The Wikimedia Foundation has remained in a period of transition. It welcomed new leadership last year, including a new Chief Executive Officer and Chief Product and Technology Officer. Additionally, the Foundation has navigated conversations with our global communities on a range of important issues, from a future charter defining roles and responsibilities, to how we raise shared resources through banner fundraising. This year's Annual Plan attempts to provide more clarity on multi-year strategic issues that do not have quick fixes, and more granular information on how the Foundation operates. Feedback from our many stakeholders is welcome and appreciated.
Last year, we decided to focus our efforts at the Wikimedia Foundation on radically changing how we did our work. This included organizing our work regionally to respond to the varying needs of communities globally, to refreshing our values within the Foundation to improve our own levels of collaboration. This is putting us in a better position to now more meaningfully shift what we do – especially as the world around us changes in more unexpected ways and we assess how to have more collective impact on common goals towards the 2030 Strategic Direction.
Once again, we must first consider the changing world around us, what it needs from us, and how we must adapt to it. We are grounding this annual plan in multi-year strategic planning to consider longer-term shifts on the Wikimedia Movement's revenue, product and technology, and roles and responsibilities. External trends show that social platforms continue to displace traditional search engines, and that artificial intelligence threatens even more disruption to the digital world. In addition, the legal landscape on which our global Movement relies is changing significantly after decades of relative stability. In response to continuing threats like mis- and disinformation, lawmakers are attempting to regulate internet platforms in ways that could fundamentally endanger our mission. These threats and increasing polarization create new reputational risks for our projects and work. Finally, continued uncertainty in the global economy is accelerating the need to assess the trajectory of our revenue streams, and make investments now that can support growth in resources to fund our collective work and ambitions.
For the second consecutive year, the Wikimedia Foundation is anchoring its annual plan in the Movement's strategy to advance equity. Our intention is to connect the Foundation's work even more deeply with the Movement Strategy Recommendations in order to make even deeper progress towards the 2030 Strategic Direction. We remain driven to do this through collaborative planning with others in the Movement who are also implementing the recommendations. This is made more actionable in deepening our regional focus so that the Foundation's support better meets the needs of varying communities in all regions of the world. Furthermore, the upcoming Movement Charter is expected to provide more clarity on roles, responsibilities, possibly through new collaborative structures like hubs and a Global Council. We intend to continue our collaboration with the charter process to advance equity in decision-making for our Movement.
Approach to annual planning:
Anchor in Movement Strategy. Tie to Knowledge Equity and Knowledge as a Service. Align more closely with the Movement Strategy recommendations.
Take an external perspective. Start with: what's happening in the world around us. Look outward. Identify the key External Trends impacting our work.
Focus on Product + Tech. Recenter support for communities and volunteers through our unique role in enabling product and technology at scale.
Regional approach. Continue to take a more regional approach to supporting global communities.
This year, the Foundation is recentering its plan around Product & Technology, emphasizing our unique role as a platform for people and communities collaborating on a massive scale. The bulk of this effort, called "Wiki Experiences," recognizes that volunteers are at the heart of the Wikimedian process of sensemaking and knowledge creation. Therefore, this year, we are prioritizing established editors (including those with extended rights, like admins, stewards, patrollers, and moderators of all kinds, also known as functionaries) over newcomers, to ensure that they have the right tools for the critical work they do every day to expand and improve quality content, as well as manage community processes. Managing the platform effectively also requires the Foundation to address large-scale infrastructure and data needs that may extend beyond the specific Wiki Experiences of the projects. This work is described below as "Signals & Data Services." And finally, in a category called "Future Audiences," we must accelerate innovations that engage diverse audiences as editors and contributors.
The financial model on which the Wikimedia Movement has relied for most of its historic growth (banner fundraising) is reaching some limits. New funding streams to complement this – including Wikimedia Enterprise and the Wikimedia Endowment – will take time to develop. They are unlikely to fund the same levels of growth in the coming few years as we have seen in banner fundraising over the last decade, especially given an uncertain global economic outlook.
In response to these trends, the Foundation slowed growth last year compared to the prior three years. We are now making internal budget cuts involving both non-personnel and personnel expenses to make sure we have a more sustainable trajectory in expenses for the coming few years. Despite these budget pressures, we will grow overall funding to Movement partners, including expanding grants to: take into account global inflationary costs, support newcomers to the Movement, and increase funding for conferences and Movement events. This plan involves more funding in all regions while prioritizing proportionally larger growth in underrepresented regions. To enable this growth for affiliates and newcomers, some grant programs (like the Research and Alliances funds) will need to be smaller. Furthermore, as we assess the Foundation's core capabilities, we recognize that there are activities where others in the Movement may be better placed to have meaningful impact and are exploring pragmatic ways to move in that direction in the year ahead.
The Wikimedia Foundation has four main goals in 2023−2024. They are designed to align with the Wikimedia Movement's Strategic Direction and Movement Strategy Recommendations, and continue much of the work identified in last year's plan. They are:
In the sections that follow, you will find more specific details on the work of various teams at the Foundation in support of these four goals. After a brief history of planning at the Foundation, we look outward at what is changing around us – and ask what this means for Wikimedia and the Foundation's priorities. What else do we need to consider? Are we collectively heading in a direction that brings us closer to the Movement's 2030 vision? What does the world need from us now?
In refreshing the values of the Wikimedia Foundation, our staff has endorsed the principle of being in this mission together. We hope the content that follows provides you with a deeper understanding of how the work being done by the Foundation tries to deliver on that promise for us all.
Early efforts around strategic thinking at the Foundation were mostly led by executives and the Board of Trustees (for example through SWOT analysis). The 2009–2010 strategic process was the first exercise to seek wide input from the Movement. It "aimed to understand and address the critical challenges and opportunities facing the Wikimedia Movement through 2015," and "culminated in a series of priorities and goals, as well as specific operational initiatives for the Wikimedia Foundation." In retrospect, the resulting 2010–2015 Strategic Plan is now acknowledged to have been too ambitious, with goals difficult to reach.
In 2012, Executive Director Sue Gardner argued that Foundation staff was "over-stretched and over-mandated," and that "the major bottle-neck at the Wikimedia Foundation at this point" was not money, but rather "organizational attention." Sue decided to "Narrow the focus" of the organization, centering its efforts mainly around Technology and Grantmaking. This notably led to the creation of the Wiki Education Foundation as a separate nonprofit, to spin off and expand the Wikimedia Foundation's Education program in North America.
In 2016, Executive Director Lila Tretikov started a community discussion around a proposed "Interim Strategy." This process was consultative, asking for feedback on a predetermined plan rather than being co-created. The Foundation used this framework to guide its annual plans for a few years.
In 2017, Executive Director Katherine Maher launched the Movement Strategy process, an ambitious Movement-wide effort to determine a shared Strategic Direction for the 2030 horizon. After months of discussions, research, interviews, and events (Phase 1), the resulting Strategic Direction was endorsed by over a hundred Wikimedia organizations. Between 2018 and 2020 (Phase 2), nine thematic working groups composed of volunteers, staff, affiliates, and trustees prepared Recommendations for the Movement to work towards the Direction. The final list of Recommendations (and accompanying Principles) was published in 2020.
Between 2019 and 2022, the Foundation's activities were organized around the Medium-Term Plan, an attempt at multi-year planning to guide the Foundation's work until a more specific mandate emerged from Movement Strategy recommendations and implementation.
As of 2023, the Movement is now in Phase 3 of Movement Strategy: implementation through prioritized Initiatives. This last phase is notably hindered by strategy fatigue and loss of momentum. While the Recommendations are considered to be necessary, they are also unlikely sufficient to realize the 2030 vision of the Wikimedia Movement.
In 2022, the Foundation proceeded to ground its 2022–2023 annual plan in the Movement Strategy's Strategic Direction, and is now seeking to align its multi-year strategic planning more closely with the Movement Strategy Direction, Recommendations, Principles, and other strategic guideposts.
See also:
Strategy on Meta-Wiki: An overview of all strategy efforts relating to the Wikimedia Movement, including links to strategic plans of other Wikimedia organizations.
A more detailed audit of 2010–2016 strategy processes, written before the launch of the 2017 Movement Strategy process.
Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation shared a list of external trends, prompted by the "Puzzles and Priorities" from CEO Maryana Iskander in her incoming Listening Tour. This year, the Foundation set out to update the trends and is requesting help from the wider Movement to share their thoughts on these topics. When considering the world around us, a variety of perspectives makes for a clearer picture of reality and better-informed decisions. We welcome and encourage your feedback on the draft ideas below.
This is an opportunity to look outward: As a Movement, we need to keep asking: "what does the world need from us now?" It is also a starting point for shared understanding, even with different views: Trends analysis requires us to have a long-term view and to track what is important to us - even if we have differing views about how to address it.
With that said, we live in a complex, fast-changing world. This is not a comprehensive list of threats and opportunities facing our Movement, but rather a few of the most pressing issues we face.
Update from 2022: social platforms continue to disrupt traditional search engines, but artificial intelligence (AI) threatens even more significant disruption.
Personality-driven experiences are increasingly drawing younger audiences to social platforms (TikTok, Instagram) and away from traditional search engines. Social platforms are testing out new search features to keep users engaged. Traditional search engines are testing different strategies to stay competitive and remain destinations – which reduce SEO ranking of Wikimedia content in external search results links.
The explosion of generative AI could benefit knowledge creation and consumption, but creates uncertainty and risk for our role in the knowledge ecosystem. In just 2 months, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer web application of all time. Traditional search engines and browsers (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) have begun to pilot AI chatbot-assisted search, leveraging GPT and other large language models (LLMs) – which rely in part on Wikipedia as a source of training data and a knowledge store but do not always represent or attribute information coming from our projects accurately.
These technologies are emergent and evolving quickly, and they could eventually be used in ways that help us advance the Wikimedia mission – e.g. by adding efficiencies to content creation, moderation, and technical contribution workflows on our projects, as well as providing new ways to make content more findable and accessible to readers. However, there are barriers to integrating generative AI tools into our projects – e.g. open questions about the copyright status of the output of generative AI, cost to maintain and run, and concerns about bias and inaccuracy.
There are also major challenges to our sustainability presented by this technology. The use of AI assistants as an entry point to search could exacerbate existing challenges around attribution and disintermediation, further distancing consumers from contributing to or financially supporting our projects. Widespread AI-assisted content creation (both on and off our projects) also risks overrunning our projects with unreliable and/or harmful content and irrevocably damaging our mission and brand. In March 2023, we hosted the first of what may become a regular conversation with community members interested in this topic to discuss opportunities, challenges, and next steps.
Information warfare is intensifying. Information warfare as a political and geopolitical weapon by governments and political movements is intensifying and growing more complex/subtle, while also growing more dangerous (disinformation campaigns are increasingly accompanied by physical threats, blackmail, arrests, etc.).
Machine-generated content is expanding. The ability of artificial systems to generate quality content is expanding, and crucially, its societal mainstreaming is unfolding fast in most major markets. How Wikimedia positions itself could help shape the field.
Encrypted disinformation and misinformation attack vectors are growing. Digital privacy and information warfare fears push disinformation further into closed channels where encryption makes monitoring and prediction more challenging, allowing disinformation to thrive and polarization to further advance. As an open platform counter to this damaging trend (monitor-able, stewarded, cared for, public and open) we can show our form/method as functionally addressing the problem.
Wikimedia has become a notable target. In 2022, disinformation narratives and dedicated attacks against the Movement, individual volunteers, and the Foundation also increased, creating increasingly severe risks for our volunteers and for the Foundation's reputation.
