Talk:Towards a Healthy Ecosystem of Wikimedia Organizations

Wikimedia movement organizations draft paper open for community review

The Wikimedia Foundation and a group of experienced co-authors with affiliate background have drafted the paper Towards a Healthy Ecosystem of Wikimedia Organizations. This paper looks at the history and status quo of affiliates, hubs, and other close organizations. It proposes key questions to clarify roles and responsibilities, and to suggest focus areas for affiliates. Finally, it also makes preliminary recommendations to the Affiliations Committee, the interim Global Resource Distribution Committee, and the Wikimedia Foundation to address longstanding problems around entity recognition and resource allocation. This paper has been commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The first version published today has been co-authored by Wikimedia Foundation staff and Wikimedia organizational leaders Bobby Shabangu (Wikimedia South Africa), Lucy Compton-Reid (Wikimedia UK), and Tanveer Hasan (CIS-A2K, India), in consultation with Wikimedia affiliate leaders. You can learn more about its goals and background on the project page.

This paper doesn't contain any decisions. Instead, it proposes the problems to look at and possible solutions to explore and discuss. Any decisions will be discussed and made by the corresponding bodies after community reviews specific to each topic.

This paper aims to be presented as a proposal for the movement at Wikimania in August 2025 in Nairobi. Before that, the authors want to share the draft to receive early feedback from the affiliates and the communities. The feedback period starts on July 8 and ends on July 29.

Please leave your feedback on the paper’s discussion page. Some of this feedback might be already incorporated into the paper before its presentation at Wikimania. Some might identify key topics to be discussed after its official presentation. JVargas (WMF) (talk) 19:34, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

What are the "WMF Core Metrics"?

Is there a link? Are they these? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_Plan/2023-2024/Goals#Measuring_progress_toward_our_goals ? 2603:800C:EF0:A480:3CE6:D157:C315:7C4E 23:04, 8 July 2025 (UTC)

Good question and good catch! Now those words are linked to Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2025-2026/Goals#Draft metrics selection, which provides an overview to the metrics mentioned. Qgil-WMF (talk) 20:38, 9 July 2025 (UTC)

Link to research about readership decline?

This is a bit tangential, but regarding

research shows declines in awareness, readership, registrations, active editors, and administrator retention

- I can't find statements about a readership decline on the linked page (Research:Knowledge Gaps Index/Measurement/Readers Survey 2023; also, surveys like this aren't really designed to measure changes in overall usage volume). Was this link meant to point to a different study?

(Apropos, since the preceding sentence highlights global trends that will strongly affect how we work: declining trust in online information [including Wikipedia?], the rise of generative AI, and increasing threats to free speech and knowledge sharing: It's probably worth keeping in mind that there isn't a lot of evidence so far tying these global trends to those declines in our metrics. Even in case of generative AI, where such a causal influence seems quite plausible, several academic studies have so far yielded mixed results, see e.g. the overview at Research:Newsletter/2025/March#So_again,_what_has_the_impact_of_ChatGPT_really_been? and additional caveats.)

Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:26, 11 July 2025 (UTC)

Hi HaeB, In much of the world I think we are dealing with two unconnected problems. mediawiki is a better editing environment on PC than on the phone, and some of the tech giants who repackage our content are not strictly adhering to the Attribution and Share Alike parts of the licence. We also have countries that want to restrict our coverage of certain topics. Improving the editing environment for smartphone editors is really a task for the WMF, though there may be some things that chapters and projects can help with - for example would a maximum section size help? But given that in some parts of the world the smartphome is the dominant internet access device, our PC focus has repercussions on our lack of diversity. Similarly I suspect the WMF has more influence over tech giants than chapters or individual editors. I'm pretty sure our readership is still growing, we just need more reusers to add links to where on our sites they sourced material from. Where I suspect the chapters could really make a difference is in retaining the editors who've already made a few hundred edits but have hit some barriers. The first editathon I went to back in 2010 was in part a skillshare/wikisurgery for a bunch of existing wikipedians, and I think we should refocus outreach on people who'd appreciate tips on fixing and preventing edit conflicts rather than as Harry Mitchell once put it trying to sell people a new hobby. Remember we still have lots of new editors clicking the edit button and joining the community, our problem as ever is that few of the people who fix one typo go on to adopt a new hobby. WereSpielChequers (talk) 11:15, 18 July 2025 (UTC)

Thank you WereSpielChequers for these reflections — in particular your comment on the potential for affiliates to make a difference on editor retention. We've added a bit more recognition of this potential in the Appendix in the description of the affiliate role vis-a-vis supporting communities. BVershbow (WMF) (talk) 16:33, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, HaeB, for spotting this discrepancy. The readership picture is indeed more complex, and our Movement Communications team is actually preparing a larger share-out on data relevant to that. For now, we've removed that from the list of trends impacting the movement's work. BVershbow (WMF) (talk) 16:31, 6 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks Ben! Looking forward to that share-out.

I assume the Movement Metrics published by your colleagues from the Research and Decision Science team (which you had already linked to in the same sentence regarding registrations and active editors) are of interest in that context, too, in particular these two charts.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:25, 27 August 2025 (UTC)

PS: The Movement Communications team has indeed now published mw:Readers/Newsletter_updates#August_2025:_Newsletter_#1, observing e.g After an increase during the pandemic, pageviews have remained relatively flat. During this time, internet usage globally has only continued to increase, and pointing out that This means that the percentage of internet users that find, use, and appreciate Wikipedia is decreasing significantly.

