in every U.S. state!

8. What are your programs, approaches, and strategies? What are the challenges that you are trying to address and how will your strategies support you in addressing these challenges? (required)

Background

Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, rely on freely licensed images. Despite efforts by many photographers and editors, a large number of Wikipedia biographies still have low-quality images or no photo at all. This gap has been recognized for years and even covered by major media, including the New York Times article "Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It's a Desert for Photos" (2009).

Despite ever-increasing access to cameras, photographing notable individuals can be difficult as the best opportunities involve attending events where the people are, and can require media credentials. Access to these events can be logistically and financially challenging, and most organizations with access to these events are commercial enterprises which do not freely license their photographs. Gaining press credentials requires both legitimacy as a media/press outlet and demonstrating a professional or near-professional caliber of work.

The WikiPortraits initiative was created in early 2024 to address this critical gap in the availability of freely-licensed, high-quality photos of notable individuals across Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. Currently, more than 1 out of 100 Wikipedia pageviews globally is illustrated by a WikiPortraits image — more than 400 million image views monthly.

Our subjects have included thousands of individuals ranging from actors to scientists, Olympic athletes to Nobel laureates, medical doctors to politicians, from all around the globe. WikiPortraits also makes a conscious effort to prioritize its coverage of groups who are underrepresented on Wikimedia projects.

WikiPortraits also serves as a strong recruitment engine, to onboard a new cohort of Wikimedia contributors from around the world. There is an ongoing community worry about the declining rate of new contributors to the Wikimedia projects. We believe that Commons has untapped potential to attract photographers, some of whom go on to also edit other Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia and Wikidata. Between 2024 and 2025, WikiPortraits has onboarded 150 individuals to the Wikimedia Commons. Through the end of 2025, these newcomers have collectively contributed 55,000+ edits across all projects that includes 21,900+ Commons uploads, 385 articles on the English Wikipedia, 580,000+ words across Wikipedia projects, and 5,800+ references added to articles.

WikiPortraits received a General Support Fund grant from the Wikimedia Foundation for its May 2025 - May 2026 activities. We have found many successes so far through our work, and are requesting this grant to continue our activities for the next 12 or 18 months. We would request 18 months so we can sync our budget year to the calendar year for better annual planning.

2025 Activities

We have created our 2025 Report to provide an overview of our activities throughout the last year, much of which was directly supported through our current General Support Fund grant. This report is a living document as we continue to expand it and provide statistics, but should already give a good comprehensive overview of the breadth of our coverage, photographer network, statistics, collaborations, technical development, and more. We highly encourage grant reviewers to look through the 2025 report as it gives a good idea of the type of effective work we will continue doing for 2026-2027.

Plan

Our proposed activities for 2026-2027 includes a continuation of our current activities, with adjustments for the growing size of our population, our priorities, and additional technjc tools to be more effective and scalable.

National and Global Events Coverage: WikiPortraits has a list of high-priority international events that it aims to cover each year. These events range from cultural festivals to international sporting events to political conferences that host hundreds of notable and near-notable people that can be photographed efficiently in a concentrated period of time. While seemingly time and resource-intensive, these events are the most cost-effective way to serve the demand from the over 200 wikis that have used WikiPortraits images, ranging from Hausa to Ukrainian to Malagasy. These larger "mainline" events that require multiple photographers also serve as a great opportunity for us to bring together experienced and new photographers, so we can cultivate mentorship. These events include but are not limited to the Jaipur Literature Festival, the Olympics, Eurovision Song Contest, the Nobel Prizes, the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference, the Venice Biennale for art, and various film festivals including Cannes, Venice, Locarno, Berlin, Sundance, and Toronto, among others.