Wikimedia has become more international as an organization, which means that more laws of more countries apply to us. To protect our projects and people, we will need to comply with an increasingly broad range of laws around the world. This includes laws in the United States, broad laws in the European Union such as the Digital Services Act and, on a case by case basis, laws in other countries in multiple regions of the world such as defamation and privacy claims. We must be prepared to fight against harmful government actions in court and publicly advocate against harmful laws in even more countries as we continue to grow.
More is demanded of hosting providers than ever before. Governments are under increased political pressure to address a variety of perceived harms and biases online. In the near future, multiple cases involving seminal internet law CDA 230 will be heard by the US Supreme Court, potentially disrupting well-established intermediary protections that platforms like Wikipedia rely upon. Meanwhile, penalties for hosting harmful content are growing, including criminal liability in some cases like the UK Online Safety Bill.
Lawmakers aren't thinking about Wikipedia. Legislation continues to conflate Wikimedia with for-profit platforms. Few policy makers understand Wikimedia's volunteer-led content moderation model. We need to educate governments and policy influencers about Wikimedia's model -- and how laws should protect and support it.
Our relationship with for-profit tech platforms is important and complicated. We need each other. But to protect Wikimedia's model, projects, and people from harmful regulation, lawmakers and policy influencers must be educated about how we are different from large for-profit platforms. We must invest in ways to ensure that lawmakers and policy influencers understand how our volunteer-led model works and our Movement's positive role in society.
The Wikimedia Foundation has four main goals in 2023−2024. They are designed to align with the Wikimedia Movement's Strategic Direction and Movement Strategy Recommendations, and continue much of the work identified in last year's plan. They are:
INFRASTRUCTURE: Advance Knowledge as a Service.Improve User Experience on the wikis, especially for established editors. Strengthen metrics and reporting.
EQUITY: Support Knowledge Equity. Strengthen Equity in Decision-Making via Movement governance and Movement Charter. Empower and engage the Movement, support regional and thematic strategies, and help close knowledge gaps.
SAFETY & INCLUSION: Protect against growing external threats. Defend our people and projects against disinformation and harmful government regulation. Work across the Movement to Provide for the Safety of Volunteers.
In order to measure progress toward our goals, we have identified a limited set of core metrics that the Wikimedia Foundation plans to impact in the coming year. These metrics should motivate our work and serve as signals to indicate whether we are moving in the right direction. Where we are not seeing the impact we expect, we will adjust our work to have the impact we need.
The core metrics were selected using the following criteria:
We believe the metric indicates that we are moving in the right direction toward our goals.
We believe that the Foundation can have a measurable impact on the metric over the course of the fiscal year.
We are able to measure changes in the metric on a monthly basis so that we can course-correct as needed throughout the fiscal year.
We are able to measure and set a baseline before the start of the fiscal year.
In some cases we identified an important area of measurement for which we do not have a scientifically- or empirically-validated metric. In those cases, we have proposed workstreams to develop and identify metrics during the fiscal year. While we have identified measurements and milestones for the main metric areas below, there are additional data points the Foundation will monitor in the year ahead for a more complete view.
The Wikimedia Foundation has identified four main metric areas for 2023−2024.
CONTENT: Increase quality and reliability of encyclopedic content.
CONTRIBUTORS: Improve and maintain the health of the Movement's communities of contributors.
RELEVANCE: Ensure our relevance and sustainability to a broad audience world-wide.
EFFECTIVENESS: Ensure our long term sustainability by improving how the Foundation operates and scales.
Content: Increase quality and reliability of encyclopedic content
Our mission is to ensure the spread of free knowledge worldwide, and the content on our projects is a key way we provide access to free knowledge. Our Movement has had incredible impact at scale and our communities have spent many years improving the content on our projects. Through experimentation and partnership, we have found impactful ways to support our communities' ongoing efforts to increase quality and reliable content. Languages, regions, and topic areas where we can most likely have an impact are where we also improve free knowledge equity globally. Work on medium-sized wikis to expand reliable and quality content, in close partnership with volunteers, will be our focus for this fiscal year. This metric maps to our top-level goal of Equity.
Measurement: In medium-sized wikis, we will increase the percentage of Wikipedia articles that are in high-impact topic areas (beginning with gender and geography) and meet a shared quality standard.
Contributors: Improve and maintain the health of the Movement's communities of contributors
Our staff and the communities that enable Wikipedia's success and global reach, as well as Commons' effectiveness, tell us that the sustainability of those communities is at risk. The Foundation plays a role in helping ensure the success and health of our communities through Trust & Safety services, support for volunteer governance, and at-scale interventions to increase the number of editors. We will track community sentiment: specifically, how much our community members enjoy participating and intend to continue on in our Movement. We will also drill down on engagement among contributors who receive more targeted support from the Foundation, including organizers, on-wiki administrators, and technical contributors. This metric maps to our top-level goals of Infrastructure and Safety & Inclusion.
Measurement: We do not have an established metric that adequately reflects this year's focus on established editors (including those with extended rights, like admins, stewards, patrollers, and moderators of all kinds, also known as functionaries) and meets our constraints for selecting core metrics. Instead, we propose a milestone-based goal. We have committed to provide at least 1 metric no later than January 1, 2024.
Milestone-based goal: Deliver one significant intervention per quarter that addresses these contributor groups.
Relevance: Ensure our relevance and sustainability to a broad audience world-wide
Wikipedia is a resource for the world to find, learn, and share free knowledge. We in part judge the success of our work based on our readership, reuse of freely licensed content, and our ability to fundraise to sustain our broad Movement's objectives. The free knowledge Movement faces multiple challenges, including changing reader habits, disintermediation by advertising-driven search engines and the growth of social media platforms that use video and ML-driven recommendation algorithms rather than text and the open web to engage audiences. Facing these challenges requires new thinking on multiple fronts – fundraising, finding new audiences and creatively engaging with a changing world. This metric maps to our top-level goal of Infrastructure.
Measurement: We will increase the number of unique devices on Wikipedia for targeted languages and geographies.
Effectiveness: Ensure our long-term sustainability by improving how the Foundation operates and scales
We have selected programmatic expense ratio as our metric for the Foundation’s effectiveness. Programmatic expense ratio is a commonly used and well-defined financial accountability measure, employed by services like Charity Navigator to evaluate the efficacy of non-profits. This measure is based on publicly available information from our Form 990 filing to the IRS. This effectiveness measure establishes for the Foundation a metric to better evaluate key resourcing trade-offs for our departments and their associated financial accountability implications as well as assist us in communicating these trade-offs to our stakeholders by using this defined metric. This metric maps to our top-level goal of Effectiveness.
Measurement: We will increase our programmatic expense ratio to 77%.
The work we do at the Wikimedia Foundation has many purposes, and has been described as supporting a socio-technical ecosystem. Within that ecosystem, the Product & Technology department provides critical services, designs and launches new products, and innovates in areas like machine learning and internet-based collaboration. This year, the Foundation is recentering its plan around Product & Technology, emphasizing our unique role as a platform for people and communities collaborating on a massive scale.
As we think about both multi-year strategic planning and this year's annual plan, we are identifying core areas of work that extend from Wikimedia's historic success, advance Movement Strategy recommendations, and provide clear, visible roadmaps to stakeholders internally and externally.
The arrival of our new Chief Product & Technology Officer also presents an opportunity to tackle long-standing technical questions, like:
what lodestar metrics should we use to measure the impact of the Foundation and the health of societies of volunteers,
how to responsibly steward the limited resources we have towards Wikipedia and/or the sister projects, and
how to ask and answer significant questions about the future of MediaWiki.
To focus the work of the Product & Tech department going forward, we assigned wranglers (Product & Technology department leaders who determine priorities) to "buckets" of work for planning purposes. These groups of wranglers identified objectives and key results (OKRs) at our highest levels through our planning process. After defining OKRS, we then gave teams the opportunity to define the work that would be most impactful. Roadmaps will be created from this process and iterated on over the course of the fiscal year. The "buckets" and OKRs were published on-wiki for early-stage community input and discussion.
About half of the Product and Technology department's total resources will focus on achieving these objectives. The other half will go toward the essential "committed work" of keeping our sites up and servers up to date, defending against attacks, maintaining software (including essential tools for developers), fixing bugs, and maintaining our testing environments.
An important aspect of the "three key buckets" is that we are declaring that work within a bucket will not block work in another bucket. This means that we still consult and inform one another, and collaborate to enable work where appropriate, but teams can make a decision to move forward with plans without someone from another bucket blocking their work. This will make our work more efficient.
Also as part of our planning process, we are making a series of structural changes across the Product & Technology department. Important characteristics of the thinking behind changes include:
Make common sense changes to our reporting structures. Periodic review and alignment of teams with key work is required to maintain a healthy department. Areas we identified as opportunities for change included Program Management, data related teams, and our Feature Engineering teams. Each one of the changes identified carefully considers the needs of both individuals and managers so that they receive mentoring, support and sensible career growth over time, and enables the Foundation to focus our work in achieving the annual plan goals. At the director+ level, we are also moving or opening roles where needed and creating opportunities for internal growth, rather than simply backfilling any role that opens.
Focus more people on clear, cross-department priorities. We have produced a draft set of OKRs for next year that looks at work across the Product and Technology department, and how this work relates to all other departments at the Foundation. In some cases, like the new focus on the workflows of established editors (including those with extended rights, like admins, stewards, patrollers, and moderators of all kinds, also known as functionaries), this results in needing to make management or structural changes to support the new focus, and also deprioritize other work.
Increasing productive collaboration. Some decisions about management and process are designed to make decision owners more clear, direct and transparent. Thanks to increased work on collaboration, we're now raising long-standing unresolved issues between teams and systematically resolving them. There are a class of problems, however, that are due to unclear ownership, confusion about role and title, and lack of focus. Going forward, clarity of decision making and alignment of work with our most important goals is part of our criteria for how we organize teams under directors and VPs.
Budget Planning: Across the Product & Tech department, we plan on allocating an estimated 50% of our non-committed resources to Wiki Experiences, 30% to Signals and Services, 5% to Future Audiences, and the remaining 15% to Infrastructure and Product and Engineering Services.
A simple way to distinguish between the purposes of the two largest buckets are: Wiki Experiences is focused on our audiences interacting with our content through our web properties (wikis, mobile apps, tools etc.). Signals and Data Services serve audiences seeking insights into our content/metadata, making decisions on our content and services, and/or interacting with our content in structured or programmatic ways. Future Audiences will focus on experimenting with ways to invite new audiences into our Movement in direct and indirect ways.
The purpose of this bucket is to efficiently deliver, improve and innovate on wiki experiences that enable the distribution of free knowledge world-wide. Knowledge is constructed by people! As a result, our annual plan focuses on the content as well as the people who contribute to the content and those who access and read it.
Our audiences include all collaborators on our web properties, as well as the readers and other consumers of free knowledge. We support a top-10 global website, and many other important free culture resources. These systems have performance and uptime requirements on par with the biggest tech companies in the world. We provide user interfaces to wikis, translation, developer APIs (and more!) and supporting applications and infrastructure that all form a robust platform for volunteers to collaborate to produce free knowledge world-wide.
Our objectives for this bucket should enable us to:
Improve our core technology and capabilities.
Ensure we continuously improve the experience of volunteer editors and editors with extended rights (inclusive of admins, stewards, patrollers, and moderators of all kinds, also known as functionaries).
Improve the experience of all technical contributors working to improve or enhance the wiki experiences.
Ensure a great experience for readers and consumers of free knowledge worldwide.
We will do this through product and technology work, as well as through research, communications, and marketing. We will have three objectives in this bucket.
Our aim has been to produce an operating plan based on existing strategy, mainly our hypotheses about the contributor, consumer and content "flywheel". The primary shift in these objectives is an emphasis on the content portion of the flywheel, and exploration of what our editors with extended rights might need from us now, with the aim of identifying community health metrics in the future.
