Wikimedia Foundation Annual Report 2009-10/Imagine a world
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in which every
single person on
the planet is given
free access to the
sum of all human
knowledge.
It started with a dream
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Ten years after Wikipedia’s launch, the original vision captured in our mission statement continues to inspire those of us working at the Wikimedia Foundation. Our great accomplishment of 2010 was the finalization of a strategic plan for the Wikimedia movement. It was an extraordinary effort -- over a thousand volunteers worked collaboratively to develop the priorities that will help chart our course through 2015. The plan focuses on five areas: stabilize our organizational and technical infrastructure, increase participation in our projects, improve the quality of the information in our projects, increase the global reach of our projects, and encourage innovation to better enable collaborative information sharing in the future.
Meanwhile, by practically every measure, Wikimedia's projects are flourishing. Readership continues to increase – we are now serving more than 400 million people every month. The total number of articles, and the quality of those articles, continues to increase. In addition, more people are donating to Wikimedia than ever before. Our material continues to find new venues -- it's now visible in maps and social networks; it's available on mobile phones, tablets and e-readers; and it's copied by countless other sites for many different purposes.
That's all good news.
But our challenges are also clear. Not enough new editors are joining our ranks, which puts a heavy workload on veteran editors. Our core community is men in their mid-twenties, mainly in Europe and North America, so now we are aggressively recruiting others to join our work, particularly women and people in the Global South. In the upcoming year, our particular emphasis will be on India, Brazil, the Middle East and North Africa.
We also need to adapt our technology to better serve the millions of people who access our projects on all types of devices and platforms, including smartphones, low-end feature phones, tablets, as well as in offline settings.
We could never hope to meet these and other challenges without your support. In 2010, people like you made more than 177 million edits, and donated more than $9 million dollars.
Thank you for all of this hard work and generosity.
We also thank those who served the movement for the past year as Trustees. Michael Snow served as Chair of the Board of Trustees from early 2008 until the summer of 2010. Michael, a long-time Wikipedian, continues to be a source of inspiration and wisdom for our community. We thank him for his leadership and support.
We welcomed new faces to our Board of Trustees. Matt Halprin, Arne Klempert, Bishakha Datta, Samuel Klein, and Phoebe Ayers joined in the past year. And we welcomed Craig Newmark, Jing Wang, Mimi Ito, and Nhlanhla Mabaso to our Advisory Board. Our thanks to you all.
Ting Chen
Chair, Board of Trustees
Sue Gardner
Executive Director