Credentialing local photographers around the world: A number of Wikimedia affiliates currently support their local Wikimedians in getting credentialed to events, but these efforts are often constrained by region, and not all affiliates have the experience to navigate media credentialing process. In addition, many experienced photographers are freelance but lack the assignment letter that press offices require. WikiPortraits serves as an outlet that can help Wikimedia photographers get credentialed to events as photographers. For newcomers to WikiPortraits/Wikimedia who are looking to get credentialed to an event, we typically request that they upload around 30 to 50 of their existing photos from their backlog to the Wikimedia Commons. This serves as part of their onboarding, and allows us to state that they are a Wikimedia contributor.

Providing badges: WikiPortraits has its own professional badge printer, allowing us to print physical media badges for our photographers. Through the end of 2025, we have distributed roughly 100 physical media badges to WikiPortraits photographers. These badges may be required by some events to be admitted as press, but also serve as a way for our community to feel official and recognized for their hard work.

Portrait studios: In 2025, WikiPortraits obtained its own professional lighting set and backdrop that enables us to set up pop-up studios at various high-profile events, to photograph people and serve as a form of outreach. Between 2025 and February 2026, we set up photo studios at the Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, National Association of Hispanic Journalists Convention, Wikimania, and in partnership with the Asian American Writers' Workshop. Our studio fits perfectly in a single travel box, enabling us to move it across the country and even internationally (Nairobi for Wikimania!). These portrait studios allow us to efficiently photograph a high volume of people as they come through. Beyond the photos themselves, the studios provide a form of outreach, to inform the public about WikiPortraits, Wikimedia Commons, and free licensing. We also encourage people to register for Wikimedia editing accounts.

Equipment loans and sharing: Throughout 2025, WikiPortraits has expanded its portfolio of cameras and lenses. We've found that there are existing Wikimedia Commons photographers who are extremely dedicated to photographing events and people, but lack the equipment for the job. As an example, we've had a Wikimedia photographer from Türkiye who had uploaded thousands of photos from sporting events. Sports, however, typically require higher-tier "fast" lenses with plenty of zoom, to properly capture players in-motion. Given his dedication and experience, we were happy to purchase a lens for WikiPortraits and provide it to him on long-term loan. We've found this system allows us to be cost-effective to make sure dedicated Wikimedia photographers have the equipment they need while they spend hours and days of their time to get great photos of people for Commons. (Note: We have also raised private donor money for camera equipment for Africa. We were supposed to transfer it to them at RightsCon in Lusaka, Zambia in May 2026, but that event was abruptly cancelled. We now plan to transfer at Wikimania!)

Technical tools: As we've onboarded dozens of photographers to Wikimedia Commons, we've found that they face a number of challenges. Examples of these challenges include:

When a user registers, it's not made clear that their username will also be their attribution name, and there is no indication that they can change their attribution name via their preferences.
While Wikimedia Commons allows usernames that represent organizations or companies, the English Wikipedia does not; as a result, we've had a user join with the seemingly innocent username formatted as "John Smith Photography" that is appropriate for Commons, but led to them being instantly blocked when they tried to edit the English Wikipedia.
It can be difficult to grasp categories, and the UploadWizard is not great for category discovery and exploration. It takes experience to become familiar with our category taxonomy, to know what sort of categories exist and how they might be named (e.g. "American scientists" vs. "Scientists from the United States").
Wikidata items are important to tag photos with, but are an entirely separate ecosystem that takes training to onboard photographers to (and is something photographers are sometimes not interested in, when their priority is the photography itself).
There is no consistent file naming scheme on Commons, which may not necessarily a problem, but having more consistent file naming between our events would be good for consistency, organizing, etc.
Wikimedia Commons has limited intuitive ways for photographers to showcase their work.

Throughout 2025, we have started to develop technical tools to address these challenges. We have created our own onboarding portal that guides new users through the registration process, including having them select an unproblematic username; setting up their userpage; and setting their desired attribution name. We have also created a template generator to help our photographers create WikiPortraits templates and categories to mark their photos with. One of our photographers in Norway has also started building a custom upload portal that would not only allow users to batch-upload photos with consistent naming and descriptions per event, but will also take care of automatically creating Wikidata items when needed, to better utilize Structured Data on Commons. We expect that upload tool to be available to our photographers later this year.

