Where to from here?

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Hi everyone – It’s approaching three years since I started getting to know many of you through a nearly 300-person “listening tour” that was designed to help me understand the current needs and the future aspirations of the Wikimedia movement. A couple of months later, I officially joined the Wikimedia Foundation as CEO. Since then, I have regularly communicated here and elsewhere about what I’ve been doing and learning. And by now, I have met with or spoken to thousands of you all over the world. 

As some of us travel to Wikimania next week, I wanted to reflect on where we are now – both in the world, and in our movement. I also want to share a few thoughts on the things that are keeping me up these days, what is giving me hope, and where I need more help as we try to move forward together. 

Setting priorities, showing results

When I arrived in 2022, it was a very difficult moment of transition at the Wikimedia Foundation. Leadership changes are always disruptive, and I was met with a growing list of demands from Foundation staff, affiliates, volunteers, and others about what needed to be changed, fixed, added, eliminated, expanded, or devolved. And there wasn’t much agreement on any of them. 

I listened first, and then got to work prioritising the Foundation’s focus in areas that felt urgent and important, including: 

In a relatively short period of time, we have made significant improvements responding to a range of concerns I encountered when I arrived. This is not the full list of what has improved – of course there is more to do and many more improvements to make. But I believe that the Wikimedia Foundation has changed for the better. Some of you have let me know whether or not you agree. 

Puzzle solving

And now? As I think about all the issues we face, I keep returning to these puzzles because, for me, they remain difficult questions that require inventive and collective puzzle solving. I can’t solve them alone, and the Foundation can’t solve them in isolation, either. 

The one that is keeping me up is whether we are delivering what the world needs from us, now?  I want to talk more about how we strengthen communities all over the world in the face of increased risks and threats to our people and projects. Some of these include combating mis/disinformation in this blockbuster year of elections, the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks on our platforms, tracking complex legal requirements across a growing list of jurisdictions, responding to ongoing demands to remove content on our sites, the questions being posed in novel legal cases that we are litigating right now, and the step-change increase I see in crisis management and brand attacks for a more polarising world.  

These risks we face are mirrored by even bigger threats in the broader knowledge ecosystem. These include more frequent internet shutdowns, threats to civic spaces, decreasing freedom online, attacks on free expression, lower levels of public trust in information sources, increased threats to human rights, and the amplification effect of powerful AI tools being introduced all at the same time.  

In the face of all this, a mandate of our mission is to “make and keep useful information from [our] projects available on the internet free of charge, in perpetuity.” What does this require of us, now? I want to talk more about how our projects become “multigenerational” to sustain themselves in this volatile future. 

Are there enough contributors, administrators, and other editors with extended rights to create, revise, and share the sum of all knowledge? Are enough people with varied perspectives and experiences raising their hands to participate in shaping their project communities, our global movement, or even just to vote in elections? Can we maintain and increase the trust of the public in our content, and also for our financing?  

All of this requires the Foundation to keep centering itself on enabling the essential technical infrastructure that is core to every aspect of our mission. In 2022, I said that while I can’t solve the puzzle of tech-enablement alone, “I can take accountability for the leadership, focus, and clarity that is needed to begin closing the gap between where we are and where we need to be.” Since then, we’ve named this priority for the entire Foundation. Our teams have accelerated what they can improve quickly, and named the things that they can’t do alone. 

Making Progress

We are making progress. Over the last year, we have seen a 25% increase in MediaWiki core developers. Our engineering teams launched a new data centre in South America reducing load times (by as much as one-third of a second) across the region. They have also upgraded core technical infrastructure for more security and sustainability. We’ve transformed accessibility on our projects with dark mode. Our stewards now have the ability to globally block accounts (not just IP addresses and IP ranges). Patrollers now can tackle vandalism on mobile. Communities can now customise wiki features to meet their unique needs. Moderators can configure automated prevention or reversion of bad edits based on scoring from a machine learning model. 

We also see progress in becoming more multilingual than in name only and making more contributions count. A new translation service (MinT) supports 200+ underserved languages, including 44 with machine translation for the first time. MinT is becoming the second most used translation service (behind Google Translate) for Wikimedia projects. An Africa growth pilot experimented with growing the active editor base in sub-Saharan Africa. Early results show that participants trained in core Wikipedia policies experienced a 38% decrease in 48-hour edit revert rate on English Wikipedia at 6 months. In addition, as part of a new project to create tools that guide newer editors to contribute in line with policies on their local wikis, we introduced References Check. With this tool, more than 42% of new content edits added references, and were not reverted within 48 hours. 

The Foundation has worked to comply with significant new regulations like the European Union’s Digital Services Act when the Wikimedia Foundation was the only nonprofit organisation to be classified as a “very large online platform” (VLOP) alongside major tech platforms. A disinformation team has built this repository to map volunteer efforts promoting trustworthy information and acting against disinformation. And many other Foundation teams have delivered results on many other commitments. 

Less visible has been tackling intractable topics that have sometimes been left unaddressed by the Foundation, probably because there is no happy answer. Difficult and unpopular decisions must be made, and we are still learning how to make them well together. Some of these include: how to evolve our systems to keep scaling Wikipedia as essential infrastructure for the internet while also enabling the varied needs of smaller projects? How to face into the realities of an internet that is becoming more fragmented, less open source, and less free?  How to make the right collective choices for Wikimedia’s future as generative AI disrupts the search-driven web traffic we have relied on for decades? 

