Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/End of year report 2022

The purpose of this document is to increase on-wiki narrative discussions of the Wikimedia Foundation’s priorities and performance. It covers the Foundation’s key areas of work for the period of July 2021 to June 2022, alongside other significant changes like the onboarding of a new Chief Executive Officer.

In brief, the Wikimedia Foundation implemented an annual plan to resource specific objectives of its medium-term priorities including: (1) increasing access to knowledge, (2) improving knowledge equity, and (3) supporting communities:

• Financial and other support to Wikimedia’s global communities included a 92% increase in community grants and affiliate support.
• Key investments in product and technology included improvements to the capacity and performance of the platform and the user experience for both newcomers and veteran contributors. This included new tools to improve mobile access and contributions to the Wikimedia projects, especially targeting users in emerging markets. Additional priorities focused on partnering with existing volunteer communities to expand awareness about Wikimedia projects to new audiences in regions that have high potential for reader and editor growth.
• Legal support for the integrity of information on the Wikimedia projects included work around disinformation, as well as advocacy against regulatory threats to free knowledge. A significant milestone for the year was moving forward on movement strategy recommendations like the Universal Code of Conduct.

Notably, in this fiscal year the Wikimedia Foundation underwent a successful CEO transition. Maryana Iskander’s appointment was announced in September 2021 and she formally joined in January 2022. The Foundation also shared the announcement of a new Chief Product and Technology Officer, Selena Deckelmann, who joined at the beginning in fiscal year 2023.

FY22 Financial Overview

The Foundation has seen a period of year-on-year growth, which began to stabilize in this fiscal year. The budget plan focused on increasing the amount of funds spent on programmatic work and grant support to movement partners. A few highlights:

• We grew our programmatic spend to 76%, up +2% from the previous year.
• We funded increases in all major types of grants and community support, including significant growth in the regional grantmaking strategy, Wikidata, and restarting grants for in-person events/conferences. Overall this grant and affiliate funding grew by 92% ($9.1M) compared to the prior year.
• We made several key infrastructure investments, including in Wikidata and an additional data center.
• We developed and rolled out accounting processes for software development capitalization.
• We grew our revenue, and were able to contribute $22M to our sustainability reserve.
• We carefully managed our budget, underspending by (-5%).

New Foundation Leadership

A new CEO: Maryana Iskander

In September 2021, the Foundation announced the appointment of Chief Executive Officer Maryana Iskander. After conducting an extensive listening tour to meet with volunteers, staff and partners across the Wikimedia ecosystem, she formally joined in January 2022. Maryana has dedicated her career to breaking down systemic barriers of access to opportunity and education. She has a proven track record for scaling complex organizations through collaborative solution-building and community empowerment. She joined Wikimedia after ten years as the CEO of Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, a non-profit social enterprise focused on building African solutions to tackle the global crisis of youth unemployment. She received the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2019. Prior to this, she spent more than half a decade as the Chief Operating Officer of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a volunteer-led social movement focused on expanding access to healthcare. Maryana has a juris doctor from Yale Law School, a M.Sc. from Oxford University (where she was a Rhodes Scholar), and a B.A. magna cum laude from Rice University.

New Product and Technology Leadership: Selena Deckelmann

In June 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation also announced a new Chief Product and Technology Officer, Selena Deckelmann. Selena brings nearly a decade of experience from Mozilla, where she led the Firefox organization of more than 400 people responsible for all Firefox product and technology functions including desktop, mobile, web platform, and browser services. She oversaw some of the company’s most significant achievements including performance projects like Quantum Flow, architectural changes like Project Fission, key features like Enhanced Tracking Protection and Total Cookie Protection, and services such as Firefox Monitor. Selena comes from the open source software community and will lead the product and technology teams at the Wikimedia Foundation.

Key Investments in Product and Technology

Over the past fiscal year, the Wikimedia Foundation made specific investments in the capacity and performance of the platform and the user experience for both newcomers and veteran contributors.

