Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge." This was the statement that guided Wikipedia in its 2001 founding. More than 20 years later, this original vision continues to inspire the people who work at the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation was established in 2003, and Wikipedia has since grown from 200,000 articles in a handful of languages to more than 60 million articles across more than 300 languages. Every month, people around the world view Wikipedia more than 15 billion times.

Even with this success, there is much more to accomplish. Every year, the Wikimedia Foundation sets clearly defined project goals in our annual plan and evaluates our work over the year in an annual report. Our latest annual report can be found at https://annual.wikimedia.org/. And our latest annual plan is at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2022-2023.

The key focus areas of our 2022-2023 annual plan are:

1) Advance Knowledge Equity by bringing a stronger regional focus to our collective work.

2) Deepen our commitment to Knowledge as a Service by strengthening how we prioritize and allocate product and tech support to 740+ Wikimedia projects, starting with Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.

3) Strengthen movement governance and health by supporting key priorities like the Movement Charter, the Universal Code of Conduct, and movement strategy implementation.

4) Improve the Foundation’s performance and effectiveness by improving our translation/interpretation support, lifting up more meaningful metrics to assess our impact, and designing shared services to support a truly global working environment.

The Wikimedia Foundation is guided by detailed strategies that we've formulated with each of our departments and with our volunteer communities -- the thousands of writers, editors, photographers, and other contributors around the world who comprise such a major part of our sites' success. We outline our strategies for making our priorities happen at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2022-2023. Here are ways we’re implementing our priorities for the 2022-2023 fiscal year:

1) Advance Knowledge Equity by bringing a stronger regional focus to our collective work: One goal that the Wikimedia Foundation has set to advance knowledge equity is to further regionalize our support of a globalized movement. Recent calls for power-sharing and decentralization have led to programmatic structures (e.g., grantmaking) and other models that are more regionally-based, including the concept of hubs. This has been done with an equity lens to support more localized needs and differentiated contexts. How can we shift even more of the Foundation’s ways of working to support these objectives? As a starting point, we're organizing more of our work around 8 regions: East, Southeast Asia and Pacific (ESEAP); South Asia; Sub-Saharan Africa; Middle East and North Africa (MENA); Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Central Asia; Northern and Western Europe; Latin America and Caribbean; and North America (United States and Canada)

Starting in June 2022, Foundation teams began convening more intentionally around defining the impact that is possible for us to make together in different parts of the world. We’ll start with a historical lens on lessons learned from the past, and then launch a quarterly review of activities being done now by communities, individual volunteers, chapters, user groups, thematic organizations, partners organizations in the free knowledge ecosystem and beyond. We’ll then look at planned work by various teams at the Foundation to prioritize and align resources for focused results and more impactful partnerships. We’ll improve each quarter and share our learnings at https://diff.wikimedia.org/.

2) Deepen our Commitment to Knowledge as a Service, starting with Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata: With a growing list of 740+ Wikimedia projects across many languages, we must ask harder questions about how to prioritize the Foundation’s current support while we also commit to increasing our capabilities through reallocation of existing resources and/or securing new funding for our technology needs. An (imperfect, iterative) survey sought to understand how current Foundation resources were allocated to various Wikimedia projects. It confirmed that the majority of our resources remain committed to the multiple language versions of Wikipedia.

For more about our strategies -- including how we'll further Goals #3 and #4 -- go to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2022-2023.

As a nonprofit that has existed for almost 20 years, the Wikimedia Foundation has a strong track record of accomplishment, of steady growth, of being efficient at using financial support, and of having a measurable impact on the way people access and use knowledge. We are the largest nonprofit website in the world, and the world's greatest collaborative information source. We are led by an experienced staff and board of trustees who are among the most accomplished in their field, with decades of experience in engineering and product development, community development, media and editorial leadership, law, advocacy, and nonprofit administration.

From the Wikimedia Foundation's beginnings in 2003, we have continued to innovate, resulting in a wide range of initiatives that have benefited millions of readers around the world. In our second year, for example, we created Wikimedia Commons (​​https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), which is the Wikimedia Foundation's online repository of media files -- photographs, video, and audio -- that are free to use, remix, and share just like Wikipedia's articles. Wikimedia Commons now has more than 80 million media files, and each year, people upload tens of thousands of photos to Commons through the Wiki Loves Monuments contest, which has set a record as the world's largest photo competition.

We also create new tools for editors as a way to make it easier and more efficient to contribute to Wikipedia. In January 2015, we introduced a Content Translation Tool that aids editors in translating existing Wikipedia articles into other languages (see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation). The tool has led to more than 1 million new articles in more than 200 languages (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslationStats), and we're regularly introducing new features and improvements to the Content Translation Tool. Most of the world's web content is in English, but many of the millions of people coming online speak a language other than English.

Another example of our innovative ways: In July 2020, we announced Abstract Wikipedia, a project that gives us a new way to generate baseline encyclopedic content in a multilingual fashion. The multi-year project will allow more contributors and more readers to share more knowledge in more languages -- leading to millions and millions of new articles across Wikipedia. We continue to make noteworthy progress, as we document at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia.

In the past decade, the Wikimedia Foundation has accomplished an extraordinary feat: We've worked with volunteer contributors around the world to make Wikipedia the most extensive free knowledge resource in the world. In 2003, when the Wikimedia Foundation first began operations, Wikipedia had fewer than 200,000 articles, including 115,000 in English. Today, Wikipedia has 60 million articles across more than 300 languages. Wikipedia also has 11 sister sites, including Wikimedia Commons, which has 90 million media files. Today, our websites are among the most visited in the world, read by people on every continent. The world comes to the Wikimedia sites to gain knowledge and to share knowledge, but there is still so much more knowledge to share on Wikipedia, and so many more people to reach around the world.

Billions of people are coming online in the next 10 years, and we need to make Wikipedia available in their language, on their device, across all regions of the world. This holds great promise - and huge implications - for how humans create and share knowledge, and the Wikimedia Foundation is focused on how to anticipate and adapt to these changes.

Every day, new knowledge is added to Wikipedia, and we must continue to support the community of contributors around the world that make Wikipedia and the Wikimedia sites possible. As our community has grown, the Foundation has also created new ways to support them. We’ve introduced a grant-making capacity, so that community members and organizations can apply for funding and resources to help support outreach in their local countries and languages. We've introduced programs that help community members integrate their efforts with local cultural and education institutions, such as museums, libraries, and universities. We also have programs to grow and diversify the languages, communities, and cultures represented on Wikipedia. We know this will make us an even better resource for all people, in all parts of the world. We're looking to continue and expand the support of this community as we look to the future.

These are just a handful of areas where we're looking to improve and expand our work in the coming years. We look forward to improving Wikipedia and our other knowledge projects side by side with our community of contributors -- including the projects’ millions of donors.