Decision makers from across the Wikimedia Movement must have access to reliable, relevant, and timely data, models, insights, and tools that can help them assess the impact (both realized and potential) of their work and the work of their communities, enabling them to make better strategic decisions.
In the Signals & Data Services bucket, we have identified four primary audiences for data insights: Wikimedia Foundation staff, Wikimedia affiliates, developers who reuse our content, and Wikimedia researchers. Our work will span a range of activities: defining gaps, developing metrics, building pipelines for computing metrics, and developing data and signals exploration pathways that help decision makers interact more effectively and joyfully with the data and insights.
The purpose of this bucket is to explore strategies for expanding beyond our existing audiences of consumers and contributors, in an effort to truly reach everyone in the world as the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge. More and more, people are consuming information in experiences and forms that diverge from our traditional offering of a website with articles: people are using voice assistants, spending time with video, engaging with AI, and more. The effort to identify a sound logo for Wikimedia projects this past year recognizes this growing trend and the need to increase our visibility and relevance.
In this bucket, we will propose and test hypotheses around potential long-term futures for the free knowledge ecosystem and how we will be its essential infrastructure. We will do this through product and technology work, as well as through research, partnerships, and marketing. As we identify promising future states, what we learn from this bucket will influence future product and technology strategy to serve knowledge-seekers. Our objectives for this bucket should drive us to experiment and explore as we bring a vision for the future of free knowledge into focus.
We also have two other "sub-buckets" that consist of areas of critical functions, which must exist at the Foundation to support our basic operations, and some of which we have in common with any software organization. These "sub-buckets" won't have top level objectives of their own, but will have input on and will support the top level objectives of the other groups. They are:
Foundational Infrastructure. This bucket covers the teams that sustain and evolve our data centers, our compute and storage platforms, the services to operate them, the tools and processes that enable the operation of our public facing sites and services.
Product and Engineering Services. This bucket includes teams that operate "at scale" providing services to other teams that improve the productivity and operations of those teams.
Strengthen Equity in Decision-Making via Movement governance and Movement Charter. Empower and engage the Movement, support regional and thematic strategies, and help close knowledge gaps.
One of the Movement's top goals in achieving its 2030 Strategic Direction is equity. We deeply believe that to succeed, we must focus on the knowledge and communities that structures of power and privilege have left out. We cannot serve as the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge for the world without the people of the world working together to assemble and distribute information resources that have value for all. To achieve our vision, we must also raise awareness and build trust with people who we need to help us close our equity gaps.
The Movement Strategy recognizes that by sharing accountability, as well as ensuring equitable opportunities for participation in decision-making and resource allocation, we will empower and represent all Movement stakeholders and have mechanisms to ensure all decisions that affect them are legitimate.
In this second year of the Foundation anchoring its annual plan in Movement Strategy, we are coordinating Movement Strategy implementation more centrally through the office of the CEO, with special emphasis on supporting the success of the Movement Charter. The charter is intended to finally provide more clarity on roles, responsibilities, and equitable decision-making, possibly through new collaborative structures like hubs and a Global Council. We believe it is essential that this document has a solid evidence base, and are committed to collaborating with the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) to share information and data, as well as the Foundation's experience with the centralization and decentralization of various Movement roles. We believe this will help the Committee to create a charter that can build more trust and coordination between stakeholders to support the greatest possible impact for our collective goals.
As this work is ongoing, we will continue to support the piloting of Hubs and documenting what we are learning from those pilots. The Foundation does not stand in the way of organic efforts to explore these structures, nor does it intend to pre-empt the role of the MCDC in recording and defining Hubs in the Movement Charter. Rather, our goal is to ensure that communities have equitable opportunity to engage in such exploration, and to help Movement organizers understand what is working well in these pilots and what is not in considering future approaches.
Knowledge Equity: Co-creating regional and thematic approaches
Taking a regional approach enables us to center perspectives that have historically been marginalized and to support more localized needs, counteracting structural inequalities and ensuring an equitable representation of knowledge and people in our Movement. Our Movement Strategy calls on us to prioritize communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. As such, while we will continue to work in all regions of the world and support mature affiliates who are actively engaged in strengthening the Movement globally, we will put special attention on regions that have been underrepresented in our Movement. We will continue to strategically grow grantmaking to these regions and prioritize staff for regional and global teams in these geographies.
Engaging in collaborative learning and planning with our Movement, we have identified the following strategic priorities in each of our eight regions, and will be working jointly with affiliates and partners in the Movement to plan, learn, and adapt throughout the year:
Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the fastest-growing regions in the Movement, and grantmaking to the region has grown significantly in recent years. We will grow grantmaking in the region this year as we continue to shift funds to historically underfunded regions, though at a slower rate than previous years. A primary focus this year will be to continue transitioning rapid fund grantees towards general support funding to enable sustainability and longer-term planning. A key challenge to programmatic growth in the region has been the difficulty of retaining African editors on Wikimedia projects, driven by both on-wiki policy barriers (e.g. Wikipedia notability policies) and technical challenges (e.g. IP blocking). This year, the Foundation is proposing to work with communities to jointly address the editor retention challenge through social and technical interventions. Finally, we will build on the programmatic successes of previous years by expanding the Movement's engagement with strategic partners in the region, including the African Library and Information Association (AfLIA) and the African Union.
South Asia
South Asia: In 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation and South Asian communities identified community building and reconnection as a core need for the region following years of disconnection exacerbated more recently by COVID and reduced Foundation engagement due to legal barriers impeding direct funding of communities. The April 2023 WikiConference India (WCI), the first of its kind in nearly 7 years, marks a turning point for the region. This year, we will build on the momentum of WCI, working with South Asian communities to support them − through resourcing, partnerships, communication and facilitation − to host local and regional gatherings (e.g. WikiWomen Camp) to continue to build the connective tissue within the region and revitalize their communities. We will also work with strategic partners to unblock access to funding in the region, and as a result, expect to be able to grow our support in the region significantly. Programmatically, our focus will be on continuing to support communities on culture and heritage preservation on Commons and Wikisource and partnering with third-party reusers of Wikimedia content (e.g. Jio) to increase exposure to this growing local content.
Central & Eastern Europe & Central Asia
Central & Eastern Europe & Central Asia (CEE): Our focus this year will be on supporting the CEE Hub as it continues into its second year of piloting. We will use this as an opportunity to work with the region and the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) to continue to define the Foundation's roles and responsibilities vis-à-vis hub structures, and jointly document what we learn from the work. In addition to funding the pilot hub, we will be growing our grantmaking in the region, though at a slower rate than last fiscal year, and will continue to engage in shared learning spaces with affiliates in the region. Within Education and GLAM, which continue to be affiliates' top programmatic areas of work, we have seen particular momentum in the library space. Having hired a new Program Officer for Libraries in January 2023, the Foundation will invest in supporting the region in this field through capacity building and ad hoc programmatic support.
Latin America & Caribbean
Latin America & Caribbean: The affiliates of the Latin America and Caribbean region were some of the first to explore intentional regional collaboration with the creation of the Iberocoop network in 2010. Thirteen years later, following Iberoconf 2023, the region is undergoing a major conversation about its future. The Foundation will continue to support Education and Culture & Heritage in the region, including supporting the 2023 GLAM conference taking place in Montevideo, Uruguay in November 2023. Grantmaking support to affiliates will grow over last year, though at a slower rate, as we continue to support affiliates with strategic plans to transition to multi-year grants. Programmatically, we will explore our role as a backbone organization by working with affiliates to identify the Foundation's roles and responsibilities in thematic areas, working closely with those, including Wikimedia Colombia and Wikimedistas de Uruguay, that have requested more direct partnership support. For example, we are exploring a new version of the Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom Training of Trainers Program with an affiliate and a Ministry of Education in the region and advising on a Climate Change and Citizenship course (in the context of our continuing partnership with the InterAmerican Development Bank) to support regional capacity building around climate and sustainability as "topics for impact."
Middle East & North Africa
Middle East & North Africa (MENA): The MENA region has faced particularly challenging technical and policy challenges in recent years, such as IP blocks that restrict certain individuals or regions from editing, government restrictions that make it difficult to receive grants from the Foundation, and difficulty engaging more than a small, core group of Wikimedians in the region. This year, building on the 2022 WikiArabia conference, the Foundation will continue to support affiliates in the region through grantmaking, which is anticipated to grow over last year, though at a more modest scale, strategic partnerships (e.g. evaluating an expansion of the Ideas Beyond Borders project to universities beyond Iraq) and programmatic support for the region's Education and Culture & Heritage priorities.
East, Southeast Asia, & Pacific
East, Southeast Asia, & Pacific (ESEAP): 2023 marks a momentous occasion for the ESEAP region, as it prepares to host the first-ever regionally-organized Wikimania in Singapore, building on the 2022 ESEAP conference hosted by Wikimedia Australia. The region has identified this as a way to begin to prototype the strategy, planning, and activities of a potential ESEAP hub. In addition to supporting these efforts, the Foundation will continue to support growth in the region with a modest increase in grantmaking. Programmatically, we will continue to support the region's education and culture & heritage preservation goals, through community-led programs and partnerships (e.g. Wikisource Loves Manuscripts). Given the tightening legal and policy restrictions in a number of countries in the region, the Foundation will also prioritize countering legal and policy challenges to our projects and collaborate with local communities to ensure they can engage in their work freely.
Northern & Western Europe
Northern & Western Europe (NWE): Historically, NWE has played − and continues to play − an outsized role in the Wikimedia Movement, with more than 30% of Wikimedia contributors coming from this region. Indicative of this scale and organizational maturity, in 2022, the region established Wikimedia Europe, an organized network of regional affiliates, primarily to facilitate European-level engagement in policy and legal discussions. From a funding perspective, last year saw an increase in smaller affiliates in the region seeking funding, with a particular focus on closing the gender gap. As in previous years, this year the Foundation will continue to increase funding to affiliates in the region, but in accordance with Movement Strategy guidance, will prioritize greater funding increases in traditionally underrepresented regions. We will provide resources for affiliates who are interested in developing their fundraising skills and capacities.
North America
North America (US & Canada): The US/Canada region hosts an incredible range of Wikimedia organizations, community projects, and partnerships, but also struggles with coordination challenges and capacity gaps across this vast geography. This year, the Foundation will continue to engage in community-led research and conversations exploring the possibility of a more sustainable collaboration model for the region, and will continue to advise large, technically advanced GLAM partners like the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum, following all the work done in prior years with collaborations with leading institutions. In particular, we will prioritize support to the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which is developing a large-scale contribution pipeline to Wikimedia Commons for thousands of cultural institutions, and organizing a Wikimedia working group to strengthen Wikimedia practices in the library and archives fields. As in other long-established communities, we will increase our grantmaking in the region over last year, but at a slower rate, and continue to invest in strategic multi-year funding partners including Wiki Education Foundation and Art+Feminism.
While continuing to develop a regionalized approach, the Foundation will strengthen its efforts to coordinate across stakeholders and ensure equity in decision-making around three global organizing themes: Education, Culture and Heritage, and Gender. Historically, these Movement outreach spaces have built bridges to new contributors and partners, addressed critical knowledge gaps, and improved Wikimedia's reputation and brand. But for too long, their full strategic potential has been limited by a lack of global coordination, enduring technical and infrastructure gaps, and a need for more training and skill development. This is particularly true in the gender organizing space, where these challenges have continued across the Movement for years. To bolster the work of the Movement in Education, Culture and Heritage, and Gender this year we will begin to develop more consistent backbone support for these cornerstone thematics through shared metrics, thematic convening, capacity building, and better alignment of social and technical support.
