Wikimedia Foundation/Chief Executive Officer/Updates/January 2025 Update

Hi everyone,

As this year begins, I wanted to check in with all of you as I try to do regularly. There is a lot to say about what 2025 may bring: an accelerating pace of change from generative AI; the election of new governments in the United States and elsewhere; social, political and environmental upheaval around the world that force us all to keep adapting in order to meet new and different needs.

There are so many difficult questions being asked about what the world needs from us, now. How should we respond? I don’t have all the answers, but in reflecting on my letter to you from last August, I find credible reasons to remain hopeful.

In looking back at the question of how we collectively strengthen volunteer communities in the face of increased risks and threats to our people and projects, I believe that we can celebrate some wins. As you will read below, at the end of a blockbuster election year in 2024, Wikimedia community processes prevented any significant disinformation attacks on the projects; in the face of increased regulation, Wikipedia fared well in its first compliance audit under the European Union Digital Services Act (DSA); and we continue to make meaningful progress in resourcing the technology needs of our movement as a top priority for the Wikimedia Foundation.

I am the sender of this email, and it is authored by all members of the Foundation’s executive team. Over the past year, this close-knit group has provided leadership and accountability across so many critical areas of challenge and success.

Product & Technology

Hi! I am Selena Deckelmann, Chief Product and Technology Officer. When I joined the Foundation in the summer of 2022, I was tasked with bringing together the Product and Technology departments, which had been operating separately for many years, and figuring out how to respond to the wide-ranging and varied needs of and requests from contributors everywhere. This has not been easy!

I started by asking three key questions of Wikimedia contributors and staff: what is the impact that technology-focused teams have had over the last five years, what is the current vision and strategy, and what are the most promising future opportunities (and what would need to be true to pursue those opportunities)?

From those conversations, our technical teams prioritized the essential maintenance of Mediawiki and supporting editors with extended rights. Some of the early results included a 25% increase in Mediawiki core authors with 5+ patches; a new data center in Brazil to improve our global site performance; new and improved tools and features, including Automoderator, Community Configuration, Upload Wizard, Edit Check, Edit Patrol and In-App Watchlist, PageTriage, Commons Impact Metrics, CampaignEvents, Talk Page Improvements, Dark Mode, the Charts Extension, Machine in Translation (MinT); and much more! This has taken deep collaboration, energy and enthusiasm from so many of you – thank you.

This past year, we’ve continued this trajectory by improving the Wishlist process and making it a year-round process. We’re also collaborating more closely with community members, including with the newly formed Product and Technology Advisory Council, to assess the most impactful priorities for our work. We are also responding to volunteer requests to experiment with how new generations of people may read and use Wikipedia content. Our reader experience teams are running six experiments now to help us learn where to invest even more time and attention. If you would like to share thoughts about any of this work, please check out this post asking for help with our planning for next year.

When I reflect more on the long-term, this research convening asked us to think deeply about Wikimedia’s central role in the context of an internet being reshaped by AI. We know that in a world that increasingly has synthetic and unreliable content, human-created knowledge on Wikipedia is even more vital, albeit increasingly less visible. After spending time with our own researchers thinking deeply about what the world needs from Wikimedia projects, my reflection is that Wikipedia’s pillars have created a powerful, humanistic system that continues to produce reliable information for the entire world (and its AI training models).

For me, the generational question we have to ask is how to sustain these contributions with declines in editors (and in particular functionaries and administrators)? How to make the right bold choices soon, led by our vision and values, to meet a very rapidly changing internet? This is our collective call to action.

Legal

I'm Stephen LaPorte, General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation and have been with the Foundation's legal team for well over a decade. The last year has been significant for Wikimedia's legal and policy work. We defended the Wikimedia projects and supported volunteers against many complex lawsuits and other legal threats, including a significant victory in Germany, and continue to provide support for ongoing cases in India and elsewhere. The Foundation’s legal team continues to publish data twice a year about the demands we receive and how we respond to defend free knowledge around the world.

This year, there were big changes in the regulations for online platforms. Wikipedia received its first independent audit under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) and published the results. This was a massive undertaking, covering the Wikimedia Foundation's work related to transparency, complaint handling, risk mitigation, accountability, and more. Wikipedia was the only Very Large Online Platform that did not receive a negative evaluation.

It was also a blockbuster year for elections, with more people eligible to vote than ever before in human history. We set up Disinformation Response Teams for three elections (India, European Union, and the United States) and published a report that highlighted the effectiveness of processes developed by volunteers to protect Wikipedia. Ahead of the 2024 United Nations General Assembly, Wikimedia successfully hosted an event on the power of the commons, collaborating with chapters and volunteers, to promote a positive vision for the Internet's future.

Revenue & Fundraising

Hi all, I am Lisa Gruwell, Chief Advancement Officer, and I have met so many of you over the past 13 years that I have been with the Wikimedia Foundation. During that time, you have heard from me on a long-term strategy to diversify revenue streams that can support Wikipedia in a changing world. We remain very fortunate to still be funded by millions of donors from around the world. Last month, our movement hit a very important milestone: we now have over one million recurring donors - readers who have signed up to make an automatic donation to us, usually every month. This support for our mission provides added financial resilience as we confront a future where Wikipedia content is read increasingly off our platform.

In 2016, we successfully launched the Wikimedia Endowment to provide long-term support for the Wikimedia projects. Since then, we have built a board of engaged donors and community members who help to raise funds for the endowment and to make sure that it is invested wisely. Once the endowment reached US$100 million, we asked the people who donated to the Endowment what they would like it to support financially. From these conversations, we set a strategy of providing funding for the technical innovation of Wikimedia projects. You can read more here about the current year plans for the Wikimedia Endowment.