Our biggest technical project in 2025 was commons.gallery, a new separate web platform that allows Wikimedia Commons users to set up beautiful, sleek portfolios that more closely resemble dedicated portfolio sites like Flickr. While Wikimedia Commons users can set up galleries on-wiki, the experience lives within the text-first MediaWiki interface and the galleries aren't easily discoverable. Our mission with commons.gallery is to provide a dedicated, modern, media-first interface to showcase and share work. So far we've had over 95 users create over 400 albums of photos. This is not just WikiPortraits photographers, but other Wikimedia Commons photographers, Wikimedia affiliates, and Wikimedians in residence setting up albums for their institutions. Example albums include WikiPortraits at Riddu Riđđu 2025; Wiki Loves Africa 2025 winners; astronomy winners from the Wiki Science Competition in the U.S.; Wiki Loves Butterfly; and replicas of food from Musée de la Gourmandise.

In addition, we have created some tools that are more broadly useful for Wikimedia Commons photo editing, including an on-wiki EXIF editing tool called QuickEXIF that allows photographers to easily adjust their images' metadata.

We plan to continue this line of technical work into 2026-27, to improve the onboarding, uploading, and showcasing experience for Wikimedia Commons photographers. With onboarding new photographers being a major aspect of WikiPortraits, we have continuous firsthand experience of the challenges new users face – and with several software developers in our team, we are able to create technical tools to help address these challenges, not just for WikiPortraits, but for Wikimedia Commons contributors more generally.

Among the tools we are potentially interested in creating if there is enough budget:

A unified database of our photographers, their user names, contributions, locations, interests and activities. Right now that is all piecemeal. This would allow us to easily look up photographers in, say, Florida if we want to photograph an event there.
Tool for scaling credentialing letters. This process currently exists within Google Docs, but could be made more efficient.
Tool for opportunities that are warm towards WikiPortraits photographers. Right now, all the opportunities are pushed via WhatsApp groups or word of mouth.

Communications: In 2025, we launched a WikiPortraits newsletter at blog.wikiportraits.org, allowing our community and anyone interested in the project to stay up-to-date and learn more about our activities. We've also increased our activity on social media, particularly Instagram, where most photographers we meet are active. Many of the photographers who join WikiPortraits find out about the project through news stories, social media, and word-of-mouth. In 2026, we would like to continue to invest in our communications to continue this momentum. The goal is to help attract new photographers, increase brand awareness, and help inform the general public about an interesting and fun aspect of Wikimedia (volunteer-driven photography, free licensing, event coverage, etc.). We'd also like to collaborate more with other people and organizations to spread the word, such as Depths of Wikipedia (who has posted about and started mentioning WikiPortraits in her show!).

Educational programming and mentorship: We would like to invest more in exploring partnering with educational organizations, especially in the Global South, to teach students photography for use on Wikimedia Commons. One of our 2025 programs that we are most proud of is our work with the Dandora Youth Economic and Social Empowerment (YESE) organization. At Wikimania 2025 in Nairobi, we met a photographer who co-leads YESE to teach teens and young adults photography in Dandora, a low-income informal settlement. We were invited to visit Dandora and hosted a photography class for the students. Having observed that the program lacked functional camera equipment, WikiPortraits raised private money and gathered used cameras for the students, and we helped onboard them onto Flickr. The organization and students have since uploaded dozens of photos from day-to-day life in Dandora, including food, arts and crafts, and transportation. We also provided funding to send a couple of the students to Mombasa and photograph the Wimbi La Sanaa Festival. We are working on cleanly importing these photos to Commons and help better illustrate local life and culture on Wikipedia. We plan to continue to support YESE, and would like to find other such situations and organizations where our support could go a long way in supporting students and creating media that properly documents an underserved and underdocumented locale (for example, one of our photographers with Wikimedia Mexico was also invited to work with students in a government-operated home). We like these programs because it allows the students to tell their own stories of their own neighborhoods. Given the priorities we have in trying to get in-demand photos, we would likely not use the Wikimedia Foundation annual grant on these activities, but rather raise private money.