This year, we will support key affiliates and the broader EduWiki network to unite around a 2030 vision for Wikimedia and Education, collaborating on community-led research and experimentation to inform:
A common Movement agenda for Education and a shared system for measuring impact
A plan for a new collaboration model to support mutually reinforcing activities at Movement scale
A clearly articulated backbone support role for the Foundation (anticipating the forthcoming Movement Charter)
Concurrently, we will explore how the Foundation-initiated program Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom can continue to become more regionalized and community-owned, testing lighter-touch approaches to training with affiliates, and evaluating the program's place in the broader Movement agenda. We will also continue to support the EduWiki Outreach Collaborators (EWOC) peer network and explore how to integrate it with other support spaces in the Movement.
This year, we will continue to focus on Commons and Wikisource, which are so important to this network, and build our strategic alliances with museums and archives to fill visual knowledge gaps and diversify information sources in local and indigenous languages.
Last year, we supported OpenRefine to develop a Commons batch upload service with structured data that could meet the needs of large institutions. This year, in response to community calls for a simpler contribution experience for photographers and small institutions, we're partnering with the Flickr Foundation on an integrated upload experience.
To equip our communities and partners to understand and evidence the impact of their contributions to Commons, we will coordinate across the Movement to define the metrics that matter for GLAMs and work with the Product team to start delivering them.
Responding to interest from communities in ESEAP, South Asia, and Africa, we will open the Wikisource Loves Manuscripts initiative to a broader cohort of learning partners, providing support through our grant programs, technical partnerships, and links to institutions that hold relevant collections.
We will strengthen the culture and heritage network through improved support for thematic user groups; a coordinated engagement with museums at the triennial conference of the International Council of Museums; continue to support global conversations about a potential Language Diversity Hub, and support to the Movement's first global community convening in five years, GLAM Wiki: The Culture, Heritage and Wikimedia Conference.
The Movement's engagement with libraries is at a more developed stage. We will continue to collaborate with key partners and user groups to evaluate our library programs and develop a plan for sustainable support in the Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and CEE regions where we see the most momentum. We will also proactively support the next global Wikimedia + Libraries convention, anticipated in 2024.
This year, the Foundation will prioritize co-creating a shared agenda for gender organizers across the Movement looking to access targeted capacity building, technical support, and improved coordination with peer contributors and allies. Following initial consultations with Movement actors and Foundation staff, aspirations for closing the gender gap include:
More frequent, curated and facilitated convening spaces to share work, strategies, and priorities (such as through annual gender gap conferences and year-long active gender campaigning across regions).
Enhanced technical support for established gender organizers, including for centralized list-building and more efficient messaging support to reach interested contributors.
More inclusive, gender-equitable and safe spaces to contribute intersectional content on women's biographies and material that women want to read, including the need for facilitated processes with contributors and editors with extended rights to onboard gender equitable norms and practices into the volunteer experience.
Building upon these insights, this year we will explore ways to make closing the gender gap a more nimble experience for contributors, through both social and technological solutions to identified priorities. We will undertake research and learning with Movement actors to map how they envision the Foundation proactively supporting their work, resulting in a co-created strategy that captures our shared priorities for finally closing the gender gap.
The Wikimedia Foundation will continue to support the Equity Fund, which was established in 2020 to specifically advance knowledge and racial equity goals, recognizing the need to create additional pathways and collaboration opportunities for people working on these issues to contribute to our Movement. Last year, the committee that oversees the Equity Fund expanded to include additional community volunteers, with an open call for grant nominations from communities. The remaining funds for this initiative will be transferred from Tides back to the Wikimedia Foundation to simplify and clarify accountabilities, and future rounds of grants will be given by the Foundation until the funds are spent. A report of the first round of grantmaking is available.
The Foundation's ability to work effectively as part of the larger Wikimedia Movement relies on forging equitable connections across the Movement. Next year, we will strengthen collaboration with the Movement by building consistency in how all parts of the Foundation communicate and engage. This will involve bringing together all the staff that engage with the Movement.
Regional connections: We will also deepen our multicultural, multilingual communications to build two-way conversations informed by local knowledge. Our regional specialists will build and maintain personal relationships in order to cultivate collaboration and shared understanding with local communities. They will continue to listen and amplify local community stories, help coordinate local and regional gatherings, triage any local support requests, and localize the Foundation's messaging and communications approach. Most importantly, we will work to connect the local to the global by plugging into regional community structures.
Build a better front door: Strengthening our presence on Meta we will build a "better front door" for information, support, and resources available from the Foundation. We will aim to offer Movement members across the world a better user experience when contacting us and partnering with us. We will also work to maintain the momentum with Diff, the Movement blog. With almost a thousand subscribers, publishing just over a blog and half per day, and growing readership traffic, Diff will reach further parts of the Movement.
Celebrate and connect through Wikimania, Wikimedian of the year and more: Research showed us that our Movement wants stories that draw the connections between projects and initiatives and Movement Strategy, and that link local work to the global Movement. And they want stories that reflect the community back to themselves with a big emphasis on celebrating unsung heroes, strengthening a sense of connection and belonging in the Wikimedia Movement.
Wikimania 2023 will be a collaboration between volunteers, chapters, and user groups of the Wikimedia East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific region (ESEAP) with the theme of Diversity. Collaboration. Future. The Wikimedian of the Year program will continue its journey of expanding from celebrating a single individual to celebrating multiple Wikimedians. Further, we will explore more ways of celebrating work by the Movement, from Barnstars to storytelling. This work will look to make every contribution count.
Skill Development: Growing the WikiLearn platform, including launching a "design your own curriculum" suite of templates, trainings and resources for new curriculum developers and trainers; cross-publication of Affiliate campus on WikiLearn; deploying governance structure and administrator training (anti-abuse); and supporting peer-learning through Let's Connect.
Leadership Development: We will build on our work with volunteers in previous years to define effective leadership in the Wikimedia Movement and support volunteers to identify their own leadership roles, capacities and aspirations. We will do this by launching a skills self-assessment, discussion guides, a WikiLearn module, and visual diagrams, informed by a Movement leadership development plan and supporting Affiliate and AffCom partnerships. We will ensure that volunteers can access leadership development opportunities enabling them to grow in their capacities to lead effectively. We will do this by issuing leadership development growth grants to encourage people to build resources or develop as leaders themselves (e.g. host learning sessions, translate resources, create trainings). We will also design and implement a leadership development learning pathway.
Defend our people and projects against disinformation and harmful government regulation. Work across the Movement to Provide for the Safety of Volunteers.
Now more than ever at a time of geopolitical and economic uncertainty, the world needs high-quality, well-sourced free knowledge. But the legal and policy environment in which the Wikimedia projects and communities have thrived for more than twenty years is also in a period of rapid change. The communities who build the projects, and the content they create and share, face new challenges and threats.
As volunteers across the globe fill knowledge gaps and improve the quality and accuracy of information on the projects, everyone needs to feel safe, welcome, and respected. People need legal frameworks that allow them to safely contribute to the projects and the Foundation should work to ensure that the content available to become free knowledge is as broad as possible.
To support this goal, the Wikimedia Foundation aims to protect the Wikimedia projects and communities from external threats, to advance the environment for contributing to free knowledge, and to support community self governance and risk mitigation efforts.
As our communities face unprecedented challenges to legal and regulatory frameworks that make it possible for the projects to survive and thrive, the threat to free knowledge posed by mis- and disinformation is compounded by machine-learning tools able to generate and spread massive amounts of disinformation. Government interference and surveillance threaten volunteers' safety.
In the coming year, we will help strengthen local capacity to advocate for policies and laws that enable communities to thrive. We will support communities in adapting to changes in laws and regulations that affect the projects. We will collaborate with volunteers to track and counter mis- and dis- information. We will work to strengthen trust and safety processes. And we will support efforts to strengthen community self-governance.
This year, we expect to see additional laws and regulations focused on hosts of online platforms. Because many new or proposed laws are not aimed at the Wikimedia Foundation or the communities, we can help regulators understand how the Wikimedia communities work so they can draft better laws that protect the communities and our values. Even so, several proposed laws take a one-size-fits all approach designed with large commercial platforms in mind. Laws that do not take the Wikimedia model into account can have harmful consequences for our projects and the people who build them, regardless of whether the harms are intended.
We provide here a few examples of how we approach this challenge. Legal developments can occur sometimes unexpectedly throughout the year, so this list cannot be comprehensive.
We are planning to implement the proposed updates to the Terms of Use in the new fiscal year, to ensure that the Terms of Use continue to reflect our legal compliance obligations and help us to effectively protect the projects from bad actors.
We will be looking closely at the Digital Services Act (DSA) from the European Union, which is a significant new legislation that changes how platform hosting works and applies to nearly all websites worldwide so long as they provide services to EU residents. In particular, we will be monitoring the process for new requests under the DSA and how they are handled and reported to help protect the communities from disruption or bad faith takedown demands.
We will be closely monitoring the US Supreme Court's cases including Gonzalez v. Googleand Netchoice v. Paxton. These are two cases that have the potential to significantly change the legal rules for hosting user-generated content and could present risks not only to the Foundation but to individual Wikipedians. We will be working to defend the projects if the cases give rise to new lawsuits trying to remove content or harm users. We will also be looking at legislative options that may come forward in light of these cases.
Our Global Advocacy team will work in partnership with affiliates to educate lawmakers about the Wikimedia model, and about the potential impact of over-broad laws that fail to take our model into account. We will work with volunteers to build local capacity to advance a positive vision for the legal and regulatory frameworks our communities need in order to thrive.
As Wikimedia projects are increasingly regarded as trusted sources of knowledge across the world, some politicians and governments have made deliberate efforts to discredit Wikipedia through disinformation campaigns in mainstream and social media. The open nature of the projects themselves make us vulnerable to information warfare between governments and political movements within and across borders. The 2020 Foundation-wide human rights impact assessment flagged project capture and manipulation as a serious human rights risk. Since then, the Human Rights Team has tracked targeted surveillance as well as physical threats against editors who work to correct disinformation. Meanwhile, government regulations that claim to combat disinformation often include measures that increase their surveillance and censorship powers.
In 2023−2024, we will collaborate across the Foundation and work with communities across the world to address the threat to the mission, content, and people caused by disinformation in a number of ways:
Strengthen investigations to identify disinformation on-wiki in collaboration with volunteer functionaries and support from research and partnerships.
Strengthen and expand moderator tools, including transparent and accountable use of machine learning in service of volunteers' efforts to identify and address disinformation.
Support efforts to increase reliability of sources.
Implement technical improvements to strengthen security and privacy of volunteers on-wiki, protect against surveillance, and enhance the communities' ability to effectively govern themselves and address disinformation and human rights risks.
Strengthen risk assessment and human rights due diligence to prevent unintended consequences when implementing technical changes & innovations to editing systems and tooling.
Support and strengthen sharing of information, tactics, and resources among functionaries and other key self-governance stakeholders and affiliates working to counter disinformation in their communities.
Work with communities to educate policymakers about the Wikimedia model and help them understand what types of laws and public policies can protect and support volunteers' ability to fight disinformation.
Countering on-wiki misinformation (information that is inaccurate but not deliberately meant to mislead) is the core work of volunteers. Supporting volunteers' work in improving the accuracy of the wikis is a key priority in 2023−2024. In addition to Product & Technology work, several teams including Trust & Safety, Partnerships, and Research can support volunteers with resources to improve the reliability of sources and connect communities with experts who can help identify patterns of off-wiki misinformation about particular topics. Global Advocacy helps our communities advocate for laws that will protect volunteers' legal right to remove misinformation, and Legal Affairs is there to defend volunteers' rights, when necessary, in court.
The best defense against mis- and disinformation remains a strong, diverse, safe, well-supported community that is able to fill knowledge gaps. These gaps often contain missing information about historically marginalized groups or communities that are underrepresented in the Wikimedia Movement, which is why the environment for contributing to free knowledge is so important.
