Taking stock of the 2024–2025 research grants
- By Alaexis
The Research Fund is a Wikimedia Foundation initiative that supports individuals, groups, and organizations with expertise and interest in conducting research on or about Wikimedia projects
. The main funding criterion is whether the grant would result in high-quality and high-impact scholarship
. Grant sizes range from $2,000 to 50,000 USD and work must be completed within 12 months. Since the previous batch of grants was issued in summer 2024, those projects should now be finished making this a good time to examine the results. The nine projects in this batch received over $400,000 USD in total funding.
Out of 9 projects in that batch, 5 have published their results on Meta Research pages. For the remaining 4 projects without published results, I reached out to the researchers directly and added their responses to the Notes column in the table below.
The research is supposed to
- Contribute to generalizable knowledge that has the potential to improve and expand our understanding of the Wikimedia projects and their impact;
- Identify and/or evaluate novel technical and socio-technical solutions that can enhance the technology or policy in support of the Wikimedia projects;
- Inform important social or policy decisions that organized groups within the Wikimedia communities want to make.
- [Create] datasets of importance for Wikimedia communities (including but not limited to Wikimedia research communities).
Notable findings
Daniel Baránek and Veronika Kršková compared the coverage of Wikidata with that of a Czech biographical dictionary. They found that more than a quarter of dictionary entries were missing from Wikidata (and likely from Wikipedia as well). Fascinatingly, further research showed that the gap reflected different notions of notability now and in the past. Many missing persons were principals and professors who played major roles during nationalist tensions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Brett Buttliere, Matt Vetter and Sage Ross tried to solve the problem of low academic engagement on Wikipedia. They identified reasons why scholars do not edit Wikipedia: academic contributions to Wikipedia aren't measured and valued in the academic community and there is general skepticism about the reliability of Wikipedia. We all want more experts on Wikipedia, so it's good to have more data about the problem. See the Research Page for the solutions that the authors proposed and implemented.
Personally, I'd be very interested in the results of the AI tagging for Commons initiative, as well as in the two projects addressing the gender gap. Unfortunately, their results were unavailable as of October 18.
Gaps and concerns
While the Research Fund supports important work, several issues emerged from this batch:
- Incomplete reporting: 4 out of 9 projects have not published results on Meta, even though the grant period has ended.
- Unpublished datasets: some projects that could benefit the community haven't shared their underlying data. For example, the biographical dictionaries comparison identified specific gaps in Wikidata coverage, but the dataset of missing entries hasn't been published (happy to be corrected if I'm wrong).
- Uncertain scholarly impact: the fund aims to support "high-quality and high-impact scholarship," but measuring impact is challenging, especially for research generating "generalizable knowledge" rather than artifacts that Wikipedians can use right away. As far as I can tell, none of these projects have yet resulted in peer-reviewed publications.
Table
| Project name | Link to programs page | Link to research page | Results | Amount, USD | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikidata for the People of Africa | [1] | [2] | yes | 40,000 | |
| Development of a training program for teachers to use Wikipedia as a resource for collaborative learning and the development of skills for digital citizenship | [3] | [4] | no | 50,000 | Results expected in December 2025 |
| Bridging the Gap Between Wikipedians and Scientists with Terminology-Aware Translation: A Case Study in Turkish | [5] | [6] | yes | 50,000 | |
| Wikimedia versus traditional biographical encyclopedias. Overlaps, gaps, quality and future possibilities | [7] | [8] | yes | 50,000 | |
| System Design for Increasing Adoption of AI-Assisted Image Tagging in Wikimedia Commons | [9] | [10] | no | 49,500 | Data collected by December 2024 |
| Investigating Neurodivergent Wikimedian Experiences | [11] | [12] | yes | 22,000 | An open access publication is in the works |
| Developing Wikimedia Impact Metrics as a Sociotechnical Solution for Encouraging Funder/ Academic Engagement | [13] | [14] | yes | 42,000 | |
| Cover Women | [15] | [16] | no | 32,000 | |
| Addressing Wikipedia's Gender Gaps Through Social Media Ads | [17] | [18] | no | 30,000 | At the data collection phase in October 2025 |
Briefly
- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
Discuss this story
Easy money. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 13:47, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Corrections to Report
Hello all,
I'm Kinneret, Research Community Officer on the WMF Research Team and Workflow Chair for the Research Fund. I got to connect with the author of this piece, and I wanted to add some relevant updates and information that I shared with them and didn't make it to the final edition of the Signpost.
• The 9 grants in this round were funded at USD 270,687, and not over USD 400,000 as mentioned in the report. The grant amounts included in the report were based on the requested amounts in proposals rather than the approved and disbursed amounts. This is something we identified and corrected in the public Meta Pages for future rounds, but missed the earlier years which were still affected.
• For the 2024 round, dataset publication was not an explicit goal. This was a learning for us, and we clarified and strengthened this expectation in subsequent rounds. More info on this round can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Grants:Programs/Wikimedia_Research_%26_Technology_Fund/Wikimedia_Research_Fund&oldid=28156852
Beyond these corrections, I also shared with @Alaexis that we maintain similar tracking on our end, and we will be exploring ways to share that information to reduce duplication of effort and increase transparency.
Finally, I would like to invite anyone interested in this report and the Research Fund to book an Office Hour to discuss this together. Thanks again to @Alaexis for the initiative and for helping us improve the accuracy of the public documentation.
Wrong budget numbers for Research Fund grants
Hi @HaeB, thanks again for reaching out to me on my talk page on Meta-Wiki. I'm adding my response on this talk page per your request.
For most Wikimedia Foundation funding programs (namely the General Support Fund, Rapid Fund, Conference and Event Fund, and Hub Fund), the application process and grants administration are managed through external grants management software (Fluxx). A bot automatically updates the corresponding grant pages on Meta-Wiki on a daily basis using data from Fluxx. Each grant page displays the amount requested (in grantee's local currency and USD) at the submission stage, and the amount recommended/approved in local currency and USD if the grant is approved. For these programs, the funding information is much more reliable.
The Research Fund uses OpenReview for its application process and no such automated integration currently exists. As a result, Research Fund grant pages are updated manually, typically with longer delays and are more prone to errors. After January 5, I will work with @KGordon (WMF) to review and add or update all approved funding amounts for Research Fund grants. We will also develop a plan to improve the update process so that final approved amounts are reflected on Meta-Wiki shortly after funding decisions are made. Thank you! DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 11:48, 17 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]