For the first time in over a decade, we introduced new improvements to the desktop user experience on Wikipedia, working closely with contributors across different language Wikipedias to iterate on new features. We also invested in new tools to allow reading and editing on mobile, across more mobile platforms than ever before and with increased capabilities including rich media contributions and content moderation on mobile. We also substantially increased our platform resilience and defenses to support users in both established and emerging markets. Additionally, we improved our data as a service capacity and machine learning capabilities. Below are several highlights across our product and technology work over the FY22 fiscal year.

1. Improving the user experience on Wikipedia

Through 2021, we continued to expand on our ongoing project to improve the desktop user experience for Wikipedia. Our last major revision of Wikipedia’s desktop design was in 2010 — and in the past decade, design best practices have continued to evolve, reflecting changes in how people use websites and what people expect from online resources such as Wikipedia. This work, which began in 2019, introduces design elements that allow Wikipedia to be intuitive for today’s internet users: prominent table of contents, clear search bar, a sticky header for easy access to tools, a prominent way to switch languages, and several other improvements. We did this work in close consultation with our global community, piloting a range of changes on different language Wikipedias to develop compelling features that improve both the reading and editing experience.

These improvements have been shown to substantially improve user experiences. The new table of contents increased how often users looked at different sections by 50%. The clear search bar increased searching by 30%. As of September 2022, the engineering work on the improvements is largely complete, and they are the default experience for 37 wikis.

2. A new Wikiproject to share knowledge across more languages than ever before

Wikifunctions is a project that seeks to drive cross-language knowledge exchange and close the gap about knowledge available across the hundreds of languages spoken by our movement. Wikifunctions will accelerate language equality across Wikipedia, evolving Wikipedias with small article bases into full-fledged knowledge sources that benefit hundreds of millions of people. The project utilizes a new technical architecture that will translate baseline content into text that can be used across Wikipedia’s language editions.

Wikimedia’s Head of Special Projects Denny Vrandečić, an international expert in technologies that categorize and process data in advanced ways, is leading this effort. This fiscal year, we also brought on board specialized talent through a Google.org fellowship to advance the goals of Abstract Wikipedia and Wikifunctions. For nine months, up to 10 Google.org Fellows will be supporting the Wikifunctions team. Most of their focus will be on the backend of Wikifunctions: they will work towards making the evaluation of functions far more efficient. They have also started a natural language generation work stream that is working closely across the Wikimedia communities and academia to seek contributions and improve.

3. Substantially increasing platform resilience and defenses

A significant infrastructure project was successfully completed with the launch of a new data center in Marseille, Frace. This new site is able to handle traffic coming from all of Europe, the Middle East and Africa and greatly enhances our platform resilience.

We also increased the capacity of our Ashburn data center by 25%.

We also strengthened our network defenses by rolling out proactive Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) and cache busting countermeasures.

4. Improving data as a service and machine learning capabilities.

We successfully kicked off a multi team Event Platform working team, including evaluating and selecting our event streaming technology which will enable work that unblocks multiple engineering teams.

We’ve loaded most machine learning ORES models onto Liftwing and improved model performance. This will lead to more reliable and scalable machine learning services across the projects.

5. Building technical volunteer communities

We ran the Small Wiki Toolkits Global workshops initiative to encourage tool development and support for smaller wikis, and launched Toolhub and the Developer Portal to provide better access to information for technical contributors. We also coordinated a Hackathon in May 2022 to connect with technical volunteers. The Hackathon, organized by both the Foundation and volunteers, included 51 sessions, numerous projects proposed in Phabricator with a focus on Hacking and Newcomers, and 10 in person meetup events, many of which were supported by the Foundation. Nearly 300 people attended in person events, and several hundred joined the Hackathon online.

