Grants talk:Start

Archives

---

2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025

Alternative overview of the research fund proposals under further consideration

A version of the list at Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Research_&_Technology_Fund/Wikimedia_Research_Fund#Review_submissions enriched with some information from the linked proposal pages (in case it is useful for some people following this invitation to review them):

Proposal title	Applicants	Start – end dates	Budget (USD)
Extended: Opportunities for Supporting Community‑Scale Communication	Cristian Danescu‑Niculescu‑Mizil	August 2025 – August 2027	$105,000
The Anatomy of Coordination among Wikipedia Users	Marco Minici; Giuseppe Manco; Cristian Consonni	1 September 2025 – 1 September 2026	$41,294
WikipedAI: Investigating AI Collaboration and Conflict in Open Knowledge Systems	Patrick Gildersleve	1 October 2025 – 30 September 2026	$46,840
Informing Memory Institutions and Humanities Researchers of the Broader Impact of Open Data Sharing via Wikidata	Hanlin Li; Nicholas Vincent	15 July 2025 – 14 July 2026	$49,450
Exploring How AI Can Interpret Discussions Through an Insider Lens to Support Future Mediation	Soobin Cho; David W. McDonald; Mark Zachry	1 October 2025 – 1 October 2026	$47,598
Lexeme‑based approach for the development of technical vocabulary for underserved languages: A case study on Moroccan Darija	Anass Sedrati; Reda Benkhadra; Mounir Afifi; Jan Hoogland	1 July 2025 – 30 June 2026	$25,722
Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in the focus of scientific research – a research community‑building event in Ukraine	Anton Protsiuk; Mariana Senkiv; Natalia Lastovets	1 July 2025 – 31 March 2026	$12,115
Extended: Making Community with Wikimedia	Steve Jankowski; Richard Rogers	1 July 2025 – 30 June 2027	$149,976
Between Prompt and Publish: Community Perceptions and Practices Related to AI‑Generated Wikipedia Content	Anwesha Chakraborty; Netha Hussain	1 October 2025 – 31 August 2026	$8,571
Establishing a Critical Digital Commons Research Network	Zachary McDowell	October 2025 – March 2026	$14,300
The state of science and Wikimedia: Who is doing what, and who is funding it?	Brett Buttliere; Matthew A. Vetter; Lane Rasberry; Iolanda Pensa; Susanna Mkrtchyan; Daniel Mietchen	1 August 2025 – 30 July 2026	$49,450
Developing a wiki‑integrated workflow to build a living review on just sustainability transitions	Adélie Ranville; Romain Mekarni; Rémy Gerbet; Arthur Perret; Finn Årup Nielsen; Dariusz Jemielniak	1 September 2025 – 31 August 2026	$49,622
Navigating Today, Shaping Tomorrow: Studying the Role of LLMs on Wikipedia	Manoel Horta Ribeiro; Andrés Monroy‑Hernández	1 September 2025 – 31 August 2027	$143,202

Regards, HaeB (talk) 06:43, 6 May 2025 (UTC)

Newer general support fund reports

I'm failing to find reports of some general support fund projects for the last couple of years. Should they be found somewhere under Category:Wikimedia Community Fund - General Support Fund or am I looking at the wrong place? It seem like there is Category:General Support Fund reports in FY 2022-23 but no newer ones. whym (talk) 05:12, 10 May 2025 (UTC)

Why ?

@DSaroyan (WMF) hello. That /Tech is an official WMF funds for tech project, newly set up, and shared around at the Wikimania. Why hide a pointer to it ? Yug (talk) 10:38, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Hey @Yug, I left a note on your talk page after rolling back. Thanks --DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 10:41, 28 August 2025 (UTC)

Project start date

I've got a question about the reasoning behind the project start dates. I understand that the grant payment ending at a specific time means that the paid portion of the project has to be after it. But if projects are designed such that they start after the "decisions announced" period, and only the paid portion starts after the grant payment, what is the issue there? Egezort (talk) 01:19, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

Question about funding equipment

Hi there. I e-mailed this to the Latin America program officer, but there's no name listed for that so I'm guessing no one is following that mailbox.

I am interested in applying for a Rapid Grant to acquire a drone for the purpose of mapping a UNESCO World Heritage site Brazil. The outcome of this project would include approximately 14,000 high-resolution aerial images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, accompanied by documentation of the workflow for integrating aerial imagery, orthomosaics, SDC tagging, and OpenStreetMap.

