"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. Seventeen 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 40 million articles across nearly 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://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/. As of this writing, our current annual plan is mapped out at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Final

A few key areas of focus for our 2017-2018 annual plan are:

Reach: Everyone should be able to freely share in the free knowledge on our projects. We are making it a priority to reach new readers and contributors around the world and improve the experience for all, including those on mobile devices. To do this, we will better understand and respond to the needs of our global readers and contributors through research, new technologies, effective programs, strategic partnerships, and more.

Communities: Volunteers and open collaboration are the pillars of the Wikimedia movement. It is the efforts of the global community of volunteers that have made Wikimedia possible, and the community's health and sustainability are essential to our future. We will increase volunteer retention and engagement through improved programs, experiences, and resources for community members. We will invest in capacity and leadership building to support the continued growth and health of Wikimedia communities.

Knowledge: Sharing in the sum of all knowledge is the vision that inspires Wikimedians around the world. 15 years of volunteer work created the world's largest and most beloved shared knowledge resource. We will increase and diversify knowledge by developing high-priority curation and creation tools and services for user needs. We will support programs and partnerships that increase the quality, breadth, and diversity of free knowledge in our projects.

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 over the next 10 years.

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 2017-18 fiscal year and beyond. As derived from our strategic plan, our programs for the fiscal year are syncing their work through three main goals: 1: Understand our users to better serve their needs (“Reach"); 2: Increase volunteer retention and engagement (“Community"); and 3: Increase and diversify contribution of knowledge (“Knowledge").

We're investing in areas that we believe the Foundation is uniquely positioned to address, including readership and reach, volunteer retention and engagement, and support for knowledge creation. We will deepen and expand work in our newly clarified strategic directions, while strengthening the core work that supports our communities and projects. For more details, please see our 2017 - 2018 annual plan at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2017-2018/Final, and our Strategic Plan and discussion that is taking our projects through the year 2030, at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017.

We've worked with the Wikimedia community to shape our new Movement Strategy, which we are implementing

As a nonprofit that has existed for 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 35 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.The tool has led to more than 300,000 new articles in more than 200 languages. 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.

The Wikimedia Foundation prides itself on being one of the world's most transparent nonprofits, and our commitment to transparency is embedded in everything we do, including the way we monitor our progress.

Every year, we issue an Annual Report that summarizes the year, and an Annual Plan that meticulously reviews our goals from the previous year, details what worked (or didn't), why, and how we can achieve our new goals in the year ahead. We also have interactive metrics tables -- online at http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/# -- that detail our number of pageviews, mobile pageviews, new monthly editors, active monthly editors (five or more edits), overall articles, new articles created per day, and monthly edits, and many other categories. In January 2016, we introduced a new metric, “unique devices," that more accurately represents mobile readership while prioritizing user privacy and security. The majority of our work is conducted or documented on public web pages. Our monthly metrics meetings -- where the staff covers Wikimedia developments in engineering, fundraising, grantmaking, programs, legal, community advocacy, communications, and other areas -- are streamed live and published online for public viewing.. On the Foundation's home page, we link to our audited and unaudited financial statements, the Form 990 that we file annually with the IRS, the minutes of all Board meetings, as well as many other materials. Many are translated into multiple languages, and often they are accompanied by detailed FAQs.

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 39 million articles across nearly 300 languages. Wikipedia also has 11 sister sites, including Wikimedia Commons, which has 35 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 grantmaking 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.