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

Committee Questions

Thank you for this proposal! I have a couple of follow-up questions to help with funding decisions.

• Please give more detail into the line item on row 16. What conferences have you identified that you intend to use these funds for? How many people do you want to send to Wikimania with this line item?
• Can you say more about your collaboration with TED?

Thanks in advance! Emjackson42 (talk) 19:04, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

Just a couple more questions... Thanks for a very detailed & well thought-out proposal.

• A question about outreach:

It's clear you are investing heavily in outreach & it makes a lot of sense to develop talent regionally & thereby avoid huge travel expenses. In your budget you itemize money for outreach and volunteers in many locations, and your proposal includes a "soft goal" of having a volunteer in each of the US 50 states. However, even though you include Canada as a partner in your last report, there is no mention of providing any outreach to Canada. Are you not planning any activity in Canada?

• Budget for training:

It appears that your outreach initiatives are successful -- you seem to be receiving a lot of requests to participate. Assuming your outreach activities continue to be successful, do you think your onboarding, training & educational initiatives will be sufficient to meet the demand?

Sincere thanks - Redwidgeon (talk) 22:29, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

@Emjackson42 and Redwidgeon: Thank you for your questions! Here are answers that User:Jenny8lee and myself have prepared:

Please give more detail into the line item on row 16. What conferences have you identified that you intend to use these funds for? How many people do you want to send to Wikimania with this line item?

Just for reference: this is for line item "Non-photography event travel", with description "This is for going to events, possibly wikiconferences for editors we want to bring in a more significant way. Higher because Wikimania going to Paris this year will likely attract more of our active photographers".

The intention here is to help cover costs for WikiPortraits organizers and photographers who are going to Wikimedia events (and possibly other conferences) on behalf of WikiPortraits, to present or otherwise represent the project, but are not directly taking photos. For example, we've done presentations and panels at WikiConference North America and Wikimania, as well as co-hosting Wikicurious events in New York City, Austin, and Park City (though Austin and Park City did not have additional travel costs for us since they happened to be events where we were sending photographers anyway for SXSW and Sundance, respectively).

We've also had WikiPortraits participants present at local events, such as the upcoming en:Event:Bay Area Meetup April 2026 where one of our newer photographers will be presenting on uploading photos for Commons (and we are planning a bigger WikiPortraits event with the Bay Area Wikipedians in the future). There are further opportunities at non-wiki events we are exploring, such as presenting at broader photography events for outreach and recruitment, or hosting photography workshops.

With Wikimania 2026 registration already having filled up in about 24 hours, we may not actually be able to have as much of a WikiPortraits presence at Wikimania as we had hoped. But we may be involved in some of the offsite activities (we could, for example, run a WikiPortraits studio off-site). But this is all still very early in planning.

Can you say more about your collaboration with TED?

We don't directly collaborate with TED (though we could perhaps if we had the bandwidth since Jenny has attended before and has a few talks on TED.com and knows the publicists). Rather, one of our New Zealand photographers attends as a TEDx organizer on her own ticket. She checked with the organizers and she is allowed to take photos of people (just not while they're on stage, which TED itself controls). She was able to grab photos of speakers and notable attendees in the social area. This is somewhat common for us, that our photographers are attending in their own right and can get great access for photos (for example, one of our photographers had a short at Telluride Film Festival and attended the filmmaker brunch where he got some nice photos).

It's clear you are investing heavily in outreach & it makes a lot of sense to develop talent regionally & thereby avoid huge travel expenses. In your budget you itemize money for outreach and volunteers in many locations, and your proposal includes a "soft goal" of having a volunteer in each of the US 50 states. However, even though you include Canada as a partner in your last report, there is no mention of providing any outreach to Canada. Are you not planning any activity in Canada?

While not necessarily highlighted in our grant request, we do outreach activities in Canada, especially with our single largest and most productive event being the Toronto International Film Festival, which we have covered two years in a row with many Canadian photographers (both local and diasporic).