6. New research about the free knowledge ecosystem

We published an updated roadmap for Addressing Knowledge Gaps. We worked on multi-language section alignment and readability score models. We co-organized Wiki Workshop 2022 and Wiki-M3L workshop, expanding and strengthening our research network. More can be found in our Research Report #6. We also launched the Research Fund in November 2021 to fund research initiatives that support the Wikimedia Movement in deeper understanding of the contributions, decision making and building technologies for the Wikimedia projects. We funded 9 projects across CEE, ESEAP, MEA, Latin America and North America. These grantees are pursuing work that will increase our understanding of non-English Wikipedia communities, how the resources are used, and how we can facilitate translation of articles into many languages to make them more globally accessible.

7. Making contributions easier for both newcomers and veteran contributors

In the past year, we added the second machine-learning assisted suggested edit for Wikipedia on the web: “add an image”. This is a workflow in which an algorithm suggests images from Commons to newcomers, who then choose whether to insert them into an article. “Add an image” and the first of these types of edits, “add a link”, are both contributions that newcomers can easily do from mobile devices, and without having to learn all the tools and rules of Wikipedia before getting started.

As of September 2022, newcomers have made 225,000 “add a link” edits and 15,000 “add an image” edits. With these suggested edits as part of the broader newcomer experience, we see that newcomers are 16% more likely to make edits and keep editing. Many of the newcomers who start with these suggested edits move on to other kinds of edits.

We also started a targeted user campaign to increase access to editing in emerging markets and on mobile, and increase effectiveness of editing in those places. Our plan had two target user groups, newcomers and experienced contributors, each having separate strategies and features.

We built a data pipeline orchestration pathway using an open source tool called Apache Spark, the first time the Foundation has ever used this approach to build products. This allows data producers to schedule processes to extract, transform, and load data (ETL), which is a common data integration process that makes data usable. This enabled the management of the dataset for image suggestions. It will also further enable future natural language processing work and enable connections across our content. With this work, we increased contributions from users in emerging communities by inviting experienced users to the image-suggestions functionality on Wikipedias in languages where there is less illustration. Experienced users with over 500 edits are asked to evaluate an existing Commons image that is suggested for an unillustrated article and add it to the article if they determine it improves the content.

8. Increased focus on mobile-first access to knowledge in growth markets

To reach readers in emerging markets, Wikipedia needs to be available on operating systems that are used around the world. KaiOS is a popular phone operating system in India and Africa, but the small screen and limited typing controls made it difficult to access Wikipedia. The Inuka team released a Wikipedia app for KaiOS, leading to over 1 million downloads and 5.8 million pageviews in its first quarter. A subsequent content exploration experiment in 4 countries led to an increase in users reading Wikipedia articles longer than before.

Newer internet users in different parts of the world prefer to learn and access information in formats beyond the “long form article.” Wikistories is a mobile web-based tool that empowers editors to create new content that is short and visual, with reliable knowledge, for quick consumption and easy sharing. The visual format captures and distributes encyclopedic knowledge that is less suitable for long form articles. Since the launch of the pilot on Bahasa Indonesian Wikipedia, 140+ stories have been created organically between July 4 - August 3, 2022.

We also added support for push notifications of editing (Echo) messages, intuitive Talk interactions and Edit notices and feedback. This includes support for the new topic subscription system and is built on the same infrastructure as the web Talk improvements. This has resulted in a 121% increase in users' interactions with notifications on Android, a 44.5% increase in talk page activity, and a 23.4% increase in edit rate among target active editors, while substantially addressing many of the concerns with curation and editing feedback raised last spring by the English Wikipedia community. On iOS, notifications resulted in a global 2.3% increase in editing interactions, across 100+ projects, including Commons. This work has also revealed that users have a 11.1% higher edit completion rate for article talk pages when on the apps as compared to mobile web.

9. Doubling access to the Wikipedia Library and increasing reliable citations on the projects

The Wikipedia Library platform gives Wikipedians free access to over 90 of the world's top subscription-only databases, providing material from books and journals in 33 languages that our contributors can use to research and cite information in Wikipedia articles. This year, the Library team (now the Moderator Tools team) completed a huge upgrade to the service. Library users can now use a single sign-on to access most of the Library's content, rather than apply for each database individually. The team added a search feature across multiple databases, which makes it easier to find the content that users are looking for. Finally, we set up a new notification system that informs users when they've reached the edit-count threshold that makes them eligible to use the Library: at least 500 edits, six months of activity, and 10+ edits in the last month.

