* 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".
--
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de ·
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