I think it makes great sense to draw more attention to this decline in relative usage of Wikimedia projects, which by the way has been going on for much longer than the 2019-2025 timespan examined there (considering that pageviews had been mostly stagnant or slighly declining since at least 2013 already, see this 2013-2019 chart, while global Internet usage had been growing steadily during those years as well).

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:01, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

Some comments

Unfortunately, I have not had to deal with groups and affiliates, so I will only write a few comments. Of course, this is just my opinion.

"...you find several Affiliates competing with each other." But is it bad that there are several groups and people can choose where to participate? In addition, if the participants have serious conflicts, then, in my opinion, working in one group will be problematic. The practice of such mergers is extremely contradictory.

"you come for the knowledge and stay for the people" Perhaps this is more desirable than real. In my opinion, many people work on articles and are not ready to do anything else.

"These organizations can bring unique expertise and connections to the movement, building bridges to adjacent movements and knowledge professions." Of course, but they can bring not only the desirable, but also the undesirable. Even if their goals seem close, the ways to achieve them in their conditions may be completely different. You should not forget about yourself either. After all, not only activists participate in Wikipedia and its sister projects, so there may be risks.

The text talks too much about strategies and the Strategy of the Movement. It seems to me that this is too abstract and ambitious (naive?) from the current reality. Or, for example, “By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge....” But wasn’t that still the case in 2017? In a sense, Wikimedia projects have been playing this role for many years.

Any indicators, including those for grants, can only provide a rough estimate. There is no need to pay too much energy and attention to them. Proeksad (talk) 23:58, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

Visible, Vibrant, Valuable: Affiliates at the Heart of a Thriving Movement

@JVargas (WMF) thanks for the conversation at Wikimania Nairobi about the paper Towards a Healthy Ecosystem of Wikimedia Organizations. So far your paper didn't ignite a lively debate. I wrote a response in the paper: Visible, Vibrant, Valuable: Affiliates at the Heart of a Thriving Movement - which I belief might resonate better within the Wikimedia Movement. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 19:12, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

Dear @Ad Huikeshoven, thank you for this generous and expansive response/rework of the paper! It is wonderful to see that we are largely in agreement on the substance, but the re-framing, tone shifts, and language changes you suggest are very welcome and compelling — we love how your version moves things from a "key questions and problems to be solved" framing more toward an appreciative inquiry approach. Please allow us a little more time to digest this and we may circle back for further discussion. We too would like to see a more lively response to the paper and are considering some next steps to boost engagement. And as it says at the top, the paper is very much a draft, and so could theoretically make adjustments based on your approach. Thank you so much for the time and thoughtfulness you have brought to this process so far. More soon! :) BVershbow (WMF) (talk) 16:18, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

Affiliations Committee draft recommendations for the ecosystem

Hi Everyone,

I am happy to share draft recommendations and documentation from the Affiliations Committee [1] on three strategic areas that need continuous consideration to best support Wikimedia affiliates. These areas are: 1) overall affiliate model, 2) capacity development, and 3) conflict management.

Context

The key areas were proposed at the Affiliations Committee strategic retreat in November 2024 [2] and, as a result, working groups were convened within the Affiliations Committee to strategically define potential future approaches to improve the support to the affiliates. These conversations have also aligned with the pilot proposed by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2024 around updating the ecosystem of Wikimedia organizations [3] and can be in a way considered as the input of the expertise of the Affiliations Committee to the ongoing conversation.

Content

For clarity of presentation, purpose and expected outcomes of the proposal are presented first to be then followed by the actual outline of the proposal itself. Finally, a potential future role of the Affiliations Committee in respective areas is put forward.

Affiliate model. The overall definition of the affiliate model has the biggest implications to the future of the affiliates and their impact. The Affiliations Committee has given due consideration to existing landscape and future options, and is boldly [4] proposing an efficient overall model with reduced layers and complexity. In this model, a proposal is made to connect more clearly the rights of the organizations to their responsibilities. At the same time, the Affiliations Committee recognizes that there are some big questions in this that need wider and deeper input from across the movement, so we are proposing some questions for your consideration and further input.

Capacity development. A key area for the affiliates to become more effective and sustainable, creating more impact. The Affiliations Committee has especially considered the learning spaces and materials that are available, and from its own perspective to improve the onboarding process. Areas of governance, leadership, and community support stand out for continuous improvement, and as key factors for future success.

Conflict management. When it comes to conflicts, prevention tops reactive management at all times. For it to function better, there needs to be a holistic approach with professional support systems. In its documentation the Affiliations Committee has mapped out, based on its experience, the key principles, resources, and structures needed for improvements.

Conversations and next steps

The Affiliations Committee has started collecting feedback on some of these ideas at the regional conferences in September and October. Now, we are moving into a virtual feedback phase, collecting feedback on these draft proposals through the month of November 2025. We will be following conversations on meta and will participate in some regional calls. Your input will then be integrated to form finalized proposals of the Affiliations Committee for updating the future ecosystem of the movement organizations and its own ways of working. We look forward to hearing from you!

Regards,

Jeffrey Keefer

Chair, Affiliations Committee

Links:

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/Recommendations_November_2025

[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliations_Committee/News/Issue_4#Affiliate_Strategy_Updates

[3] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Updating_the_ecosystem_of_Wikimedia_organizations

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold

FULBERT (talk) 16:43, 12 November 2025 (UTC)