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Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan 2024-2025

Annual Plan Feedback

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The discussions began this year with Talking:2024 - conversations between Foundation staff, leaders, board members, and Wikimedians around the world. They were followed by an invitation from Chief Product & Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann for input on-wiki into proposed objectives for the Foundation’s product and technology work next year. These objectives build on ongoing conversations through Talking:2024, which highlighted the importance of continuing focus on the needs of our platform and online contributors.

We then welcomed your ideas over April and May 2024 and Wikimedians shared their take on the proposed plans and about their own goals for the upcoming year.

This year a change to our approach was to take the annual plan to the movement rather than asking them to come to the annual plan. We engaged directly on over 50+ wikis in a number of languages. This led to a step-change increase in our on-wiki collaboration with pageviews up tremendously over last year.

We were also guests in 12 co-created spaces and managed to connect with 867 Wikimedians (up 23.8% over last year). Here we heard about different community priorities, discussed how the work captured in the plan can support these priorities and answered questions about the annual plan.

Throughout, we found inspiration in what so many others are doing in their own work and collaborated on the annual plan - making changes as we went along.

Feedback Themes

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  1. The Wikimedia platform should support multigenerational growth.
    • In particular, Wikimedians - both on wiki and in community calls - want both programs and technical infrastructure to support newcomer retention and equitable participation. For example, on Japanese Wikipedia, multiple users wrote from the perspective of experienced users who highlighted the need to educate and inform new users about credible sourcing policies and practices. This education would ensure that Wikipedia contains verifiable information and supports young people who are new to editing. Similarly, volunteers in both South Asia and Africa voiced their concerns over retention of articles created by or contributed to by editors from their region. In the MENA region, Wikimedians asked whether strengthening editing skills can be used in content growth. On Meta-Wiki, Wikimedians spoke about the importance of supporting newcomers. Though voicing different perspectives, these Wikimedians share the same problem: a lack of understanding of Wikipedia policies and criteria for credible sourcing and notable subjects. When new editors have their articles deleted or their edits reverted, it can be discouraging to further contributions, and Wikimedians are eager for support from the Foundation to address these concerns. While editorial and content policies are determined by Wikimedians, the Foundation’s role supporting our product infrastructure offers opportunities to leverage technology for multigenerational growth.
    • For these reasons, the Foundation’s annual plan for FY 2024-2025 involves further work on the Edit Check project, which provides real-time feedback to users while they are editing. Similarly, the Growth team and Android team will continue work on Structured Tasks. These tasks break down editing workflows into a series of steps that newcomers can accomplish easily.
    • Communities in MENA and South Asia also expressed an interest in strengthening the presence of regional Wikimedians in online communities that connect beyond an individual’s siloed contributor journey. Relatedly, Nigerian Wikimedians who met through the Naija office hours discussed a roadmap for supporting volunteer growth and development in emerging communities. Users from the CEE and South Asia communities asked for strong support for youth communities, particularly by educating university students about how to contribute. Enabling peer-to-peer connections through co-created spaces mentioned under our Equity goal will work to strengthen their presence. Also, events like Wikimania help existing contributors feel like they belong and enable them to collaborate with each other.
    • Product features can also offer solutions: new work planned under Wiki Experience 1.1 will help strengthen connection between newcomers, experienced editors, and the community spaces offered by Wikiprojects using Event Registration and the Programs and Events Dashboard. Sometimes also the answer is as simple as strengthening outreach around tools, as was asked for by Indic communities in regards to language and content translation.
  2. Joining community spaces allowed for two-way conversations across the Wikimedia movement.
    • For 2024, the Wikimedia Foundation shifted its approach around how we draft the first version of the plan and then how we collaborate with the movement on that draft. By starting with Talking:2024, we collected ideas from the movement even before the first edit to create the annual plan wiki page was committed.
    • In addition to Meta-Wiki, this year we focused on reaching online contributors on their home wikis. To this end, we had a human from the Foundation engage contributors on over 50 wikis in as many languages. Wikimedia communities took up the invitation, and had discussions on Polish Wikipedia, Russian Wikipedia, Spanish Wikipedia, and French Wikipedia. For the first time, Wikimedia Foundation staff joined annual plan conversations in local languages, answering questions on topics such as site security, interactive content, artificial intelligence, and the Wikipedia Library.
    • We also joined existing community discussion spaces as invited guests. This approach was intended to bring the annual plan to spaces where community members are already active, and to ensure our work lines up with local priorities. We heard about different community priorities, discussed how the work captured in the plan can support these priorities and answered questions about the annual plan. Most importantly we made changes to the annual plan based on what we heard. From simple things like making it easier to know who to talk to about what both within the annual plan and the wider Foundation, to other changes clarifying our metrics (also here), discussion of large language models, clarify our technical work, refine our Campaigns key result, linking to regional priorities such as the Africa Agenda and address content gaps. There were substantial updates to many Product & Technology objectives (including addition of news ones) and clarifications to timelines.
