The Wikimedia Foundation and a group of experienced co-authors with affiliate background have drafted the paper Towards a Healthy Ecosystem of Wikimedia Organizations. This paper looks at the history and status quo of affiliates, hubs, and other close organizations. It proposes key questions to clarify roles and responsibilities, and to suggest focus areas for affiliates. Finally, it also makes preliminary recommendations to the Affiliations Committee, the interim Global Resource Distribution Committee, and the Wikimedia Foundation to address longstanding problems around entity recognition and resource allocation. This paper has been commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. The first version published today has been co-authored by Wikimedia Foundation staff and Wikimedia organizational leaders Bobby Shabangu (Wikimedia South Africa), Lucy Compton-Reid (Wikimedia UK), and Tanveer Hasan (CIS-A2K, India), in consultation with Wikimedia affiliate leaders. You can learn more about its goals and background on the project page.
This paper doesn’t contain any decisions. Instead, it proposes the problems to look at and possible solutions to explore and discuss. Any decisions will be discussed and made by the corresponding bodies after community reviews specific to each topic.
This paper aims to be presented as a proposal for the movement at Wikimania in August 2025 in Nairobi. Before that, the authors want to share the draft to receive early feedback from the affiliates and the communities. The feedback period starts on July 8 and ends on July 29.
Please leave your feedback on the paper’s discussion page. Some of this feedback might be already incorporated into the paper before its presentation at Wikimania. Some might identify key topics to be discussed after its official presentation.
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