Hi All,

Today we're pleased to announce a new group of grantees working to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects.

In early March, we announced the Inspire campaign, an initiative led by WMF’s Community Resources team to generate new ideas to address Wikimedia's gender gap. From 266 ideas came 42 grant proposals eligible for consideration. After careful review by a committee of volunteer Wikimedians and gender-focused experts, 16 projects have been recommended and approved for funding.

The projects are experimenting with a variety of strategies: organizing events and leveraging professional communities, institutions and partnerships to create quality content, researching gaps in both content and contributors, and testing approaches for training and mentorship to better support gender diversity on-wiki. Overall, we’re particularly pleased to see projects looking at gender in multiple ways as they work to improve Wikipedia’s gender diversity across various contexts, and to be supporting some returning grantees as well as many new project leaders who identify as women or allies for increasing gender diversity.

You can also read more about the campaign and each funded project on the Wikimedia Foundation blog.

The funded projects are:

• Wikipedian in Residence for Gender Equity
• Gender gap admin training 
• Survey women who don't contribute 
• Wikipedia Gender Index 
• Wikipedia Buddy Group 
• Wiki Edit-a-thon Work Parties
• More Female Architects on Wikipedia 
• Linguistics Editathon series: Improving female linguists' participation and representation on Wikipedia
• Wikipedia edit-a-thon for the Aphra Behn Society
• Wikineedsgirls
• Gender in East Asia Wikipedia Editing
• Full Circle Gap Protocol: Addressing the Unknown Unknowns
• Wellington Wikipedia Meet Up - With Childcare 
• Just for the record 
• Let's fill the gender gap Workshops
• Empowering Afrodescendant women in Wikipedia

What’s next:

We hope you'll continue to engage with these projects as they begin work in coming months and offer your experience and ideas!

Meanwhile, our regularly scheduled grant programs continue :)

A number of ideas and grant proposals from the campaign are still in development. Over the coming year, we'll continue to encourage people to make changes based on feedback and our Project and Event Grants and Individual Engagement Grants programs will be happy to continue to receive new or adjusted proposals aimed at increasing gender diversity during regular funding cycles along with all other topics.

A full analysis of the Inspire campaign is in progress, and in coming weeks we'll be sharing findings from a traffic analysis and a participant survey. Stay tuned for another update in mid-May on what we learned from the Inspire experiment, what worked, what didn't, and recommended steps for the future.

Many thanks to all of you that contributed to this campaign with proposals, ideas, feedback and suggestions!

Cheers,