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ウィキメディア財団コミュニティ事案委員会/2025-12-11 理事との対話

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This page is a translated version of the page Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee/2025-12-11 Conversation with Trustees and the translation is 56% complete.
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Recording of the call

コミュニティ事案委員会 – ウィキメディア財団理事会傘下の委員会 – では、次回の理事との対話（Conversation with the Trustees）を世界標準時12月11日 17:30 – 19:00に行います。（Community Affairs Committee）。この対話とは、コミュニティの皆さんからそれぞれの作業について、直接、理事と話す機会です。理事会は運動リーダーと外部の専門家の手弁当（ボランティア）の集まりで、ウィキメディア財団が説明責任を果たすように導きます。

How to participate

This conversation will be held on Zoom. It will be 90 minutes, with the first half covering updates and the second half dedicated to breakout discussion on the topics presented. All Wikimedians in good standing are encouraged to join. Request the Zoom link by emailing askcac(_AT_)wikimedia.org at least 48 hours prior to the event start time. You can also request live interpretation by emailing askcac(_AT_)wikimedia.org.

The recording will be uploaded on Commons and shared to this page for anyone who cannot attend. There will also be meeting notes shared on this page.

議題

理事会の情報うさんには以下を含みます。

  • 理事会名簿
  • CEO の交代移行期
  • 監査報告
  • Safety and security updates
  • Product and technology project updates

分科会と協議テーマ：

  • 人々が知識を探して見つける方法のトレンド
  • The future of leadership in the movement (including the Board elections process and the CEO transition)
  • Users with extended rights tools and pathways

Notes

These notes are a synthesis of what was discussed on the call.

Celebrations

  • Wikipedia’s 25th birthday on January 15. To celebrate the quarter century we’ve been bringing free knowledge to the world, there will be a big virtual birthday party on January 15 with trivia, games, original musical performances, prizes, and spotlights on editors across regions. It’ll be translated into French, Spanish and Portuguese, Arabic & Chinese. Register on Meta to save the date and get event updates: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event:Wikipedia_25_Virtual_Celebration
  • We've also been able to meet some of you at regional and thematic events around the world, including the CEE Meeting in Thessaloniki, the Wikimedia Youth Conference in Prague, GLAMWiki in Lisbon, WikiConvention Francophone in Cotonou, WikiConference North America in New York, the EduWiki Conference in Bogotá, the WikiSource conference in Bali, the ESEAP Strategy Summit in Manila, and Wikimania in Nairobi to mention a few.
  • Turkish and Malayalam Wikipedias which both turn 23, Wikivoyage and Wiktionary which turn 19 and 22. We also celebrated 22 years of Wikisource a few weeks ago.

Board Updates

  • Welcoming Bobby and Michal as our new trustees. You can read more here.
  • Thank you to Mike, Shani and Nat for their time on the board.
  • The Board has recently reviewed its committee structures, as it does periodically, and made a decision to move to a leaner structure - including moving from having the CAC to having Community & Affiliates Liaisons.
  • The work of the CAC will continue through internal mechanisms it is using to get insights and communicate. CAC’s other responsibilities will be distributed to the Executive Committee and the Product and Technology Committee. The Board is also establishing two Community and Affiliate liaisons who will flag matters for the attention of the Executive Committee and the full Board. The liaisons will help to build connections with the community to help the Board continue to support the movement.
  • The Board has also updated various charters, most significantly the charter of the Product & Tech committee. The charter focuses on understanding, overseeing, and providing advice with respect to its strategies for the creation and use of technology; its investment plans and priorities (including a broad product roadmap); as well as the use of licenses, policies and practices for content reuse in support of the Foundation’s mission.

CEO transition

  • Earlier this week we announced that the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees has appointed Bernadette Meehan as the new CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation. She will officially join on January 20, 2026. Maryana will stay in her role until then for a seamless handoff.
  • Bernadette has spent her career in roles dedicated to mission driven and public service work. Most recently, she served as the U.S. Ambassador to Chile from 2022–2025.
  • Prior to her ambassadorship, she served as Executive Vice President for Global Programs at the Obama Foundation, where she designed and led international leadership programs spanning Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and South Asia.
  • Bernadette joins the Foundation at an important moment, on the cusp of Wikipedia’s 25th birthday. The world is facing unprecedented social, technological, regulatory and generational shifts. How people search and find information is being transformed. As Wikipedia’s influence has grown, so too has the importance of ensuring that people and decision makers understand its model and contribute to its future.

Audit report

  • Highlights from the report include: a clean audit opinion for the 20th year in a row; more funds devoted to movement support, and on-track revenue diversification.
    • Expenses totaled $190M. In terms of movement support, in the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the Foundation  77.4% of expenses supported volunteers, outperforming our goal of 76.9%. In real terms, this means that, during this fiscal year, we devoted $9.3M more in funding support to the movement compared to the previous fiscal year. These funds went to things like grants, product and technology support, and raising awareness about the Wikimedia model with policymakers around the world.
    • Total revenues of $208M  In terms of revenue diversification, Wikimedia Enterprise became profitable for the very first time this year, which is a huge milestone. Its revenue increased to $8.3M, meaning it represented 4% of the Foundation’s overall revenue for the year. Continuing to diversify our revenue streams away from banner fundraising is important for ensuring our long-term future, particularly since the way people are interacting with Wikimedia content is changing rapidly and we may not be able to rely on site banners as much as we once did.
  • You can read more on Diff, and if you want to dive deeper into Enterprise specifically, we’ve also prepared a financial report about Enterprise on Diff, as part of our commitment to detail commercial revenue separately.