When the first round of notifications went out, about 15,000 Wikipedians visited the Library for the first time, more than doubling the total number of users that had ever used the service. Now, about 200 users visit the Library every day, which is double the number of users since the upgrades rolled out. The majority of new users (60%) are non-English speakers, which was one of our goals for the project. Most importantly, the number of citations that come from the Wikipedia Library has increased more than 40%.

10. Enhancing content moderation on mobile

The Moderator Tools team focuses on the needs of content moderators in the medium-size wikis, focusing this year on mobile-first contributors. A number of Wikimedia projects have as many as 40-60% of their active editors primarily contributing from a mobile device, but there are relatively few mobile-first editors who contribute to Wikimedia projects in deeper ways beyond making basic edits. They are less likely to post on talk pages, participate in project namespace discussions, and less than 1% of administrators primarily edit from a mobile device. Our communities are missing a potentially large number of active mobile editors who can't meaningfully participate in their communities on-wiki.

So far, the team has added an "overflow menu" to articles on mobile that contains key functions that moderators need. As a result, the number of page moves made on a mobile device went up by 15%, page deletions by 35%, and user blocks by 12%, demonstrating that there's an appetite among mobile-first users to do more moderation actions. The team is currently rolling out a new mobile preferences page, and will soon be adding more functionality to mobile diff and history pages.

11. Understanding the safety needs of our contributors and building new support tools

The Trust & Safety Tools team works to make Wikimedia projects safer, so that more people are able to join our communities and contribute to the movement. The team's first priority this year was to establish a baseline to measure contributors' feelings of safety. The Safety Survey has now run twice on French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and Farsi Wikipedias, providing the Global Data & Insights team with data that they can use to track perceptions of safety over time.

Now the team is working on a Private Incident Reporting System, which will support the new Universal Code of Conduct policy. The new tool will be an easily accessible way to connect users who have experienced harassment and other forms of abuse on our platform with volunteer responders, who can help to assess and resolve the situation. The team has designed a first version of the tool, and will be working with Trust & Safety staff and experienced volunteers to develop the new system.

12. A new approach to increasing privacy and reducing harassment across the Wikimedia projects

The Anti-Harassment Tools team supports volunteers who are working to keep our wiki communities safe from harassment and other forms of abuse. The team's main project this year is IP masking, which will remove users' personally identifiable information from public view, in accordance with current standards of data privacy on the internet.

The team has released an IP Info feature, which will help administrators to investigate suspicious accounts once IP addresses are hidden from public view.

Our wiki communities use IP addresses as an important part of their moderation and security workflows, so the team is building new features that will help moderators to identify bad actors without relying on IP addresses. The team has released an IP Info feature, which will help administrators to investigate suspicious accounts once IP addresses are hidden from public view.

13. Improving onwiki engagement and discussion

Discussion between contributors is an absolutely critical part of how the wikis function — people discuss changes to articles, debate policy, and thank each other for their work. But newcomers have always struggled to take part in conversations, in part because the tools for doing so required them to use wikitext code to edit a discussion page. The “Discussion Tools” effort began in 2020 to make discussion pages accessible for new people, and introduced a host of new tools and modern experiences while keeping it possible for longtime contributors to interact with those pages the same way they always have. In the past year, the team built on the initial “reply tool” by introducing the ability to add new topics to pages, notifications for when topics of interest are updated, and an overall visual redesign of the page. Development work is largely complete, and most of the tools are available by default on most Wikipedias, with the final features rolling out to the final wikis in the coming weeks and months.

These tools have been shown to greatly improve outcomes for new people on discussion pages. Newcomers with these tools are 164% more likely to publish the comments they start making and 7.2 times more likely to successfully publish a comment. They are 19% more likely to publish a new topic. There has been a 57% decrease in the median response time to comments, a 99% increase in responses people receive within 10 days of posting, and an 8.3% increase in the likelihood that newcomers will receive a response.