Evaluation Plan

We use a variety of tools to determine the long-term impact of our media. As we pull stats, we mostly document them on our annual reports (e.g. 2025). Examples of metrics we track:

Number of articles that photos have been added to, across all Wikimedia projects.
- Of these, how many pages have received a photo for the first time.
Views our photos receive across the Wikimedia projects.
New content (articles, Wikidata items) created for notable subjects, motivated by our coverage through WikiPortraits.

Tools we use to determine our impact:

We use the Outreach Dashboard, to see the impact of the newcomers we onboard to Wikimedia via WikiPortraits.
GLAMorgan provides insights into file usage across all the various language Wikimedia projects, and the views those pages get per month.
We have just onboarded onto Commons Impact Metrics, to receive monthly stored data on the views our media gets through use across Wikimedia articles.
We have our own custom CLI tool (source code) we can run against categories to see file usage across projects, and whether it's the first time an article or Wikidata item has been newly illustrated by our photos.
We are actively developing a new tool to efficiently pull media view statistics, which provides another insight into how many views our photos get.
On the English Wikipedia, we have en:Template:WikiPortraits article to mark articles that are created as part of WikiPortraits coverage and events. Our category, en:Category:Created or significantly improved through WikiPortraits, has over 230 articles.

9. What categories are your main programs and related activities under? Please select all that apply. (required)


Category	Yes/No
Education	Yes
Culture, heritage or GLAM	Yes
Gender and diversity	Yes
Community support and engagement	Yes
Participation in campaigns and contests	No
Public policy advocacy	No
Technology (software development)	No
Other	No

Education

9.1.1. Select all your programs and activities for Education. (required): Wikimedia Commons programs, Other Wikimedia project programs; Other programs and activities if any: N/A
9.1.2. Select all relevant audience groups for Education. (required): Vocational, tertiary, or higher education; Other groups if any: N/A

Culture, heritage or GLAM

9.2. Select all your programs and activities for Culture, heritage or GLAM. (required): Introducing new approaches to underrepresented culture and heritage, e.g. decolonising or reparative work; oral and visual knowledge; outreach to communities of origin, indigenous and first nations self-determination, Partnering with institutions, professional associations, and allied organizations to raise awareness of open culture, ethical sharing, and related issues; Other programs and activities if any: N/A

Gender and diversity

9.3. Select all your programs and activities for Gender and diversity.: Bringing in women and/or gender diverse participants and editors, Focusing on creating content about women and/or gender diverse groups, including biographies, intersectional topic areas and/or adding images, Focusing on creating content about marginalized (underrepresented) communities and their knowledge, Focusing on knowledge equity by bringing in contributors from underrepresented communities, Building organizer skills in women and diversity groups, Fomenting female leadership within the movement (either staff, members or boards); Other programs and activities if any: N/A

Community support and engagement

9.4. Select all your programs and activities for Community support and engagement.: On-wiki training of community members, Off-wiki training of community members, Organizing meetups, conferences, and community events, Supporting community members' participation in events and conferences, Offering micro-funding and other financial support to community members , Offering non financial support and services to community members (equipment, space, books, etc.); Other programs and activities if any: N/A
10. Please include a link to or upload a timeline (operational calendar) for your programs and activities. (required): We have prepared annual timelines to list the most significant international events that WikiPortraits plans to cover, which account for most of the budget we have dedicated to covering international events:

Note, WikiPortraits photographers cover many many more events than these through self credentialing (over 180 events throughout 2025!).

11. Describe your team. (required)

Our grantees are Kevin Payravi and Andrew Lih.

