Grants talk:IdeaLab/Pay schools or students to write wikipedia articles in low-income regions of the world

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Policies on funding[edit]

@Cacique40: Hi Cacique40, I wanted to let you know that the WMF maintains some policies on how funding can and cannot be used with regard to grants and in general. Funds cannot be given to individuals to write or produce project content; this is likely to be rejected by virtually all Wikimedia communities in principle (because content can be reliably written by volunteers), and more generally, it's not a sustainable solution to the challenge of how to engage folks in low-income areas. There are also issues of scaling: The only way to expand paid editing (assuming it is successful) is to provide more money, the burden of which falls on the Foundation. One alternative avenue you can consider exploring is the idea of contests (see this one from Wikimedia España, as an example) with prizes, which have been routinely done by program leaders across the world. I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 03:47, 15 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

April 12 Proposal Deadline: Is your project ready for funding?[edit]

The deadline for Individual Engagement Grant (IEG) submissions this round is April 12th, 2016. If you’ve developed your idea into a project that would benefit from funding, consider applying!

To apply, you must (1) create a draft request using the “Expand into an Individual Engagement Grant” button on your idea page, (2) complete the proposal entirely, filling in all empty fields, and (3) change the status from "draft" to "proposed." As soon as you’re ready, you should begin to invite any communities affected by your project to provide feedback on your proposal talk page.

If you have any questions about IEG or would like support in developing your proposal, we're hosting a few proposal help sessions this month in Google Hangouts:

I'm also happy to set up an individual session. With thanks, I JethroBT (WMF) 00:38, 2 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]