Sharing an Update to the Draft 2025-2026 Annual Plan – Diff

Sharing an Update to the Draft 2025-2026 Annual Plan – Diff
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Forests and roads in the Yedigöller region of Turkey.
Following a historic
election year in 2024
, when more people were eligible to vote than ever before in human history, the world in 2025 is experiencing significant geopolitical, regulatory, policy, and social shifts that present the Wikimedia movement with challenge and opportunity.
In January 2026, Wikipedia will turn 25 years old. This generational anniversary will occur at the midpoint of the Wikimedia Foundation’s next annual plan. Looking ahead, it provides a rare opportunity for reflection and celebration, as well as reinforcing the need for clear-eyed and pragmatic planning to protect and grow this unique global knowledge resource. Indeed, our
mission
calls on us to do this
in perpetuity
for generations yet to come.
At this moment, the Wikimedia Foundation’s planning covers the spectrum from rapid response all the way to a
multi-generational
strategy aimed at increasing volunteers, content, readers, and funding. We must be able to work simultaneously on the short, medium, and long term.
These multiple levels of planning advance the Wikimedia movement’s
strategic direction
to serve as the “essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge” as we look to 2030 and beyond. This Annual Plan recognizes the vital need for neutral, free, encyclopedic content in the rapidly shifting landscape of a changing internet. It asks how we can strengthen and defend Wikimedia’s values and principles to protect its people and projects. It focuses on how we can collectively reach new contributors and consumers so that they continue to thrive for generations to come.
In that context,
this Annual Plan and Budget
provide an overview of goals for the next fiscal year (July 2025 – June 2026) as well as a breakdown of how resources are being invested and prioritized. It takes its direction from the key trends and needs in the world around us, and how the Wikimedia Foundation can respond with impact.
What does the world need from us now?
For the past several years, the planning process has begun with this central and guiding question. It informs research and analysis on the global trends and community trends that shape our work to fulfill Wikimedia’s mission, year-in and year-out.
Challenges and threats to sharing verified, neutral information online have increased significantly. Global trust in information online is declining, and shared consensus around what information is true is fragmenting. Laws and policies that seek to regulate online technology platforms do not always make sufficient room for nonprofit platforms like Wikipedia.
We are also seeing a rapidly changing digital landscape that includes an exponential increase in the amount of machine-generated content online. High-quality information that is reliably human-produced has become a dwindling and precious commodity that technology platforms are racing to scrape from the web and distribute through new search experiences (both AI and traditional search) on their platforms. The role of Wikimedia projects becomes vital in this context, though we are seeing our projects become less visible, as third-party content use grows.
Additionally, the long-term sustainability of Wikimedia communities relies on a steady influx of new users who contribute quality content and remain engaged. We will experiment with ways to recruit the next generation of
editors
, and expand the number of trusted volunteers (also called
users with extended rights
) who play crucial roles in ensuring quality and reliability on the projects.
Consistent goals, innovative experiments
As we face into these and other global trends, this plan responds with both consistency and innovation. The goals described below build on the consistent delivery of prior plans (see
2024
2023
2022
). Support for technology infrastructure and product development remain at the center of the Foundation’s priorities and resources to keep Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects reliable, secure, accessible, and evolving to meet the needs of contributors and consumers everywhere.
Our top-line goals have been reorganized to three (Infrastructure, Volunteer Support, and Effectiveness) as a simplified and more effective way to mirror Wikimedia’s “socio-technical” role in supporting both the technology and the people that power the projects as a vital part of the free and open Internet.
Infrastructure Goal
Consistent with prior years, the work under the Infrastructure goal are organized into:
Improving
Wiki Experiences
so that consumers and readers want to return, engage deeply, and contribute in ways that are meaningful to them;
Experimenting with
new ways to reach
Future Audiences
including bringing encyclopedic content to online social spaces where newer generations of contributors and consumers are spending their time;
Investing in
Data Services
to increase the pace of testing and development and experiment even more quickly with new technologies.
Volunteer Support Goal:
The Volunteer Support
goal aggregates the work of many teams at the Foundation to support and protect the people who contribute to Wikimedia projects at all levels, and the social systems essential for growing these contributions. It expands on consistent objectives of prior years, including those focused on safety and knowledge equity, to prioritize:
Protecting volunteers
through trust and safety support and improvements to infrastructure and tools to protect people (e.g., scaled abuse);
Supporting our projects’ integrity
through legal protection, strengthening neutrality principles, countering misinformation and disinformation, raising awareness and addressing knowledge gaps;
Strengthening our movement
by deepening critical connections and collaborations between volunteers, affiliates and movement entities, and through global and regional engagement.