In addition, we have compiled a large list of Canadian events to discuss with WMCA, ranking them by international, national and local significance. The most interesting to us after TIFF is probably the powwow in Manitoba. We have also met with Laura Levie of the Globe and Mail Foundation to discuss their work around supporting Canadian photographers to figure out if there is a collaboration we can do.

So far, Toronto has been the most fruitful density of photographers for us. At the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, five of our photographers were first-time WikiPortraits contributors and five of which are local to Toronto (3 were both local and new to WikiPortraits). Another two photographers have done an event or two for WikiPortraits earlier in the year, but were still overall new to contributing. So TIFF is actually an excellent force of function for us to engage with local photographers and get them involved with WikiPortraits. This work was partially supported by WMCA. In addition, we have all sorts of Toronto photographers who pop up throughout the year.

That being said, our U.S.-centric 50-states goal is in-part due to there being no national-level organization in the US. While Wikimedia Canada can and has helped with photographer recruitment in Canada, we lack such a central entity in the United States to do the same. With us working on building a network of wiki-photographers throughout the U.S., we hope to, in a way, also be creating a strong national wiki-network that helps bolster the current work to expand national level outreach (primarily through Wikicurious and the CANCUS hub planning).

In Canada, we would like to look beyond Toronto, and have had photographers reach out from Halifax, Edmonton, Ottawa, Vancouver, though none of them have particularly "stuck". We are in discussions with WMCA to see if we can bring more photographers from not Toronto to TIFF, but that would take a larger microgrant to do more than one as these new photographers would all need housing during TIFF (why local Toronto photogs are great for us).

That being said, since Depths of Wikipedia just gave WikiPortraits a shoutout in her Montreal show on April 4, 2026, we have had four photographers in Montreal sign up as volunteers in the two days afterwards. This is great, as we have been looking for folks to do the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival, among other events.

It appears that your outreach initiatives are successful — you seem to be receiving a lot of requests to participate. Assuming your outreach activities continue to be successful, do you think your onboarding, training & educational initiatives will be sufficient to meet the demand?

We are actually already reaching our capacity limits to meet the demand as-is! With most of our funding going towards event coverage to support our contributors directly, our wiki-onboarding is largely done on a semi-volunteer basis (since we didn't have a distinct line item for that time to acclimate folks to Wikiverse). It can take quite a bit of work to get a new Wikimedian acclimated to not just uploading to Wikimedia Commons, but also categorization, captions, Wikidata items, dealing with freedom of panorama, deletion requests, etc. Our community Whatsapps have been helpful to deal with questions, with senior Wikipedians jumping in to answer questions.

We recognize that the best way for us to meet the onboarding demand is better tooling. We've so far created an Onboarding Wizard that guides our new photographers on creating a Commons account. This wizard helps our photographers avoid some of the common pitfalls, such as ensuring they pick an appropriate username; set their desired attribution name; and create an appropriate userpage. These were pain points that we were having to regularly help photographers with, but now largely don't have to thanks to this tool.

We've also created our own template generator, to help our photographers quickly generate WikiPortraits templates and categories (prior to this, they'd often have to ping and rely on myself (Kevin) to create them, since they take some wiki-knowhow to create).

Another project we're actively working on is a "WikiPortraits Dashboard", which will be a CRM-esque platform dedicated to tracking our photographers and events. Right now, all our planning takes place through a mix of Whatsapp, email, and wiki, which is unideal since it's all over the place and we don't have the ability to efficiently query questions like "do we have a photographer in Rome?".

By creating a dedicated platform, we'll have a central space to catalog both our photographers and the events we plan to cover. Photographers will be able to express interest in events, and we (the organizers) would be able to identify the photographers who would be best to cover events (based on location, interest, past work, etc.). Once this platform launches, we expect our capacity to manage more photographers to increase quite a bit, and allow us to continue scaling in a more manageable way.

In terms of developers, I (Kevin) am currently the main developer, and a few of our photographers are developers by day as well, so we are effectively creating a small team of software developers that can help work on and maintain these tools in the long term.

