Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-06-08/News from the WMF
News from the WMF
Progress on the plan — how the Wikimedia Foundation advanced on its Annual Plan goals during the first half of fiscal year 2023–2024
- Elena Lappen is the Wikimedia Foundation's Movement Communications Manager, and works to strengthen the communications and collaboration between the Wikimedia movement and the Wikimedia Foundation.
Each year, the Wikimedia Foundation summarizes goals for the year in the Annual Plan. This fiscal year’s plan, which started in July 2023, centers Product and Technology work, recognizing Wikimedia’s role as a platform for people to contribute on a massive scale. To that end, it puts special emphasis on established editors, who have an outsized impact expanding and improving the quality of content, as well as managing community processes. Hundreds of Wikimedians shaped this annual plan both on and off wiki.
Below, we have summarized progress on each of the four goals during the first half of fiscal year 2023–2024 (July 2023 to January 2024).
Goal 1: Infrastructure
- Contributor tools: progress on Event Discovery, Dark Mode, New Pages Patrol, Patrolling on the Android app, Better diff handling for paragraph splits, Watchlist on iOS, Edit Check, Discussion Tools, Automoderator, Community Configuration, and other tools.
- Wikimedia Commons: Upgrades to Thumbor, support for OpenRefine, the Wikimedia Commons Upload Wizard, and other work.
- Underserved languages: Better support for underserved languages with open machine translations through a new translation service – MinT that supports 200+ languages, including 44 with machine translation for the first time.
- Community Wishlist: Reviewing and improving the community wishlist process to better handle the needs of diverse users, growing technical complexities, and deeper collaboration between the Foundation's Product & Technology teams and technical volunteers. Two changes are being implemented to the process: the Community Wishlist will be open year round in order to have a continuous mechanism for identifying needs from volunteers, and will introduce a concept of Focus Areas, where community submissions that share a common problem will be grouped in order to better align and prioritize work.
- AI: Advancing community conversations about generative artificial intelligence, while also modernizing our machine learning infrastructure to support mission-aligned ML tool use on our projects. This has included experimenting with whether and how we can serve reliable, verifiable knowledge via off-platform AI assistants like ChatGPT. We have also experimented with how machine learning might be used to help smaller wiki communities automatically moderate incoming edits.
- Maintenance and support for MediaWiki Core: Dedicating more resources to maintenance and support of MediaWiki software while we begin thinking together about the future roadmap.
- MediaWiki technical contributors: Ramped up support for technical contributors, with engineers dedicating more hours to guidance and code review. The MediaWiki Platform team provided review for 200 volunteer-submitted patches in Q1; the number of contributors to MediaWiki core who have submitted more than 5 patches increased 15% over Q1 last year.
- New caching center: As a part of our commitment to knowledge equity, we are adding a new caching center in South America for increased site responsiveness in the region.
- Volunteer-reported issues: resolved 600+ volunteer-reported issues in Phabricator over a period of 6 months.
- Typography decisions: used research methods to solicit prototypes directly from volunteers for informing typography decision-making
Goal 2: Equity
- Wikimania: supported volunteers from East and Southeast Asia & Pacific (ESEAP) to connect over 2800 Wikimedians virtually and in person from 142 countries – many of whom may not otherwise have been able to collaborate and learn from each other.
- Co-created spaces: facilitated co-created spaces that strengthen support and collaboration, including the peer-learning platform Let's Connect, plus regional gatherings including Afrika Baraza, Central and Eastern Europe Catch Up, WikiCauserie for French-speaking Wikimedians, and the South Asia open community call.
- Movement conferences: advanced movement goals by resourcing conferences like EduWiki Conference, WikiWomen Summit, WikiWomen Camp and the GLAM-Wiki Conference.
- Collaborations: Collaborated with communities on projects including the Africa New Editors project, Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards, and the WikiSource Loves Manuscripts Learning Partners Network.
Goal 3: Safety and integrity
- EU Digital Services Act: took steps to comply with the new Digital Services Act, an act that went into effect in August 2023 that regulates internet platforms operating in the European Union.
- Advocacy: educated regulators, policymakers and government leaders about Wikimedia's model
- Disclosure: met our reporting and disclosure obligations, including publishing a supplemental transparency report
- Disinformation: supported volunteers and project integrity by mapping anti-disinformation initiatives across the ecosystem; tackled disinformation on the projects in an Anti-Disinformation Repository
- Volunteer safety: supported community measures for safety and inclusion by working with the Affiliations Committee, Case Review Committee and Ombuds Commission.
Goal 4: Effectiveness
- Increased efficiency: we are on track to increase the percentage of our budget that goes to directly supporting Wikimedia's mission (our "Programmatic Efficiency Ratio") through increasing our internal efficiency around administrative and fundraising costs.
- Additional investment into supporting the movement: this increased efficiency will enable an additional investment of $1.8M into funding in areas like grants, feature development, site infrastructure and more.
If you are interested in diving deeper into some of these workstreams, you can read about our progress against the plan on Diff. We also maintain quarterly Metrics Reports to help measure impact, and are constantly feeding data back into the process to see what interventions are working and where we need to course correct. We look forward to sharing more progress as fiscal year 2023–2024 wraps up and we head towards the next fiscal year, for which Annual Plan conversations and drafting are already underway.
Discuss this story