Effectiveness Goal:
The Effectiveness Goal
focuses on continuously strengthening and improving the Foundation’s financial, risk management, organizational, and operational capabilities to deliver on these goals and on our mission. This year, key objectives include:
Investing in longer-term
diversified revenue strategies
, including learnings from additional donor experience experiments;
Further deepening
risk management protocols
, processes, and systems embedded within teams across the Foundation;
Strengthening
financial, operational, and human capital
performance management, and improving tools and processes for doing our work efficiently and effectively.
Pilot experiments in decentralized decision-making
Alongside these goals, this year’s annual plan will also include learnings and iterations of three pilot experiments chartered by the Board of Trustees. These are aimed at  assessing how the Wikimedia movement can responsibly shift more accountability and decision-making to representative councils and volunteer-led bodies in multiple areas of responsibility:
Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC)
: This body brings technical contributors, affiliate representatives, and the Wikimedia Foundation together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. Members of the council were announced in October 2024, and met in-person in January 2025 to publish their first
recommendation
Global Resource Distribution Committee (GDRC)
: This pilot will establish a volunteer-driven global body to set strategies and policies for how grants and resources across the Wikimedia movement are distributed, oversee
Regional Fund Committees
, and make recommendations to the Wikimedia Foundation related to the operations of the
Community Fund
. An
interim GRDC will be established
by Wikimania 2025 as a two-year learning experiment, to then be evaluated before becoming fully operational.
An improved strategy for supporting movement organisations
: This experiment, to be more closely aligned with the approach of the resource distribution pilot, focuses on the ecosystem of movement organizations, including existing affiliates and proposed entities like hubs. It has focused on a fact-gathering phase with key stakeholders, including the
Affiliations Committee
and
Affiliate Executive Directors
, to map how movement bodies are and can be organised for future needs.
More recently, the Wikimedia Foundation also worked with the Board of Trustees, and through a community workshop, to propose strengthening
Wikipedia’s neutral point of view principles
at a time they are needed more than ever. We anticipate these efforts will continue into the fiscal year covered by this Annual Plan.
Prioritizing our investments
Wikimedia’s financial model is a central topic for multi-year strategic planning that relates to priorities in fundraising, financial management, and a commitment to growing diversified revenue streams to protect and grow this mission for generations to come.
Current modeling suggests revenue growth of about +6% in 2025-2026, and +/-5% for the following two years. Compared to prior years, this more modest level of growth requires continued focus on priorities and trade-offs in key areas of investment, while also increasing our sustainability.
In response, this year’s budget reflects a commitment to prudent financial planning that supports goals from the immediate to the multi-generational. Our resourcing must be future-facing to advance the mission, and flexible to respond to emergent needs. As in recent years, Infrastructure remains the largest part of the budget, and we will continue to prioritize growing direct funding for the movement.
Similar to last year, technology-related work represents nearly half of the Foundation’s budget at 47% alongside priorities to protect volunteers and defend the projects of an additional 29% – a total of 76% of the Foundation’s annual budget. Expenses for finance, risk management, fundraising, and operations account for the remaining 24%.
An additional working capital
reserve
is maintained in line with non-profit best practice for sustainability, as well as the flexibility to respond to unplanned or unexpected changes in the tax, regulatory, or policy environment. In this annual plan, 1% of the reserve may be used to fund Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary as a highly strategic, once-off, non-recurring event.
Finally, direct funding to volunteers and movement entities will increase by nearly 11% next year, in line with the Foundation’s overall growth rate. This supports over
400
grants to volunteers, affiliates, and movement partners. In line with multi-year principles, this funding will increase by an additional 5% annually in FY26–27 and FY27–28 to support more sustainable long-term planning. It also allows regional grants to keep pace with inflation and provides a modest increase in overall grant support.
How to learn more
You can
find more information here
about how to engage with the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual plan.
Additionally, the Foundation
sends out a bulletin
every two weeks on progress against the Annual Plan. And you can also read a
six-month snapshot here of the progress
made against last year’s plan.
Links and Resources
Strategy
Multi-generational strategy
Movement Strategic Direction
Global Trends
Global Trends 2025 (
Diff post
) (
Meta
Strengthening Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View (NPOV)
Product & Tech
Product & Tech Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)
(FY25-26 draft for feedback)
Pilot Experiments
Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC)
Creating the interim Global Resource Distribution Committee
Transparency Reports
Transparency Report
(March 2025)
Organizational Effectiveness
Global Guidelines Policies & Practices
Progress on last year’s plan
Progress updates
Progress on the FY 24-25 Annual Plan (6-month snapshot)
Reflections on 2025 from Executive Team
Previous annual plans:
2024
2023
2022
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