Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2026-2027
Introduction
[edit]The Annual Plan is the Wikimedia Foundation’s description of what we hope to achieve in the coming year. This is a time of urgency and focus for the Wikimedia projects: as we have seen with global trends, the Internet and information ecosystem continues to change rapidly. AI is a transformative force on the internet, along with new ways that young generations consume information, and increasing scrutiny from governments and regulations. Recently, we noted that Wikipedia pageviews have been declining.
As these trends have taken shape, we have executed annual plans meant to address them. In our next annual plan, from July 2026 to June 2027, we aim to continue to evolve our technology and experiences to meet this moment. We want to do so at an energetic pace, while preserving and enhancing those things that have made the wikis so valuable. The goal continues to be a multi-generational project where future generations will access and contribute knowledge for free, in ways that work for them.
As with every year, we ask you to shape this plan together with us. We’d like to hear your hopes, concerns, bold ideas, and specific requests, which will then help the Foundation make choices about how to use our time and resources.
For the work of our Product & Technology department, annual planning begins by sharing an early list of “big picture” questions. These questions are by design similar to those we shared last year; many of our challenges remain relevant and require work over multiple years. Beyond this, we will continue to listen and engage through specific product team or topic area conversations, surveys and research interviews, the Community Wishlist, live calls, at conferences, and on our annual plan talk page.
Last time around, this process helped us to prioritize work in the current plan that has benefited our communities and projects. For instance, we heard from both the community and the Product and Technology Advisory Council that mobile editing continues to be a major challenge, so we decided to continue building Structured Tasks, Edit Checks, which we know improve outcomes on mobile, and did additional research. We also used community feedback and the Product and Technology Advisory Council’s guidelines to reshape how we collaboratively develop and communicate our work on readers, bringing communities in earlier to set shared expectations and guardrails that enable responsible product experimentation and ensure our work meets the needs of current and future generations of readers and editors.
We also held a series of listening and discussion sessions focused on Commons about issues that have been raised over the years, which led to prioritizing a number of infrastructure improvements for the Commons databases, some software components, and specific unsupported tools work for video2commons. And we unified the mobile and desktop domains which improves the loading time and search engine visibility of pages, especially for Commons.
Additionally, after years of community concerns with the accessibility of our CAPTCHA, and requests from users with extended rights to step up our detection of automated editing, we deployed a real-world trial of a new bot detection service for both account creation and higher-risk editing, to English Wikipedia and several other wikis.
Looking ahead, the annual planning process that will run till 31st May 2026 will continue to focus on involving communities early and often. We want to discuss how global trends may shape our future, how we can experiment, adapt and respond together.