Funding: First Grants Announced From the Wikimedia Endowment to Support Technical Innovation Across Wikipedia and Wikimedia Projects

From a Wikimedia Foundation Post:

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia Endowment Board today announced the first recipients of grant funding from the Wikimedia Endowment, the long-term fund established in 2016 to support the future of Wikimedia sites. The initiatives that will receive grant funding include Abstract Wikipedia, Kiwix, Machine Learning, and Wikidata. The projects were selected for their ability to foster greater technical innovation on Wikimedia projects, crucial to keeping the sites relevant in a rapidly-evolving landscape.

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The initiatives receiving grant funding from the Wikimedia Endowment include:

• Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions, $1 million: Abstract Wikipedia aims to build a knowledge base independent of language, making it easier to share, add, translate, and improve knowledge across languages on Wikipedia. Abstract Wikipedia’s technical development is led by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikifunctions is the underlying technical infrastructure that supports the project.
• Kiwix, $250,000: Kiwix is a nonprofit which provides an offline reader for Wikipedia content, making knowledge more accessible to people around the world regardless of internet connectivity. Kiwix has more than 4 million users in over 200 countries.
• Machine Learning, $950,000: Led by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Machine Learning team, this programmatic area of Wikimedia work focuses on building and strengthening AI and machine learning infrastructure on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects. Machine learning tools make the work of volunteer editors more efficient, enabling them to focus time on edits that require complex human judgment. This work includes the development of algorithms to measure the quality of Wikipedia articles and machine learning models that help catch incidents of vandalism on Wikimedia projects.
• Wikidata, $1 million: Wikidata is the multilingual, structured knowledge base that powers knowledge on Wikipedia. With more than 100 million data items, it is the most edited Wikimedia project. Wikidata more easily connects knowledge from Wikimedia projects with machines, including voice assistants, websites, and other platforms that leverage Wikimedia content. The grant from the Endowment will fund the existing multi-year plan for the project which is led by Wikimedia Deutschland, the independent Wikimedia affiliate based in Germany, in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation.

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