Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2026-2027/Goals/Enable

Goal 4: Enable

Build speed and resilience

This goal is about supporting the people and systems that enable the work outlined throughout this annual plan. This allows us to build capacity across the organization and the broader Wikimedia movement, helping teams focus on delivering impact through the creation and sharing of free knowledge.

Objective area 4.1 Strengthen Financial Resilience

As we navigate increasing revenue pressures, the need for investment in new revenue channels and practices with rigorous financial stewardship has never been greater. We need the ability to act quickly, allocate resources efficiently, and build a resilient, diversified revenue base that will sustain our mission into the future.

This year, we will focus on generating the resources necessary to meet our mission: generating $230M in annual fund revenue and $10M for the Endowment. We'll build a more diversified way of reaching new donors, real-time revenue visibility, and a rigorous investment analysis framework that evaluates multi-year return on investment. Fundraising infrastructure and platform upgrades will enable automation, improved audience communication, and scalable analytics.

Some of this work builds on existing financial management best practices, while new initiatives, such as developing methodologies to understand investments and return on work in our key objectives, will enable improved financial decisions and help us deploy resources more efficiently and effectively.

We will also continue to grow Wikimedia Enterprise and generate additional revenue by opening the platform to a wider range of commercial reusers.

Impact

Generate $230M in revenue for the annual fund, and $10M for the Endowment.
Maintain a Programmatic Ratio ≥77%, exceeding non-profit best practices.
Maintain a Working Capital Reserve of 12-18 months to ensure our long-term sustainability.

Objective Area 4.2 Strengthen Ways of Working

As the Foundation has matured to a globally distributed workforce, our structures and culture have been shaped more by history than by intent. This has led to varied and inconsistent staff experiences according to where staff are based, challenges with complying with regional laws, and incomplete investments in the tools and processes required for efficient work.

The Ways of Working objective addresses these challenges in three areas:

What we must do: Ensure geographical and operational compliance.
What we want: Build a shared culture and clear expectations, shaped by input at all levels.
What we need: Invest in tools and processes that help us work together and scale now and in the future.

Some of this work is ongoing, such as the location strategy and policy updates for greater clarity and consistency. Other work is new, including creating guidance for generative AI use by our staff that aligns with our values and mission.

We will deliver on this work by:

Enabling clear, consistent interpretation of staff policies and expectations across regions and functions.
Supporting the development of a shared organisational culture at the Foundation through dialogue, storytelling, and feedback loops.
Driving awareness, understanding, and adoption of internal tools, systems, and processes that enable effective collaboration and productivity at scale.

Impact

Improvement of 1-3 points on the annual Engagement and Inclusion survey on questions related to change, engagement and enablement factors.

Objective Area 4.3 Developer Productivity

Meeting the moment means WMF development teams and volunteer contributors will need to take bigger bets and iterate on new ideas faster than ever before. This is a shift to being able to learn in a matter of days and weeks, rather than in months and years. Crucially though, this cannot come at the cost of degraded quality (of both content and software) or loss of trust in the Wikipedia brand.

Moving with this increased sense of urgency therefore requires the capability to ship features quicker and more frequently alongside the tooling to confidently test, monitor, and fix issues as they arise. Moving faster is also achieved through greater focus. This will be delivered by giving staff and community developers time back through increased automation and standardization of manual processes, and decreased fragmentation of tools.

Impact

Increased software development velocity, confidence, and quality metrics (deployment frequency, lead time to production, failure rate)
Improved developer satisfaction survey results

Objective Area 4.4 Strengthening & Risk Mitigation of the Platform

To face the moment we're in and address the changing landscape, we must reevaluate both the biggest risks to our technical platform, and what opportunities we must enable on our infrastructure to serve our audience funnel.

One area we will focus on is supply-chain security attacks, which are increasing in frequency and in sophistication. We need to be able to scan 100% of the software we run in production when we build it in docker containers for known security vulnerabilities, and then regularly check the ones that are running.

We also need to implement off-site, tamper-resistant backups of all of Wikimedia data to allow recovery in case of a catastrophic failure.

Another focus area this year will be how we serve our logged-in users, a big strategic initiative to engage our reader base more deeply: as of now, logged in users are served from our core data centers rather than caching sites, which both means that logged in users experience more latency, and that they put a higher strain on the infrastructure. We plan to both serve more page views from the caching sites, and to improve the performance of our software, to make logged-in readership both more scalable and a better user experience.

Finally, a lot of the features we've been building over the last few years depended on extracting or inferring information from either our analytics platform or MediaWiki edits; up to now, this process has been implemented ad-hoc for every such use case. We want to rationalize these processes and streamline them so that development teams can focus on the business logic they want to build and our systems are easier to understand and more robust long-term.

Preparing for these risks and opportunities will enable us to sustain our long-term growth.

Product and Technology OKRs for Enable