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.