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Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan 2025–2026

Annual Plan Feedback summary

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For Fiscal Year (FY) 2025-2026, the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual planning process has focused on involving communities early and often through continuous conversations.

The journey

We began discussing the ideas that would turn into goals and objectives at Wikimania 2024. In January 2025, we invited the movement to think with us about some of the larger strategic puzzles in the year ahead through 14 questions around editing, metrics, reading, and other topics. In early March, we published the Product and Technology Department’s annual plan narrative and draft OKRs for community review. And in April, we published additional draft material including the summary, goals, our financial model, and a budget overview. We heard feedback throughout the process with the materials evolving and changing e.g. the number of global trends changed from four to five and we developed the detail of the work through the discussions.

The engagement

This year's engagement has featured active conversations both on-wiki and in co-created spaces. On-wiki pageviews- including French, Japanese, English, Russian and beyond - where the annual plan was discussed were up 33.6% compared to last year. This increase was driven mostly by an 166% increase in the number of comments on Meta-Wiki alone.

~937 Wikimedians - up 9% from last year - engaged in co-created community spaces that held deep dives into the global trends shaping the plan. In recent months there have also been dozens of conversations on specific areas of work in community channels which offer guidance to the Wikimedia Foundation for the year ahead.

Next steps and board approval

This plan is built through continuous conversations and is always evolving. The Foundation will continue to shape its annual plan work and specific goals based on the feedback shared here and throughout the year, as part of our commitment to evaluate, iterate, and improve. During the June Board meeting on June 18, the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation voted unanimously to approve the current draft and budget. You can read more about the resolution approving the Annual Plan and budget. Thank you to everyone who contributed your feedback, and for partnering with us in the year ahead.

Feedback themes

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The world is undergoing rapid changes in our social, political, regulatory, and technological landscapes. In March, the Foundation's annual summary of Global Trends highlighted those with the greatest impact on the Wikimedia projects, including polarization, declining trust in online information, and the value of human created knowledge. Participants met these trends with shared curiosity and concern, agreeing that our annual plan should prioritize responding to the needs and changes in the world around us.

One of the global trends discussed was neutrality. This discussion kicked off with a Diff post by the Wikimedia Foundation highlighting the global decline of trust in online information and the fragmented consensus about what information is true. Wikipedia's reputation for neutrality is both more relevant and under greater scrutiny, creating a need for communities to strengthen their policies and practices. Across several calls and online discussions (like the CEE Catchup, MENA Connect, Africa Baraza, South Asia Open Community Call and Global workshops), participants agreed with the broader need to strengthen neutral point of view policies, while highlighting potential barriers, including vulnerability to the influence of individual bad actors, the challenge of explaining neutrality to newcomers and the public, and non-neutrality in local language media and source material, especially in cases of state-owned media. These barriers are especially difficult for smaller language communities. Participants discussed how some NPOV policies may not have been updated for many years and how perception and rules around neutrality are different across regions. They also discussed the need to better explain policies to newcomers and those outside of the movement.

Volunteers identified a broad array of technological, social, and systemic barriers that hinder positive engagement in our projects. These barriers included harassment and reporting processes, edit conflicts, gatekeeping practices, language and cultural differences, limited visibility of important community metrics, ineffective data collection, language bias in search results, mobile editing tool accessibility, existing tool improvements, the Request for Adminship (RFA) process, notability requirements, and external interference in information access.

2. Wikimedians remain focused on improving the editing experience, but have diverse views and needs

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Over 40% of Wikimedians who participated in the Meta-Wiki discussions shared their insights on editing topics, focusing on what makes editing experiences rewarding or frustrating, as well as ways to improve collaboration on wikis. Common themes across these comments included the need for more supportive and inclusive editing environments, better conflict resolution mechanisms, and stronger protection against abuse. While these concerns are not new, they emphasize the ongoing importance of enhancing tools, increasing the visibility of existing resources, and developing programs that help volunteers resolve disputes.

The conversation on recognition and motivation showed connections are key to making contributions feel meaningful. Some Wikimedians prefer formal accolades, while others value simple peer acknowledgments. Many emphasized the importance of peer-to-peer connections, advocating for more Wikimania scholarships and recognition of the real-world impact of their contributions, which connects to upcoming Foundation work around Wiki Experiences 1.2. Others felt that technical improvements and bug fixes should take priority over recognition systems.

Discussions about communication during volunteer collaborations also showed a variety of opinions. While some contributors are content with current technical tools, others called for more structured support, such as personalized task suggestions, task prioritization, and better citation tools. A common concern emerged around improving connections with local communities and increasing visibility of ongoing projects, such as WikiProjects. Proposed solutions ranged from technical improvements and localized notifications to more private communication channels. This diversity of perspectives highlights that Wikimedians are motivated by different factors and seek stronger connections, both online and in person.