Wikimedia Enterprise finds itself in an inflection point as we determine how to respond to a radically altered landscape of content reuse that is being accelerated even further by AI and large language models. While our content has always been reused, AI companies are more relentlessly scraping our sites without much thought to their responsibility to contribute back to the commons. The Wikimedia Enterprise team, supported by their colleagues in Legal and Product/Technology, will advance more focused community conversations about these issues, and more generally how to harness AI to meet and sustain our mission in new ways.

Communications

Hi everyone, I’m Anusha Alikhan, Chief Communications Officer. Since joining the Foundation in 2019, I’ve seen the reach and influence of the Wikimedia projects grow substantially. This has brought more attention to our collective work, highlighted the need to strengthen the global understanding of our model, and deepened connections with volunteers across the world.

In the past year, Communications teams have supported the rollout of improved technical features like Dark Mode; facilitated the co-creation of global meeting spaces like Afrika Baraza, WikiCauserie, the CEE Catch-Up for increased connections; and increased regular communications through the Foundation bulletin, Tech News, and Diff. And our teams worked side-by-side with many of you to make Wikimania 2024 a success.

Efforts like WikiCelebrate, Knowledge is Human, and Wikipedia Needs More Women have raised the visibility of Wikimedia’s work at a time when capturing mindshare online is even more difficult than it has been in the past. We’ve experimented with using regional conferences to share more analytics and data from our Brand Tracker, and other research projects like this recent report looking at how young knowledge creators attribute Wikipedia on social media.

In the media, we’ve navigated challenging moments. Importantly, we’ve also shared positive stories, including the top 25 most-read stories on Wikipedia and creative resources like these 13 WikiMinute videos (and counting!). Our media work has also been critical in supporting global advocacy efforts to make sure that key decision-makers understand the need to protect public interest projects at a local and international level.

Finance

Hello, I am Jaime Villagomez, Chief Financial Officer, and I have been a member of the Foundation’s executive team since 2016. You mostly hear from me about the successful audit reports that the Wikimedia Foundation and now Wikimedia Endowment receives each year, and our efforts to continue improving how we share financial information. This year, the Finance & Administration team has led budget efforts to increase the resources we provide to movement entities. We also prioritized cost-saving initiatives that significantly reduced the size of the Foundation’s office in San Francisco as we prepare in September 2025 to bring together all staff for the first time since January 2020.

People

Hi, I am Courtney Bass Sherizen, Chief People Officer, the newest addition to the executive team. My first day on the job was at Wikimania 2023 in Singapore, where I began my learning journey about Wikimedia through an intense week of conversations and meetups with volunteers from around the world. This perspective has served me well, as many Foundation staff come from the Wikimedia movement and all of our staff are expected to understand the central role of volunteer communities in our shared mission. The People department supports the needs of a remote-first, globally distributed workforce of which about half of are located outside of the United States. My team supports managers and staff with recruitment, learning & growth, performance management, as well as the Foundation’s strong commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion – work we are proud to share and learn from affiliates as well.

Update on Pilots

A final note from me on the Board of Trustees recommendations following the Movement Charter process last year. Last October, the Board shared next steps to assess how the Wikimedia movement can responsibly shift more accountability and decision-making to representative councils and volunteer-led bodies in the areas of responsibilities proposed by the Movement Charter Drafting Committee.

This mapping exercise was completed with input from interested stakeholders to provide further analysis of community input provided throughout the charter process, including areas of agreement and divergence. These ranged from more equitable representation and accountability in decision-making; the desire for more clarity about the roles and responsibilities of movement bodies including affiliates, hubs, and the Foundation itself; as well as comments in favor of evolving existing grantmaking and fundraising approaches.

This mapping has provided encouraging support for the following three pilots where progress has been made since October. Anyone is invited to learn more and provide comments at the on-wiki spaces linked below:

1. Global Resource Distribution: Earlier this month, this Diff blog was posted outlining next steps to create an interim Global Resource Distribution Committee in March, including a call for nominations for this Committee in the month ahead. This is intended to pilot a volunteer-driven global body to set strategy for distributing grants and resources across the Wikimedia movement, and to make recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation for funding regional and thematic activities and initiatives in support of the mission of the Wikimedia movement.
2. Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC): In October, members of the PTAC were announced and have just finished their first in-person meeting. This body brings technical contributors, affiliate representatives, and the Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform.
3. An improved strategy for supporting movement organisations: The third pilot focuses on the ecosystem of movement organizations – including existing affiliates and proposed entities like hubs, to be more closely aligned with the resource distribution approach in the first pilot. This has commenced with fact-gathering sessions focused on key stakeholders, including the Affiliations Committee and Affiliate Executive Directors, to better understand how movement bodies can be organised for the future needs of our movement.

Hearing from you

The year ahead is going to require even more resilience. I mentioned a few months ago that in tough moments, our global community always finds its way through. That’s what the Wikimedia movement has been doing for nearly 25 years. Now, when the world is really counting on us, we’ll need to come together even more.

Last year, the Foundation’s leadership experimented with Talking: 2024 as a way to reduce the barriers for anyone to ask for a conversation with Trustees, me, or any of our executive leadership. We are continuing that effort through "Let’s Talk" and hope you will take up the offer if you would like to engage with any of us.

In addition to the many other mechanisms for connection that Anusha mentioned above, we will look for more opportunities to gather interested volunteers and other stakeholders to help us think about how to respond to the changes all around us (e.g., former Trustees, the Foundation’s annual planning retreat this March, in-person and virtual community convenings, Wikimania, etc.).

Finally, here is the agenda for tomorrow’s quarterly Open Conversation with the Trustees if you would like to join.

Thank you for reading this far,

Maryana

Maryana Iskander
Wikimedia Foundation Chief Executive Officer