* Sydney Poore wrote:
It has become pretty obvious that funding the interests/values of existing community members through regular channels is not creating content free of systemic bias in general nor closing the human gender gap. (I say this as someone who has read all types of WMF funding proposals and evaluations of for several years now.)
Temporarily doing a 3 month targeted Gender Gap experimental campaign is a modest approach to take in addressing one of the biggest weaknesses of Wikimedia Foundation projects. The reaction of some members of the community was predictable, because it is evident in the majority of previous and current funding requests that increasing the diversity of the larger Wikimedia movement is secondary priority of most existing people and organizations.
Proposed projects with a good chance to measurably "shrink" the "gender gap" are not being denied adequate funding as far as I can tell. Without actual resource shortages concerning the "gender gap" topic with respect to "grants", be that money or staff time for proposal reviews, what we have here is a solution looking for a problem. We would have a different kind of discussion if we were talking about "there is a huge backlog of great gender gap projects in need of funding", but you don't say that it is evident in the *rejection* of requests, you say that's evident in the requests themself. Earlier Siko Bouterse wrote the same, "these kinds of projects haven’t emerged organically at any meaningful scale".