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 55 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 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/2020-annual-report/. And our latest annual plan is at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Medium-term_plan_2019/Annual_Plan_2021-2022

Three key focus areas of our 2021-2022 annual plan are:

1) Ensuring a thriving movement. We need to ensure that the volunteer contributors whose work drives Wikipedia and our other projects have the systems they need to succeed and the tools and information to safely succeed within those systems. For the 2021-2022 fiscal year, we are addressing key movement governance issues, including a movement charter, leadership training, and creating enforcing mechanisms for our Universal Code of Conduct. Among other things, we are also addressing ways to be more welcoming to diverse contributors, with systems encouraging global growth.

2) Ensuring an evolved platform on which that movement can thrive. In order to ensure that our technical systems can support our aspirations for equitable, global growth we are focusing on ensuring that our platform and processes are ready and able to invite all of the world’s population to join us in creating and sharing free knowledge. This includes making our content more machine readable and scaling our ability to use relationships between content. We are working to ensure that people in emerging communities have the same level of performance for their contribution workflows as those in established communities.

3) Ensuring a resilient and inclusive Foundation to carry out this work. A resilient, inclusive organization is essential to meet the needs of our growing global movement, and to champion free knowledge throughout the world. To do this we maintain a massive and complex technical collaboration platform, steward Wikimedia’s public image, drive readership and use of Wikimedia content, fund a global network of volunteers and affiliates, and advocate for free knowledge around the world. In the 2021-2022 fiscal year, we will continue to invest in creating a diverse workforce and an inclusive workplace.

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_Medium-term_plan_2019/Annual_Plan_2021-2022 and at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Wikimedia_Foundation%27s_2021-2022_Annual_Plan_Overview.pdf. Here are ways we’re implementing our priorities for the 2021-2022 fiscal year:

* To ensure a thriving movement: We’re implementing a new grants strategy that’s aligned with our strategic direction and local decision making, which we believe will result in content and editor growth in underrepresented communities. In July 2021, we announced the grants strategy (see https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/07/15/community-resources-announces-new-funding-strategy/), which decentralizes decision-making as we work with regional committees to reach underrepresented communities -- including through a new Community Fund that offers flexible support and funding for volunteer Wikimedia contributors. In October, we detailed our new Wikimedia Alliances Fund (see https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/10/25/launch-of-the-wikimedia-alliances-fund/), which supports organizations that share our values to amplify free knowledge in underrepresented regions. The Alliances Fund is designed to increase the skills of contributors and editors, bring in more content to the Wikimedia projects, and increase awareness of the projects.

* To ensure an evolved platform on which that movement can thrive: During the 2021-2022 fiscal year, we’re continuing to expand on our ongoing desktop improvement project (see https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/08/12/the-story-behind-wikipedias-upcoming-new-look/). The work, which introduces features that allow Wikipedia to be more intuitive for internet users, was developed in close consultation with our global community, piloting a range of changes on different language Wikipedias to develop compelling reading and editing features -- including improved searching. Another key direction: Bolstering the work that we’re doing with machine learning, which will make the knowledge on the Wikimedia projects more discoverable. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Machine_Learning.

* To ensure a resilient and inclusive Foundation to carry out this work: To help implement this, we’re making sure that all Foundation staff have access to engaging, accessible learning opportunities that drive the needed skills and capabilities for our mission; we’re making sure that Foundation leadership has access to organizational data, insights, and dashboards for impactful decision making; and we’re doing racial-equity trainings for all people managers and doing at least two Diversity Equity Inclusion workshops for staff.

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 58 million articles across nearly 300 languages. Wikipedia also has 11 sister sites, including Wikimedia Commons, which has 80 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.