Wikimedia Foundation FY21-22 Annual Plan

Today, we are proud to share the Wikimedia Foundation’s finalized Annual Plan for next year. It represents completed, cooperative work across the Foundation to define our goals for the July 2021-June 2022 fiscal year (FY 21-22). It is guided by ongoing discussions with volunteers, such as the Movement Strategy process, and our long term mission to promote free knowledge. It uses our Medium Term Plan as its overarching framework.

Please see our page on Meta-Wiki for the full plan materials, including our list of objectives and videos from the Wikimedia Foundation executive team with subtitles in Arabic, French, German, Russian, Spanish, and Chinese. Questions should be directed to our talk page, and to the live Annual Plan Conversations (office hours) held at the end of the month.

This year’s plan involves three overarching priorities—ensuring a thriving movement, an evolved platform on which that movement can thrive, and a resilient and inclusive Foundation to carry out this work.

Thriving Movement

Our first focus area within Thriving Movement for FY 21-22 is to ensure that Wikimedians have the systems they need to succeed and the tools and information to safely succeed within those systems. 

The direction for this comes from Movement Strategy, which has informed the work of the Foundation, affiliates, and volunteers for years, including through the Foundation’s Medium Term Plan. This year, we will address key movement governance issues, including a movement charter, global council, hubs, leadership training, and create enforcing mechanisms for our Universal Code of Conduct. We will also:

• Evolve trust and safety tools, including IP masking and prioritizing several functionary asks,
• Provide access to information to help communities prioritize strategic initiatives and address challenges that exist across platforms, such as disinformation, and
• Help prepare community members for governance roles, ensuring that people across the diversity of experience and identities of our global movement are ready to help lead the movement into the future.  

We want to support the movement in building independent systems, leaders and structures of self-governance that serve our editing communities, welcome diverse newcomers, sustain and protect contributors of all kinds, and reflect the movement’s values.

Our second focus area within the Thriving Movement priority is to become more welcoming to diverse contributors, with systems encouraging global growth. Later this week, the Foundation will launch a new grants strategy. This strategy was built through broad reaching discussions with volunteers and grant recipients around the globe. It will involve a shift toward regional grantmaking, and increased involvement of community members in grant decision making. 

We are also increasing our total Foundation grants budget from an estimated over $8 million to $15.6 million, an increase of 95% across movement strategy, community programs, and community resources.

As an additional commitment to this priority, we will work with emerging communities to promote growth across the wikis. We will work with local communities to develop three pilot programs that welcome contributors in parts of the world where Wikimedia is currently underrepresented. Our success will be measured by newcomers from historically underserved populations feeling welcomed and staying. We will continue our current work to support volunteers through an updated grants program, language support, and regional safety protocols in areas where volunteers face risks due to their participation.

Overall, the largest part of new investments this year is the increased investment in Thriving Movement. The Thriving Movement budget has increased from $14.3 million last fiscal year to $36.7 million in this budget which represents an increase of $22.4 million or 157%. It has also grown from being 13.2% of the Foundation’s overall budget to 24.5%.

Platform Evolution

In order to ensure that our technical systems can support our aspirations for equitable, global growth we will focus on ensuring that our platform and processes are ready and able to invite all of the world’s population to join us in the creation and sharing of free knowledge. This includes making our content more machine readable and scaling our ability to use relationships between content. We will work toward ensuring that people in emerging communities have the same level of performance for their contribution workflows as those in established communities. We will also work toward making Wikimedia application data easily discoverable and well-prepared to enable data-informed decision making, application development, and research by the community and the Foundation.

Resilient and inclusive Foundation

Our other focus area is strengthening our organizational capacities. A resilient, inclusive organization is essential to meet the needs of our growing global movement, and to champion free knowledge throughout the world. To champion free knowledge we maintain a massive and complex technical collaboration platform, care for Wikimedia’s public image, drive readership and use of Wikimedia content, fund a global network of volunteers and affiliates, and advocate for free knowledge around the world. 

This year, we will continue to invest in creating a diverse workforce and an inclusive workplace. Our work will include attracting and hiring top talent from a broad range of backgrounds. We will generate accountability for inclusion efforts across management tiers and strengthen a workplace culture where people feel valued and able to do their best work. 

Furthermore, through targeted interventions aimed at supporting specific underrepresented groups, we will help create equitable outcomes for all staff members at the Wikimedia Foundation. We also seek to strengthen internal capabilities to make data-informed decisions—specifically the ability to allocate costs and measure the impact of initiatives across departments.

Together, Thriving Movement, Platform Evolution, and a Resilient & Inclusive Foundation are complementary efforts toward the same steadfast goal—to set knowledge free, for everyone. In a world of widespread disinformation, sociopolitical instability, and threats to open knowledge, this work matters now more than ever. Thank you for all that you do to set knowledge free, and on behalf of the Wikimedia Foundation Executive Team, we’ll see you on the wikis!