Users with extended rights update

  • The Foundation’s Annual Plan prioritizes better supporting users with extended rights on an ongoing basis. We know from research that on many of the large Wikipedias, the number of users with extended rights is in decline. This poses challenges for the growth and health of the community, since users with extended rights both prevent harm on the projects and create conditions for positive collaboration.
  • This Wikimania in Nairobi saw the first ever global pre-conference for users with extended rights, which gathered more than 100 admins, stewards, checkusers, arbitrators and other community elected roles, who discussed tools for moderation, security of the projects, small language Wikipedias, admin retention etc.
  • In parallel to events and calls, the Foundation is also working with users with extended rights to encourage more editors to get more involved in patrolling, which will then lower the amount of work of individual admins and patrollers.

Safety and Security updates

  • A long-awaited feature, Temporary accounts, is now deployed across all but one wiki, which means that Wikimedia wikis better protect editor privacy by not publicly revealing their  IP addresses. Instead, logged-out editors are identified by a temporary account created for them automatically by our system.
  • This has been a critical part of our safety improvements in recent years - as Wikipedia has grown and some editors face threats and retaliation for their editing, redacting logged-out users’ IP addresses has been increasingly important and urgent as a protective measure.
  • There’s also been important developments in bot detection. At the Wikimedia Foundation, we have been modernizing our bot detection system. This new system uses a service called hCaptcha and is now active on 8 trial wikis, including English Wikipedia.
  • There’s a lot of work being done around account security. In response to threats we’ve seen to user accounts, we’ve been making our two-factor authentication system a lot better, and available to all users for the first time.

Unsupported tools working group

  • In September, and with the help of the Product and Technology Advisory Council, the Foundation established the Unsupported Tools Working Group. The group’s mandate is to review requests for support of unsupported extensions, gadgets, bot and tools. The Working Group is currently made up of 3 experienced community members with a few staff providing support.  The group prioritizes support based on potential impact, as well as the ability to complete the work required in a 3 to 4 month time period.
  • This concept came out of Product & Tech’s work in the last fiscal year to improve critical tools that were no longer being supported.
  • For this pilot, focus was on Commons tool and after consultations with the Commons community and the Foundation, the WG  selected video2commons as the first unsupported tool to focus on for this pilot. So far, the V2C tool has seen some fixes of underlying issues, including fixes for upload failures caused by filename conflicts, improved retry handling, black-video imports, AV1 support, and better detection of duplicate YouTube IDs and trailing whitespace). See the WG page for latest updates.

A changing internet

  • We know that in a world that increasingly has synthetic and unreliable content, human-created knowledge on Wikipedia is even more vital, albeit increasingly less visible.
  • Responding to this changing internet, in April this year, the Foundation shared its AI strategy for supporting editors - that puts humans first.
  • We also shared the impact crawlers were having on our infrastructure with 65% of our most expensive traffic coming from bots.
  • We are also seeing a change in how people search for information online and there's work happening in the foundation to meet this moment.

NPOV work

APP process starting

  • This year’s Annual Planning will coincide with the first months of tenure of Bernadette, the Foundation’s new CEO. It’ll be a great opportunity for her to get to know the movement and understand priority areas in different regions. It will also serve as an introduction for how we do our collaborative and ongoing planning.
  • As she goes around the puzzle globe meeting communities, we'll start with some questions for the community this week which will begin many months of continuous conversation around prioritization and planning.
  • As in previous years, Foundation leadership and trustees will visit you in different community spaces. We’ll be attending community calls across regions, talking with you at in-person community events, and hosting a couple of global Annual Planning calls.

Breakout discussions

  • What do those of you on the board think is the biggest priority, for the movement as a whole to focus on, in relation to the changing consumption of knowledge?
  • Two things to focus on: continuing to update Wikipedia and ensuring that we have good attribution so that all concerned can be noted for their work. Even if you go to open AI - Wikipedia is still coming up strong. Keeping us in the mainstream for how people search for knowledge.
  • More legal work going on, we are building that capacity. This is also affecting fundraising, so we need to continue to diversify our revenue streams. Many pressing things at once is a different type of work from the past. And this is just external - not even considering the movement and volunteers. Improving the content, the tools that volunteers have, to help improve workflows in much smarter ways.
  • Where can we follow what the foundation is doing in terms of working on AI? We have the village pump, telegram channels, but is there a specific place where we can understand what the staff are working on and where they may be seeking input? Just as things are moving so quickly, a year is a long time in AI.
  • We launched the Bulletin with updates from WMF and teams. The Annual planning process is also a great time to engage with P&T to feed back. There is also a space on Meta to follow up on specific questions on Gen AI and there is a team called Future Audiences, who are innovating and experimenting, they have open calls to join.
  • We also do a lot of discussions about AI as it relates to individual products and projects. There isn’t a central “hub” to talk about all things AI, because as you know it's not one thing - it impacts all areas of our work!
  • WM Europe has been doing a mapping exercise as part of the AI working groups task. A repository at the moment, looking at the landscape. Good to not fixate on just the Foundation, this is an area that we need to make sure that we are joining forces and not duplicating activity.
  • One of the things to elevate is the 25th anniversary, this is going to be a tremendous year to raise visibility. As we discuss attribution and reuse, we need to consider how we engage with other tech companies about the profile of our work.