3. Safety, security, and privacy are top of mind

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Over the past 6 months, there have been numerous discussions on both Wikipedia and in the public media about the safety of Wikimedians across wikis and around the globe. For example, communities have been actively involved in discussing and responding to the ANI case, the potential for editors to be fingerprinted and identified, and another case in France following a threat by a newspaper. Others have asked questions about the Foundation's continued legal, staffing, and technological presence in the United States or the security risks posed by retaining IP addresses.

Globally, we see a rise in malicious behavior targeting our platform, including DDoS and attempts to compromise our users' accounts, which has also driven a sense of urgency to make information security and account protections even more central to our work.

These concerns transcend major headline incidents and impact both the willingness of Wikimedians to take on greater responsibilities and the overall functioning and long term trajectory of the Wikimedia projects. As part of these discussions, the Wikimedia Foundation shared its ongoing, longstanding approach to risk management, is organising a pre-conference event at Wikimania for users with extended rights focused on safety and privacy, as well as annual plan commitments around strengthening attack prevention and mitigation, improving user privacy and safety protections, and protection of volunteers and our projects against legal threats. These efforts are longstanding and part of the Foundation's regular annual plans, which look at a range of global trends and user needs to determine where we should focus efforts.

4. Contributor workflows on mobile have strong potential to bring in new and unheard voices to the Wikimedia movement

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In February, the Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) published their first draft recommendation, urging the Wikimedia Foundation to prioritize mobile experiences. The recommendation highlights mobile contributions as having the greatest potential to diversify and expand the Wikimedia movement's global community, especially those who focus on content creation but are best able to edit from their phones. The PTAC saw this work as more important than improved image uploading, growing the number of administrators, or work supporting new editors on desktop. It also presents a major opportunity to draw in new contributors, another PTAC priority and one that heavily targets potential Wikimedians who use a mobile device as their primary or exclusive device for accessing the internet. For this reason, much of the work planned next year under Wiki Experiences 1, including further development of Edit Checks, is being designed for mobile-first usage.

5. Wikimedians are debating the risks, opportunities, and inevitabilities of artificial intelligence

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Changes in the way people find and consume knowledge online are creating new challenges for the Wikimedia ecosystem, including around how contributors create and manage content and how to bring in new readers. This annual planning season, both the Wikimedia Foundation and volunteers looked at a wide range of potential approaches to face this moment, including new approaches with small and large language models.

Discussions on the annual plan talk page covered a range of topics, focused in particular on the potential pitfalls of these technologies, including the US-centricity of major AI and LLM models as well as the exploitation of Wikipedia content, data, and APIs to drive them. Others have suggested that more investment in tools powered by machine learning, AI, or similar approaches is needed for improving various editing workflows, most notably Wikidata querying. The publication of the Foundation's first ever AI strategy brief, which focused on the use of AI to support editors, also spurred active debate on both Village Pumps and the strategy brief's talk page. Participants raised questions about the accuracy and utility of models, whether and how predictive and generative technologies are already used on the platform, as well as how and why these models would be used in their workflows moving forward. In June, Wikimedia Foundation posts on the English Wikipedia Village Pump about two projects, Tone Check, and a planned early-stage experiment on simple article summaries, sparked extensive debate and questioning about the role and value of machine learning and AI on the Wikimedia projects, particularly in relation to content creation. In response to the Tone Check discussions, volunteers and staff met on Discord to discuss project risks and opportunities. The Foundation paused the article summaries experiment in response to community requests.

Amid all these discussions, two things are clear. First, individual volunteers have divergent views about and understanding of AI technologies, both in the world and on the Wikimedia platforms. Second, volunteers and the Wikimedia Foundation are firmly aligned that Wikimedia projects should be powered by human knowledge, curation, and judgement; if and when models are used, they should serve this broader aim, aligned with shared values around transparency and adaptability.

6. Wikimedia infrastructure needs clearer pathways for responsible use by both humans and machines

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In an op-ed published in the English Wikipedia Signpost (also on Diff), Foundation staff highlighted a rapidly emerging challenge: our content is free, our infrastructure is not, and the costs to run our infrastructure have been growing. Demand for Wikimedia content has spiked rapidly since early 2024, due in large part to traffic by scraping bots collecting training data for large language models and other use cases. This heavy reuse is often done without appropriate attribution, while also causing significant overload on the underlying infrastructure that keeps our sites free for everyone. In response to these trends, the Foundation is looking to establish pathways for responsible content reuse under Wiki Experiences 5: Responsible Use of Infrastructure, enabling us to prioritize human and mission-oriented access first and to protect our infrastructure.

