Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/WMAT Multi-Year-Plan Grant 2025-2027/Yearly Report (2025)
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Part 1: Understanding your work
[edit]Per the recent update on the Wikimedia Foundation Affiliates Strategy process, Wikimedia Affiliates that are General Support Fund grantees will fulfill their affiliate reporting requirements through their final or yearly grantee report.
If you are a Wikimedia Affiliate, you will use this form for your affiliate reporting and to address the affiliate health criteria. You do not need to submit a separate report to AffCom. Follow the guidance in the green boxes to report on how you met the corresponding affiliate health criteria.
If you are not a Wikimedia Affiliate, aligning your responses with the affiliate criteria is optional and not required.
1. Please share to what extent your programs, approaches, and strategies contributed to addressing the challenges you shared in your proposal. If they did not contribute as you believed they would, please share what obstacles you faced and what, if anything, you learned from them? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 1.) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 1.1 (Goal delivery). Describe how you actively delivered on mission goals, e.g. content creation.
Two important processes formed the foundation for our work this year:
Firstly, we finalised our mid-term strategy until 2030, to provide focus, alignment and direction. Here we worked with new approaches such as stakeholder analysis and subsequent focus group interviews with representatives of all central stakeholder groups.We also analysed strategy documents of selected like-minded communities.
Secondly, we hired a suitable person to support our team on this journey, particularly regarding outreach to younger audiences.
WMAT used 2025 to gear up for the anniversary in 2026 with following main goals:
- Make sure our communities feel valued and celebrated and to make the anniversary mainly about them and their tireless work
- Use the (media) attention around the anniversary for promoting our most important narratives (value of digital volunteering, the value of Wikipedia in the age of disinformation and in the face of a global democracy crisis, explaining how Wikipedia works)
- Being able to have an informed opinion and convincing narratives regarding Wikipedia and AI, the dominant public narrative at the moment
- Use the Wikipedia anniversary to attract young people
As outlined in our proposal, we hired a communication specialist for this purpose. The first challenge we encountered was that we discovered that the inflation of the past view years really impacted the level of salaries, even for junior positions and our salary levels at WMAT are hardly competitive, even for NGO standards. As we planned this as a part-time position we decided that flexibility regarding the hours was our only way to deal with the situation and we ended up with a great hire (Peter Zlabinger), but fewer hours than we wished for.
The new position could be filled by March, got a thorough onboarding plan and was ready to dive into the challenges starting May.
Within the first few months Peter managed to free up the rest of the team by taking over the communication tasks in the daily business (newsletter, website, annual report, social media) and start on building the foundation for our youth strategy which as part of our new multi-year strategy was finalised and community approved during our general assembly in June. Peter gathered inspiration and good practices from existing initiatives in the movement, mainly during the Wikimedia Youth Conference in Prague and in exchange with the CEE Youth Group (e.g. at the CEE Meeting in Thessaloniki). As a result, we also managed to start some pilots, such as an Western Armenian editing group with young expats in Vienna. We also established strategic partnership with youth groups such as Mensa Youth or the fact checking channel for young people BAIT Media. First projects with these groups are planned for 2026.
With Peter’s support we also planned two media campaigns (one general campaign around the anniversary and digital volunteering and one for the börthday presents from major Austrian cultural institutions - see Diff post linked below) for January 2026 which resulted in ~25 articles promoting our narratives in all major Austrian news outlets and across all regions. Part of the planning was a thorough briefing of volunteer interviewees, especially on the fairly new and fast changing topic of AI.
We also built on our success of last year’s Wikidata Contest “Coordinate Me”, refined it further and managed to organise another edition that even topped the previous year’s impressive metrics (four times as many Wikidata items created, over 550 newcomers and 1384 participants in total) and included new communities, e.g. in LatAm and Africa (growing the total number from 16 to 28 countries).
Last but not least, WMAT continued its close involvement in Wikimedia Europe. Our ED Claudia Garád was elected as president for a second term and contributed to the design of WMEUs first election process and multi-year strategy in this capacity. While the latter is still ongoing, the election design included innovation around skill based board selection, avoiding popularity contests, respecting the privacy and dignity of candidates and building trust among the member organisations. We plan to refine the conecept until the next elecations in 2027 and then share the concept more widely.
2. Is there a plan to build on the key successes you had? If yes, please describe the plan and if no, please share the limitations to do so. For instance, did the activities lead to any new priorities, ideas for activities, or goals for the future? (required)
An important achievement of 2025 - that has been in preparation for over a year - was the Wikimedia Residency around the Second Austrian Assessment Report on Climate Change (AAR2). In the context of a long-standing strategic partnership with the University of Innsbruck, the whole 800 page report has been published under a free-license (CC BY-SA 4.0) and the information was being used to expand Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects with important and up-to-date information on the climate crisis in Austria.
