Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2022-2023/Feedback Appendix
During the month of April, we engaged with groups around the movement on the draft of the Foundation’s annual plan. We hosted 11 conversations - four conversations with staff and seven with communities - in addition to engaging with comments on the Talk page for the draft plan. Through these rich conversations, we received substantive insights and feedback on each of the four goals outlined in the plan.
Goal #1: Advance Knowledge Equity by bringing a stronger regional focus to our collective work.
- Understand unique regional challenges and how to provide support
- We heard throughout the conversations about specific regional challenges faced by different communities, which underlined the need for an approach that could recognize the context of different regions and the role of Foundation support alongside additional regional structures. We also continued conversations about how this approach could complement the regional hubs.
- Continued commitment to decentralization
- Volunteers also shared the need to identify how our current movement structures may be reinforcing knowledge inequities and the need for a regional approach to take that into consideration. “Countries outside the US are not an appendix.”
Goal #2: Deepen our commitment to Knowledge as a Service by strengthening how we prioritize and allocate product and tech support to 740+ Wikimedia projects, starting with Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
- Technical debt and handling technical requests from the communities
- During the community conversations, we heard from people about the need for additional support to handle technical debt and to improve responsiveness to technical requests. These include technical requests that volunteers may have started working to resolve, but that also require Foundation support to implement a solution given the collaborative nature of our projects.
- We heard about the need to prioritize technical requests, and potentially allocate more dedicated resources to retire technical debt on the projects.
- Increasing support for Wikimedia Commons
- We saw lots of engagement during two dedicated sessions about Wikimedia Commons. Many people highlighted practical issues around upload tools and the need for more consistent technology support.
- People spoke about the need to create a more welcoming experience for newcomers, with more intuitive tools and tutorials. “We have too much trust in people finding the trust and the support they need to be able to contribute meaningfully.”
- We learned about the nuances and risks of making it easier to upload images to Wikimedia Commons given some of the recent history.
- These conversations also highlighted the need for future movement conversations around what Commons should and should not do and its role within the larger Wikimedia ecosystem.
- Continued commitment to mobile access
- Several volunteers emphasize the need for reading and contributing experiences on mobile, especially for projects outside of Wikipedia.
Goal #3: Strengthen movement governance and health by supporting key priorities like the Movement Charter, the Universal Code of Conduct, and movement strategy implementation.
- People shared their insights about community health and burnout over the past two years and suggested exploring additional ways to support volunteers. This included a focus on harassment and abuse on the projects and supporting the volunteers that are constantly impacted by this activity.
Goal #4: Improve the Foundation’s performance and effectiveness by improving our translation/interpretation support, lifting up more meaningful metrics to assess our impact, and designing shared services to support a truly global working environment.
- Establishing metrics for success
- People shared their ideas on metrics to track progress across the movement on key issues such as the gender gap.
- Multilingualism as a best practice
- As one participant put it, “Multilingualism should be our superpower!” We offered live interpretation on many of the community conversations as part of the plan’s commitment to translation and interpretation, and it fueled conversations about the limitations of participating on movement issues, especially in spaces like Meta, for non-native English speakers. People pointed out that while the Wikimedia projects are some of the most multilingual spaces on the internet, most of the conversations about our movement do not reflect that same access across languages.
During this feedback period, we also invited groups across the movement to share their own plans to encourage more two-way planning and identify collective opportunities and challenges. Affiliate leaders and volunteers shared examples of their work and best practices that allowed us to connect the dots throughout these calls. We will continue to create ways to do more two-way planning across the movement.
Statistics[edit]
The annual plan had over 17,000 pageviews on Meta and saw hundreds of Wikimedians give feedback on the goals during the planning calls.