    • We also heard a repeated request to talk about specific projects rather than strategy and objectives. Thinking about "porous participation" - i.e. allowing those who want to contribute throughout to do so whilst enabling those who only want to engage on a specific topic an opportunity later - will be something to consider in the future about how the Foundation engages Wikimedians on its strategy and work.
  3. Wikimedians remain engaged about the impact and use of Artificial Intelligence on Wikimedia platforms, particularly in terms of alignment with Wikimedia values.
    • Like in 2023-2024, artificial intelligence features prominently in this year’s annual plan. The plan summary opens with an observation that the world is in a period of growing uncertainty, volatility, and complexity, driven in part by the rise of new technologies such as artificial intelligence. AI offers both opportunities, such as the potential use of machine learning to automatically moderate incoming edits, and challenges, such as a shift from link based to chat based search architecture impacting how people find and consume information online. It also raises questions, such as those from the MENA region, about how to leverage AI for the benefit of readers, and how Wikimedia can strengthen its defences against disinformation.
    • We continued creating shared spaces for interested Wikimedians to talk and share together about their work in this domain for the coming year. Wikimedians from the Wikimedia Tunisia User Group and Wikimedia Switzerland presented alongside WMF staff on topics ranging from a values-based approach to AI work to how AI can enrich editing and Wikidata. These topics are of broad interest across the Wikimedia movement, and have been raised in the Global Majority Wikimedia Technology Priorities as well as in annual planning questions from the South Asia community call, the ESEAP conference, and CEE regional call. Like many things in the Wikimedia movement, work around AI is many faceted and does not have a central owner, but continued collaboration through calls like this and Future Audiences discussions offer an opportunity for everyone to shape this work.
  4. The Wikimedia platform must evolve to meet the needs of global audiences.
    • In addition to advocating for editing improvements, Wikimedians are invested in the reading and user experience for consumers of Wikimedia content. Wikimedians were particularly engaged with Wiki Experiences 3: Consumer Experience, which will prioritize the browsing and learning experience for Wikipedia readers (Key Result WE 3.1). These are important considerations for the upcoming work of the Web team, and for the Wikimedia Foundation more broadly as we move toward a more focused platform strategy to maintain and strengthen global readership.
    • Discussions around platform strategy were woven across multiple discussions around the work of the Wikimedia Foundation for next fiscal year. The first was an ongoing discussion about investments in interactive content, including around improvements to the Graph extension and the function of a community created gadget to embed content from Our World in Data on the Wikimedia projects. In parallel, discussions around the needs of Wikimedia Commons both on Meta-Wiki and on Commons drew attention to questions about how to prioritize among suggested improvements on Wikimedia Commons, and more broadly, the strategic tradeoffs between support for Wikimedia Commons and other areas of our technical infrastructure, specifically MediaWiki. Finally, some also asked questions on talk pages and in community calls about support for sibling projects, specifically Wikisource and Wiktionary, again calling into question how the Wikimedia movement should prioritize resource investment in an era of only modest budget growth. These conversations are part of a broader ongoing discussion (that will continue past this collaboration period) within the Wikimedia movement about how to use our limited resources. With rapid changes to how people find, understand, use, share, and access information online, the Wikimedia movement is facing questions about what to prioritize - and what not to - more directly and urgently than ever before. How can we come together as a movement to decide a way forward? How can we invest our shared resources to best expand free knowledge throughout the world?
  5. Volunteers and affiliates are looking for guidance into what movement strategy recommendations are best led by the Foundation and other movement entities.
    • On the cross-regional, South Asia and MENA community calls, volunteers asked how the Foundation would signal what movement strategy recommendations are most informative in achieving our 2030 movement strategy. In the CEE region, communities asked about the next steps for the movement charter process and the feedback already provided by the Foundation.
    • Having been involved in discussions to create and define the movement strategy recommendations since 2019, volunteers and affiliates shared that they are ready to take action, and want clarity about which recommendations the Foundation plans to be the most active. The Foundation’s annual plan for FY24-25 addresses these questions, with specific work under Recommendation #2 (Improve User Experience), Recommendation #3 (Provide for Safety and Inclusion), Recommendation #4 (Ensure Equity in Decision Making), and Recommendation #10 (Evaluate, Iterate, Adapt).
    • As the Board resolution on the movement charter noted, the Foundation has already committed within the annual plan to shifting core areas of decision-making to increased volunteer oversight, including fund dissemination, advising on product & technology and changes to the ecosystem of movement organisations.
  6. Metrics matter.

Statistics

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On-Wiki Material

Page Pageviews - as of 06 June*
Main annual plan draft pages 31,666
Main annual plan draft talk page 2,382
Product & Technology OKRs talk page 5,139
Local posting of annual plan content and invitations* 137,722**
Other pages 430 + 239
TOTAL 177,578 (more than 500% increase from last year)

*Note that pageview calculations for local wikis includes data from Village Pumps, where other content appears on the same page.

** Most village pumps and community spaces do not have a way for us to measure specific pageviews for a topic so this is pageviews for the period the plan was being discussed and posted

All on-wiki postings/conversations about the annual plan are listed below.

Co-created Community spaces

This year, staff and leaders from the Wikimedia Foundation joined existing community organized calls for two-way planning around next year’s draft annual plan. Additionally, Foundation staff are organized several thematic calls that anyone could attend based on their area of interest.

