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This is part of the Wikimedia Foundation's Product and Technology departments' drafting process for the 2024-25 Annual Plan.

This document represents the first part of the 2024-25 Annual Planning process for the Wikimedia Foundation's Product & Technology department. It describes on the departments' draft "objectives and key results" (OKRs). This is a continuation of the structure of work portfolios (called "buckets") that began last year.

I spoke with you all back in November about what I believe is the most pressing question facing the Wikimedia movement: how do we ensure that Wikipedia and all Wikimedia projects are multigenerational? I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to really consider that question and to respond to me directly, and now that I’ve had the chance to spend some time reflecting on your responses, I’ll share what I’ve learned.

First, there is no single reason volunteers contribute. In order to nurture multiple generations of volunteers, we need to better understand the many reasons people contribute their time to our projects. Next, we need to focus on what sets us apart: our ability to provide trustworthy content 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 or bias. Our content needs to also serve and remain vital in a changing internet driven by artificial intelligence and rich experiences. Lastly we need to find ways to sustainably fund our movement by building a shared strategy for our products and revenue so that we can fund this work for the long term.

These ideas will be reflected in the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2024-2025 annual plan, the first portion of which I’m sharing with you today in the form of draft objectives for our product & technology work. Like with last year, our entire annual plan will be centered around the technology needs of our audiences and platforms, and we’d like your feedback to know if we’re focusing on the right problems. These objectives build off ideas we’ve been hearing from community members over the past several months through Talking:2024, on mailing lists and talk pages, and at community events about our product and technology strategy for the year ahead. You can view the full list of draft objectives below.

An “objective” is a high level direction that will shape the product and technology projects we take on for the next fiscal year. They’re intentionally broad, represent the direction of our strategy and, importantly, what challenges we’re proposing to prioritize among the many possible focus areas for the upcoming year. We’re sharing this now so community members can help shape our early-stage thinking and before budgets and measurable targets are committed for the year.

Feedback

One area in which we’d particularly like feedback is our work grouped under the name “Wiki Experiences.” “Wiki Experiences” is about how we efficiently deliver, improve, and innovate how people directly use the wikis, whether as contributors, consumers, or donors. This involves work to support our core technology and capabilities and making sure we can improve the experience of volunteer editors — in particular, editors with extended rights — through better features and tooling, translation services, and platform upgrades.

Here are some reflections from our recent planning discussions, and some questions for all of you to help us refine our ideas:

Volunteering on the Wikimedia projects should feel rewarding. We also think that the experience of online collaboration should be a major part of what keeps volunteers coming back. What does it take for volunteers to find editing rewarding, and to work better together to build trustworthy content?
The trustworthiness of our content is part of Wikimedia’s unique contribution to the world, and what keeps people coming to our platform and using our content. What can we build that will help grow trustworthy content more quickly, but still within the quality guardrails set by communities on each project?
To stay relevant and compete with other large online platforms, Wikimedia needs a new generation of consumers to feel connected to our content. How can we make our content easier to discover and interact with for readers and donors?
In an age where online abuse thrives, we need to make sure our communities, platform, and serving system are protected. We also face evolving compliance obligations, where global policymakers look to shape privacy, identity, and information sharing online. What improvements to our abuse fighting capabilities will help us address these challenges?
MediaWiki, the software platform and interfaces that allow Wikipedia to function, needs ongoing support for the next decade in order to provide creation, moderation, storage, discovery, and consumption of open, multilingual content at scale. What decisions and platform improvements can we make this year to ensure that MediaWiki is sustainable?

Discussion

–– Selena Deckelmann

Draft Objectives

This is a draft document, open for comment and conversation.

Currently published are the highest planning level - the "Objectives".

The next level - the draft "Key Results" (KR) for each finalised objective will be available for discussion here in March.

The underlying "Hypotheses" for each KR will be updated on the relevant project/team's wiki pages throughout the year to be updated throughout the year as lessons are learned.