The project would be conducted in collaboration with a local university.

In accordance with the Rapid Grants guidelines, I would donate the drone to Wikimedia Brasil (WMB), of which I am a member, upon completion of the project. WMB would then coordinate its use with other members of the community.

My main question concerns the requirement that “equipment purchase is allowed for groups, organizations, and affiliates.” In this case, the applicant would be myself as an individual, not WMB. Although I would be collaborating with the university, that is not a recognized Wikimedia user group.

Given this context, would it still be possible to apply for a Rapid Grant under these terms?

Thanks,

Rkieferbaum (talk) 11:53, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

My thought is that you consult and coordinate with WMB to budget the equipment, and then lend it from them for your project. It would be less tedious and more sustainable. They might probably have resources available to purchase the equipment. Why chose a long route? _signed, Aafi ^(talk) 10:05, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

@Aafi: the drone I need would consume a huge portion of WMB’s annual budget for projects, and in any case it would have to be included in next year’s budget. That would not fit my project’s timeline. I wouldn’t rule it out but at this point it’s really not an option… Rkieferbaum (talk) 11:38, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Archiving

Can we set up automatic archive of old sections here? I would suggest copying that of Grants talk:Start, replacing the talk page name.

(unless perhaps we want to merge the page to Grants talk:Start to centralize) whym (talk) 22:29, 1 September 2025 (UTC)

Hi @Whym, thanks for your suggestion. I'll move the page content to Grants_talk:Start to centralize everything, create a redirect, and it will follow the same archiving schedule. DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 13:50, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

Please fund more technical improvements / software development

Please fund much more technical development of key Wikimedia software – like MediaWiki or the Listeria tool – i.e. more development of wishes in the Community Wishlist and of issues in phabricator and less of everything else such as events, conferences, research, wishes-unrelated experiments or tools, etc.

I'm not saying those aren't important but until now technical development has been severely neglected and there are so many old urgent issues and much potential for big impacts such as for facilitating more volunteers to help with software development (example), increasing Wikipedia readership (exam ple), and saving lots of editors' time (example).
There may currently not be many grant requests for technical development of key Wikimedia software but I suggest the ones that are get prioritized and more often funded, that funds in that case are used more for technical development teams instead of for grants, that if thought to be necessary for more tech development (it isn't) more of WMF funds are being spent, and that more grant proposals relating to technical wishes&issues are facilitated. There's many supporting discussions, for example see Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Larger suggestions/1% (note that 1% would be way too little).

On a related note: where can I find the grant proposals so I can endorse the ones about impactful or important technical developments? This isn't clear on this page. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:56, 12 November 2025 (UTC)

Community grants for software projects can be found by searching "T1. Describe the technical project" ([ https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=2025+%22T1.+Describe+the+technical+project%22&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns200=1 example]), this returns community grant applciations which have checked that they are doing software projects. There is also Grants:Project/Rapid/Tech with tracking category Category:Tech Rapid proposals which doesn't seem to contain all grants as least Provelt grant is missing. --Zache (talk) 12:21, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! I just found the latter tech and added it to Category:Software development shortly before your comment. I suggest that if there's more categories like it, they're also added to that category or a subcat of it. The search query is interesting but do you know why it contains fewer items – worryingly just 4 as of now – than the TRp cat (19)? Prototyperspective (talk) 13:12, 18 November 2025 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective I think that they added the tech projects category to community grants first time at this year. This is one reason why nobody have added projects there yet. Afaik WMNO is doing some, CEE have their tech group and there is also d:Wikidata:Wiki Mentor Africa which is I think funded through Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Igbo Wikimedians User Group Annual Grant 2024 and Beyond. WMCEE is working adding Cat-a-lot wikipedia gadgets, WMA is working with ISA-tool and inaturalist. --Zache (talk) 13:54, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. I don't yet know why it wasn't there before, e.g. if/where these grants were before and which implications the prior practice or this change has in regards to getting wishes & tasks implemented. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:11, 24 November 2025 (UTC)

