Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2024-2025/Goals/Equity
Support Knowledge Equity
Strengthen Equity in Decision-Making via movement governance, equitable resource distribution, closing knowledge gaps, and connecting the movement.
Knowledge equity is about closing knowledge gaps, making it easier to participate in free knowledge, and ensuring that our projects and movement are representative of the world that we serve. As Wikimedia's strategic direction states: "as a social movement, we will focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We will welcome people from every background to build strong and diverse communities. We will break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge."
As we support our projects to become more sustainable and multigenerational, we will advance this goal by supporting equity in relation to movement governance and decision making, resource distribution, knowledge creation, and connections. At a time when consumers have more ways to search for and discover knowledge, and creators have new opportunities and incentives to share it, Wikimedia projects stand out as an important alternative where we must continue to foster equity.
The work outlined under this year "Equity" goal responds to three key external trends:
- Content: Contributors have many rewarding, potent ways to share knowledge online
- Search: Consumers are inundated with information, and want it aggregated by trusted people
- Disinformation: Content veracity is more contested than ever before, and AI will be weaponized
In addition, throughout our discussions during Talking:2024, the human-led nature of our movement and the importance of making every contribution count repeatedly came up. We also heard that movement roles need greater clarity.
Movement Governance and Decision-Making
As we advance into the third year of aligning our annual plan with the movement's 2030 Strategic Direction, our commitment to equity remains at the forefront. Knowledge equity asks us prioritize the knowledge and communities historically marginalized by existing power structures.
We believe that enhancing Equity in Decision-Making is a critical component to better coordinate our global network of communities and organizations for our stronger collective impact in the world. In this year's plan, we emphasize the focus on shared accountability, equitable participation, and supporting governance success across and for the movement. In essence, our journey this year is about empowering decision-makers across the movement, fostering environments where autonomy of movement groups is respected and supported, and ensuring that our governance practices are not only effective but also inclusive and inspiring to all involved.
We continue to support effective, impactful, and equitable decision-making. The Movement Charter, clarifying the future roles and responsibilities in the movement, including suggesting potential new structures like hubs and a Global Council, is nearing its completion following 2.5 years of work and movement-wide conversations. The Foundation has been engaging directly with the Movement Charter Drafting Committee (MCDC) and other stakeholders to share perspectives and discuss what roles and responsibilities should be owned by different movement bodies. We share more about the immediate next steps in the Planning History section.
As this work is ongoing, we maintain our commitment to the advancement of regional and thematic Hubs and networks. We are ready to provide backbone services, including strategic support, facilitation, documentation and learning. We will also provide financial support and grants as part of the Movement Strategy Implementation Grants portfolio to more strategically enable Hubs and other core infrastructure of the movement.
While supporting the development of new and emerging governance structures, we will continue to support other key governance committees, here defined as committees with decision-making powers that have influence on the broader movement. These include but may not be limited to the Affiliations Committee, the Elections Committee, and the Foundation's own Board of Trustees. Our goal is to support these committees as appropriate in being successful in their mandate while respecting their autonomy. This year we have three major focuses: (1) Implementing and iterating committee support processes, including a central service inbox, to effectively process support requests and foster collaboration among stakeholders; (2) Supporting the Affiliations Committee with the evolving recognition process as well as creating tighter alignment among Foundation teams to appropriately assess and address affiliate challenges in collaboration with AffCom and the Board, and (3) coordinating the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees elections to support orderly elections with results that are considered legitimate by electors across the movement via the implementation of a new committee stakeholder accountability map.
We will also offer further training and development for volunteers interested in participating in movement governance committees, as well as onboarding support.
Resource Distribution
Yael Weissburg and Veronica Thamaini
In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with the movement, launched a refreshed grants strategy to align its grant distribution process with the Movement Strategy recommendation to increase the sustainability of the movement. As a result of the shift, grantmaking has grown each consecutive year and larger proportional growth taking place in regions we have historically underinvested in.
This year, we will continue to align our grantmaking with Movement Strategy, working with communities to support equitable resource distribution to facilitate the long-term growth and sustainability of the movement. We will be working with the 8 Regional Funds Committees and engaging Affiliates and community members to bring decision-making about funds allocations closer to the movement. We will collaboratively determine the regional allocations of the grantmaking portfolio. We will also work together to take concrete steps towards subsidiarity in resource distribution by moving decision-making about global campaigns and rapid funds grants to those closest to the work.
To facilitate better long-term planning and budgeting among Affiliates, this year we are publishing a three-year grantmaking budget (as opposed to the 1-year budget that has historically been published). We will also partner with interested Affiliates to develop their local and regional fundraising capacity, by offering tools, resources, and personnel support.
The Wikimedia Foundation announced the third round of its Knowledge Equity Fund in the 2023–2024 fiscal year. The Knowledge Equity Fund was established in 2020 to advance knowledge and racial equity goals and address barriers to free knowledge caused by racial inequity. Each round of grantmaking is spending down the initial amount set aside for the fund in 2020, and you can view the remaining balance on Meta. In the past fiscal year, the Equity Fund introduced new initiatives based on proactive community outreach and feedback (like Connected Grants that will be given to movement groups alongside external organizations they are partnering with to address the goals of the fund). This year we will continue to use the fund to explore new ways of achieving impact towards knowledge equity.
Closing Knowledge Gaps
Ben Vershbow, Fiona Romeo, Runa Bhattacharjee
The 2017 Strategic Direction affirms our role as a Movement to "break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge." This year, the Product and Technology department, together with staff across Advancement and Communications departments, will work together to support communities to effectively close knowledge gaps through tools and support systems that are easier to access, adapt, and improve, accelerating growth in trustworthy encyclopedic content.