I wake up every day thinking about how many hard things like this we need to solve together: protecting our people and projects from a now much-longer list of sophisticated attacks and threats, complying with (or dissenting from) a now much-longer list of laws, regulations, and legal requirements; making the best moves we can now to sustain Wikimedia projects for generations to come in a changed internet. 

Progress also in our governance

With all of this need in the world, I hope that the governance of our movement does not become an impossible puzzle. Many are frustrated by the future of a charter, and the Foundation’s decision not to ratify the current version. I can’t solve that frustration or confusion here, but I can share my perspectives on what might help us move forward. 

When I arrived, these were some of my views and questions: 

“Early on, I asked for help to learn more about the founding pillars of Wikimedia projects, about the organisational values of the Wikimedia Foundation, and about what led to prior successes and failures throughout our 20-year history. What emerged for me is the circular puzzle of how best to run and manage the centralised institutions of a decentralised, volunteer-led movement?
This question gets asked in many different ways: is the Wikimedia Foundation more like a non-profit development organisation or a technology company? What is the role of affiliated entities like chapters or user groups? How do we account for the majority of ‘unaffiliated’ volunteers who power our projects?

These issues then become layered with views about the power and trust relationship between movement actors, including (but not only) the Foundation and communities. How should decisions be made? How should resources be shared? In my experience, these are familiar debates across many volunteer-led social movements around the world.
In our context, I am learning that some dynamics are about fundamental values, structure and power-sharing: “We operate by the tyranny of the majority – consensus – this is not good enough.” “Transparency is a tool, not a value. What is the end goal of what we need transparency for – to build trust or to what end?” “Capacity is the issue, not resources. We are volunteers – giving us money doesn’t give us time.”

While other issues are about performance and execution: “Too much focus on governance, not actual enablement of people and projects.” “What is the focus of the Wikimedia Foundation today? It is totally unclear.” “We are never willing to turn things off, shut things down or stop doing anything.”

The puzzle is how to build convergence between our divergent organisational forms and in support of our movement strategy. How do we draw on similar pillars and principles even though our organisations cannot be run like our projects? How does our diversity (of every possible form) remain the catalyst for what it takes to create – not just imagine – a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge?” 

I see similar sentiments echoed in the comments submitted alongside the charter ratification vote. For me, these dynamics are likely to remain a feature of any large, diverse, and divergent global movement. Yet, this movement has set shared goals that we all have an obligation to implement effectively.

The Foundation remains committed to the idea of having a charter for the Wikimedia movement. My prior experience from other volunteer-led movements is that we need more clarity than we currently have in the conversations about how to share and devolve accountabilities, not only power. The Foundation has put forward this open proposal to co-create practical, time-bound experiments that are intended to represent a break from the past. This is a good-faith effort to work on the practicalities of shifting accountability and decision-making to representative councils and volunteer-led bodies. Your questions, suggestions, and comments on Meta will help make the outcome more successful. 

We have also asked for proposals for how to progress on discussions about a next version of a charter, taking into account challenges faced in this process and the need to change it going forward, the Board’s expressed reservations, and the input submitted in the ratification vote. 

Even prior to this vote, the Foundation has itself been identifying areas of accountability that should responsibly be transferred to others. We have executed on this intent, like devolving educational programmatic implementation to affiliates and others. Through this, we are learning that even on a smaller scale, equity in decision-making requires multiple stakeholders to agree on strategy, governance, financing, operations, staffing, communications, risk management, and who takes ultimate responsibility at the end of the day. 

Some of you joined a session I hosted at this year’s Wikimedia Summit to ask what the Foundation should stop doing or hand over to others. While no specific proposals were offered, it is a conversation that we intend to continue. We need more clarity, not less, on roles and responsibilities in our movement – this has been and remains a priority for me and the Board of Trustees, who I see as deeply committed to Wikimedia’s mission and global communities. 

Where I need more help is how to make progress within my reality of managing a much larger, highly regulated, more distributed, exceedingly complex organisation like the Wikimedia Foundation is today. I personally believe it is possible to change nearly anything we want about the Foundation – with clear-eyed, informed, and realistic understandings of the practical trade-offs and real-world consequences of those changes. 

I am confident that the input provided on the Foundation’s open proposal plus the conversations next week for those attending Wikimania will help us find a clearer path forward together. 

Rational optimism 

These governance questions may be discouraging to some of you right now. Not me. I know we can solve them… and draw on the best of our values and humanity along the way. 

One second ago, people around the world accessed Wikipedia 5,500 times. Our reach is consequential. I see from our readers, donors, partners, and allies that what we do is needed now more than ever before. I see that our values continue to unite people everywhere. I see that we can work with others to advance our commitments to equity.

In tough moments, this global community always finds its way through. That’s what the Wikimedia movement has been doing for almost 25 years, in spite of the critics, naysayers, and sceptics. We do this by assuming good faith, engaging with respect and civility, expressing appreciation, and talking through our disagreements. And above all, having each other’s backs now when the world is really counting on us. 

I welcome your reflections and your input on-wiki about the path forward. You can contact me at miskander@wikimedia.org or on my talk page or by signing up for a conversation with me and other Foundation leaders and Trustees at Talking: 2024. 

Maryana

Maryana Iskander

Wikimedia Foundation CEO

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