Page:Funding Free Knowledge the Wiki Way - Wikimedia Foundation Participatory Grantmaking.pdf/9

 WMF Finances

The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation is an "intermediary grantmaker" — a non-endowed organization that raises funds from foundations, individuals, and other sources and then gives funding to other organizations and individuals that work to advance the movement's mission. The role of WMF Grantmaking is to invest a portion of the WMF's overall budget in a diverse constituency of stakeholders in the movement by finding and supporting projects and initiatives that further the WMF's mission and strategic vision. Most critically, only 20% of Wikimedian contributions and contributors currently come from the Global South or 80% of the world, and only 1 in 10 contributors worldwide is projected to be female. For the largest free knowledge platform in the world, this implies a significant set of knowledge gaps on Wikipedia and its sister sites that the Grantmaking team is trying to address, in partnership with Wikimedia communities. In this way, the Wikimedia Foundation's finances reflect and align with the intentions of the early Participatory Grantmaking movement: a vision of social justice movements funding and supporting themselves, independent of grants and funding from other foundations, states, corporations, or individual people with wealth. For the most part, this vision has not been attained on a large scale by social justice grantmakers, which often struggle to raise their annual budgets or young group of panelists.

Wikimedia Foundation staff and board, Wikimedia volunteers, and Wikimedia organizations work together to find and fund innovative and impactful projects, and to evaluate and share to diversify their funding sources. Wikimedia Foundation is a powerful example of this vision, enabled by the creation of an international infrastructure for free knowledge which is one of the top 10 most visited websites.