We plan to build on this key success by integrating the strategic partnership into a wider network of like-minded organisations and initiatives, nationally and internationally: For 2026 there will be a co-hosted event for science communicators interested in Wikimedia in Innsbruck and we plan to share our work and learn from others in the context of a joint pre-conference event in Paris during Wikimania (a pre-conference day on Information Integrity on Climate Change and a strategic strategic coalition with UNESCO and other potential partners).
3. Please provide a link to reports that detail the activities that took place in the last year. This can include an annual report, Meta pages, and websites. If there are no links available, briefly describe the implemented activities and programs below or upload any files. (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 3.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.1 (Affiliate health & resilience), 4.1 (Internal engagement), 4.2 (Community connection), and 4.3 (Partnerships and collaboration):
- Describe your activities engaging new users, new members for your decision-making body(ies), and developing leaders and organizers (2.1).
- Describe your activities creating or hosting spaces to encourage greater collaboration and engagement among your members (4.1).
- Describe how you engage with the contributing community that you serve and/or support (4.2).
- Describe your partnerships with other affiliates or with non-Wikimedia entities (4.3).
4. Are you interested in sharing what you achieved or learned this year with the wider community through different peer learning programs (e.g. Let's Connect program, Diff)? (optional)
We will share our learnings in the context of the events we co-organize (Wikimedia Europe General Assemblies, German language WikiCon) and with Diff posts on selected topics. We also work closely with the Volunteer Supporters Network and use this group to exchange on relevant topics.
5. Did you collect feedback from your community or target groups on how the activities implemented impacted them? If yes, please attach/provide information on the results (e.g. community surveys, stories, impact booklets/reports, interviews with partner institutions, etc). Did you collect other impact-specific data? (required)
For affiliates, the response to Question 5. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criteria 4.1 (Internal Engagement), 4.2 (Community Connection), or 4.3 (Partnerships & collaboration), where applicable.
WMAT’s annual community survey: [7]
6. During the fund period, did your efforts do any of the following? (required):
For affiliates, the response to Question 6. also partially addresses Affiliate Health Criterion 2.2 (Diversity balance).
- 6.1 Bring in participants from the following groups: women, neurodiverse people, LGBTQ+ groups, young people, speakers of minority languages, underrepresented geographical regions (ESEAP, LATAM, SSA, MENA, SA)
- 6.2 Develop content about the following underrepresented topics or groups of people: women, underrepresented geographical regions (ESEAP, LATAM, SSA, MENA, SA)
- 6.3 Support the retention of: Editors, Organizers, Partnerships
7. What, if any, effective tactics or approaches can you share that worked well when dealing with the programs under points 6.1-6.3 that you selected? (optional)
-
8. If you developed partnerships, which of the following factors most helped you to build partnerships? Please pick a MAXIMUM of the three most relevant factors (optional):
Permanent staff outreach, Board members’ outreach, Partners proactive interest
Part 2: Metrics for Year 1
[edit]| Wikimedia Metrics | Target (Year 1) | Results (Year 1) | Comments and tools used |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number of all participants | 4500 | 4605 | |
| Number of all editors | N/A | ||
| Number of new editors | N/A | 570 | |
| Number of retained editors | N/A | ||
| Number of all organizers | 340 | 495 | |
| Number of new organizers | N/A |
| Wikimedia project | Target - Number of created pages (Year 1) | Target - Number of improved pages (Year 1) | Result - Number of created pages (Year 1) | Result - Number of improved pages (Year 1) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | 17000 | 22946 | ||
| Wikimedia Commons | 60000 | 56391 | ||
| Wikidata | 50000 | 679266 | ||
| Wiktionary | ||||
| Wikisource | ||||
| Wikimedia Incubator | ||||
| Translatewiki | ||||
| MediaWiki | ||||
| Wikiquote | ||||
| Wikivoyage | ||||
| Wikibooks | ||||
| Wikiversity | ||||
| Wikinews | ||||
| Wikispecies | ||||
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
Tool used and comments (optional):
PetScan & GLAMorous2 (orphaned) still problematic and time intensive to use Eventmetrics (WMF) Program- & Eventdashboards (WikiEdu) still overwhelmed with the sheer numbers of our Wikidata contest
11. Did you set other quantitative and qualitative targets for your project (other metrics)? (required): Yes
11.1. Other Metrics.
In your application, you outlined some other open metrics that you would like to measure. Please fill out the achieved results for each of the open metrics you defined.
