Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2026-2027/Goals/Engage
Goal 2: Engage
[edit]This goal describes our work to convert casual readers into repeat readers, contributors and donors, and better support our existing volunteer community. Our plan is to relentlessly focus this year on an audience funnel that turns engagements off wiki into experiences on wiki, and then converts these readers into active participants and donors to our projects, while cultivating ongoing engagement from our volunteer community.
Objective Area 2.1. Increase reader and donor participation
[edit]As pageviews decline, our aim is to engage readers more deeply, so that readers experience more value from every visit and become more engaged over time, leading to measurable increases in retention, contribution, and donation activity. This work builds on our multi-generational approach to readers and contributors.
Deepening Reader Engagement
[edit]Even as overall pageviews may decline, we want the users who continue to come to Wikipedia to engage more frequently and deeply, sustaining Wikipedia's brand as the most important and most trustworthy repository of knowledge in the world's collective consciousness. We plan on doing this through presenting existing Wikipedia content in ways that make every first visit helpful and memorable so that new readers return, and active readers can easily find opportunities across our website and apps to go deeper and grow into the active readers, donors, and contributors of the future.
Deepening Donor Engagement
[edit]While all donors are Wikipedia readers, some hold a deeper affinity for our mission beyond the utility Wikipedia brings to their lives. This year, we will build on that connection by investing in donor relationships and strengthening ways we keep supporters connected to the impact of their contributions. This includes expanding how we communicate with donors about the difference their donations make in the world, through email, social media, and by sharing stories and updates that bring that impact to life.
A key focus this year is encouraging our existing donors who are able to give more. By better understanding what motivates our supporters and offering more ways to contribute - whether through a larger one-off gift, a regular monthly donation, or a deeper long-term involvement - we aim to increase support in a way that reflects genuine donor intent and gives every donor a meaningful experience.
Impact / Metrics
[edit]- 3x logged-in weekly active readers on web in one year, 5x active readers on apps in 2 years
- Increasing average annual giving per donor from $24 to $28 USD
Objective Area 2.2 Deepening contributor engagement
[edit]On the contributor side, we will focus on strengthening contributor engagement and retention by combining new product features with community-driven pathways to participation.
Contributor On-Wiki Experience
[edit]To meet this moment and double the number of retained editors over the next 2 years, we need to both bring in new contributors and help them grow quickly while continuing to support and retain the experienced editors who sustain Wikipedia. The work being done to focus on active readers, presented in the first goal of Reach, presents a major opportunity, but realizing it depends on a clear value proposition that shows why contributing is worth readers' time. Once readers have taken a step to becoming part of the editing community, we need to make sure we retain them, all while ensuring that we do not overwhelm experienced editors who are an important part of the contribution workflow.
Achieving this will require three concurrent approaches: First, continuing to lower barriers to entry through a more structured editing experience, building on foundations like Edit Check, Structured Tasks, and the new article creation flow, so that contributing feels clear and achievable from day one. Second, making it easier for volunteers to discover opportunities and grow through a modular, personalized dashboard that connects them with the right tasks at the right time. And third, making the contributor experience more meaningful, for example by highlighting recognition, celebrating milestones, and enabling collaboration. Getting these levers right will result in more than just an increase in the number of editors. It will create a system where people feel capable, connected, and valued, enabling both new and experienced contributors to thrive and building a stronger, more sustainable wiki ecosystem.
Learning-Driven Engagement
[edit]We will use learning as a core engagement mechanism to help contributors build skills, improve the quality and impact of their work, and advance into more experienced roles. We will embed learning across priority contributor journeys to support contributors at key moments in their development. This includes experimenting with short form video and learn.wiki modules for early editor engagement, providing in workflow tutorials and self guided learning to strengthen contribution practices, and introducing role based learning experiences for patrolling, technical contribution, and other specialized contributor pathways.
Access to Reliable Sources
[edit]We will sustain experienced editors' access to paywalled sources through The Wikipedia Library by renewing and extending our partnerships with publishers. Through our programs, we will also improve the onboarding experience for newly eligible editors who are trying the Library for the first time.