Comments from the community included urging the Foundation to enable scraping from trusted bots and community members, asking questions about the role of Enterprise, and how to leverage our API strategy.

7. Wikimedians are curious and engaged around off platform experiments to bring in new audiences

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"Future Audiences" is one of three "buckets" of Product & Technology investment in the 2024–2025 and 2025–2026 annual plans. Its purpose is to explore strategies for expanding beyond our existing audiences of readers/reusers and contributors in an effort to truly reach everyone in the world as the "essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge". It connects to the Global Trends that highlight the tendency of people to participate more eagerly in online spaces that provide a rewarding sense of connection, including social media, gaming, and chat platforms.

Discussions around Future Audiences work spanned both live community calls and discussions on-wiki. On the annual plan talk page, volunteers shared varied responses to whether and why Wikimedia should target new users on external platforms as well as the costs and benefits associated with such experimentation. In earlier calls, participants suggested Wikipedia speedruns as something to build on. This idea led directly to the Wikispeedia Roblox experiment, a smaller, time-limited experiment to see if the Roblox platform can effectively reach younger audiences. Relatedly, the short video project using repackaged Wikipedia articles on external platforms has received generally positive community reception.

Overall, the feedback we received from the Movement illustrates the complexity of our ecosystem and highlights the diverse needs within our global volunteer collaborative platform.

Statistics

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On Wiki Material

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Page Pageviews - as of 5 June
Main annual plan draft pages (including OKR pages) 76,605
Main annual plan talk pages 10,299
Product & Technology OKRs talk page 5,949 (pre page-move to become the main talkpage, not counted separately)
Local posting of annual plan content and invitations* 136,125**
Other pages 7,624 (diff links) + 657 (signpost link)
TOTAL 237,259 (Up 33.6% on last year)

* Note that pageview calculations for local wikis includes data from Village Pumps, where other content appears on the same page.

** Most village pumps and community spaces do not have a way for us to measure specific pageviews for a topic so this is pageviews for the period the plan was being discussed and posted

All on-wiki postings/conversations about the annual plan are listed below.

Co-Created Community Space statistics

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Date Discussion Participants (estimate)
May 2025 Annual Planning and Global Trends Community Workshop 52
May 2025 Future Audiences Community Call ~10
May 2025 ESEAP Strategy Summit 2 61
May 2025 Afrika Baraza 80
May 2025 MENA Connect 50
May 2025 Russian Wikipedia and Vector 2022 & Universal Language Selector 15
June 2025 African Wikimedia Admins 30
April 2025 South Asia Open Community Call 58
April 2025 CEE Catch Up 54
April 2025 Wikipedia Apps – Offline Usage Community Calls 2
January 2025 – June 2025 Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia Volunteers' Corner 15
June 2025 WikiCauseries 35
June 2025 Global Resources call 31
March 2025 Annual Planning Community Workshop (NYC) ~30
November 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Discussions with the Commons Community 32
December 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Discussions with the Commons Community 35
January 2025 Wikimedia Foundation Discussions with the Commons Community 50
February 2025 Wikimedia Foundation Discussions with the Commons Community 38
February 2025 Future Audiences Community Call ~15
January 2025 CAC hosted Conversation with Trustees 59
October 2024 WikiCon North America 2024, Hubs discussion ~40
August 2024 Wikimania 2024 various
November 2024 Let's Connect Learning clinic: Tools for Wikimedia Communities ~40
March 2025 Introduction to Temporary Accounts ~20
December 2024 Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024 50
September 2024 Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024, Temporary accounts ~30
September 2024 Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024, Resource distribution 20
February 2025 Former and current Foundation trustee workshop 25
TOTAL ~937

Engagement

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Over the last few years we have continued to evolve and improve our collaborative planning process. The Wikimedia Foundation’s mission remain constant, while the work and deliverables within them iterates on the significant progress made in the current year. Continuous conversations with the community inform our annual plan and we'll be documenting these here on this page.

Get involved

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There are several ways you can get involved and discuss the annual plan. Right now, we are seeking feedback on all published annual plan materials, including the goals, global trends, objective and key results, budget overview, and financial model.

We welcome your ideas on the talk page till 31st May 2025 and co-created spaces will continue into early June. We will update this page as new on-wiki and live discussions open in various channels and languages. These discussions are where the Wikimedians share their take on the proposed plans and share about their own goals for the upcoming year. Inspired by what so many others are doing in their own work, we continue to find opportunities to collaborate and learn from the planning processes and work of others in the Wikimedia movement as well as other partners. There will be many ways to engage: here on Meta-Wiki, in co-created community spaces, in person meetings, on Wikimedia project pages, and on community channels.