14. Improved tools to increase translation support across languages

Large Wikipedias have millions of articles, while small ones only have thousands. One way to grow the smaller Wikipedias is to translate articles from one language to another, but translation was a manual, technical, and laborious process. Wikipedia's content translation tools leverage machine translation algorithms (such as Google Translate) to help users from around the world translate articles from one language to another.

The desktop version of the Content Translation tool has enabled the creation of 1 million new Wikipedia articles. The Language team is now building a new section translation capability, which helps users to fill out articles with sections from other wikis. It is designed primarily for mobile phones, to help mobile-first users expand the content on their wikis.

15. Building the foundation for a better search experience across the Wikimedia projects

We focused on Search infrastructure improvements to support both the user search experience and other features and tools that rely on Search to find knowledge. We completed the upgrade of our search engine, Elasticsearch, to version 7, identified emerging languages/regions and unpacked almost all the language analyzers, and developed a search UI improvement plan. We also acted on the need to better understand Search by building an analytics dashboard and conducted user research to inform our Search strategy and planning for the next year.

16. New Mediawiki support to create a better user experience

This year we established a team to develop the Mediawiki Design System, which aims to deliver more equitable knowledge experiences by increasing consistency of the user experience, improving accessibility through adoption of global accessibility standards, and inviting more design and front-end contributors by modernizing our code and streamlining the various standards, tools, and implementations within Mediawiki. We’ve successfully created Codex, the UI component library, and piloted with TypeAheadSearch and other components that are now live.

Other highlights include:

• standing up our Gitlab source control and CI environment and begun migrating projects over, providing more robust developer support tools;
• MediaWiki on Kubernetes will allow us to fully automate deployment of MW updates;
• we’ve deployed Airflow as a service to automate data pipelines and are helping teams migrate to it; and
• data governance planning work has begun, and we have deployed a data catalog tool in beta to begin capturing information about our data assets in one place.

A New Approach to Grantmaking

After a collaborative process in 2020, the Foundation introduced a new funding strategy in July 2021 with the launch of the Wikimedia Foundation Funds. The goals of the new funding strategy were to align grants to the strategic direction, decentralize decision-making with a regional focus, increase funding and support to underrepresented communities, and provide support beyond funding, such as creating spaces for peer learning. The new funding strategy emphasizes learning, partnership and iteration which has informed our approach to every aspect of the programming and reporting. The Wikimedia Research Fund and Wikimedia Alliances Fund offer two focused pathways to support communities by supporting people and organizations to collaboratively work with communities. Over the first year of implementation we supported 20 Alliance fund proposals and 9 research fund proposals.

Regional Approach

As part of this relaunch, we introduced volunteer Regional Funds Committees made up of Wikimedians around the world to make decisions about funding and guide applicants across seven regional areas. Their work is an essential piece of the new funding strategy, to offer local knowledge and context and bring decision making closer to where the work is being implemented. To increase the access to funds regional program officers conducted proactive outreach, language support was provided and criteria to receive longer term funding opened up including the opportunity for the first time for multi-year funding.

Support Beyond Funding and Using Information

The Let’s Connect Peer Learning Program was launched focused on human connection and creating a safe environment to share. During the initial pilot phase which began in August 2022, the program received 172 registered users across 25 different countries. There were 10 learning clinics with 158 participants. By introducing the Fluxx portal we have been able to understand and share more information amongst all actors about the work that is being funded and seven regional learning sessions with grantee partners, regional fund committees and Foundation staff were held in September and October with over 200 participants.

Results

The Funding Distribution Report provides an overview of total fund distribution globally and by region. This year, we see that the new funds strategy has resulted in a more equitable distribution of funds across the region. Funding globally increased 51% from USD 8 million to USD 12.4 Million, with the highest growth in the Middle East and Africa, where we saw 149 percent growth, and ESEAP, where we saw 135 percent growth.