Objective	Objective area	Objective	Objective context	Owner
Wiki Experiences (WE) draft objectives
WE1 Discussion	Contributor experience	Both experienced and new contributors rally together online to build a trustworthy encyclopedia, with more ease and less frustration.	In order for Wikipedia to be vibrant in the years to come, we must do work that nurtures multiple generations of volunteers and makes contributing something people want to do. Different generations of volunteers need different investments -- more experienced contributors need their powerful workflows streamlined and repaired, while newer contributors need new ways to edit that make sense to them. And across these generations, all contributors need to be able to connect and collaborate with each other to do their most impactful work. With this objective, we will make improvements to critical workflows for experienced contributors, we will lower barriers to constructive contributions for newcomers, and we will invest in ways that volunteers can find and communicate with each other around common interests.	Marshall Miller
WE2 Discussion	Encyclopedic content	Communities are supported to effectively close knowledge gaps through tools and support systems that are easier to access, adapt, and improve, ensuring increased growth in trustworthy encyclopedic content.	Encyclopedic content primarily on Wikipedia can be increased and improved through continuous engagement and innovation. Tools and resources (both technical and non-technical) that are available for contributors to use for their needs can be made more discoverable, and reliable. These tools should be better supported by WMF, through feature improvements achievable in short cycles. In view of recent trends around AI assisted content generation and changing user behaviour, we will also explore groundwork for substantial changes (e.g. Wikifunctions) that can assist scaled growth in content creation and reuse. Mechanisms to identify content gaps should be easier to discover, and plan with. Resources that support growth of encyclopedic content, including content on sister projects, projects such as Wikipedia Library, and campaigns can be better integrated with contribution workflows. At the same time, methods used for growth should have guardrails against growing threats, that can ensure that there is continued trust in the process while staying true to the basic tenets of encyclopedic content as recognised across Wikimedia projects. Audience: Editors, Translators	Runa Bhattacharjee
WE3 Discussion	Consumer experience (Reading & Media)	A new generation of consumers arrives at Wikipedia to discover a preferred destination for discovering, engaging, and building a lasting connection with encyclopedic content.	Goals: Retain existing and new generations of consumers and donors. Increase relevance to existing and new generations of consumers by making our content more easy to discover and interact with. Work across platforms to adapt our experiences and existing content, so that encyclopedic content can be explored and curated by and to a new generation of consumers and donors.	Olga Vasileva
WE4 Discussion	Trust & Safety	Improve our infrastructure, tools, and processes so that we are well-equipped to protect the communities, the platform, and our serving systems from different kinds of scaled and directed abuse while maintaining compliance with an evolving regulatory environment.	Some facets of our abuse fighting capabilities are in need of an upgrade. IP-based abuse mitigation is becoming less effective, several admin tools are in need of efficiency improvements, and we need to put together a unified strategy that helps us combat scaled abuse by using the various signals and mitigation mechanisms (captchas, blocks, etc) in concert. Over this year, we will begin making progress on the largest problems in this space. Furthermore, this investment in abuse protection has to be balanced by an investment in the understanding and improvement of community health, several aspects of which are included in various regulatory requirements.	Suman Cherukuwada
WE5 Discussion	Knowledge platform I (Platform evolution)	Evolve the MediaWiki platform and its interfaces to better meet Wikipedia's core needs.	MediaWiki has been built to enable the creation, moderation, storage, discovery and consumption of open, multilingual content at scale. In this second year of Knowledge Platform we will take a curating look at the system and begin working towards platform improvements to effectively support the Wikimedia projects core needs through the next decade, starting with Wikipedia. This includes continuing work to define our knowledge production platform, strengthening the sustainability of the platform, a focus on the extensions/hooks system to clarify and streamline feature development, and continuing to invest in knowledge sharing and enabling people to contribute to MediaWiki.	Birgit Müller
WE6 Discussion	Knowledge platform II (Developer Services)	Technical staff and volunteer developers have the tools they need to effectively support the Wikimedia projects.	We will continue work started to improve (and scale) development, testing and deployment workflows in Wikimedia Production and expand the definition to include services for tool developers. We also aim to improve our ability to answer frequently asked questions in the field of developer/engineering workflows and audiences and make relevant data accessible to enable informed decision making. Part of this work is to look at practices (or lack of such) that currently present a challenge for our ecosystem.	Birgit Müller
Objective	Objective area	Objective	Objective context	Owner
Signals and Data Services (SDS) draft objectives
SDS1 Discussion	Essential metrics	Our decisions about how to support the Wikimedia mission and movement are informed by high-level metrics and insights.	In order for us to effectively and efficiently build technology, support volunteers, and advocate for policies that protect and advance access to knowledge, we need to understand the Wikimedia ecosystem and align on what success looks like. This means tracking a common set of metrics that are reliable, understandable, and available in a timely manner. It also means surfacing research and insights that help us understand the whys and hows behind our measurements.	Kate Zimmerman
SDS2 Discussion	Experimentation platform	Product managers can quickly, easily, and confidently evaluate the impacts of product features.	To enable and accelerate data informed decision making about product feature development, product managers need an experimentation platform in which they can define features, select treatment audiences of users, and see measurements of impact. Speeding the time from launch to analysis is critical, as shortening the timeline for learning will accelerate experimentation, and ultimately, innovation. Manual tasks and bespoke approaches to measurement have been identified as barriers to speed. The ideal scenario is that product managers can get from experiment launch to discovery with little or no manual intervention from engineers and analysts.	Tajh Taylor
Objective	Objective area	Objective	Objective context	Owner
Future Audiences (FA) draft objective
FA1 Discussion	Test hypotheses	Provide recommendations on strategic investments for the Wikimedia Foundation to pursue – based on insights from experiments that sharpen our understanding of how knowledge is shared and consumed online – that help our movement serve new audiences in a changing internet.	Due to ongoing changes in technology and online user behavior (e.g., increasing preference for getting information via social apps, popularity of short video edu-tainment, the rise of generative AI), the Wikimedia movement faces challenges in attracting and retaining readers and contributors. These changes also bring opportunities to serve new audiences by creating and delivering information in new ways. However, we as a movement do not have a clear data-informed picture of the benefits and tradeoffs of different potential strategies we could pursue to overcome the challenges or seize new opportunities. For example, should we... Invest in large new features like chatbots or social video on our platform? Bring Wikimedia's knowledge and pathways to contribution to popular third-party platforms? Something else? To ensure that Wikimedia becomes a multi-generational project, we will test hypotheses to better understand and recommend promising strategies – for the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia movement – to pursue to attract and retain future audiences.	Maryana Pinchuk
Objective	Objective area	Objective	Objective context	Owner
Product and Engineering Support (PES) draft objective
PES1 Discussion	Efficiency of operations	Make the Foundation's work faster, cheaper, and more impactful.	Staff do a lot in their regular work to make our operations faster, cheaper, and more impactful. This objective highlights specific initiatives that will both a) make substantial gains toward faster, cheaper, or more impactful; and b) take coordinated effort and change of formal and informal practices at the Foundation. Essentially, the KRs included in this objective are the hardest and best improvements we can make this year to operational efficiency of work touching our products and technology.	Amanda Bittaker

