Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2025-2026/Product & Technology OKRs

The Annual Plan is the Wikimedia Foundation’s description of what we hope to achieve in the coming year. We work hard to make the plan participatory, aspirational and achievable. Every year, we ask contributors to share their perspectives, hopes and specific requests as we shape the plan. Some of the ways we seek that input are through product team conversations with communities, the Community Wishlist, community conversations like the Commons conversation series, at conferences and through wiki pages like this one.

For our next annual plan, from July 2025 to June 2026, we are thinking about how we can best serve a multi-generational vision, given rapid changes in the world and the internet and how that affects our free knowledge mission.

As I said last year, we need to focus on what sets us apart: our ability to provide trustworthy content even as disinformation and misinformation proliferate around the internet and on platforms competing for the attention of new generations. This includes ensuring we achieve the mission to assemble and deliver the sum of all human knowledge to the world by expanding our coverage of missing information, which can be caused by inequity, discrimination and bias. Our content needs to also serve and remain vital in a changing internet driven by artificial intelligence and rich experiences. And finally, we need to find ways to sustainably fund our movement by building a shared strategy for our products and fundraising so that we can support this work for the long term.

To make choices and tradeoffs about where to focus our efforts in the coming year, we pulled together questions and thought about how to allocate our finite resources toward achieving the most impact.

If you are interested specifically in what features or services the Product and Technology department will build based on priorities set here, there will be time in March to comment on specific objectives and key results. (Here are the objectives and key results for the current annual plan, for reference.)

If you want to think about the challenges and opportunities in our technical environment and the direction we should set in the next annual plan, please consider the questions below with us.

We continuously take in information about these questions in many ways -- from community conversations, data we collect, research interviews we do, and more. This is not the first time we're asking and learning about many of these things–and we have already been doing work around many of them! We want to ask them again now and keep learning, as they are top of mind for us at this stage of our planning.

Questions:

Metrics and data
- What are some ways that data and metrics could better support your work as editors? Can you think of data about editing, reading, or organizing that would help you choose how to spend your time, or when something needs attention? This could be data about your own activity or the activity of others.
Editing
- When does editing feel most rewarding and fun for you? When does it feel most frustrating and difficult?
- We want contributors to receive more feedback and recognition for their work, so it doesn’t feel like nobody notices the effort they spend on the wikis. What kind of feedback and recognition is motivating to you? What nudges you to keep editing?
- Because the wikis are so large, it can be hard for editors to decide what wiki work is most important for them to spend their time on each day. What information or tools could help you choose how to spend your time? Would it be useful to have a central, personalized place that allows you to find new opportunities, manage your tasks, and understand your impact?
- We want to improve the experience of collaboration on the wikis, so it’s easier for contributors to find one another and work on projects together, whether it’s through backlog drives, edit-a-thons, WikiProjects, or even two editors working together. How do you think we could help more contributors find each other, connect, and work together?
Reading/Learning
- The wikis load faster or slower depending on where in the world people live. Are there any parts of the world where you think that improved performance is most needed?
- How can we help new generations of readers find Wikipedia content interesting and engaging? We’ve discussed ideas around interactive content and video in the past, and in the current year have focused on charts and on experimenting with new ways to surface existing Wikipedia content. How might we continue on this track to use our existing content in new ways that are unique to Wikimedia?
Moderators
- What might need to change about Wikipedia in order for more people to want to get involved in advanced volunteer roles, like patrollers or administrators?
- What information or context about edits or users could help you make patrolling or admin decisions more quickly or easily?
External Trends
- What are the most important changes you’re noticing in the world outside Wikimedia? These might be trends in technology, education, or how people learn.
- Outside of the Wikimedia movement, what other online communities do you participate in? What lessons can we take away from tools and processes on other community platforms?
- How are you using AI tools inside and outside your Wikimedia work? What do you find AI useful for?
Commons
- What decisions can we make with the Commons community to create a sustainable project that supports creating encyclopedic knowledge?
Wikidata
- How would you like to see Wikidata evolve in the future? How can it be most useful for building trustworthy encyclopedic content?

Discussion

–– Selena Deckelmann