This suggestion looks worth to investigate. As for commons, certain areas are weakly covered, there might be some people willing to purchase a collection into the public domain. I'll ask a question there.
teun
On 1/9/07, Sage Ross ragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:
In the past there was some effort put into grant writing, but I'm not sure if any grant applications ever got submitted. In any case, it's been quite a while since anything was done on Meta about grants: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants
There is a new NEH grant that looks like something appropriate for Wikimedia (or at least for English Wikipedia, through Wikimedia): http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/Digital_Partnership.html
From the program description, they want: "...proposals for innovative, collaborative humanities projects using the latest digital technologies for the benefit of the American public, humanities scholarship, and the nation's cultural institutions. These grants will support collaborations among libraries, museums, archives, universities, and other cultural organizations that may serve as models for the field. We encourage projects that explore new ways to share, examine, and interpret humanities collections in a digital environment and to develop new uses and audiences for existing digital resources."
It almost looks like it was written with Wikipedia in mind. The grant range is $50,000 to $350,000 over two years; not enormous, but it seems worth the time of some Wikimedian grant writers.
With some creativity, there are probably some other NEH and possibly NSF grants that Wikimedia might have a shot at as well.
-User:Ragesoss
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