Date Discussion Participants (estimate) Interpretation
October 2023 – April 2024 Talking 2024 145 (as of April 2024) French, English, Japanese, Czech, Arabic [and many more]
March 21, 2024 Conversation with Trustees hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee 50
March 22, 2024 WikiCauserie 53 French, English
May 4, 2024 MENA Community call 41 English, Arabic
May 8, 2024 CEE Catch up 38 English, Russia
May 10, 2024 Annual Planning Session at ESEAP Conference 2024 68 Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Melayu
May 11, 2024 Product and Technology Focused Session at Indic Community Monthly Engagement Calls 9 English
May 11, 2024 Igbo Wikimedians Open Community call. 45 English
May 15, 2024 Cross Regional Call 81 English, Polish, Portuguese,Spanish, French
May 16, 2024 Wikimedia AI Call 90 Spanish, French
May 16, 2024 Afrika Baraza 109 English, French, Arabic, Swahili
May 17, 2024 Annual Planning Session during the South Asia Open call 48 English
June 1, 2024 Annual Planning Discussion during Naija Office Hours 90
TOTAL: 867 (up 23.8% from 700 last year)

Translations & Interpretation

Material FY 2024-2025 Translations FY 2023-2024 Translations
Full annual plan draft 17 13
Annual plan draft Summary 34 34
Annual plan Diff post 23 7
Maryana’s annual plan update 33 9
Product & Tech OKRs Diff post 16 N/A
Future Audiences Diff post 13 N/A

Engagement

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Over the last few years we have continued to evolve and improve a collaborative planning process – the Wikimedia Foundation’s focus remains centered on humans and technology given the Foundation’s unique role as the platform provider for people and communities who are leading peer-to-peer knowledge production systems. The four overarching goals (Equity, Infrastructure, Safety, Effectiveness) remain constant, while the work and deliverables within them iterates on the significant progress made in the current year.

The discussions began this year with Talking:2024 - conversations between Foundation staff, leaders, board members, and Wikimedians around the world. They were followed by an invitation from Chief Product & Technology Officer Selena Deckelmann for input on-wiki into proposed objectives for the Foundation’s product and technology work next year. These objectives build on ongoing conversations through Talking:2024, which highlighted the importance of continuing focus on the needs of our platform and online contributors.

We welcome your ideas now through 31st May 2024 and will update this page as new on-wiki and live discussions open in various channels and languages. These discussions are where the Wikimedians share their take on the proposed plans and share about their own goals for the upcoming year. Inspired by what so many others are doing in their own work, we continue to find opportunities to collaborate and learn from the planning processes and work of others in the Wikimedia movement as well as other partners. This year there are many ways to engage: here on Meta-Wiki, in co-created community spaces, on Wikimedia project pages, and on community channels.

Co-created Community spaces

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This year, staff and leaders from the Wikimedia Foundation will be joining existing community organized calls for two-way planning around next year’s draft annual plan. Additionally, Foundation staff are organizing several thematic calls that anyone can attend based on their area of interest. If you wish to join a call but interpretation is not available in your preferred language, email us at movementcomms@wikimedia.org, and we will make the necessary arrangements. Please note that the list will be regularly updated as dates are finalized to ensure you have the most up-to-date information.

  1. Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee Conversation with Trustees: .
  2. WikiCauserie: , interpretation available: English - French.
  3. MENA Community call , interpretations available: English - Arabic.
  4. CEE Catch up: , interpretations available: English - Russian
  5. Annual Planning Session at ESEAP Conference 2024: . Etherpad notes
  6. Product and Technology Focused Session at Indic Community Monthly Engagement Calls (by CIS-A2K ): May 11, 2024 (1300-1430 UTC)
  7. Igbo Wikimedia Open Community Call: .
  8. Cross-regional meeting: May 15, 2024 (15.00-16.30 UTC), interpretation available: English, French, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish.
  9. Wikimedia AI call: May 16, 2024 (14.00-15.00 UTC). Interpretation: TBD
  10. Afrika Baraza: , interpretation available: English – French, Arabic and Swahili. Etherpad notes.
  11. Annual Planning Session during the South Asia Open call: .
  12. Annual Planning Discussion during the Naija Office Hours:

On-Wiki

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A summary message to engage in annual plan conversation will be posted locally on various projects. The full version of draft annual plan materials 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, always in your preferred language. We will add links here to where the content has been posted as they become available.

Other conversations about the annual planning are also happening in other community channels on Discord and Telegram. We encourage you to join the discussions if you subscribe to these channels.

Product-specific conversations will happen in different channels. The conversations are between members of communities who collaborate with the Wikimedia Foundation Product teams that own objectives and key results in the annual plan. Community members interested in specific objectives and key results owned by Product teams can engage with the teams for work details of the objectives they own, its implementation, and alignment with the communities' work and interests.

The engagements are opportunities to ask questions and get clarification on the product teams' outlined work for the 2024–25 year based on the annual plan objectives and key results. We will add links to places where product teams are engaging with their audiences when they become available.

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