Advance the environment for contributing to free knowledge
As part of our legal and advocacy work, we not only defend against threats and problems but also look for ways to make the legal and regulatory environment of the Movement more favorable for safe and inclusive contribution. Several examples of this work include:
Advocating for laws and regulations that protect the projects and the Movement's people, and which advance everyone's right to access and contribute to the projects. Such laws must include strong protections for freedom of expression and privacy in alignment with international human rights standards.
Looking for useful test cases to help clarify and expand the public domain and to help ensure that defamation and right to be forgotten issues are clearly understood so that users know what types of content are safe to contribute to the projects in different places around the world.
Implementation of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license for text on the projects following the Terms of Use update. This will bring the project licenses up to the latest version of Creative Commons, helping to make Wikipedia safer and easier for reuse and opening it to new contributions internationally!
Supporting and coordinating the work of affiliates and allies to advocate for copyright reforms to ensure that the law protects and supports the use of free and open licenses.
Support community self-governance for impact and risk mitigation
Our collaboration with communities in guiding our projects constructively forward is arguably our greatest strength. The Wikimedia Movement is based on the power and agility of crowdsourcing, through the strength of which we are able to achieve incredible impact, from the flourishing of content to the rapid moderation and review of changes to the creation and enforcement of policies. Our crowdsourced self-governance is a key mechanism for the mitigation of risks in our projects, allowing us to be far more nimble than a pure staff model could ever be in not only keeping our sites legally compliant, but also in handling complex review of Movement coordination challenges.
Committees largely or even often exclusively comprising volunteers are one way we support self-governance. They help bring in diversity of experience and perspectives and help ensure that key workflows reflect our international Movement. The success of what we describe as governance committees (excluding resource-allocation committees) is integral to key aspects of the success of the Movement, yet the individuals sitting on these committees remain volunteers. Many have limitations on time available to support the work or on training in areas necessary to succeed, and some face personal threat when their work involves curtailing abuse of our systems. We are here to help them.
We are aligning our support of key governance committees to enhance their success via a range of services from training to administrative support, tailored to the needs of the committee. Our support commitment encompasses:
the Movement Charter Drafting Committee throughout its production of a Movement Charter capable of aligning Movement stakeholders at multiple levels in shared understanding of roles and responsibilities and decision-making processes;
the Affiliations Committee as it responds to a new strategy for Foundation affiliate support;
the Elections Committee as it adopts new protocols and approaches in preparation of better supporting the next Board election;
In all cases, our goal is to support these committees in achieving their functions as well as they can, sustaining our self-governance model while observing the degree of independence appropriate to the type of committee.
Movement Strategy recommendation #10 encourages us all to "adapt to meet new and altered situations and challenges by adopting policies and procedures based upon evaluations of the changing Movement and the changing world." This commitment to evaluate, iterate, and adapt must be a clear and committed way of working across the Wikimedia Foundation.
Last year's annual plan identified the need to improve the performance and effectiveness of the Foundation itself. This included better coordination across our shared services/administrative functions (e.g. legal, finance, HR) as well as specific initiatives where it was believed that better coordination could both increase impact and reduce costs.
An example was last year's goal of creating a shared services approach to translations so that the Foundation could support more languages while not leaving each team to figure this out on their own.
Last year, we began a journey to improve translation and interpretation support for communicating with the Movement across the Foundation. Looking at resource allocations, we found that significant language support was provided by most teams across the Foundation. Yet, this happened through an array of external vendors, contractors, and volunteers. We worked to connect the dots to improve language support for Movement-facing communications from the Foundation.
By pooling people resources, harmonizing processes and using our existing tools better, we scaled support from 6 languages at the start of the year up to 25 languages currently. This growth did not involve additional investments. By improving efficiencies and working to a single framework, we actually reduced costs overall.
Next year, we will shift our focus to build on previous attempts at a shared glossary: a list of words commonly used within Wikimedia to help build consistency in how we translate. We will also look to improve quality control in translations and interpretation commissioned by the Foundation. Finally, we will continue to improve the use of tools by translators.
In 2022−2023, we advanced our efforts to provide improved services to the Foundation and meet our financial planning and compliance commitments. We rolled out the Supplier Diversity program, set up the financial infrastructure for Wikimedia Enterprise, deployed our project management tools to all of our major departmental initiatives, and completed key internal IT projects for greater automation and better user access.
In 2023−2024, we are planning to keep improving business workflows to increase the effectiveness of our operations to deliver faster financial results with appropriate controls. Our financial constraints and commitment to achieving the most impact with limited resources means a renewed focus on financial planning, internal technical support that meets the needs of a globally distributed workforce, and working environments that enable people to deliver their best work, in office and virtually. We will complete spinning out the Wikimedia Endowment from Tides, with independent banking and custody partners.
In 2022, the Foundation embarked on a number of conversations about how we work, particularly in relation to what we are trying to achieve for the mission. One of these conversations centered on the question of whether our existing organizational values were still serving us well. Values are fundamental to every organization and can create clarity and alignment to help guide everyday actions, behaviors, and expectations. Through a series of small-group workshops, a first value was refreshed ("We are in this mission together"), and its text made clearer and more actionable. We then continued this process for the remaining values, with refreshed versions emerging by July 2023.
The next phase of the project will include integrating our newly refreshed values into our core people processes and "bringing them to life" in everyday work at the Foundation. These will notably include:
Performance and individual development: The values will be integrated into the Wikimedia Foundation performance framework through individual performance evaluation and career progression framework through the promotion processes.
Learning: The values will be integrated into the learning curriculum for all staff, including the cultural orientation session for new hires.
Recruiting: The values will be reflected in our branding and recruitment efforts/processes to help ensure cultural fit of new joiners.
A key area of focus for the Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) team has been to invest in strong employee networks based on shared identities. These Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) are voluntary, staff-led groups whose aim is to foster a welcoming, diverse, equitable and inclusive workplace. They serve as a resource for staff and are formally created and recognized by the Foundation. These groups work as trusted partners with the Talent & Culture department and the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion team. There are currently eight active groups: African ERG, South Asian ERG, LatinX ERG, Black ERG, Asian ERG, Women and Non-Binary ERG, Queer ERG, and Neurodivergent ERG.
In 2023−2024, we plan to help ERGs get more aligned to our annual plan and have them support regional priorities as well as regional planning. Some of our ERGs are also exploring partnerships with Wikimedia thematic user groups to share best practices and engage in joint celebrations of heritage month activities with Movement partners. Finally, ERGs are continuing to serve as a key driver for staff engagement, helping make a remote-first, globally-distributed workforce feel more familiar and welcoming to people from all backgrounds.
Another key development in 2022−2023 was the DEI leadership dashboard, a central place to track progress around DEI and ensure accountability. The DEI Leadership Dashboard will continue to help us track our commitments in 2023−2024. We will build on our strategic and programmatic commitments within other areas of this annual plan and also further create accountability checks and balances across every level of the organization.
This year, one of the initiatives for increasing the Foundation's performance and effectiveness will be the creation of an updated enterprise risk strategy, identifying the major risks we face as an organization and creating mitigation steps to reduce the impact of those risks. This process will involve identifying, prioritizing, and tracking our response to the highest priority risks. This will be led through a coordinated effort across our Legal and Finance teams.
The world is currently in a period of increasing financial instability. The instability of our global economic outlook (including inflation and other concerning financial signals) creates uncertainty for the future financial projections of the Foundation. Currency fluctuations are also adding some unpredictability to the Foundation's finances as it raises and spends funds in multiple currencies.
Slowing budget growth. The Foundation's budget grew dramatically over the past five years, fueled in part by the creation of an ambitious Movement Strategy. Since last year, budget growth has been flattening; for this upcoming fiscal year (2023−2024), the growth flattened even more, to the point that it will not easily keep up with inflation and other unavoidable cost increases. What this means is that the Foundation had to reduce internal expenses in some areas to fund cost increases in other areas, including keeping our grants programs at similar levels to last year. Based on the information we have now, we expect to maintain an effectively flat budget for the next few years.
Most expense categories are affected by things like inflation, cost of living adjustments, and other unavoidable year-on-year cost increases, which means that the budget grows even if nothing else changes. To maintain current staffing levels (no additional overall growth in staff), the Foundation's annual budget would need to increase by 6−7% annually. We are looking instead at annual budget increases of about 3-5%, which has meant that we needed to actively reduce expenses to make up for those types of increases.
Reductions in expenses. Based on projections, we need to reduce expenses by approximately $8 million in the 2023−2024 budget compared to our current run rate. As a consequence, the Foundation is making budget cuts both in non-personnel and personnel costs. We focused first on preserving funding to grants and Movement support and funding inflationary increases in several core operating areas like data centers. Then we worked to identify reductions in non-staffing expense categories like professional services, legal fees, and subscriptions. However, it became necessary to consider staffing expenses, which affected some vacant/unfilled roles and about 5% of occupied roles. The Board of Trustees agreed to the availability (if it is needed) of 1% of the organization's financial reserve for one-time, non-recurring expenses.
Movement funding will not decrease. The Wikimedia Foundation raises the vast majority of resources for our Movement. We have an obligation to consider the financial sustainability for other entities that rely on funding from these resources. Therefore, we prioritized cuts in other areas so that the Foundation's overall grants budget will not be reduced. The overall budget for grants will increase by an average of 7% across all regions to keep up with global inflationary costs, support newcomers to the Movement, and increase funding for conferences and Movement events.
As the chart below depicts, Personnel costs followed by Grants and Movement Support remain the two largest expense categories at the Foundation, making up 59% and 14% of the budget respectively. Grants and Movement Support (which includes support for Wikidata) makes up a slightly higher share of the budget this year compared to last. Units are millions of US dollars.
As part of multi-year strategic planning, we need to deepen the collective understanding among all stakeholders of Wikimedia's financial model, and the trade-offs inherent in any choices we make. Our current revenue streams are closely linked to both product and community decisions (e.g. how we approach banners, how we consider the Enterprise model, realism on the approach to endowment fundraising).
Online behavior of content consumption has indicated for several years that relying on banner fundraising alone would not be a future-proof revenue strategy for our Movement. The Movement Strategy working group on Revenue Streams recognized that banner fundraising might not prove to remain a major source of revenue by 2030, encouraging us to adapt to changing reader behaviors and to diversify streams of revenue.
In that sense, product and revenue are "dance partners:" these decisions need to be coordinated and intentional to avoid stepping on each other's toes, going into opposite directions, or stumbling into each other. Decisions to prioritize one kind of revenue, or restrict another, lead to real trade-offs, especially if those decisions are at odds with the behaviors of our readers: a decision to limit revenue from Enterprise leads to revenue trade-offs in a world where an increasing number of people access Wikimedia content via large commercial reusers. Conversely, community constraints on the content and format of fundraising banners involve revenue trade-offs in what has historically been our most stable source of funding for the Movement.
There is no simple answer to these questions; "revenue strategy … is inextricably intertwined with the larger decisions we have to make as an organization and a Movement," and we will need to continue having discussions about these topics in the years ahead, including with the Wikimedia Foundation Board, the Endowment Board, and community leadership structures (like a future Global Council).
Product
We need more page views on our websites …
We need more focused initiatives and programs …
We need to consider charging more to large-scale reusers …
… to raise more (unrestricted) online/banner fundraising …
… to raise more major gifts …
… to build a sustainable revenue channel beyond charity…
Revenue
Trade-offs
… but this is not where search and other internet trends are heading.
… but this is generally less flexible funding and can bring more risks.
… but this has trade-offs in how some people understand our mission.
Revenue for the Foundation has grown by a factor of 5 over the last decade, but this growth is reaching some limits due to a convergence of factors.