But having a larger budget definitely can help bring more administrative people where the tenor work moves beyond volunteer territory. For example, we had a volunteer manage all the WikiPortraits music credentialing (a beast in its own right that takes centralized attention). But now that volunteer is on tour as a concert photographer (which is great!). We have thought about paying an honorarium to someone to help take that role on, since it's not in our core skill set and above what a volunteer can be reasonably asked to do.

Hopefully we've answered your questions, but please let us know if you have any more or if we can provide further clarification on anything. Thank you! ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 21:50, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

May 2026 budget update

Hello,

From myself and User:Jenny8lee:

We have updated our budget and our request as more information came in on grants from WMCH and WMIT, and as our photographer community continues to grow (40+ volunteers have wrote in since we submitted the grant in March!).

Our amount requested has jumped substantially from our earlier submission, for a few reasons.

• IMPORTANT! We added a significant dedicated line item for black diasporic events. Last grant cycle WikiPortraits had partnered with AfroCROWD to cover the Essence Festival, Congressional Black Caucus, Martha Vineyard African American Film Festival, and National Urban League, with multiple photographers at each event, as well as Black Week, the African Film Festival, Sundance and SXSW in a more limited way. We see AfroCROWD will not receive funding this cycle, and so, to make room in our budget, we are adding $20,000, which is a conservative estimate of their contribution to travel and lodging for photographers across multiple events. (As a result, we removed our portion for Essence and other events from the underrepresented communities allocation)
• In addition, the numbers now more accurately reflect the "real" cost of work WikiPortraits has been doing in the last half year or so. As noted in our original budget comments, we had allocated artificially low numbers for support line items (credentialing, community, onboarding, training) to keep within the guidance numbers we were given, as well as with an expectation that we would continue to receive some level of funding through other grants and donations. But these current numbers are a more accurate assessment of how much work is needed beyond volunteer support as the number of WikiPortraits photographers around the world continues to grow. To give a sense, since we first submitted our grant on March 1, we have had 40 new photographers sign up on WikiPortraits form. Likely, given the rate of growth, we will actually need to give more support for more photographers.
• Administrative costs increase as the nonprofit grows, because of the rigor needed for IRS compliance as WikiPortraits grows. This includes more bookkeeping tracking in preparation for any potential audits, D&O insurance for nonprofits, preparing whistleblowing and conflict of interest policies, etc.
• We structured the budget so now it shows a line item total for WikiPortraits, with a percentage allocation for the WMF grant. The remaining allocation is expected to be carried by WMCA, WMCH, WMIT, WMUK, and private donors. But this will give a more holistic representation of WikiPortraits total budget with visibility as to what share is allocated WMF main grant.

Some costs, like administrative and support costs, are expected to continue year after year as we scale, though may be helped through better tooling. On that note, our proposal includes line items for software development, including a platform for us to better manage our event tracking and photographer assignments. The software projects are generally timebound to within the year, and in turn can also help lessen labor time and cost in the future.

We know our new budget is a significant increase from our original proposal in March, and we don't necessarily expect to receive it in its entirety -- we will be able to work effectively with what we receive, bu we wanted to provide a list of what we would accomplish given this updated budget. What would be cut or reduced, in order if we don't get the full amount:

• Outreach to build photographer network in all 50 U.S. states (nice to have given push beyond the coasts, but not necessarily prioritized with Wikipedia image demand). $5,000
• WikiPortraits Studios with GLAMs. While these are great for community outreach, these are pricey and only a fraction are useful for on-wiki use. These were also priced below full effort. $6,750
• Editing and shooting training honoraria (nice to have, but we would lean on volunteering). $5,000.
• Then we reduce the metadata/admin support.

Thank you! ~SuperHamster Talk Contribs 02:28, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

General Support Fund proposal approved in the amount of 329,925 USD

@SuperHamster, Jenny8lee, and Fuzheado: Congratulations! Your grant is approved for full funding in the amount of 329,925 USD for the grant term starting 21 May 2026 and ending 31 December 2027. The funding across this 18-month period will be disbursed as follows:

• Year 1: 249,925 USD (full funding as proposed in the May 2026 budget revision)
• Year 2: 80,000 USD (for a six-month period)

WikiPortraits is being supported for an 18-month period so that in future funding rounds, it will be able to request funding in Round 1 to coincide with its own financial/annual planning cycles.

