Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard/August 2025 Meeting Outcomes

Dear all,

As the Board prepares for several planned transitions at the end of the calendar year, Maryana and I would like to provide an update on the outcomes from the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees meeting held at Wikimania, including more information on succession planning for the Board Chair and CEO roles.

This is my last such email to all of you regarding the regular meetings of the Board of Trustees, and overall I encourage you to subscribe to the Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin to stay up-to-date on the latest news and information the Foundation shares about its activities and progress against its goals.

Board Chair Transition

The Board held its official business meeting on August 4 in Nairobi, prior to Wikimania. This was my last in-person meeting as Board Chair, where I symbolically “passed the gavel” to Lorenzo Losa, as the Board officially voted to start his term as Chair on December 10, 2025. Lorenzo was announced in January as Chair-Elect, the first time the Board had appointed such a position. This is one example of the orderly succession planning we have implemented at multiple levels of leadership across the Foundation. Lorenzo joined the Board in October 2021 and was reappointed in December 2024 after the community-and-affiliate selection process.

Board Appointments and Selection

At this meeting, the Board also appointed Mayree Clark to the Board effective August 4, 2025 through January 1, 2027 to fill the remainder of Esra’a Al Shafei’s term. Mayree is already familiar with the work of Wikimedia, as a longtime major donor and a current member of the Endowment Board. She brings significant experience across governance, leadership and risk management, including serving on global Boards with stakeholder selected seats. With this transition, on behalf of the Board, we would like to thank Esra’a for her nearly eight years of service on the Board. She will continue as a volunteer advisor to the Foundation’s Human Rights team. You can read more about the governance items from the Board meeting here.

Looking ahead, this year two new community-and-affiliate selected Trustees will be joining the Board, as Shani Evenstein Sigalov and Mike Peel finish their terms after six and three years of service respectively. We look forward to recognising the contributions of departing Trustees in the months ahead. Two weeks ago the Elections Committee shared information on changes to the Board selection process including timing for the vote, which will happen starting October 8 through October 22.

CEO Search Update

As you may know, the Foundation formally launched the search for the Foundation’s next CEO on May 6, 2025, alongside the news of Maryana’s transition. Since that time, with the assistance of Viewcrest Advisors, a succession working group of the Board has been reviewing a pool of over 400 applications and beginning to interview the strongest candidates, looking at what is needed in the role in the coming years. There has been a very positive response to the search and strong support for the Wikimedia movement’s critical contribution to the world at this time. The process is on track for a new CEO to be in place by early next year.

Topics discussed at the Board Meeting

During the meeting, the Board spent time on strategic topics including the global risk profile of Wikimedia projects around the world, a conversation with members of the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) working group to discuss the latest outputs of the working group (which I share more on below), as well as a session reviewing the state of the communities and the Foundation’s approach to engagement and support with the volunteer communities.

Strengthening Wikipedia’s approach to neutral point of view (NPOV)

In March, the Foundation shared a Diff post about a new effort to strengthen the neutrality pillar as a core principle of Wikipedia as well as our neutral point of view (NPOV) policies. A working group of experienced editors and Trustees has been meeting regularly to discuss these topics and how best to support volunteers and the projects on the topic of NPOV. As part of this work, the Foundation recently published a comprehensive analysis of NPOV policies across different language Wikipedias, which shows how neutrality guidance is shared and understood across the different wikis. The Foundation also published a white paper with guidance for researchers interested in studying how NPOV is applied on the Wikimedia projects. At Wikimania, during the first-ever pre-conference day dedicated to users with extended rights, the Foundation hosted two sessions with these users to learn about their challenges with applying and enforcing NPOV policies, to further inform our proposals.

Looking ahead, the working group will share a proposal for some common standards for NPOV guidance across all Wikipedias, as well as an initial research method for assessing how our NPOV principles handle contentious topics.

Updates on three pilots to share roles and responsibilities across the movement

A year ago, the Board introduced three new pilots to experiment with more shared decision-making and shared accountability across the movement, related to the areas that received the most comments and questions in governance conversations: around grants distribution, product/technology, and the affiliate ecosystem. The work on each of these pilots continued over the past several months:

The Product and Technology Advisory Council was formed last October and has been meeting regularly since then. In May, PTAC provided additional recommendations to expand upon their decision to prioritise editing on mobile. In July, in response to the recent English Wikipedia community's reaction to the use of AI, PTAC created two working groups to advise the Foundation’s Product and Technology teams on how to better communicate to the communities on new product features, and how to conduct and communicate experiments.
The Global Resource Distribution Council kicked off at Wikimania with all of its members newly seated. This two-year pilot will have several responsibilities around distributing grants and resources across the movement, including making policy and structural decisions around the Wikimedia Community Fund; overseeing the Regional Fund Committees and defining new Fund Committees as needed; coordinating with the Foundation to set principles for distributing funds between regions + thematic groups; and playing an advisory role and sharing feedback to the Foundation on how the overall grants budget is allocated.
As part of the third pilot to improve how the movement organisations are supported - including existing affiliates, movement partners, and hubs - recently the Foundation has published a draft paper sharing perspectives about the landscape of affiliates and some questions about key focus areas, to invite feedback.

Learn more about our work in this year’s Annual Plan

In June, the Board approved the Foundation’s Annual Plan and budget. This year’s planning process included ongoing conversations with communities to share input and learnings on their needs. Support for technology infrastructure and product development remain at the center of our work. The Foundation has organised its work around three goals (Infrastructure, Volunteer Support, and Effectiveness) as a simplified and more effective way to mirror Wikimedia's “socio-technical” role in supporting both the technology and the people that power the projects as a vital part of the free and open Internet. This work is well into the first quarter of the year, and the Foundation will be sharing outcomes from the first quarter in the months to come.

If you have questions about any of these initiatives, you can reach out to me directly or sign up on Meta to talk with me or others in the Foundation and Board leadership. We would be happy to hear from you.

Thank you,

Nat Tymkiv, Chair, Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees

Maryana Iskander, CEO, Wikimedia Foundation