Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2018-2019/FDC questions
Overview questions from FDC proposal form
Name, fiscal year, and funding period.
Legal name of organization: The Wikimedia Foundation
Organization's fiscal year: FY2018-19
12-month funding period requested: 1 July 2018 - 30 June, 2019
Currency: USD
Name of primary contact: Jaime Villagomez, Chief Financial Officer
How does your organization know what community members and contributors to online projects need or want? Does your organization conduct needs assessments or consult the contributors and volunteers most involved with its work?
The Foundation has multiple ways it researches what community members and contributors need. Ways the Foundation does this include:
- In 2018-19, the Foundation will conduct a range of design research activities focused on readers, contributors, and organizers of our communities. These initiatives include contextual inquiries, literature reviews, analysis of logged use patterns, prototyping, participatory design workshops and ongoing evaluative/usability testing of product features. These research methodologies are used to help the product and community-focused teams improve the quality of our products and interactions with the community by better understanding and supporting their specific needs and challenges.
- The annual Community Engagement Insights survey allows Foundation teams to hear from the communities we serve and make informed decisions related to strategy. Questions on the survey cover demographics, awareness and satisfaction with Foundation services, volunteer activities and engagement, attitudes about community health, and feed on needs. In 2016-2017, the survey received a total of 4,597 responses from affiliates, contributors, developers, and program leaders.
- Community Wishlist to better understand and prioritize specific product features and enhancements needed from all of our projects.
- Community consultations online and at events, such as last year’s Movement Strategy consultations, annual feedback collection on plans and major initiatives. This year we will be consulting with community on our 3-5 year plan.
- One-on-one discussions with Wikimedia editors and developers at Wikimedia events (hackathons, Wikimania, and more).
- Observing issues raised and community discussions on mailing lists.
- Quantitative research to understand and model reader needs and behavior and identify gaps in the content, readership, and contributors of Wikimedia projects contents across languages.
- Research to design and evaluate algorithms (edit- and article- quality classifiers, article creation recommendations, stub expansion, and reading recommendations), based on community needs, providing contributors, tool developers and audience teams with AI as a service.
Please provide a link to your organization's strategic plan, and a link to your separate annual plans for the current and upcoming funding periods if you have them.
Our strategic plan will be developed during this Annual Plan period based on the Wikimedia 2030 strategic direction.
Please sign below to complete this proposal form.