What you mentioned is nearly nothing though. Available total budget of that CEE project 1.500 EUR – I think it's quite clear to people that this is nearly nothing. Why are there not more grants for tangible technical developments? These are severely needed, unlike more usually low-impact and virtually always much-less-needed 'research' which is what Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Research & Technology Fund/Wikimedia Research Fund seems to be all about. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:02, 22 January 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Prototyperspective, sorry for the late reply! I know that this may not fully address your request, but as mentioned, the Rapid Fund program provides grants (500–5,000 USD) to small software development projects that support movement goals and community needs. We have a similar pilot for the General Support Fund to support software development projects as part of the Wikimedia affiliates' annual plans. The reason we don't have a dedicated tech fund was shared a few years ago and it can be found here: Wikimedia Research & Technology Fund. The Community Resources (grants team) and Product & Tech are working to improve how communities can access resourcing for technical projects and we hope the co-review pilot we are implementing and learnings from it will support this effort. I suggest that you also add your request to the discussion page of the upcoming Wikimedia Foundation's annual plan draft.

@Zache is correct that the Category:Tech Rapid proposals category captures only recent Rapid Fund tech grants and requests because we started tracking these projects separately last year. While in the past we supported other tech project requests in the Rapid Fund program, they are not categorized separately. Last year we worked on a streamlined process between Product & Tech and Community Resources to support the review and application process. In late 2025, a similar pilot was also kicked off for the tech projects received in the General Support Fund. Category:Tech - General Support Funds in FY 2025-26 captures all General Support Fund requests that also have dedicated tech projects. You can use Category:Tech Rapid proposals to track new Rapid Fund applications. If it helps, I can also add state-based categories (i.e. Category:Tech Rapid proposals/Under review, Category:Tech Rapid proposals/Funded). DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 07:24, 27 January 2026 (UTC)

Hello, thanks for your answer. I made a post at Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2026-2027#The problem that underlies most issues and challenges noted here and elsewhere.

-

I don't fully understand the reasoning why this tech fund isn't anymore and there doesn't seem to be much explanation on the page if I read it correctly. It has Product & Tech department will work directly with volunteers to develop a plan for building it (potentially using contract agreements vs. grants), alongside a plan for maintaining it

Rapid Fund program provides grants (500–5,000 USD) to small software development projects that support movement goals and community needs Interesting. It's obviously not quite successful given the low pageviews of that page and how rare it is to see wishes or issues getting fixed via it if that ever occurs. Also it nowhere mentions or links to phabricator (issues) or the m:Community Wishlist (wishes) where devs could find things to build (other than recommending phabricator "for project tracking"). It's also probably not well-known and found (as clearly indicated again by the low activity & views) where one could more prominently link to it at relevant places. Also I'd like to add a mention of the Wishlist & phabricator issues to it if that's fine (albeit again that approach doesn't seem/isn't efficacious anyway).

At that post at the annual plan discussion page maybe something about grants & contracts should be added to the list of things that could be done more explicitly. Maybe you could provide some info about that and I don't know whether it would be best to list it separately – it's basically already included in point 1 and 3. I'm pretty agnostic as to how development increases are achieved as long as they're substantially increased and of course funding motivated members of the community would probably the most ideal. Afaik there are probably significant limitations for both contracts & grants. But again even if there was a lot of budget available for these, things don't end with setting up a page somewhere (and the only category I just added to the page doesn't make a change either and neither would a small link somewhere in another low-visibility page). Is Category:Tech - General Support Fund for all things that request funds at least in part for technical things (ie could the software development category also be added there)?

I think which ones got funded can be seen at this query if I'm not mistaken (9 so far): [1]. Btw how does the rejection work – here I could only see a bot update the page but no reasoning or anything else was added. Also most these requests funded or not seem to have a tendency for rather niche new things and not for highly-requested or highly-impactful already-requested (issue or wish) things. Maybe not niche (haven't looked much into all of these yet) and not saying the requested things aren't good but what I was hoping for is more requests to implement any of the many already-existing important open issues.

As a sidenote – and I don't know if you know more about any of this – I wonder if Web2Cit is such a good approach – shouldn't their work be integrated into citoid and shouldn't the priority first of all be to roll out the automatic citation feature of refoolbar to more wikipedias? I mean this looks going quite advanced and I doubt extremely many users have that nondefault script installed (but lots of users use the automatic citation) and while ENWP is at the cutting edge innovating the automatic citation functionalities even further, other WPs are left out and still have to actually cite by hand in the wikitext editor. Prototyperspective (talk) 01:30, 6 February 2026 (UTC)