| Other Metrics | Description | Target | Results | Comments | Methodology |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Newly registered users | N/A | 300 | 570 | N/A | N/A |
| Community Motivation | in % | 80 | 82 | N/A | N/A |
| Free content beyond Wikimedia projects | Mainly our own project RegioWiki | 1000 | 812 | N/A | N/A |
| Quality content | N/A | 5200 | 6532 | N/A | N/A |
| Strategic partnerships | N/A | 60 | 64 | N/A | N/A |
Part 3: Skill Development / Capacity Building
[edit]12. Reflecting on your programmatic (external) and organizational (internal) work, did your grant support you to undergo any skill development that made a difference to your success? If yes, what skill was developed, and how did it lead to success? (e.g. received coaching on public speaking, attended training on nonviolent communication, hosted professional development conversations on leadership, learned and used a new tool for project management, etc.)? Can you share any materials? (required)
For affiliates, use this space (Question 12.) to address Affiliate Health Criteria 2.2 (Diversity balance) and 3.1 (Diverse, Skilled, and Accountable Leadership):
- Describe actions taken to prioritize gender balance in affiliate leadership, as well as any areas of diversity relevant to your affiliate's context (2.2).
- Describe the management, financial, or other leadership skills of your affiliate leaders. If you have a succession plan, please include it here (3.1).
- Describe any training or skill development (as outlined in the question above) (3.1).
- Incorporate into the annual report a disclosure of conflict of interests (if any) from the leadership (3.1).
Our strategy process and the resulting multi-year strategy profited from our team developing skills around effectuation and agile planning in previous years. We managed to find a good balance between classic strategic planning in areas with stability and decent visibility on the one hand and complex, fast chaning contexts on the other hand, which need a more flexible and adaptive approach. We are also in the process of developing a framework for assessing newideas and projects that we could translate and share once it is finalised.
13. What is one capacity/skill area that you would like to focus on for the next year? And how do you plan to achieve this capacity? (required)
2026 will have productivity as a focus area for reflection and skill development. Last year we looked into the possibilities of AI and how new tools can be used in an ethical way to boost productivity. This year we want to look into how this affects our processes and who can benefit how from increased productivity. For us it is currently the most potent tool to develop HR benefits, as monetary incentives are difficult, particularly now that we could not even get an inflation adjustment for our grant in 2026.
14. If you have additional information or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here. Use the space below to upload any additional documents that would be useful to understand your report.
For affiliates, also use this section (Question 14) to fulfill the Affiliate Health Criteria requirements.
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for affiliate governance, including affiliate leadership and membership with a breakdown of the demographics; how elections are conducted; how conflicts of interest are declared; and how decisions are made and communicated (2.2, 2.3, 3.1).
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for activities incorporating, promoting awareness about, or enforcing the Universal Code of Conduct in your affiliate's activities (3.3).
- Describe and link to any public-facing documentation for internal membership engagement, such as notes from your regular meetings and how you communicate to or involve your membership (4.1).
This report only contains information on the work of WMAT providing acccountability regarding the funds that our board and EDs are responsible for. Wiki Loves Monuments International which has been inculded in our grant, but is being run by an international group of volunteers, will have their own report and metrics on Meta.
Part 4: Financial reporting
[edit]For affiliates, also use this section (Part 4: Financial reporting) to address Affiliate Health Criterion 3.2 (Financial & Legal Compliance).
| Description | Amount spent (EUR) |
|---|---|
| Personnel costs | 274155 |
| Operational costs | 55794 |
| Programmatic costs | 104032 |
| Total (Year 1) | 424667 |
| Other revenue | 9314 |
| Remaining funds (Year 1) | N/A |
15. Please state the total amount spent from this fund in your local currency. (required)
424667 EUR
16. Please provide an overview of the amount spent from this fund in the following budget categories in your local currency. (required)
- Operational costs: 55794 EUR
- Programmatic costs: 104032 EUR
- Staff and contractor costs: 274155 EUR
17. Did you have any other revenue sources (e.g. other funding, membership contributions, donations)? (required): Yes
- 17.1. Provide the total amount received from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): 88492 EUR
- 17.2. Provide the total amount spent from other revenue sources in your local currency. (required): 9314 EUR
18. Provide a financial report document which will provide the details of funds received and spent in the currency of your fund. (required)
- Upload Documents, Templates, and Files.
- Report funds received and spent, if template not used.
There might be small deviations in the exact numbers that weere filled directly into the fluxx form as the year closure and auditing is still ongoing and can lead to minor changes in the final financial report.
Regarding the other income sources: Some of the third party grants / funds go beyond the calendar year 2025 and will only be spent in 2026.
18.2. If you have not already done so in your financial spending report, provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal. (optional)
N/A
19. Do you have any unspent funds from this funding?: No
20. Final confirmations (required)
- 20.1. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement? You must be in compliance with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement. In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the Wikimedia Foundation mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
- 20.2. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?
- Yes
- 20.3. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.
- Yes
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