The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, has announced four grants totaling $3.2 million in support of projects related to the knowledge-sharing platform.

The grants are the first awards made through the Wikimedia Endowment, established in 2016 to support long-term initiatives that foster technical innovation across the free knowledge landscape. The funding includes $1 million to Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions, a Wikimedia project that aims to build a knowledge base independent of language, making it easier to share, add, translate, and improve content across the Wikipedia’s 332 language editions; $950,000 in support of Machine Learning, a project that focuses on building and strengthening AI and machine learning infrastructure across the platform; $1 million for Wikidata, a project that builds and maintains the multilingual, structured knowledge base that powers the sharing of more than 100 million data items across Wikipedia; and $250,000 to Kiwix, a nonprofit that provides offline reading access for Wikipedia content to more than four million users in over 200 countries.

“Technical innovation is an essential aspect of the continued success and growth of Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects,” said Wikimedia Endowment board member Phoebe Ayers, a librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “These projects [will] foster greater technical progress in the Wikimedia movement and its aim to build the essential infrastructure for free knowledge.”

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