Trend 1: Donation revenue model relies on a high volume of readers visiting our website. The success of our banner fundraising model has been powered by high readership on Wikipedia. Growth in the early days of fundraising was fueled by increasing readership.
Trend 2: Internet trends are changing and readership is declining. As user expectations and online search change, declining page views present risks to our reader supported model. In the United States, we observed a -7% decline in average monthly unique visitors between Jan-Dec 2019 and Jan-Dec 2021.
Additionally, brand health is weak among young audiences in our key revenue countries, presenting long term fundraising challenges. 18−24-year-olds are generally less likely to consider the brand, use it, or recommend it to their friends. This is the case across all markets, with particular issues in the United States, Germany, and South Africa, where most young people wouldn't recommend the brand.
Trend 3: Banner campaigns have been heavily optimized with more visible trade-offs. When banner campaigns began, there were easy ways to increase revenue, and the targets were just a few million dollars per year. Over time, these campaigns have been heavily optimized. Different approaches are required to keep up with internet trends that are working against the traditional banner model.
Additionally, there are trade-offs in how we balance maximizing revenue with the impact on readers and volunteers. Over 75% of donors donate the first or second time they see a fundraising banner (see chart below). The return declines by showing a reader more banners and impacts the disruption to our readers and volunteers. The 2022 banner campaign on the English Wikipedia used lower-performing wording, and therefore required a longer campaign, more banner impressions, and more emails to past donors; it resulted in a $10 million decrease compared to the 2021 campaign.
There are limits to running longer campaigns.
Over 75% of donors donate the first or second time they see a fundraising banner.
The return declines by showing a reader more banners and impacts the disruption to our readers and volunteers.
Trend 4: Anticipated decrease in fundraising efficiency. Our fundraising ratio has been historically low and stable at $0.10 cost per dollar raised, driven by the high efficiency of banner revenue. As banner fundraising faces more constraints and diminishing returns, we need to consider increasing the share of revenue coming from other channels like email and major gifts, which incur higher costs. This will make fundraising ratios increase, to perhaps $0.12 cost per dollar raised (still much lower than the industry standard of $0.20).
Trend 5: Increasing major gifts requires broad organizational commitment. Increasing major gifts is dependent on building a culture of philanthropy to clarify key metrics, accountability, and storytelling of the impact of our work. Commitment to accepting restricted gifts is essential to growing major gifts and comes with trade-offs.
Accountability to donors and culture of philanthropy. We must better show causality and impact and prove that our work is actually "moving the needle" on Wikimedia projects, to replace the "leap of faith" our donors must currently make with demonstrable bona fides of our impact. We must also better develop directed gifts as part of our multi-year plans, to make large donations more meaningful and transformative, and develop the internal discipline and accountability processes to honor our commitments. To develop a culture of philanthropy, we must tell our story better to donors, and develop accessible materials and multimedia campaigns for the general public that explain the basics of how our projects and communities work.
There are still some positive trends and opportunities, but they will take time to develop and won't offset reduced growth in banners. More donors are signing up for monthly recurring donations, and email revenue continues to grow. We have opportunities to strengthen our donor life cycle to increase how much a donor gives over their lifetime. We may also open new fundraising countries and explore new channels, but these won't offset declines in our major markets. Last, organizational commitment to accepting restricted gift opportunities is essential to growing major gifts.
Multi-year revenue streams: Endowment and Enterprise
A permanent safekeeping fund to generate income to support the operations and activities of the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. The Wikimedia Endowment is a fund separate from the Wikimedia Foundation. As a financial endowment, its principal (or "corpus") value is intended to be kept forever intact, while a portion of the fund may be spent each year. The Endowment is one of the ways we can increase the financial sustainability of our Movement.
The Endowment was launched in January 2016 with the initial goal of raising $100 million by 2026 to support the Wikimedia projects. The Endowment reached this initial goal in June 2021, $30 million of which were directly contributed by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Revenue from the Endowment. In 2023, the Endowment established a cost-sharing agreement with the Wikimedia Foundation, whereby the Endowment now compensates the Foundation for expenses it incurs on behalf of the Endowment. In 2022−2023, this amounted to around $1.8 million paid by the Endowment to the Foundation, the bulk of which represented the expense of Foundation staff working on Endowment matters. We expect a similar amount in 2023−2024.
Additionally, in January 2023 the Endowment Board approved its first grants to fund technical innovation on Wikimedia projects, to ensure that the Wikimedia projects stay relevant in a rapidly-changing technology landscape. This list of projects was developed by the Endowment's Grantmaking and Community Committee in partnership with the Foundation's Chief Product and Technology Officer. They represent a total of $3.2 million funding the following projects in the 2022−2023 fiscal year: Kiwix, Machine Learning, Abstract Wikipedia, and Wikidata.
Planned giving. A planned gift, or a legacy gift, is a contribution of any amount that is agreed to in the present and given at a future date. These gifts are often made through a will; they can also be made through life insurance policies, retirement accounts, bank or brokerage accounts. We receive, on average, 183 times more funds from donors via legacy gifts than via all the gifts those same donors contribute during their lifetimes. Planned giving is a long-term investment with a higher return on investment than any other fundraising effort. By adding new planned giving revenue streams, we can build up a pipeline of commitments that will come to fruition in stages over the coming years. By 2050, planned gifts could be the primary funding source for the Endowment.
A way to adapt to how Wikimedia content is accessed. The decrease in monthly unique visitors over the past few years (-7% between Jan-Dec 2019 and Jan-Dec 2021) is a challenge to our historic model for readership, contribution, and revenue. The Foundation's metrics team believes that third-party content reuse (services that use embedded Wikimedia data, thus negating the need to visit our sites) is one factor contributing to this.
We do not control how our content is reused in third party environments, limiting our ability to communicate with readers. At present, users who encounter our content via a third party generally do not have the opportunity to develop any kind of relationship with Wikimedia, whether through donations or, more dangerously for our core model of knowledge creation, through participation and editing in our projects.
Wikimedia Enterprise aims to address this new normal. It makes more of our Movement's content available in consistent machine-readable formats, charging commercial organizations for access to Wikimedia content delivered in these formats while remaining freely available for researchers and re-users. This is consistent with the Movement Strategy recommendation to Innovate in Free Knowledge, which directed us to "build the necessary technology to make free knowledge content accessible in various formats. … To make our projects technologically adapted to include more diverse formats of knowledge, there is a need to facilitate the reuse of our content on platforms beyond Wikimedia."
Wikimedia Enterprise provides a clearer and consistent way for the largest re-users of Wikimedia content, such as major search engines, to reinvest a portion of the benefit they derive from Wikimedia content back to the Movement, instead of making occasional altruistic donations that vary in size and regularity. Wikimedia Enterprise aims to incrementally grow our commercial business with high-volume reusers in order to replace the lost revenue from historical channels that depend on direct communication with readers (like fundraising banners). As such, it is a direct implementation of the Movement Strategy recommendation to Increase the sustainability of our Movement through "new opportunities for both revenue generation and free knowledge dissemination through partnerships and earned income."
Launched in March 2021, Enterprise offers an API platform to sell data access, professional services, and commercial guarantees to high-volume re-users of Wikimedia content, currently focused on the search engine and voice assistant markets but actively exploring new market opportunities as well. As of January 2023, Enterprise has $3.2 million in annual recurring revenue.
Growth of the Wikimedia Foundation's budget will be flattening compared to prior years, increasing by +5% to $177 million. This includes growth in grant and Movement funding while also preserving investment in areas like our data centers, which are required to keep Wikimedia projects available. As described above, we have had to make cost reductions in non-personnel and personnel expenses to account for a small reduction in budget growth relative to the rate of year-on-year expenses. If needed (particularly to avoid additional personnel reductions), the Board of Trustees has agreed to make available ~1% of the organization's financial reserve for one-time, non-recurring expenses.
*Note: In 2019−2020 we were able to use a budget underrun to pay forward grants for the future in order to provide funding certainty for our grants programs in an uncertain time. The amount shown here for 2019−2020 is reduced to reflect that action.
Revenue growth is also expected to be nearly flat as compared to projected revenue in the current year. Due to the trends described above, growth in revenue from our biggest digital channels are reaching some limits. In particular, banner revenue is a declining share of the Foundation's funding next year, therefore requiring other revenue channels to increase to fund the budget.
Revenue
2022−2023 Projection
2023−2024 Budget
Change
Endowment (estimated*)
$5 M
$5 M
0%
Enterprise
$3 M
$4 M
33%
Major Gifts
$18.5 M
$19 M
3%
Online Email
$36.5 M
$38 M
4%
Online Recurring
$30.5 M
$33 M
8%
Banner & other
$77.5 M
$74.5 M
−4%
Investments
$3 M
$3.5 M
17%
Total
$174 M
$177 M
2%
* The Endowment revenue represents grants and cost reimbursement from the Wikimedia Endowment to the Wikimedia Foundation. However, this revenue is an estimate, and will be determined by the Endowment Board after July 2023.
In 2023−2024, the proportion of the Foundation's budget funding direct work on the mission, also called "Programmatic Expenses," will grow to 78% of the budget, which has averaged 73%-76% recently, reflecting the increase in allocation to grants and funding to Movement partners, among other areas.
Budget by Expense Type
Programmatic
$137.8 M
Fundraising
$17.9 M
General & Admin
$21.3 M
Total
$177 M
Building knowledge as a service reflects the largest part of the budget in 2023−2024. Supporting equity represents the second largest part of our programmatic work, with grants and Movement support representing the majority of the budget within the equity goal.
Aligned with Movement Strategy, we continue to grow the Foundation's direct support to the Movement. This year, we will increase overall Movement support by 15%, including funding for Wikidata, in line with the existing plan for that project, and grants by 7% compared to this year.
The Community Fund grant program, which includes the regional budgets for General Support Funds (non restricted and multi-year grants) and Rapid Fund programs, will grow by 10%. To build on our commitment to more equitable resource allocation, funding will grow in all regions, while prioritizing a proportionally larger growth in underrepresented regions. Funding for regional and thematic conferences will increase by 7%, while funding for Research Grants and the Alliances Fund will decrease.
In 2023−2024, we will build on the work done with grantee partners in 2022−2023 to revise elements of the grantmaking process with the overarching goals of creating a lighter-weight process for grantees, increasing partnership between the Foundation and affiliates, and a commitment to shared learning. We are proposing the following changes to the General Support Fund:
Expanding multi-year funding eligibility for all General Support Fund applicants to support long-term costs (i.e. staffing and rent), without a multi-year strategic plan.
A lean grant renewal process that focuses solely on important changes, lessons learned, and is pre-populated with previous grant information.
Removing the requirement for a written midterm report
A revised and simplified grant agreement (cut from 12 to 7 pages)
All General Support Funds remain unrestricted as they have been since the relaunch in 2021.
Unsurprisingly, the largest category of the Foundation's budget is personnel, representing roughly 60% of expenses across permanent staff and temporary contractors. The increasing costs in our budget reflect cost of living and similar expenses related to salaries, benefits, and other personnel costs. This is followed by Grants and Movement Support, where we are prioritizing growth in this fiscal year, as discussed above.
Travel and Events is increasing this year because Wikimania is returning to a primarily in-person event in August 2023, which represents a significant portion of that budget.
We have budgeted for small growth to reflect typical year-on-year costs for many of the categories which are core to maintaining operations, like Capital Depreciation, Internet Hosting and Donation processing. We are working to reduce and manage costs in most other expense categories.
How does the Wikimedia Foundation support the Wikimedia projects? In this section, we present a breakdown of the Foundation's work and how we allocate resources, including budgeting and staffing, for our core functions. The Foundation's work can be split across five distinctive categories:
Evolving the features and functionality of the Wikimedia projects
Building analytics and machine learning services to assess impact and success of technical improvements, understand metadata, and scale technical capabilities
Supporting the affiliates and volunteer communities that make the Wikimedia projects possible
Protecting access to the Wikimedia projects and improving the understanding and awareness of the Wikimedia Movement
Non-programmatic work to support the performance and effectiveness of the Foundation.