On-Wiki

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A summary message to engage in annual plan conversation will be posted locally on various projects, with follow ups as we post more information. The full version of draft annual plan materials with accompanying translations will live on this Meta-Wiki portal. You can collaborate with us on both local talk pages and here on the Meta-Wiki talk page, always in your preferred language. We will add links here to where the content has been posted as they become available.

Other conversations about the annual planning are also happening in other community channels on Discord and Telegram. We encourage you to join the discussions if you subscribe to these channels.

  1. Meta-wiki
  2. English Wikipedia
  3. Wikimedia Commons
  4. Farsi Community
  5. Igbo Wikimedians
  6. Spanish Community
  7. French Communities
  8. Korean Community
  9. Tagalog Wikimedians
  10. Portuguese speaking Communities
  11. Arabic community
  12. Italian community
  13. Swahili Wikipedia
  14. Ukrainian community
  15. Polish community
  16. Hungarian community
  17. Romanian Wikipedia
  18. Turkish Wikipedia
  19. Greek Wikipedia
  20. Czech Wikipedia
  21. Japanese Wikipedia
  22. Twi Wikipedia

Social media channels

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  1. Facebook

Co-created Community spaces

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Staff and leaders from the Wikimedia Foundation will be joining existing community organized calls for two-way planning around next year’s draft annual plan. Additionally, Foundation staff will organize thematic calls that anyone can attend based on their area of interest. If you wish to join a call but interpretation is not available in your preferred language, email us at movementcomms(_AT_)wikimedia.org, and we will make the necessary arrangements.

This year, in most spaces we will be experimenting with a new format: a workshop-style approach with breakout rooms, focusing on Global Trends and how we are responding collectively as a movement. Where possible, we will also demo new product and technology features from the Foundation that support Wikimedians.

Meetings, events and calls

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Previous

  1. Global Resources Conversation 12th of June 16:00 UTC
  2. CEE and temporary accounts 11th of June
  3. WikiCauserie 06 June
  4. Incident Reporting System Stakeholders Conversation with Stewards on 10th June at 19:00 UTC
  5. Incident Reporting System Stakeholders Conversation with U4C on 12th June at 19:00 UTC
  6. Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia Volunteers' Corner
  7. Annual Planning and Global Trends Community Workshop 28th of May 16:00 UTC
  8. Future Audiences community call 27th of May
  9. ESEAP Strategy Summit 24th of May
  10. Wikifunctions Deployment on Igbo Wiktionary, 22nd of May, 14:00 UTC
  11. Russian Wikipedia and Vector 2022 & Universal Language Selector 19th of May
  12. Afrika Baraza 15th of May
  13. MENA Connect 17th of May 16:00 UTC
  14. African Wikimedia Admins 9th of May
  15. Community Conversation: Peacock Check, April 28
  16. South Asia Open Community Call 27th of April
  17. CEE Catch Up 23th of April 16:00 UTC
  18. Wikipedia Apps - Offline Usage Community Calls. 19 April
  19. Future Audiences monthly call March 27
  20. Annual Planning Community Workshop (March)
  21. Wikimedia Foundation Discussions with the Commons Community
  22. Community discussions about Products
  23. CAC hosted Conversation with Trustees 30 January (14:30 - 16:00 UTC).
  24. Future Audiences community call February 6
  25. Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Bhubaneswar 2024
  26. Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 - Temporary accounts
  27. Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 - Resource distribution
  28. WikiCon North America 2024 - Commons Roundtable discussion
  29. WikiCon North America 2024 - Hubs discussion
  30. Former and current Foundation trustee workshop
  31. Wikimania 2024 Sessions:

Blogs and Newsletters

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Wikimedia Foundation Strategy & Planning

  1. Risk preparedness in the Foundation’s annual plan
  2. Our new AI strategy puts Wikipedia’s humans first
  3. Sharing the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2025–2026 Draft Annual Plan

Technology

  1. The Wikipedia Library: A million links and beyond
  2. Artificial intelligence for editors

Content & Editorial Practices

  1. Convening Users with Extended Rights to Discuss Safety, Privacy, and Tools during Wikimania 2025
  2. Strengthening Wikipedia’s neutral point of view
  3. Using privacy engineering to enable modern usability testing and defend against network attacks
  4. How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects
  5. Wikimedia Foundation brings legal challenge to new UK Online Safety Act requirements

Global

  1. Global Trends 2025

Signpost Coverage

  1. News from the WMF – Wikipedia Signpost, May 1, 2025
  2. News and notes – Wikipedia Signpost, May 1, 2025
  3. Op-ed – Wikipedia Signpost, April 9, 2025
  4. Technology report – Wikipedia Signpost, February 27, 2025

Other

  1. Wikimedia Research Fund
Extended content
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