Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2023-2024/Reports/Core Metrics Q1

Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan 2023-2024

• Summary
• History
• External Trends
• Goals
• Finances
• Foundation Details
• Collaboration
• Reports
  • Q1: Core Metrics Report, Progress Report
  • Q2: Core Metrics Report, Progress Report
  • Q3: Core Metrics Report, Progress Report
  • Q4: Progress Report

Q1 Core Metrics Report

Quarterly metrics are intended to measure progress toward the Foundation’s Annual Plan goals. Reviewing and publishing these core metrics throughout the year will allow us to evaluate which work streams and interventions have been most impactful and make data-driven decisions about what to prioritize through the remainder of the year. These reports will also allow the movement to track the progress we make with the many initiatives we’re running. The current report summarizes Core Metrics for Q1. The report includes comparisons to Q1 last year, as well as progress towards Annual Plan year-end targets.

What is Q1? Quarter 1 (Q1) refers to July, August, and September

What is FY 23-24? Fiscal Year (FY) 23-24 refers to July 2023 through June 2024.

What are Core Metrics? Core Metrics are small, well-defined set of measurements used to guide strategic decisions.^[1] As part of this year's Annual Plan, four Core Metric areas were developed: "Contributors", "Content", "Relevance", and "Effectiveness".

During Q1, we made progress toward the Contributors and Effectiveness metrics, detailed below. We have not yet begun to do the work that will feed the Content and Relevance metrics–those metrics remain at baseline. We expect to see progress on these through interventions in the coming quarters.

Contributors

While we develop a more comprehensive metric to measure the health of our contributors, we aim to improve and maintain the health of the Movement's communities of contributors by delivering at least one significant intervention per quarter that supports editors with extended rights.

Status: On track

In Q1, updates to PageTriage were deployed by the Moderator Tools team.

• What? This intervention addressed outdated technologies in PageTriage, the software used by English Wikipedia’s new page patrollers.
• Why? This intervention was prioritized because new page patrollers on en.wiki, who depend on PageTriage to moderate new pages, needed maintenance and updates for their critical workflows.
• So what? This intervention will help ensure that PageTriage is supportable in the long-term. Future ideas and fixes can be quickly addressed so that patrollers can continue to work efficiently.

Content

We aim to increase quality and reliability of encyclopedic content by increasing the percentage of Wikipedia articles that are in high-impact topic areas (beginning with gender and geography) and meet a shared quality standard.

Status: Work on this metric has not yet begun

The Wikimedia Foundation has not yet delivered programs or products to impact this metric; so the changes showcased here are related initiatives not led by the Foundation. Understanding these fluctuations in the content areas of geography and gender will be critical when we report on our progress in upcoming quarters, as we will need to take into account how ongoing trends, external factors, and community-led initiatives are playing a role. Do you have ideas about community activities or external factors that might be impacting the Content metric? Let us know on the talk page!

Geography

In Q1, 34% of new quality articles about geographic content were about underrepresented regions.

• 34% is a 4 percentage point increase from Q1 last year.
• 34% is 5 percentage points above our Annual Plan year-end target of 29%.
• Not all regional content had an increase. View breakdowns by region.
• Not all Wikipedia editions had an increase. View breakdowns by Wikipedia language edition.

Which regions are "underrepresented"? The following regions are classified as underrepresented within the Content metric area: East, Southeast Asia, and Pacific; Latin America and the Caribbean; Middle East and North Africa; South Asia; and Sub-Saharan Africa. Content about these five regions is underrepresented on Wikipedia when compared to global population distributions.

Gender

As part of our annual plan goals around gender equity, we aim to create "more inclusive, gender-equitable and safe spaces to contribute intersectional content on women's biographies and material that women want to read." This fiscal year, we will support two community-led initiatives aimed at closing gender gaps in article content. For each initiative, we will identify an outcome measure specific to the initiative's goals and report on the impact of each outcome measure.

Relevance

We aim to ensure our relevance and sustainability to a broad audience world-wide by increasing the number of unique devices accessing Wikipedia. Unique devices refer to the number of distinct electronic devices (e.g. mobile phones, desktop computers) that visited, in this case, Wikipedia sites. Learn more about unique devices here.

Status: Work on this metric has not yet begun

The Wikimedia Foundation has not yet delivered products or programs that would impact the Relevance metric. We have seen a consistent baseline in terms of the number of unique devices, and will be doing more work to understand how we can grow this moving forward.  Do you have ideas about community activities or external factors that might be impacting the Relevance metric? Let us know on the talk page!

In Q1, Wikipedia was accessed by 1.53 billion unique devices per month.

• 1.53 billion is about the same number of monthly unique devices that accessed Wikipedia in Q1 last year.
• 1.53 billion is about 70 million away from our Annual Plan year-end target of 1.60 billion unique devices per month.
• Monthly unique devices increased in some Wikipedia editions, and decreased in others. View breakdowns by Wikipedia language edition here or visit Wiki Stats to explore language-edition trends further!
• Monthly unique devices increased in some regions, and decreased in others. View breakdowns by region here.

Effectiveness

We aim to ensure our long-term sustainability by improving how the Foundation operates and scales. One way we aim to do this is by increasing our programmatic expense ratio, which is the proportion of budget that funds work that directly supports our mission.

Status: On track

Last FY, 76% of our budget went to programmatic expenses. We set a target of increasing that number by 1 percentage point this year, which represents a substantial financial increase towards programmatic work to support our mission.

Based on Q1 data, we are currently on track to reach our 77% target by the end of Q4.