To put this in perspective, in the previous 2021 fiscal year, funds to North and Western Europe (NWE) and the United States and Canada (USCA) represented 60% of all funding. In 2022, while the real term levels of funding to the regions grew, the overall proportion declined to 48%. This the first time in history that these two regions received less than 50% of the total funding. In addition, 21% of general support fund recipients - recipients of grants which focus on longer term planning - came from grantees that had previously received funding for rapid grants, more short term and immediate projects. 14 multi annual plan grants were approved for organizations that already had multi-year plans in place. This shows a marked growth in longer term planning across grantees.

Not only did this fiscal year introduce significant change in funding processes, but it also created significant change in the relationships that the Foundation wants to build alongside communities and grantees, as partners learning together. We are in a continuous process of learning and adapting, working together with grantee partners and regional fund committees and Foundation teams to understand how to best support the work of the movement.

First Round of Equity Fund grantees

In addition to relaunching our grants program, we introduced the first round of grantees from the Equity Fund, a pilot initiative to provide grants to organizations that are working towards racial equity but who are not yet working directly with the free knowledge movement. We assembled a committee of Wikimedia Foundation staff and community members to manage the fund and choose grantees aligned to one or more of five areas of focus that were identified as areas that are most beneficial to the larger ecosystem of open knowledge. Our first six grantees were from across the Middle East, Africa, and North and South America and focused on issues of access, education, and equity within the regions they support. Each grantee supports an established organization with a track record of success in their field. Each is also new to the Wikimedia movement, and we are excited by the prospects of closer collaboration with groups throughout the free knowledge movement.

Wikimedia Enterprise

This fiscal year we launched the first version of Wikimedia Enterprise, a new opt-in offering to simultaneously create a new revenue stream to protect Wikimedia’s sustainability, and improve the quality and quantity of Wikimedia content available to our many readers who do not visit our websites directly (including more consistent attribution). Wikimedia Enterprise packages existing, public data from Wikimedia projects in a way that makes it easier for commercial companies to reuse it for their own services. This offering is aligned with the movement strategy recommendations to both “Increase the sustainability of our movement” and “Improve User Experience.”

In October 2021, following much preparation and public discussion, Wikimedia Enterprise APIs were declared “open for business”. This included real time event streaming, page-updates, page deletes, and page page-visibility among other functionality. A WMF Board statement on the principles of revenue management was released simultaneously.

Since the v1 Launch we have been continuing to work on the stability of the product as well as working on new and improved features in accordance with the Roadmap.

Self-registration and first set of customers

In June 2022, the first set of customers was announced, as well as a new self-signup system. The first two customers were: the large social/search corporation, Google. The other is nonprofit The Internet Archive, who receive access at no cost.

The announcement is a significant milestone as it fulfilled several promises made to ourselves and to the movement. It means that the project is now covering its current operating costs; that anyone is able to sign up for an account and use/access the service, but not at a commercial scale, for free; and that those with a mission-relevant need can obtain high volume access to exactly the same product as commercial users.

In Defense of Free Knowledge and Wikimedians Around the World

The Foundation’s Legal team continued to expand the ways in which they support the global movement and the integrity of information on the Wikimedia projects. Over the last fiscal year, the department expanded its efforts to learn about disinformation on the Wikimedia projects in the wake of global events and elections, provided legal and human rights support for volunteer communities including those impacted by the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine, and increased its advocacy efforts to protect against threats to free knowledge. In addition, the team continued to execute on core movement strategy recommendations including the Universal Code of Conduct.

Protecting knowledge and fighting disinformation

The Foundation Increased understanding of disinformation across Wikimedia projects, with investigations into various disinformation campaigns across projects and original research related to knowledge integrity risks across different Wikimedia projects. We also built new mobile-focused moderator tools and IP tools to address common moderation issues, and support patrollers in dealing with vandalism and sockpuppetry by delivering key IP-related information.