Encyclopedic content, primarily on Wikipedia, can be increased and improved through continuous cycles of community enablement and technical innovation. Methods of identifying and closing knowledge gaps should be easier for editors and organizers to discover and plan with, and barriers to incubating and establishing new languages in our ecosystem must be reduced. Resources that support growth of quality encyclopedic content, including support services such as the Wikipedia Library, and community-organized vehicles like content campaigns and WikiProjects, can be better integrated with contribution workflows. In view of recent trends around AI-assisted content generation and changing user behavior, we will also explore groundwork for substantial changes (e.g. Wikifunctions) that can assist scaled growth in content creation and reuse.
Our priorities this year will be to:
- Support organizers, contributors and institutions with tools, insights, and organizing approaches that increase the coverage of quality content in key topic areas.
- Implement and test two recommendations, both social and technical, to support onboarding for small language communities, with an evaluation to analyze community feedback.
- Launch two new contributor features and engage three to five institutional partners to enable easier contribution of source material that addresses language and geography gaps.
- Enable Wikifunctions on at least one smaller language Wikipedia to seed new content and keep existing content updated in a scalable way.
Connecting the Movement
The Foundation's ability to work effectively as part of the larger Wikimedia Movement relies on forging equitable connections across the movement. Next year, we will build on our existing work in celebrating, connecting and convening to engage our movement. Building on the insights from the 2021 research from movement communications, we will focus on co-creation. We will connect the dots across the Foundation and become intentionally inclusive about how we engage and communicate. A lot of this will happen behind the scenes in service of the Foundation's overarching goals around Infrastructure, Equity, Safety & Integrity, and Effectiveness. Overall, we will strengthen a sense of connection and belonging in the Wikimedia Movement.
Our efforts will focus on four broad priorities:
- Firstly, we want to make every contribution count. We will celebrate the humans behind our projects through programmes such as WikiCelebrate. We will celebrate the work of functionaries and non-content contributions through the upcoming Wikimedian of the Year awards. We also want to build recognition of Wikimedia contributions through certificates in WikiLearn and accreditations from professional and educational bodies. This includes humanizing the work of contributors of gender content in the movement by telling the stories of our collective efforts at addressing the Gender Gap and inspiring internal and external audiences to become new readers, contributors, or donors. This priority aligns with Infrastructure work to improve the contributor experience on Wikimedia projects.
- We will deepen our regional connections through multicultural and multilingual communications to build two-way conversations informed by local knowledge. Our regional specialists will build on and maintain the many personal relationships they have forged in order to cultivate collaboration and shared understanding with local communities. We will listen and amplify local regional ambitions, stories, gatherings and more - beginning with this annual plan itself where we will use the process of engaging with the plan to elevate regional priorities and plans like the Africa Agenda. We will also co-create with regional communities shared spaces for people to connect like Afrika Baraza, WikiCauserie, CEE Catch Up, South Asia Open Community Call and more. As part of collaborating on this year's plans we joined many of these co-created spaces to hear about different community priorities, discuss how the work captured in the plan can support these priorities and answered questions about the annual plan.
- Connecting globally and across regions also remains important. From movement spaces like Diff that enable Wikimedians to share and learn together, to creating clearer and more accessible structures of pages on Meta-Wiki, we will help people connect across regions. We had 238,594 visitors in the 2023 calendar year (24% more than 2022) and 436,612 views (11% more than 2022) from nearly all parts of the world to Diff last year. We will also continue the movement-led Let's Connect peer learning program and increase regional impact by developing resources for volunteers to host sessions in local languages and timezones. In support of both our Equity and Safety and Integrity goals, we will also work in partnership with affiliates to educate lawmakers about the Wikimedia model, and about the potential impact of over-broad laws that fail to take our model into account. We will work with volunteers to build local capacity to advance a positive vision for the legal and regulatory frameworks our communities need in order to thrive. During the annual plan collaboration period, Wikimedians also shared how they want to be able to connect to the Foundation more simply. We will continue the work we began in 2023 to improve the Foundation's presence on Meta-Wiki and build a clearer, more straightforward way for movement members to access resources and information from the Foundation. This involves improvements to team and department pages and staff listings, as well as a centralised support line allowing anyone to contact a human at the Foundation on any topic, at any time, and be connected with the right person or team to handle their question or request.
- Finally, we will continue to help people come together to collaborate and co-create. This includes supporting the movement's flagship international event - Wikimania. The Africa Agenda notes how "Africa’s participation in global events and dialogues in our movement continues to be a major pain point for the region. For example, the inability to participate at the Wikimedia Summit due to visa issues may have affected participation in processes like the Movement Strategy." As part of a multi-year planning approach, the Wikimania Steering Committee has set out hosts for Wikimanias in 2024, 2025 and 2026 including bringing Wikimania to East Africa for the first time. Equitable visa access for African scholars was a key part of this decision. We will work side by side with the core organizing teams of each of these Wikimanias to help plan the movement's flagship international event with both a virtual and in person component. This year the Wikimania 2024 Core Organizing Team (COT) will host Wikimania in Katowice between 7-10 August with the spirit "Collaboration of the Open". We will help them share lessons learnt from Wikimania with other conference organizers in the movement. We will also work with all movement organizers to co-create consistent support from the Foundation for movement conferences, including regional and thematic events. We will also continue to support the movement's flagship technical event, Wikimedia Hackathon, to convene experienced technical contributors to get the most daring experimental projects and bugs fixed and make sure that the technical community feels connected.
Increasing growth in encyclopedic content
Each goal in this year's annual plan is also supported by Product and Technology work.
The OKRs below detail that work for the Equity goal:
- Wiki Experiences objective 2 and its key results: 1, 2, 3, and 4.