Each of these five categories represents a core function of the Wikimedia Foundation's work, spanning departments across the organization. A more detailed breakdown of each category follows:
Evolving the features and functionality of the Wikimedia projects. Develop new software, adapt the sites to new form functions (e.g. mobile, voice), maintain our servers and the tech stack, invest in site security.
23% of our budget = $39.7 million
26% of staff (All of the staff that support Wiki Experiences bucket and Future Audiences bucket)
Building analytics and machine learning services to assess impact and success of technical improvements, understand metadata, and scale technical capabilities. Develop tools and machine learning services to support contributors, create and deliver analytics, APIs and metadata that enable data-driven decision making for Foundation technical staff and volunteer contributors. Explore uses of Wikimedia content that will benefit the mission. Support continuous systems analysis and improvement.
26% of our budget = $46.4 million
30% of staff (All of the staff that support Signals & Data Services bucket, Product and Engineering Support, and Infrastructure Foundations. Wikimedia Enterprise and other teams exploring content reuse strategies.)
Supporting the affiliates and volunteer communities that make the Wikimedia projects possible. Fund our affiliates, communicate with the Movement, support creation of Movement bodies and structures, provide Movement infrastructure, fund & organize convenings and events, protect and defend volunteers.
20% of our budget = $35.1 million
12% of staff (Community Programs, Community Resources, Partnerships, Community Development, Movement Communications, Movement Strategy & Governance, Trust & Safety, and Human Rights, Board support)
Protecting access to the Wikimedia projects and improving the understanding and awareness of the Wikimedia Movement. Advocate for laws and regulation that protect Wikimedia's people, model, and values, fight censorship and threats to free knowledge, defend our trademarks, educate and build public trust, safeguard the Movement's reputation, comply with laws and regulations.
9% of our budget = $16.6 million
10% of staff (Brand, Marketing, External Communications, Global Advocacy, Legal Affairs)
Non-programmatic work to support the performance and effectiveness of the Foundation. This category is split into two areas.
Sustaining the future of Wikipedia and the Movement through fundraising. Ensuring financial support through online fundraising, major gifts, and building and administering the Wikimedia Endowment.
9% of staff (Online Fundraising, Fundraising Operations, Fundraising Tech, Major Gifts, and Endowment)
Supporting the Foundation's administrative and governance needs. Financial and legal support, and ensuring the Foundation is a world class employer
12% of our budget = $21.3 million
13% of staff (Finance & Administration, Internal Communications, T&C, General and administrative legal support)
2023−2024 Budget Overview
How does this budget breakdown reflect our resources across the four goals?
The above breakdown describes how our budget is allocated across work the Foundation does in support of the Wikimedia projects. This is similar, although slightly different than how our budget is allocated to the four goals of this annual plan, which is described in the section above.
When we look across the four goals of this year's Annual Plan, we see some clear areas of alignment and overlap. For example, the Goal of Infrastructure: Advancing Knowledge as a Service directly maps to the categories about "#1: Evolving Features and Functionality" and "#2: Machine Learning and Analytics." The Goal of Effectiveness directly maps to the category about "#5: Non-programmatic expenses: Fundraising and General & Admin."
Where we see some discrepancy is when we look at the Goal of Safety & Inclusion and Knowledge Equity. These do not map directly to the remaining categories about "#3: Supporting affiliates and volunteers," and "#4: Protecting access and improving understanding." This is because Safety and Inclusion has a wider lens than the category of "Protecting access and improving understanding." Several teams within the Foundation that are represented within the budget for Safety and Inclusion - such as Trust & Safety, Community Resilience & Sustainability, and Human Rights - are also accurately captured in the category "#3 Supporting affiliates and volunteers," since their work is directly Movement-facing. This is the reason for the difference of two percentage points between these two breakdowns of the Foundation's budget.
The Product & Technology departments include the following teams: Site Reliability Engineering, Product Management, Platform Engineering, Feature Engineering, Data Analytics, Data Engineering, Design, Program Management.
The Product and Technology Objectives were shared for community feedback in two stages:
Part 1 contained the work portfolios (called "buckets") and some potential objectives for them.
Part 2 of this documentation covers the departments' finalised Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
The final "buckets" are Wiki Experiences, Signals and Data Services, and Future Audiences representing approximately 50%, 30%, and 5% of the department's budget and focus respectively. There are two further "sub-buckets" of areas of critical function, Infrastructure Foundations and Product and Engineering Services representing the final 15% of the budget.
The Advancement department includes the following teams: Fundraising; Enterprise; and Community Resources, Community Programs, Community Development, and Partnerships.
Developing a culture of philanthropy to improve our metrics, our accountability, and our storytelling on the impact of our work.
Fundraising: Continual optimization of our annual reader supported fundraising initiatives, including bringing in new donors to support Wikimedia in current and new countries, and testing new fundraising channels to diversify the ways we acquire and retain supporters.
Increasing support from major giving: With Wikipedia page views flat or declining in some of our largest fundraising markets and thus reduced projections for small dollar donations, we will focus on increasing our support from major donors.
Endowment: In its first year of full operation as an independent 501(c)(3), we will explore and plan for the Endowment's next multi-year fundraising campaign. We will further develop the Endowment as a charity, including building out all required financial and reporting processes. We will continue to evolve the planned giving program to increase revenue and prepare to accept more complex gifts.
Enterprise: Close additional sales with companies in the search engine/voice assistant market. Expand our account management services to new and existing customers to ensure they renew and expand current contracts. Identify and pilot sales and/or commercial partnership opportunities in at least one new market.
The Communications department includes the following teams: Brand Studio; External Communications; Movement Communications; Internal Communications; and Program Management.
Growing and protecting Wikimedia's reputation, so that the value of Wikimedia work to spread free knowledge is understood. We will invite in new audiences, ensure we are enabling product and tech efforts to distribute free knowledge, and better track and transparently share our progress as an organization.
Forging equitable connections within the Movement, to build understanding across the Movement on how we work with volunteers on shared goals. We will continue convening, celebrating and connecting the Movement. We will create two way dialogue on everything from product & tech work to the Movement Charter based on insights & regional priorities.
Increasing a sense of belonging among staff, to create spaces for staff to connect and build ideas, strategy, and practice together, and to shape and create best practices that advance a more informed staff community.
The Legal department includes the following teams: Legal Affairs; Community Resilience & Sustainability; and Global Advocacy.
Support community-organizing and capacity-building efforts. Communities will be informed and empowered to participate in governance through elections and policy evolution. We will strengthen Movement structures and processes, empowering key committees to hit their goals and supporting the MCDC in their task of completing the Movement Charter.
Defend and protect our model, people, projects, and values. Wikimedia must co-create (with the Movement and key partners) a clear positive vision for laws and policies necessary for free knowledge, in keeping with international human rights standards. Regulators must be educated about how the Wikimedia model works and the social value it creates. Individuals who are targeted because of their Wikimedia work need guidance and defense.
Legal defense and regulatory response. We will defend the Foundation and project content, and oppose demands for personal data in court. We will prepare our operations to respond to the changing regulatory environment and legal obligations, and we will ensure compliance with applicable laws and our commitment to human rights.
Efficient, effective, inclusive infrastructure. We will support the creation, operation, and continuous improvement of processes that allow us to sign contracts, identify and manage risk, give grants, and hire and support our staff.
Advice, counsel, and legal advocacy projects for achieving the mission. We will evaluate risk and counsel teams on a variety of matters, from building new products and features to streamlining our grantmaking programs, to increasing awareness of the Wikimedia projects. We will help the communities and the public learn about cases where the law should protect free knowledge and culture.
The Talent & Culture department includes the following teams: Global Diversity, Equity & Inclusion; People Experience; People Operations; and Recruitment.
Improve the global experience of Foundation staff around the world: Define and harmonize our ways of working to create more equitable and seamless employee experiences across 50+ countries.
Invest in the full people life cycle: Deliver tangible improvements to every stage of the employee life cycle (across recruitment, onboarding, learning, growth, reward, performance management and attrition) to drive purpose, performance, and impact.
Build essential infrastructure: Implement systems, processes and HR capabilities that better support our complex, globally-distributed, remote-first organization.
The Finance & Administration department includes the following teams: Accounting, Procurement, Payroll, Grants Administration, Travel and Convening, Continuous Process Improvement, Financial Planning & Analysis, IT Services, Facilities & Working Environments.
Business Operations Improvement: Improve the efficiency and efficacy of our business and operational workflows so that they are streamlined, automated, user-centered, and have appropriate controls.
Financial Planning, Management & Compliance: Build plans, and manage our financial resources & operations to enable the Foundation to achieve our programmatic objectives in compliance with all regulatory filing requirements to satisfy our tax exempt charitable status.
Enterprise Risk Management: Deliver effective organizational risk oversight and management programs to recognize and respond to threats and opportunities.
Enterprise Systems: Provide internal technical infrastructure and tools for the business operations of a globally distributed workforce.
Working Environments: Develop working environments that are productive, inclusive and sustainable. The support team in F&A will deliver office and virtual support services that integrate the needs of our users with clear performance expectations.
Investment & Treasury management: Efficiently manage cash, investments, and related business processes. The team develops and executes a cash flow strategy along with organizational banking and investment policies. Safekeep endowed assets and optimize surplus to aid operational needs.
As a global employer supporting hundreds of staff around the world, the Wikimedia Foundation manages significant operational complexity for a non-profit of its size. We recently introduced global guidelines to harmonize work practices and support for our staff across the world in all people-related processes from recruitment to exit. These guidelines will continue to change and evolve as needed to best support our staff.
The Global Guidelines provide for a baseline standard of employee benefits and policies that can be adjusted depending on specific country requirements. These guidelines came into effect in January 2023.
All Foundation staff receive a set of core benefits, irrespective of their geography. These benefits include comprehensive health insurance coverage, vacation and sick time, as well as access to a retirement plan. Additionally, staff receive benefits provided for in their local context like additional public holidays. The global guidelines have introduced more standardization around many common experiences and needs of our staff. This includes experiences like new parent leave, major life events, or voting in local elections.
The guidelines have also provided an opportunity to better align our processes globally when staff leave the Foundation. This includes a new standardized severance policy for staff at all levels of one month of severance pay for every year of their employment, up to nine months (unless local laws require otherwise) – any exceptions require a joint recommendation by the Head of Talent & Culture and the General Counsel, with final approval from the CEO. The guidelines have allowed us to make these and other policies more transparent to staff irrespective of where they live and work.
For Foundation staff, please note that these are a snapshot of our policies and may change from time to time. The latest version of our guidelines is always available on OfficeWiki or through contacting the Talent & Culture department.
Over the past two years, the Wikimedia Foundation has standardized its compensation principles for all employees. The table below illustrates how the Foundation's compensation approach has evolved over the past decade, including the most recent steps we have taken this year.
The Wikimedia Foundation's approach to compensation is designed to enable a diverse hiring and staffing strategy that mirrors the global Movement of free knowledge that we support; create equivalent pay conditions internationally so that talent is attracted to and remains with Wikimedia across countries with different wage ranges and varying economic landscapes; and provide staff with a salary that reflects our non-profit status while keeping them meaningfully engaged with the work. The Foundation's compensation principles take into account several factors in order to determine appropriate compensation for each role:
External salary benchmarks. The Foundation uses an established third party compensation survey to benchmark salaries with the median base salary of similar roles across different industries in the location we are hiring. The survey includes data aggregated from international companies that operate within that specific location/country.
Cost of living data. Cost of living calculations, which can include comparisons for housing, food, transportation, and other necessities are also factored into compensation ranges for roles at the Foundation, pulling from multiple established data sources.