Invited Contributions
[edit]We will support affiliates, organizers, and volunteers to increase contributions and reactivate contributors through shared content goals, specific grantmaking and partnership initiatives, and collective editing opportunities. We will do this by supporting grantees and partners to effectively use campaign events tools; equipping organizers with data about content quality, knowledge gaps, and reader interests; and collaborating with regional organizers to design mobile-first processes for engaging junior contributors.
Connecting Contributors
[edit]Additionally, we want to encourage long-term engagement and retention by fostering stronger connections across the movement, both globally and regionally, through collaboration, recognition, and clearer communication about shared goals and impact.
- Convene to co-create: Enable Wikimedians to come together to co-create and collaborate in meaningful ways at global convenings (Wikimania, Hackathon, and others), regional conferences (WikiIndaba, WikiCon North America, and more) and thematic convenings. We will focus on working with teams across the Foundation to improve security, enable more Wikimedians to join online, and increase the number of scholarships offered to Wikimedians directly.
- Regional connections: Deepen our regional connections through multicultural and multilingual communications to build two-way conversations informed by local knowledge. Through Around the Puzzle Globe, we are organizing conversations and meetings within these shared spaces—including Afrika Baraza, WikiCauserie, CEE Catch Up, South Asia Open Community Call, MENA Connect, and others—to connect directly with communities worldwide.
- Connect a global movement: We will continue to host spaces that build connections on a global level, allowing Wikimedians to better connect with work happening in different corners of the movement as well as the work of the Wikimedia Foundation. This includes spaces like Diff - the movement blog, Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin, maintaining the Foundation's presence on Meta-Wiki - including how to contact a human at the Foundation, and ongoing Board communications.
- Joy of Contributing: This year we will work to amplify the joy of contributing to the Wikimedia projects through programmes such as WikiCelebrate, Wikimedians of the Year, convenings for users with extended rights, books for editors pilot and large-scale virtual events, to celebrate our most impactful users and our collective milestones, making participation meaningful, rewarding and fun.
- Connect contributors to product design, development, and decision making: We will work to connect with communities where they already are in on-wiki discussion spaces like Village Pumps, talk pages, and on platforms like Discord where contributors gather organically. These conversations will ensure that movement feedback shapes both the products we build, how those products are designed, and how they are implemented. We will continue engaging with the Product and Tech Advisory Council as a key representative in the Movement to provide guidance on our priorities and roadmap.
Metrics:
- 20% increase in retained editors by end of FY26/27, 2x by July 2028
- 20% increase in average monthly edits among editors who engage in embedded and self-guided learning experiences
- 25% increase in the number of collaborative contributions each month (as measured through the CampaignEvents extension) by end of Q2, 40% by July 2028
Objective Area 2.3 Support Users with extended rights
[edit]We will partner directly with our most trusted volunteers to keep the Wikimedia projects free of bad-faith (inauthentic and abusive) activity.
We will provide high-certainty signals and focused tooling that will accelerate and empower volunteers. At the same time, we will work with those volunteers to create centrally managed automated systems that can precisely and usefully implement community policies to detect and contain bad-faith activity earlier in the process.
We will continue reducing the risks of compromising the accounts of our users (especially those with extended rights) by adding smart, manageable constraints on how UWERs (and other) user accounts could be compromised or misused.
We will continue working towards being better partners for key governance volunteers. Together, the communities and staff are navigating more and more online safety and product security challenges. The first-ever global arbitrators meeting in early 2026, which also included the Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C), identified practical barriers to be resolved to help volunteers make good, timely, and consistent use of new technical signals, tools, and account security measures as we work together to protect the communities.
We will also build on initiatives around bringing together users with extended rights at events such as Wikimania.
Metrics
[edit]Our guiding-star metric is that bad-faith activity is appropriately handled twice as quickly.
"Bad-faith activity" is defined as encompassing abusive activity (e.g., threats, doxxing, vandalism, and disruption) and inauthentic activity (e.g., undisclosed paid editing, bots, campaigns to reduce knowledge integrity), and user accounts that produce this kind of activity.
We will track the time between when a bad-faith edit was attempted, and when a mitigating action (such as a revert or suppression) was taken against it by either an user with extended rights, or by an automated decision.