Kevin Payravi (User:SuperHamster) is a software engineer and has been editing Wikimedia projects since 2007. He serves on the Board of Wikimedia DC and as an organizer for the Ohio Wikimedians User Group. He co-founded WikiPortraits in 2024 and has photographed numerous events for the project, including the Sundance and Toronto film festivals, Nobel Prizes, Riddu Riđđu, and more. Each year, he also helps organize WikiConference North America and Wiki Loves Monuments in the United States, among other projects and events.

Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) is the 2021 Wikimedia Laureate, an internationally-renowned Wikipedia expert, author, professor, GLAMs activist, and long-time Wikimedia contributor. In 2023, Lih co-founded the WikiPortraits initiative. He is a long-time avid contributor of professional portrait photographs to Wikimedia Commons, accounting for more than 5 million monthly views. He has photographed high-impact events for Commons, such as the Pulitzer Prize awards, the National Book Festival, and the Hay Festival of Books. Some of his most widely used headshots on Wikipedia include Meghan Markle, Charlize Theron, Kendrick Lamar, Ronan Farrow, Lisa Su, and Priyanka Chopra.

Other WikiPortraits team members are listed at wikiportraits.org/our-team. This includes additional co-founder and organizer Jennifer 8. Lee and a number of our most active photographers.

12. Will you be working with any internal (Wikimedia) or external partners? Describe the characteristics of these partnerships and bring a few examples of the most significant partnerships. (required)

Throughout 2025, WikiPortraits collaborated with a number of Wikimedia affiliates to cover events around the world.

We received funding from, or shared costs with, the following affiliates to help cover events:

AfroCROWD
Wikimedia CH
Wikimedia Italia
Wikimedia Deutschland
Wikimedia Canada
Wikimedia Norge
Wikimedia UK
Wikimédiens du Bénin User Group
Wikimedia España
Wikimedia NYC

In addition, we have worked with the following to get credentials or promote events in-kind.

Art+Feminism
Wikimedia UK
Wikimedia NYC

Two examples of our most significant partnerships:

Wikimedia CH (Switzerland) has been a great partner in funding and supporting WikiPortraits event coverage in Switzerland, including Eurovision Song Contest and Art Basel 2025. In addition, Wikimedia CH provided a grant for the development of commons.gallery, a new platform for Commons photographers to create nice, sharable portfolios of their work.
AfroCROWD provided support and funding for WikiPortraits to cover several events covering African American culture, including the Essence Festival of Culture and Martha's Vineyard African American Film Festival.

We plan to continue collaborating with the majority of these affiliates, as well as continue to collaborate with more affiliates (we have upcoming plans with the Bay Area Wikimedians, for example).

13. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select all that apply. (required): Improve User Experience, Invest in Skills and Leadership Development, Innovate in Free Knowledge

Metrics

Wikimedia Metrics

14. Please select and fill out Wikimedia Metrics for your proposal. (recommended)

14.1. Number of participants, editors, and organizers.

All metrics provided are optional, please fill them out if they are aligned with your programs and activities.

Participants, editors, and organizers
Metrics name	Target	Description
Number of all participants	N/A	N/A
Number of all editors	200	Between our past and future work with this grant, we expect to reach at least 200 photographers who have contributed photos to the Wikimedia Commons as part of WikiPortraits.
Number of new editors	N/A
Number of retained editors	N/A
Number of all organizers	5	We have roughly five top-level organizers at any given time. Jennifer 8. Lee, Kevin Payravi, and Andrew Lih do top-level organizing and strategizing. We also have an organizer who leads WikiPortraits Music, and 1-2 organizers for communications and social media.
Number of new organizers	N/A

14.2. Number of new content contributions to Wikimedia projects. (recommended)

Contributions to Wikimedia projects
Wikimedia project	Created	Edited or improved
Wikipedia	100	2000
Wikimedia Commons	25000
Wikidata	1000	2500
Wiktionary
Wikisource
Wikimedia Incubator
Translatewiki
MediaWiki
Wikiquote
Wikivoyage
Wikibooks
Wikiversity
Wikinews
Wikispecies
Wikifunctions / Abstract Wikipedia

Description for Wikimedia projects contributions metrics. (optional)