Job families. The Foundation hires across a wide range of roles and skill sets (more on this below) which are grouped into job families. Compensation principles also take into account job families and levels within each job family.
Available budget. Finally, compensation is also based on the Foundation's available budget at the time.
Job Families and Progressions. One of the complexities that distinguishes the Foundation from other similarly-sized nonprofit organizations is the wide range of roles we hire for – spanning from highly technical to non-technical roles, across so many different geographies. This extends from software developers, engineers, designers, product managers, data scientists to people who specialize in communications, grantmaking, information technology, human resources, financial management, legal affairs, and fundraising. The Foundation currently has 17 job families across all of its teams. These job families include categories such as "Talent and Culture (HR)," "Product Management," "Quality," and "Administrative Services and Facilities." Within each job family are nine job levels - five individual contributor levels ranging from "Associate" to "Principal," and four manager levels ranging from "Manager" to "Vice President." The nine job levels within the 17 job families provide progression for staff at each level. These details will periodically be reviewed and updated as needed.
Staff overview. Staff at the Foundation are a group of over 700 people who collectively speak over 75 languages (and counting!) and span almost every timezone, across all eight Wikimedia regions. The Foundation will share this snapshot of total headcount, geographic distribution, and growth analytics on a yearly basis in the Annual Plan.
At a Glance on 31 December 2022
Our total headcount
711
We had 711 total Foundation staff on 31 December 2022.
Countries
57
Our people are located across 57 countries and all continents except Antarctica.
Growth in headcount
10%
The headcount has grown by 10% in the past 12 months (Dec 2021 – Dec 2022). This is down from 15% in the last quarter, and is down from 30% in the prior fiscal year.
Non-US Workers
49%
49% of our workers are located outside of the USA.
Tenure in years
3.8
Staff members are staying on the average for about 3.8 years.
Increased visibility of pay and executive compensation. In response to changing regulations in the US, as well as our increased commitment to pay visibility, the Foundation recently announced a practice of including salary ranges for US salaries in job postings. This is in addition to the compensation details published for top executives in our Form 990 financial disclosures annually.
Over the last year, two new executives joined the Wikimedia Foundation. Their executive compensation will not be reported in this year's Form 990 (which will be published next month) because these salaries will technically require disclosure in a future reporting cycle. To provide more visibility into the Foundation's executive pay levels, their base salary is being provided proactively below. As mentioned above, these salaries were set using an established third party compensation survey that benchmarks to median base salaries (e.g. 50th percentile) of similar roles across different industries in a specific geography, in this case the United States. This means that these salaries are in the middle of the range for executive salaries for similar positions.
Maryana Iskander, Chief Executive Officer base compensation (joined January 2022): USD $453,000
Selena Deckelmann, Chief Product and Technology Officer base compensation (joined August 2022): USD $420,000
From April 18-May 19, 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation shared and discussed its draft annual plan with Wikimedians around the world and across the wikis. Summaries of the annual plan draft were posted in over 30+ community channels, both on and off wiki, in a number of languages. The Foundation also joined four community discussions (three global calls and an in-person session at WikiConference India) to share in two-way dialog with volunteers and affiliates about our joint priorities for the next fiscal year.
Finally, the Foundation hosted five topical discussions: one on external trends and artificial intelligence and four on focus areas of our Product & Technology work. Over 690 people (up ~38%[1] from last year) joined live conversations in 13 (up roughly 217% from 6 languages last year) languages about the plan and over 60 people discussed the plan on-wiki, primarily on the talk page for our Product & Technology work and the talk page for the full annual plan draft. Pageviews on-wiki were up 203% - 34,604 this year vs 17,000 last year. The summary of the plan was translated into 30+ languages (up more than 200% from last year).
The focus on Product & Technology, and specifically, workshopping objectives and key results, created valuable opportunities for feedback and clarification between staff and volunteers.
This year, the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual plan placed heavy focus on our work in product and technology, drawing attention to both the scale of our efforts in these areas as a share of our overall work as well as a specific focus for this upcoming year on the needs of established editors. To this end, we published early-stage draft "buckets" of work areas ahead of the annual plan, followed by draft Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) for community input and feedback. This was followed by on-wiki discussions between staff and editors about the language, focus, metrics, and overall approach of our OKRs, as well as targeted focus groups for users most involved in different areas of our planned work. 120 people participated in these deliberations.
Across Product & Technology discussions (Goal 1: Advance Knowledge as a Service), conversation themes focused largely on clarifying the purpose of individual key results (KRs), as well as identifying possible unintended consequences of the target metrics as they were originally written. General themes and feedback the Foundation received included:
Support for the focus on the needs of experienced editors, especially to engage with new editors in a positive way that also decreases overall workload
Support for work to increase unreverted edits, especially from editors in the Global South and editors working on gender and LGBTQ+ topics
Terminology around describing “editors with extended rights”/who have access to non-public information is complex. We lack language that has shared meaning and usage across wikis for this broad group of contributors
Value of building more common tools across Wikimedia projects
Continued importance of prioritising Toolforge
Need for increased clarity of metrics and analytics
Optimism and caution around the role of artificial intelligence
Some people felt the work on images and audio should not be deprioritized
These broad themes, as well as the more targeted recommendations will be incorporated into the approach of the Product and Technology departments over the coming fiscal year.
The Foundation’s outlined priorities are aligned with priorities across the Wikimedia movement.
These areas include:
Growing overall grant funding, even while other budget categories are reduced or maintained
Continued investment in regional and thematic hub development and experimentation
Continued investment in regional, community-facing staff roles and investing staff time in building long term community relationships
Making Wikimedia projects more accessible, including for the visually impaired
Focusing on both social and technical challenges related to editor retention
Addressing challenges around IP blocks and challenges with mis/disinformation which are especially challenging for Wikimedians in the Global South
For next year, it was recommended that the Foundation more explicitly seeks out directed feedback on areas of the annual plan that are relevant to the work or expertise of different movement groups, as well as make specific mention of overlaps with other Wikimedia plans and opportunities for collaboration throughout the movement. (More on this in the fifth point.)
The specificity and transparency of this year’s draft annual plan was widely appreciated as an example of the "new" Foundation.
Broadly speaking, the length, focus sections, and format of this year’s draft annual plan were well received. In particular, volunteers expressed appreciation for the detail of the annual plan, both in terms of the Foundation’s intended activities for the upcoming year as well as publishing detailed information about the Foundation’s operations, compensation practices, budget expectations, and executive salaries. Communities also appreciated the plan’s explicit alignment to the movement strategy process and recommendations.
Another important practice in this year’s annual plan was its approach to multilingual engagement. The draft plan summary was translated into 34 languages, and the Foundation joined 6 live discussions that featured live interpretation, covering a total of 10 languages. These calls were widely attended, with roughly 510 people who joined to share in the language of their choice.
Finally, the Foundation heard from volunteers who were glad to see a dedicated, month-long period dedicated to community feedback.
There was discussion about many of the details within the plan ranging from external trends and Foundation details to the four goals.
Wikimedians took interest in a wide range of topics in the Foundation’s annual plan, and shared both questions and fresh thinking on new topics that they felt were important considerations in our plans for next year. These topics included China, the Foundation’s fundraising model, our carbon footprint, video conferencing tools, the importance of copyright protection, batch upload tools for Commons, machine learning, attracting new users, knowledge equity, technical collaboration, and our regional approach.
Most of the changes in the annual plan were to fix typography and spelling. These copyedits include changes to the Summary (diff), History (diff), External Trends (diff), Goals (diff), Safety & Inclusion (diff), Effectiveness (diff), and Foundation Details (diff). The Infrastructure page was simplified a little (diff) and the section about regional and thematic programs was clarified on the Equity page (diff). Last, some text was reorganized on the Finances page, and new content was added about grant programs (diff).
Annual planning is an opportunity to engage in collaborative planning with the movement, and learn about priorities from different regions and communities.
Wikimedistas Wayuu group shared the work that they are doing in the community and shared the news that on the February 27th 2023, Wikipeetia süka wayuunaiki news was finally born!
The Community Wikimedia User Group Haïti shared their contribution workshops on Wikimedia projects, participation in international campaigns and Wikimedia events, and a call for contributions in Haitian Creole.
Wikimedians in Africa intend to work on issues around misinformation & disinformation, and in particular, to partner with the Foundation in partnering with relevant stakeholders and raise awareness among regional volunteers. They also expressed interest in advancing conversations on hub structures and movement governance.
The East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific (ESEAP) community is looking forward to hosting Wikimania 2023 as a way to build the regional community.
ESEAP is also working toward creating a regional hub, starting with forming a committee to launch this work at Wikimania, organising a 2024 ESEAP conference, and strengthening regional contests like Wiki Loves Earth and Wiki Loves Monuments.
Wikimedia Australia is wrapping up the first year of a three year strategic plan focusing on equity and inclusion, engagement, and capacity building (establishing an office, evaluation, governance practices). They will also be deepening work with partnerships to increase diverse content on the wikis.
Wikimedia Indonesia will soon be releasing a five year plan, and this upcoming year will focus on engagement, partnerships, research, and capacity building.
Wikimedia Taiwan will focus on GLAM partnerships, legal advocacy, and work with small, native languages to support them in launching their own Wikimedias. They are also implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system with their partners.
Communities and individual volunteers also made several suggestions about how the Foundation could strengthen engagement and support this year:
The Latin America and Caribbean communities asked for clarity and reassurance around the respective roles and ways of working together for affiliates and the Wikimedia Foundation in fundraising
Using more videos, infographics, and other visuals in addition to short, summary text to make communication in the Wikimedian movement more accessible
Importance of the Foundation coordinating with local affiliates before signing on to any open letters
Need for greater on the ground support for Wikimedians being persecuted by authorities because of their work on the projects
Wikimedians have the opportunity to collaborate with the Wikimedia Foundation on-wiki until 19 May and in various live discussions. This collaboration will inform the final content of the Wikimedia Foundation annual plan for the financial year that runs from 01 July 2023 to 30 June 2024.
Annual Plan summary slides. Other languages: (ar, zh, fr, hi, pt, uk, id, es, ru, sw, ja)
These conversations offer an opportunity for members of the Wikimedia Movement to share their plans and intentions for the coming year with the Foundation and one another, as well as to learn more and offer suggestions about the Foundation’s annual plan.
Community members are welcome to attend any of the live calls that are convenient for them. If you would like to attend a call and interpretation is not available in your preferred language, please email movementcommswikimedia.org and we will arrange it for you.
April 26 from : Conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation. Interpretation will be available in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.Meeting linkAdd to Calendar(completed, recording)
April 27 from : Conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation. Interpretation will be available in Arabic, French, Polish, Russian and Swahili. Meeting link(completed, recording)
April 28: In person Conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation in partnership with WikiConference India. A video recording of this event and notes will be shared here when available. (completed)
April 30 from : Conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation. Interpretation will be available in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian. Meeting LinkAdd to Calendar. (completed, recording)
As well as the above general conversations, the WMF Product & Technology department is hosting some small focus group conversations. These are each focused on discussing a specific part of draft "objectives and key results" document with a group of people who would likely be affected by that OKR. These include:
Note, these conversations are not intended to be comprehensive in their coverage. If participants approve, notes and/or recording of the meetings will be made available. Feedback from anyone on any of the OKRs is still welcome on the relevant section of the draft's talkpage.
A summary version of the annual plan will be posted locally in multiple languages on various Wikipedias. The full version with accompanying translations will live on this Meta-Wiki portal. You can collaborate with us on both local talk pages and here on the Meta-Wiki talk page until May 19. We will add links here to where the content has been posted as they become available.
wikimedia.org and we will arrange it for you.