The Regional Fund Committee continues to support WikiPortraits’s mission to improve biographical content on Wikimedia projects, and recognizes the recent impact of the organization and growth in its volunteer network. The committee notes that WikiPortraits has forged and continues to develop its collaborative work with Wikimedia affiliates centered on certain key events it covers, and is able to explore some opportunities for photographs in less structured ways (such as the TEDx example discussed on the talk page). WikiPortraits has also been effective at supporting biographical content across a number of geographical and thematic areas, demonstrating improvements in biographies across several disciplines, industries, and underrepresented communities. Relatedly, WikiPortraits’s network is now broad enough that it frequently is able to support local photographers close to an event to participate and support its programmatic work, which we feel is both more supportive for local photographers in those communities and is more cost-effective overall. Finally, the committee also recognizes WikiPortraits programming in the framework of outreach, and sees the organization as a good ambassador for the Wikimedia movement overall through some of its programming.

We applaud WikiPortraits' recent growth in volunteer members and participation, and equally appreciate your organization’s recognition of capacity limits to provide different kinds of support/opportunities to a growing volunteer base to participate in your programs. The committee has sometimes observed issues of burnout and internal stability with movement organizations that grow in an unbalanced manner. We encourage you to continue to be mindful of additional volunteer recruitment or launching new programs/events, and to be sure that this is matched by your organizational capacity to support those needs.

Due to indications of impact from WikiPortraits own reporting and presentations on its progress, and due to unexpected underspend for this current round, the Regional Fund Committee supports WikiPortraits’ revised request for Year 1 of this proposal. Importantly, it is highly unlikely we can support this amount of annual funding (249,925 USD) year over year in your future proposals. After review of the budget, the committee identified a number of areas that WikiPortraits should consider to be one-time investments for various reasons:

• Items 15 and 16: Commons infrastructure
• Item 25: Design work & business cards
• Item 40: AfroCROWD-related initiatives and projects that may be reallocated to the org in a future funding proposal
• Items 39, 42, 43, and 44: Additional funding for events outside the region beyond what we can support sustainably

This adds up to about 45,000 USD in one-time expenses that can be supported in your first year. An additional 45,000 USD should also be considered a one-time investment for this year supporting other increases to equipment, data/metadata support, non-photography event travel, and other areas. In total, this 90,000 USD should be considered as one-time funding that should not be relied upon in future years and therefore, should not be used on expenses that are routinely needed for the organization (unless they can be supported through other funding sources).

Consequently, the Regional Fund Committee was willing to support a partial budget of 80,000 USD for the remaining six-month period. This amount is proportional to an overall annual budget of 160,000 USD, an amount that the Regional Fund Committee believes it can sustain WikiPortraits at for its next proposal (for activities starting in January 2028). These limitations are primarily based on limited annual growth for this region and committee funding priorities for new applicants and existing grantees. WikiPortraits is permitted to request additional funding beyond this amount for its next proposal, but the Regional Fund Committee may not be able to fully support that growth for those reasons. We advise you to prepare your next budget according to these limitations.

Finally, while the new affiliate application process is still on hold by AffCom, we request that WikiPortraits apply for an affiliate designation when it becomes available given the purpose and scope of the organization.

We look forward to WikiPortraits’ work over the next 18 months supporting high quality biographical content and other valuable contributions to the Wikimedia movement.

On behalf of the Regional Fund Committee, Redwidgeon (talk) 22:20, 20 May 2026 (UTC)

@Fuzheado: Pinging Andrew here as well! I JethroBT (WMF) (talk) 01:06, 21 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks so much @I JethroBT (WMF) and @Redwidgeon – we're looking forward to doing more great work with this funding support and appreciate this opportunity. – Fuzheado (talk) 08:13, 21 May 2026 (UTC)