Discussion on users with extended rights: tooling and workflows (including patrollers), motivations and pathways for becoming a user with extended rights

  • Admin and UwER work in general can be burdensome and time-consuming, and it’s also socially complex
    • People expect a lot out of you. Doing what others need/want instead of what you want to do. Important to figure out how to do certain jobs with tools over (burdening) humans
    • Most of the time on the defense side. "Don't pick on this person, they are trying." More like a justice of the peace.
    • But at the same time admins deal with people not working in good faith.
    • How can some of this burden be lessened? Maybe there's more humanity there.
  • Process for people obtaining rights like sysop/admin is challenging but has improved in some places
    • On EN WP, the process is a little lighter than the past. More of an election than a trial.
    • People seem to have a fear that this would be so public. Wikimedians like their privacy, not extroverts. The process is very public. When new people come to start editing they might make mistakes. Every edit is examined
      • There's also this aspect of communication. If you struggle with communication or worries of failing in public, being an admin will be challenging.
  • Might be a small pipeline of people who are well suited to adminship
    • A lot of people are enthusiastic about contributing, but do not understand the politics. Having the historical context is important. It can help people to be mentors.
    • Happy that the African Administrator space exists. To help support others interested
  • Wikipedia is the backbone of the internet – UWeR are the backbone of that! These people provide continuity and care. Not being able to support and grow them is problematic.
    • In WM Ukraine having some training to share tools and practices to help other admins who are less active – sometimes they are less active because they went a way for a bit and don't know how to start up again! Also have some experience with temporary admins
  • Are there any other obstacles that have not been mentioned that could be improved to help folks become admins?
    • Those who know what it takes, know the risks/rewards! There may be opportunities to find people who are not editors at all becoming involved.

Discussion on the future of leadership in the movement

  • Wrapping up CAC calls, but gaining dedicated community liaisons on the Board.
  • Same time as CEO transitions.
  • Board was asked to look at committee structure as part of this transition. Engaging with the community is not the job of one committee, there will be more outlets for engagement going forward with liaisons. Experimenting with Foundation Bulletin and other places to improve communication. Getting things in one place where everyone can find them.
  • CAC feels like it could have been an important space where people feel they can go. People don’t necessarily feel connected with the affiliates so a liaison that is from the affiliates may not be so useful. People sometimes don’t feel that the Foundation’s priorities are aligned with the communities. Is there overconfidence about how great things are? What if disbanding the CAC sends a message to the community that it is being deprioritized?
  • We first decide what we want to do, then we decide how we are structured to serve what we want to do. A lot of work around engaging with the movement is done outside the committee. For example, trustees always attend regional conferences and Wikimania. Those activities won’t change, and we don’t need the committee to be able to do them.
  • One year ago, we sunset the Talent and Culture Committee, whose job was to review and hire the CEO. We didn’t stop that - we just reflected that the best structure was not confined within a specific committee but to do it transversally.
  • Good point about how people will interpret this change, and we need to think about that as we move Maciej and Victoria into the liaison roles.
  • The liaisons will report to the executive committee on matters that need the Board’s attention and recommend agenda items for Board meetings. The awareness should become even stronger in this format.
  • People are focused in the area they like to work on, and don’t necessarily see what’s happening elsewhere. If you don’t know about the existence of various channels, you don’t know that you can hear information that way. Many people in the movement would feel averse to being pointed toward channels they’re not in right now.
  • What does it mean to feel connected? Does it mean to feel represented? Informed? Impactful? All of these things need to be managed in a different way. How do we engage people without making them feel like they’re being spammed? Better tooling to predict what might be of interest to someone so that we can propose it to them directly
  • Challenges of communication are very real - it’s challenging as a Board. There are sensitive topics that the Board cannot really talk about because once we talk about them our strategy would be known and people could more easily harm us. Finding a balance to publicize things enough for the community to know things while also maintaining privacy and keeping our strategy for mitigating risks is something we’ll continue to wrestle with. There are calls for the Board to “be transparent” but that means you’re invisible. You can publish lots and overwhelm people. People want the info they’re interested in at the right moment. Finding out how to do that in a distributed system in over 300 languages, we probably won’t ever be able to do that perfectly, but we’ve been working on it and will continue to work on it.
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