Support Wikimedia Foundation

Lila's Foreword

In 2015, we declared what matters. We made changes to strengthen our movement and organization. We refocused on our core: community and technology, introducing new thinking and skills to the WMF, and new products to the world. We outlined this focus in our Call to Action. We committed to organizational excellence, reconnected with our communities, and publicly reaffirmed our values.

• Organizational focus: organized around community, technology, and serving user needs.
• Results forward: built operations and strategy based on data and accountability for outcomes.
• Mobile-first: launched our first native apps for iOS and Android.
• Collaboration: created a Partnerships Team to connect our vision to like-minded organizations.
• Values: fought back against government policies that would damage our mission.

We restructured the WMF around the people we serve, anchored in community and technology. We unified community-facing teams. We began realignment with Wikimedia affiliates around shared priorities. We ran an open strategy consultation and invested in our election process, resulting in some of the highest volunteer engagement in the history of the project. We dedicated resources to promoting respectful, welcoming conduct on our sites, gender diversity, and the protection of minors. We reorganized technology talent around core audiences, elevating some of our most experienced people and bringing in new experts. We committed to user experience as a foundation for success. We shipped two highly-rated mobile apps, dramatically improved editing performance, unified user identities across projects, and brought VE to deployment-ready quality.

Across the WMF we introduced best practices for action and progress. We overhauled reporting, introduced organization-wide quarterly goals and measurements, and set clear expectations for accountability. We established a special team mandated with driving performance across the organization.

We recommitted to our values. We took a stand against policies and practices like mass surveillance that harm our community and vision, establishing the Wikimedia Foundation as a major force on policy issues. We established a team to pursue partnerships with organizations that will expand our reach, and influence the technological, public policy, and cultural landscape.

We are not done. In 2016, we must declare for our future. Knowledge production, sharing, and the internet are changing all around us. In 2016 we must close gaps in core capabilities so we can expand the reach and depth of our projects across the world. These gaps remain in the areas of community (including affiliates and partners), technology, and communication.

We are a small non-profit in a land of internet giants, and as such we must be highly disciplined in what we do. We must partner heavily, leverage the strengths of our affiliates, increase volunteer engagement, and plan ahead. We must build funds and resources in order to invest in key far-reaching projects, and reimagine our movement for future generations. To succeed, we must embark on this shared future together. Joined, we are stronger. Together we can empower every human to share in the sum of all knowledge.

Call to Action 2015 Improve Technology & Execution

• We will define our commitments - and deliver on time and on budget.
• We will make our decisions based on data.
• We will improve our process for community input, and allocate dedicated technical resources to community requests.
• We will update legacy architectures and deliver mobile-ready infrastructure and services to support structured data, user security, and a simplified user experience.

Focus on Knowledge & Community

• We will integrate across community engagement functions to improve communication and results.
• We will create a central, multilingual hub for community support.
• We will have a working plan to support emerging users and communities.
• We will improve our measures of community health and content quality, and fund effective community and content initiatives.

Support Innovation & New Knowledge

• We will integrate, consolidate, and pause or stop stalled initiatives.
• We will create spaces for future community-led innovations and new knowledge creation.
• We will facilitate and support new models and structures for knowledge curation.
• We will strengthen partnerships with organizations that use or contribute free content, or are aligned with the WMF in the free-knowledge movement.

The focus of the next year

Last year we set up teams and team structure to align our organization with the future of the Wikimedia Foundation. This restructuring of Engineering and formation of the Community Engagement Department are, with the Call to Action, the basis for change in the FY 15-16 Fiscal Year.

1. Consolidate staff and funding of current work: We will reallocate staffing and funding from low- impact projects to projects that further improve our impact.
2. Fill in the gaps in current user needs:
   1. Software: Examples include improving edit rates with Visual Editor, performance improvements, readership engagement improvements via improved readability and discovery UX, API build-out and refactor core technology so we can build faster in the future.
   2. Community support: Examples include making the grant process simpler and responding to requests for fixes in an acceptable timeframe.
   3. Communication: We are seeing communication gaps, inconsistency in messaging, and lack of centralized community and product communication. Filling the gap on product marketing, brand positioning, social engagement, and global support are all part of this effort.

Read the full annual report here.