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. Nineteen 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 50 million articles across 300 languages. Every month, people around the world view Wikipedia more than 15 billion times.

Even with this success, there is much, 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://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2019-annual-report.

Two key focus areas of our 2019-2020 annual plan (see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019) are:

1. Grow participation globally, focusing on emerging markets. We will expand the use of Wikimedia sites, projects, and products, across the globe, with a focus on increasing readership, participation, and partnerships in low-awareness or low-use geographies and languages, in order to bring the number and diversity of our users in line with rates of overall internet usage in those communities.

2. Modernize our product experience. We will make contributor and reader experiences useful and joyful; moving from viewing Wikipedia as solely a website, to developing, supporting, and maintaining the Wikimedia ecosystem as a collection of knowledge, information, and insights with infinite possible product experiences and applications.

Beyond our immediate goals is an overriding long-term one: Ensuring our projects have the resources to provide a knowledge base for decades to come. The Wikimedia Endowment, which we began in January 2016, is a permanent safekeeping fund to ensure a base level of support for Wikimedia projects in perpetuity. Our goal is to raise $100 million by 2026.

The Wikimedia Foundation is firmly committed to expanding our reach and impact -- making sure that Wikipedia remains at the forefront of the Internet's knowledge ecosystem.

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. This strategic collaboration helps ensure that we're following the most practical course in achieving our goals for the 2019-2020 fiscal year and beyond. As derived from our strategic plan, our programs for the fiscal year are syncing their work through three main strategies:

1. Make incremental but meaningful changes to our core products. For the first 12–18 months the priority will lay down the basics. It will work with the brand program to make significant design changes that will signal to the world that Wikipedia is a modern, mobile, delightful, useful trusted source of knowledge. It will require the Foundation to continue to improve our data capabilities, making strides in understanding consumption patterns, both on the projects and where our content is re-used as well as our efforts to drive awareness and traffic to our sites. We will continue our experiments to design new formats and build content for emerging communities and invest in those that are effective with our new readers.

2. Substantially extend our core product experiences. This priority will focus on deeper evolutions to the core product – integrating content from Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource and other projects into Wikipedia. This will be accompanied by powerful authoring tools and content creation mechanisms for editors that build upon new capabilities in AI-based content generation, structured data, and rich media to augment the article format with new, dynamic knowledge experiences. New content formats will come to life here as the outcomes of earlier experimentation. We will showcase these developments in a launch for Wikipedia’s 20th birthday in 2021.

3. Change the paradigm of free knowledge. Wikipedia will always be the engine of our mission and movement. We will build on its strength as a platform that disseminates knowledge for anyone to use, anywhere on the internet, in a clear, easy, identifiable manner. We will further develop the interfaces for our technical ecosystem, in order to enable people, institutions, sites, and machines to create, share, and access the sum of all knowledge, on and off the Wikimedia sites, in order to truly become the “essential infrastructure of free knowledge."

For more, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/Worldwide_readership.

As a nonprofit that has existed for more than 15 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, 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 65 million media files, and. each year, people upload tens of thousands of photos to Commons through the Wiki Loves Monuments contest, which set a record as the world's largest photo competition in 2011.

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 750,000 new articles in more than 200 languages (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ContentTranslationStats). We're regularly introducing new features and improvements to the Content Translation Tool, such as the new feature that lists suggested articles for users to translate, and the planned feature that offers personalized suggestions of topics. 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 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. (For more, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/July_2020_announcement and 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 54 million articles across nearly 300 languages. Wikipedia also has 11 sister sites, including Wikimedia Commons, which has 65 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 10-20 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 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 that we 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 addressing these challenges and more side by side with our community.