Introducing the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2023 Annual Plan

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Each year, the Wikimedia Foundation shares an annual plan of its priorities and activities for the fiscal year, which runs from July 2022 to June 2023. The Foundation’s current Annual Plan is now anchored in the two strategic pillars of our movement strategy:  “knowledge equity” and “knowledge as a service.” The movement strategy is an ambitious vision to 2030 that Wikimedia’s global community created together several years ago. 

This is part of our new approach to planning, introduced by our new CEO Maryana Iskander, as she joined in January 2022. Maryana’s top priority was evolving the way that we approached planning as a Foundation. The goals identified in this plan are directly informed by hundreds of conversations that Maryana had with volunteers and staff around the world as part of her listening tour. We built on these conversations by asking what the world needs from us now? We also identified key trends from the rise of government regulation to the increased threats of misinformation and disinformation to the changing nature of search on the internet. 

The Foundation’s 2023 Annual Plan is centered around four main goals:

  1. Advance Knowledge Equity by bringing a stronger regional focus to the work of the Foundation and our mission of free knowledge.
  2. Deepen our commitment to Knowledge as a Service by strengthening how we prioritize and allocate product and technology support to 740+ Wikimedia projects, starting with Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata.
  3. Strengthen movement governance and health by supporting key movement priorities like the Movement Charter, the Universal Code of Conduct, and implementation of key recommendations of the movement strategy.
  4. Improve the Foundation’s performance and effectiveness by improving our translation/interpretation support, lifting up more meaningful metrics to assess our impact, and designing shared services to support a truly global working environment

The process of identifying these goals also included a month of feedback and ‘two-way planning’ with Foundation staff and volunteers. There were over 12,000 pageviews of the draft plan on Meta-wiki (4x increase from last year) with 30+ contributors engaging on the talk page from across 8 wikis, including Arabic, Swedish, German Wikipedias, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Over 750 community members from all regions of the world were reached through conversations that included multilingual support in 15 languages. These conversations were an opportunity to shift planning from a one-way information sharing exercise led by the Foundation, to a more collaborative two-way planning exercise. 

You can find an appendix of the feedback we received in the final plan. This document is a starting point for what will be a highly iterative process of doing and learning in the months ahead.  We will continue to host community conversations on- and off-wiki to share progress and invite further feedback. 

We invite your reflections and questions at any time on Meta.

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