Providing legal support and defense for communities

We responded to new and ongoing litigation in Europe to support Wikimedia communities in the face of both physical and legal threats to free knowledge. We have responded to ongoing litigation in Russia, defending our volunteers and opposing various removal orders for content related to the invasion of Ukraine and other content by government institutions in Russia. We also won a case in France protecting user data of several French users, and offered a persuasive opinion that French public figures are not entitled to info about users for regular cases of insult or arguable criticism about them.

Advocating for free knowledge around the world

The Foundation supported several advocacy initiatives to expand awareness of the work of the Wikimedia movement and protect against threats of censorship and diminished internet access. We supported seven Wikimedia chapters to obtain observer status at World Intellectual Property Forum, which is a challenging effort but resulted in global press coverage about our work. We also joined a successful coalition letter against the SIM Card Registration Act which would have seriously harmed privacy and safety of platform users in the Philippines. Finally, we responded to a ruling from our case at the European Court of Human Rights - leveraging the moment to underline Wikimedia’s prominent role in the global censorship discourse. We have led advocacy complemented with media attention to influence the discussion in the US and the UK to allow internet service providers to continue providing essential internet services within Russia despite sanctions.

Advancing movement strategy recommendations to achieve the Wikimedia 2030 goals

1. Supporting movement work towards a Movement Charter

   The Movement Charter Drafting Committee met in person to make progress toward a charter outline, a drafting methodology, and subcommittees to focus on different areas of the draft.

2. Collaborating on a proposal for Regional and Thematic Hubs

   The movement strategy team shared a draft about Minimum Criteria for Hubs Pilots. After intense discussions and a series of online events, we compiled enough feedback to prepare a new proposal for consensus.

3. Advancing the Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines

   In the 2022 fiscal year, the Wikimedia Foundation worked for eight months with the contributor community to co-create a Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC) that will support our volunteers and build safer community spaces. The UCoC expands on our projects’ existing policies to elevate expectations for contributor behavior, and it outlines the types of supportive, collaborative participation that characterize Wikimedia’s communities at their best and most productive. Over the course of this fiscal year, a refinement committee was formed to advance the enforcement guidelines of the UCoC as a final step. This committee began working closely with the communities to solicit feedback and refine the enforcement guidelines based on key points raised in this consultation process. This collaborative process resulted in a successful final vote of the UCoC.

4. Investing in skills and leadership development efforts in the movement

   The Community Development team launched the Leadership Development Working Group, a group of 15 volunteers from each core region of the movement that will steward a shared definition of leadership and leadership development for the movement as well as support the creation of a movement leadership development plan.

Global Awareness and Understanding of Wikimedia’s Mission

We partnered with contributors across volunteer communities on several initiatives to expand awareness about Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects to new audiences and regions with high potential for reader and editor growth.

Building a global baseline of awareness about the Wikimedia projects

In FY22, we started a global research and awareness study to build a baseline understanding of brand awareness. We focused on 11 markets (United States, Germany, South Africa, Philippines, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, South Korea, India, Nigeria, Indonesia), chosen because they are areas of current work around Wikimedia campaigns, partnership and focus, as well as potential growth opportunities. We focused on the potential for growth based on our mission of gathering the sum of all knowledge for all people, centering on opportunities to advance knowledge equity and knowledge as a service. In order to better understand gaps, we collected additional data exploring the sentiments of groups underrepresented in our projects. This work led to several key takeaways, including:

• Wikipedia enjoys a high global awareness and outperforms other knowledge platforms, although it falls behind the global media giants in terms of awareness and reach. The Wikimedia Foundation records low awareness of the brand, compared to the commonly known social good global non-profits.
• Awareness for Wikipedia is significantly low among youths, particularly 18 to 24 year olds, when compared with the other age-groups, especially in US, Germany, Indonesia, South Korea, Brazil and Nigeria. Additionally, in all surveyed countries 18 to 24 year olds were least likely to recommend Wikipedia to a friend or colleague.
• Globally, Wikipedia seems to be recognised for delivering high quality information on a wide range of topics, but not as much with regards to its visual appeal as a website, and in terms of ease of navigation, both on the web and on mobile.
• Specific to Wikipedia awareness in Nigeria, although the Igbos and smaller ethnic communities feel less represented on Wikipedia in comparison to the Yorubas and Hausas, Wikipedia usage is still generally high across all groups.
• With regards to representation and engagement with Wikipedia in the US, the least engagement was recorded among Black and Hispanic communities, particularly amongst women from these communities.
• Wikipedia awareness is lower than average in markets where Wikipedia content is perceived to have low quality content in the primary language, especially in South Korea, Brazil and Indonesia.

Our global research also measured several other factors, including how respondents describe the value of the Wikimedia projects and the movement, their purpose for using Wikipedia, and how likely they are to recommend and advocate Wikipedia.

Targeted campaigns to raise understanding of Wikimedia work in new regions and with new audiences

We also introduced two new initiatives last year, Wiki Unseen and an Awareness Experiment, to raise understanding about the Wikimedia projects and the value of free knowledge with new audiences. These projects were driven by insights from the data described above. Wiki Unseen was a collaboration with AfroCROWD to expand the visual representation of Black, Indigenous, and people of color in Wikimedia projects and advance knowledge equity. Wikipedia articles with images receive more traffic compared to those without images. Understanding the power of visual representation in addressing knowledge gaps and breaking down stereotypes, we partnered with illustrators who created new portraits of 8 notable people of color with unillustrated Wikipedia biographies for Wikimedia Commons. We also used this campaign to highlight the work of groups around the movement looking to close the gender and equity gap through representation, including Le San PagEs, Visible Wiki Women and Wiki Pages Wanting Photos.

The WikiUnseen campaign achieved significant impact including a combined 94% positive and neutral sentiment and 1.1 million impressions across social media posts on channels owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, a global reach of 48.9 million from earned media coverage - 88% of which was achieved in Africa. All 8 Wikipedia biographies with images experienced pageview increases of 400-700% and new Wikipedia biographies were created for two of the artists with one of the artist’s works being added to a Wikipedia article on their chosen art medium.

New branding support for affiliates

We supported affiliates around the world with new guidelines for affiliate branding, and a new community pilot that offered support to create affiliate and user group logos and taglines. These efforts were done in close collaboration with affiliates like Wikimedia Algeria, to help them grow local and international awareness while being connected to the shared brand identity of a global movement.

Supporting new ways of gathering and celebrating contributors across the movement

Wikimania returned in 2021 in its first ever virtual edition being canceled in 2020 due to the pandemic. This virtual version became our biggest Wikimania ever, with a total 3888 individuals registered to participate, half of whom registered to the virtual platform we used (Remo) and over 1700 who participated and logged into the platform. A total of 62% of attendees were first-time newcomers and 34% returnees. Comparatively, only 46% of participants at the 2019 Wikimania were first-time attendees. It was also the most inclusive Wikimania to date. Participants came from all over the world, with 26% from Europe, 23% from Africa and another 23% from Asia, 18.5% from North America, 6% from LAtin America and 2% from Oceania. In 2019, 68% participants were from Europe. Because of the free translation services offered, the overwhelming majority (91%) of individuals that answered the closing survey were happy that they could listen to the presentation in their language of choice; 66% were newcomers and 33% were returnees.

In addition, during Wikimania 2021 we expanded the Wikimedian of the Year awards for the first time. Seven volunteer Wikimedians were announced as Wikimedians of the Year award series at Wikimania, the annual Wikipedia conference. The winners were selected from around the world - from the Levant, to Bali, to California - and highlight the breadth and depth of the Wikimedia movement. This new expansion of the award to include 6 categories underlines the diversity of volunteer contributors. The Wikimedians of the Year included an award for rich media, for technology innovation, for new contributors, and for veteran contributors. Thank you for taking the time to read this year-end report of the Wikimedia Foundation’s areas of work and support to volunteer communities around the world.