Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2024-2025/Goals

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The Wikimedia Foundation has four main goals in 2024-2025. 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 within the Movement, advance equitable resource distribution, support communities to close knowledge gaps, and foster equitable global and regional connections.
SAFETY & INTEGRITY: Protect our people and projects. Strengthen the systems that provide safety for volunteers. Defend the integrity of our projects. Advance the environment for free knowledge on the Wikimedia projects. (Note: this has been renamed from the Safety and Inclusion goal from last year.)
EFFECTIVENESS: Strengthen our overall performance. Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt our processes for maximum impact with more limited resources.

Infrastructure

Equity

Safety & Integrity

Effectiveness

Metrics: Measuring progress toward our goals

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 we can measure our progress toward impacting the metric over the course of the fiscal year.
We are able to measure changes in the metric on a quarterly 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.

The outcomes of our most impactful work need time to manifest. For this reason, we will monitor our progress using leading indicators and milestones related to each of the core metrics. In addition, 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 2024−2025.

CONTENT: Increase quality and reliability of encyclopedic content.
CONTRIBUTORS: Nurture multiple generations of volunteers.
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. In view of the recent rise of AI generated content, the value of human created knowledge increases manifold. Effectiveness of the methods used to scale up growth of trusted content are indicators of healthy progress that our communities can rely on. Our focus this fiscal year is on providing tools and systems that support the ability of contributors to identify and close knowledge gaps.

Goal: This metric maps to our top-level goal of Equity.
Measurement: We aim to increase the number of quality articles on Wikipedia. We will measure our success this year based on achieving the key results outlined under the Equity goal: Closing Knowledge Gaps.

Contributors: Nurture multiple generations of volunteers

Wikipedia’s success and global reach depends on the sustainability of our volunteer communities, who do the work of building and protecting the projects. We know from talking with volunteers, from data and research, and from trends in the outside world that the sustainability of our communities is at risk. The Foundation helps ensure the success and health of our communities in many ways: by improving tools for experienced editors, building ways for newcomers to quickly and effectively contribute, fostering regional and global connections, working to protect volunteers whose safety is threatened, supporting volunteer governance, and providing grants for movement affiliates.

We aim to nurture multiple generations of volunteers and build thriving volunteer communities. Because our communities are diverse and have many different contributor roles (functionaries, organizers, content editors, newcomers, etc), we will use multiple measures to evaluate our progress. These measures are built from contribution data in our projects, community sentiment surveys, and measures of program outputs.

Goals: This metric maps to our top-level goals of Infrastructure, Equity, and Safety & Integrity.
Measurement: We will measure our success this year based on achieving the key results outlined under Infrastructure, Equity, and Safety & Integrity. We will monitor the impact of our work across multiple points in the contributor journey, from newcomers to experienced editors, administrators, and moderators.

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. Knowledge seekers are turning to short form, personality-driven content. Search is changing with the rise of AI. Social media platforms use video, audio, 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.

Goals: This metric maps to our top-level goal of Infrastructure.
Measurement: We aim to increase the number of unique devices on Wikipedia. We will measure our success this year based on achieving the key results outlined under Infrastructure.

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 measure of the amount of funding that goes to programs versus administrative expenses. It 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 a way for the Foundation to evaluate key resourcing trade-offs and their implications. It helps us in communicating these trade-offs to our stakeholders. It also helps us ensure that we allocate the largest part of our budget on activities that directly support our mission in line with or exceeding nonprofit sector best practices.

Goals: This metric maps to our top-level goal of Effectiveness.
Measurement: We will maintain our programmatic expense ratio at 77%.

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