Other Metrics

15. Do you have other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required): Yes


Other Metrics	Description	Target
Articles using photos	* Views our photos receive across the Wikimedia projects. Aggregate number of pageviews our photos get compared to global pageviews of all articles.	1000
Monthly requests to our photos	The number of monthly views our photos receive, per the media requests API.	350000000
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A

Budget

16. Will you have any other revenue sources when implementing this proposal (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required): Yes

16.1. List other revenue sources. (required)

Yes. We expect to continue collaborating with Wikimedia affiliates to implement WikiPortraits activities in certain countries or thematic areas. These collaborations include receiving grant funding or sharing logistical costs. We may also continue to receive funding (as we did from Wikimedia CH) for software development.

We also expect some number of small and major donations, and are discussing how to apply for grants from some small foundations. Our donations have ranged from $20 to $5,000. These donations typically help cover equipment purchases (particularly for underserved regions).

16.2. Approximately how much revenue will you have from other sources in your local currency? (required): 30000

17. Your local currency. (required): USD

18. What is the total requested amount in your local currency? (required): 160000 USD

Multi-year funding request summary
Year	Amount (local currency)
Year 1	N/A USD
Year 2	N/A USD
Year 3	N/A USD

19. Does this proposal include compensation for staff or contractors? (required): Yes

19.1. How many paid staff members do you plan to have? (required)

Include the number of staff and contractors during the proposal period. If you have short-term contractors or staff, please include them separately and mention their terms.

We have no full-time staff members. We pay stipends and honorariums to roughly 7-10 people per year for administrative work, newsletter writing, software development, metadata cleanup, community organizing, and credentialing support/badge printing.

19.2. How many FTEs (full-time equivalents) in total? (required)

Include the total FTE of staff and contractors during the proposal period. If you have short-term contractors or staff, please include their FTEs with the terms separately.

.75 FTEs

19.3. Describe any staff or contractor changes compared to the current year / ongoing General Support Fund if any. (required only for returning grantees): We expect to have roughly the same amount of work/payout as last year, for roughly the same number of people.

20. Please provide an overview of your overall budget categories in your local currency. The budget breakdown should include only the amount requested with this General Support Fund (required).


Budget category	Amount in local currency
Staff and contractor costs	79050 USD
Operational costs	36600 USD
Programmatic costs	213324.96 USD

21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bbRiK7Jju7ceyYxsPveEFslsZqlYKdVathVfbMyCVWw/edit?usp=sharing

Additional information

22. In this optional space you can add any other additional information about your proposal or organization that you think can help us when reviewing your proposal. (optional)

The budget we have provided is for one (1) year of programming. However, we would like to switch to the following grant cycle so that our next grant can start at the beginning of 2028 (this is very helpful for our own planning and budgeting). If possible, we would like to ask for 1.5x our requested budget for through the end of 2027 (with the latter portion provided later).

We have an ask of ~$249,000 for a budget of ~$334,000 for 12 months. We understand this is a significant jump compared to our original March 2026 ask and our 2025 budget

This is due to a few reasons:

Around $20,000 of our programmatic budget for coverage Black cultural events came from a partnership with AfroCROWD, which we understand will not be funded in this cycle. In future, this bump can go back to AfroCROWD.
The demand to support the growing network of photographers is beyond a volunteer level

While our budget comes from the United States/Canada bucket, we push a significant portion of our budget out to photographers in other countries, including Europe, Latin America, Australia, and Africa.

We try very hard to use more than half our grant money in direct spend on photographers rather than on staff/contractor costs. Our photos benefit over 200 different language Wikipedias. Given the increased emphasis on photos to engage users, we believe that dollar for dollar, WikiPortraits grant money has been one of the most effective ways to improve the Wikipedia experience globally.

Additional details about our changes since our initial March ask will be shared on the talk page.

By submitting your proposal/funding request you confirm that you have read and agree to the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy, and the Universal Code of Conduct.

Yes

Feedback

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