Product and Technology Advisory Council/February 2026 PTAC Annual plan response

Introduction

The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) was asked to provide input on the foundation's prompts/questions ahead of planning for the upcoming fiscal year. We have done our best to listen to our various communities, read public conversations, and draw on our personal knowledge, expertise, and experiences in product and technology development to explore these topics. Overall, we see an urgent need for the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia communities to embrace experimentation as the surrounding digital ecosystem evolves and the ways people consume knowledge continue to change. This experimentation will require new approaches to building tools, supporting contributors, and reaching audiences across Wikimedia projects. However, it is imperative that this work be done with clear communication and with the needs of existing communities in mind.

Across these areas, we believe WMF's product and technology work could also create opportunities to address historical inequities within Wikimedia communities stemming from uneven access to infrastructure and influence over product decisions. The rest of this document is structured around the topics raised by the foundation in its public consultation.

Global Trends

In alignment with community input, we identify the most salient global trends as:

Rapid advances in AI and large-language models (many powered in fundamental ways by Wikimedia content).
A growing shift to non-textual content consumption across a range of platforms.
Increasing power of large tech firms in shaping internet experiences.
Declining public trust in online information.

The most important trend, AI, poses several distinct threats:

Issues related to disintermediation (including AI summaries on search engines, reduced viewership, the potential for reduced donations and contributions from newcomers).
Increased competition between Wikimedia and AI-generated content, much of which draws from Wikimedia content.
New forms of attacks on Wikimedia content, institutions, and technical infrastructure (e.g., scraping, spam).

These trends reflect significant disruption that requires rapid responses, flexibility, and experimentation. In responding to these trends, we believe it is important to:

Emphasize the type of human-centric content generation and curation that makes Wikimedia unique.
Invest in ways to mitigate the damaging effects of AI/LLM while promoting experimentation around useful approaches to the technology.
Learn and borrow from others outside the Wikimedia movement.
Identify ways to reach and connect with new audiences through new modalities (e.g., through audio/visual content).
Develop new ways to measure impact that go beyond pageviews to Wikimedia websites.

Experimentation

We believe experimentation is one of the primary tools for addressing the threats caused by the Global Trends identified above. PTAC has previously published a document outlining the importance of increased experimentation in Wikimedia projects; this led to the Product and Tech Experiment Tracker to increase community visibility about WMF-led experiments. We are also pleased by the growing interest in experimentation within the movement. Although the purpose of this statement is not to advocate for specific experiments, we:

Encourage the creation of better social and technical infrastructure for conducting and evaluating experiments by WMF, affiliates, and community members.
Emphasize the importance of increased trust and improved communication around experimentation.
Support the principles of codesign with communities, minimization of risk to projects, and safeguarding community health.
Argue that, where possible, experimentation should be used to address historical needs that were not addressed, including uneven access to the infrastructure and limited influence over product decisions.

Newcomers

Decreasing rates of newcomers remain a major threat to the long-term sustainability of our projects. We need a sustained influx of newcomers to keep the projects not just growing, but maintainable, affordable, and enjoyable. This requires adapting to global trends related to shifting user experiences on the web. We recommend:

Continuing an emphasis on mobile editing, as per our previously published recommendation.
Promote experimentation with building new audiences.
Promote new forms of engagement, including types of contributions that don’t involve adding or editing articles directly.

Users with Extended Rights

Users with extended rights (UWER) continue to play a vital role in communities, but their ranks have not been growing and, in many communities, have even been shrinking. To counter this trend, we should:

Invest in more effective tools to increase the efficiency of work by limited cohorts of UWER.
Promote work, experiments, and interventions to recruit and promote more UWER and identify clearer as well as new and more effective pathways for users to move toward these positions.

Collaboration

It is critical to support the humans who make Wikimedia’s approach unique. In particular, we see value in investments that will allow Wikimedia contributors to connect with each other. This includes:

Investing in new communication channels and promoting ways for contributors to find each other, connect, and exchange skills, advice, and resources.
Support collaboration in both online and offline spaces and explore approaches that bridge the two.
Respond to the rising use of synchronous communication and group chats within the movement, which have replaced conversations that once took place in traditional and official channels.
Support further experimentation with decentralizing tool-building and experimentation among affiliates (e.g., in the Wikimedia CEE HUB model).

Reading

Declines in readership have already been discussed in the global trends section above and have influenced a range of the topics and recommendations made above. In addition to those recommendations, we recommend:

Spending time to reimagine the reading experiences and, in particular, to invest in reading experiences that include video, audio, and other non-text modalities.