> Personally, I'd prefer Wikimedia focus on improving access for poor people around the world regardless of skin color, but unfortunately this view seems to have gone out of style.
I'm pretty sure the foundation could fund such work with the full support of the community, if they went about it in a different way.
For example, if they transparently said they were going to try paying professional researchers/editors/translators to beef up articles on subjects that were under-represented; they took a systematic look at subjects and determined Haiti was under-represented; and they spent $x00k towards some concrete goal, like getting Haiti more articles/words/featured articles than Star Wars.
Or if paying editors is unpopular or ineffective, they could fund efforts to recruit more volunteer contributors to the Hatian-language wikipedia, spending $x00k and measuring success by the increase in article count, how long the newly recruited volunteers stay around for, and suchlike.
You know - transparent priorities, with goals expressed in terms of wikipedia contributions.
AFAIK they do provide grants to a bunch of independent chapters around the world which do things like organize events and outreach to encourage more people to participate in editing.
I'm pretty sure the foundation could fund such work with the full support of the community, if they went about it in a different way.
For example, if they transparently said they were going to try paying professional researchers/editors/translators to beef up articles on subjects that were under-represented; they took a systematic look at subjects and determined Haiti was under-represented; and they spent $x00k towards some concrete goal, like getting Haiti more articles/words/featured articles than Star Wars.
Or if paying editors is unpopular or ineffective, they could fund efforts to recruit more volunteer contributors to the Hatian-language wikipedia, spending $x00k and measuring success by the increase in article count, how long the newly recruited volunteers stay around for, and suchlike.
You know - transparent priorities, with goals expressed in terms of wikipedia contributions.