Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2023-2024/Goals

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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.

EFFECTIVENESS: Strengthen our overall performance. Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt our processes for maximum impact with more limited resources.

Infrastructure

Equity

Safety & Inclusion

Effectiveness

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 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%.

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