The Annual Plan is the Wikimedia Foundation’s description of what we hope to achieve in the coming year. This is a time of urgency and focus for the Wikimedia projects: as we have seen with global trends, the Internet and information ecosystem continues to change rapidly. AI is a transformative force on the internet, along with new ways that young generations consume information, and increasing scrutiny from governments and regulations. Recently, we noted that Wikipedia pageviews have been declining.
As these trends have taken shape, we have executed annual plans meant to address them. In our next annual plan, from July 2026 to June 2027, we aim to conti…
The Annual Plan is the Wikimedia Foundation’s description of what we hope to achieve in the coming year. This is a time of urgency and focus for the Wikimedia projects: as we have seen with global trends, the Internet and information ecosystem continues to change rapidly. AI is a transformative force on the internet, along with new ways that young generations consume information, and increasing scrutiny from governments and regulations. Recently, we noted that Wikipedia pageviews have been declining.
As these trends have taken shape, we have executed annual plans meant to address them. In our next annual plan, from July 2026 to June 2027, we aim to continue to evolve our technology and experiences to meet this moment. We want to do so at an energetic pace, while preserving and enhancing those things that have made the wikis so valuable. The goal continues to be a multi-generational project where future generations will access and contribute knowledge for free, in ways that work for them.
As with every year, we ask you to shape this plan together with us. We’d like to hear your hopes, concerns, bold ideas, and specific requests, which will then help the Foundation make choices about how to use our time and resources.
For the work of our Product & Technology department, annual planning begins by sharing an early list of “big picture” questions. These questions are by design similar to those we shared last year; many of our challenges remain relevant and require work over multiple years. Beyond this, we will continue to listen and engage through specific product team or topic area conversations, surveys and research interviews, the Community Wishlist, live calls, at conferences, and on our annual plan talk page.
Last time around, this process helped us to prioritize work in the current plan that has benefited our communities and projects. For instance, we heard from both the community and the Product and Technology Advisory Council that **mobile editing **continues to be a major challenge, so we decided to continue building Structured Tasks, Edit Checks, which we know improve outcomes on mobile, and did additional research. We also used community feedback and the Product and Technology Advisory Council’s guidelines to reshape how we collaboratively develop and communicate our work on readers, bringing communities in earlier to set shared expectations and guardrails that enable responsible product experimentation and ensure our work meets the needs of current and future generations of readers and editors.
We also held a series of listening and discussion sessions focused on Commons about issues that have been raised over the years, which led to prioritizing a number of infrastructure improvements for the Commons databases, some software components, and specific unsupported tools work for video2commons. And we deprecated the mobile domain which improves the loading time and search engine visibility of pages, especially for Commons.
Additionally, after years of community concerns with the accessibility of our CAPTCHA, and requests from users with extended rights to step up our detection of automated editing, we deployed a real-world trial of a new bot detection service for both account creation and higher-risk editing, to English Wikipedia and several other wikis.
Looking ahead, the world needs the Wikimedia projects – and a plan to support them – now more than ever. We are doing our best to share all the questions on our minds as we enter the next planning cycle. We don’t expect each of you to answer them all, but we hope that you’ll share what’s most important to you. Thank you for taking the time to reflect and imagine with us. We’ll have more information about next steps in the process in January.
Global Trends
Global trends have continued to shape not only the Wikimedia projects, but the broader internet. We want to hear more about how those trends are affecting you and how you think we should respond.
- What are the most important changes you’re noticing in the world outside Wikimedia this year? 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?
- Has your relationship to AI changed in the last year? E.g., do you see or use AI-powered features and tools (like AI summaries when you use web search, or AI-powered features to summarize or write text in emails or documents) about the same, more often, or less often now than you did a year ago? Do you think or worry about the impact of AI on Wikipedia more, less, or about the same as a year ago?
Experimentation
In order to meet the current moment with urgency and focus, we need to experiment and try new things rapidly, in ways that are healthy for our communities. We are striving to find new ways to experiment alongside our communities.
- What ideas or changes have you wanted to test on your wiki? Are there things you wish you could measure but can’t? Do you have specific questions about impact or causality that we should consider – for example, whether a feature or a bug is causing something that you are observing on the wikis?
- A key part of our experimentation with new tools and features is communication and collaboration with our communities. Do you have ideas about how we can deliver improvements quickly while working together with communities?
Newcomers
Research has shown that newcomers struggle to edit and continue editing Wikipedia. We have built a set of features that have been shown to increase engagement by newcomers, and Edit Checks to help them follow some of the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive edits. How else can we help newcomers become effective contributors?
- What helped you build confidence and understand how to contribute, and how might we build something helpful for today’s newcomers?
- If you have experience in training, teaching or mentoring newcomers, what have you learned about how newcomers can gain the skills to contribute?
Users with Extended Rights
The rise in dis- and misinformation, vandalism, and security threats means that the work of users with extended rights has never been more important, yet their numbers are shrinking on the largest Wikipedias. At Wikimania this year, we brought users with extended rights together to share best practices and come up with ideas for the future. How else can we strengthen and grow our community of editors and users with extended rights?
- How do you prioritise what needs your attention on your wiki? What pages, categories, processes, or tools has your community developed to surface requests or manage backlogs?
- What volunteer-built tool or gadget is most important to your workflow, and why?
- What types of improvements would help more editors get involved with patrolling?
** **Collaboration
We want to make it easier for contributors to find one another and work on projects together, strengthening overall collaboration and connection on the Wikis.
- Do you ever set editing goals or challenges for yourself or for a group that you’re a part of? How do you set and share these goals? Would you be interested in having ways to do this and share your work with others?
- If you organize events (like edit-a-thons, workshops, or meetups), what is your biggest challenge? What technology could the Foundation provide that would have the most impact on your success?
- How do you show recognition for the work of others on the wikis today? What could help make it easier for editors to express appreciation for each other?
Reading
New user trends show that people are accessing Wikimedia content all over the internet, even if they don’t visit wikipedia.org. But with fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work. We are currently running experiments that focus on both enhancing familiar ways of learning for active readers, and building new ways of learning for new readers. What do you think would be most impactful in bringing and retaining readers on Wikipedia?
- What might keep new generations from finding Wikipedia content interesting and engaging? How might we overcome that using our existing content?
- Chatbots and AI-driven search are increasingly popular as ways to seek information. With this trend unfolding, what might we do to encourage more people to use Wikipedia as their go-to place for knowledge?
- What have been effective ways you have seen others learn and explore knowledge outside of Wikipedia? Can any of these ways be used as inspiration for Wikipedia?
Can you help us translate this article?
In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?