Draft Key Results

The draft "Key Results" (KR) for each finalised objective will be available for discussion here in March.

Explanation of buckets

Wiki Experiences

The purpose of this bucket is to efficiently deliver, improve and innovate on wiki experiences that enable the distribution of free knowledge world-wide. This bucket aligns with movement strategy recommendations #2 (Improve User Experience) and #3 (Provide for Safety and Inclusion). Our audiences include all collaborators on our websites, as well as the readers and other consumers of free knowledge. We support a top-10 global website, and many other important free culture resources. These systems have performance and uptime requirements on-par with the biggest tech companies in the world. We provide user interfaces to wikis, translation, developer APIs (and more!) and supporting applications and infrastructure that all form a robust platform for volunteers to collaborate to produce free knowledge world-wide. Our objectives for this bucket should enable us to improve our core technology and capabilities, ensure we continuously improve the experience of volunteer editors and moderators of our projects, improve the experience of all technical contributors working to improve or enhance the wiki experiences, and ensure a great experience for readers and consumers of free knowledge worldwide. We will do this through product and technology work, as well as through research and marketing. We expect to have at most five objectives for this bucket.

Knowledge is constructed by people! And as a result our annual plan will focus on the content as well as the people who contribute to the content and those who access and read it.

Our aim is to produce an operating plan based on existing strategy, mainly our hypotheses about the contributor, consumer and content "flywheel". The primary shift I’m asking for is an emphasis on the content portion of the flywheel, and exploration of what our moderators and functionaries might need from us now, with the aim of identifying community health metrics in the future.

Signals and Data Services

In order to meet the Movement Strategy Recommendations for Ensuring Equity in Decision Making (Recommendation #4), Improving User Experience (Recommendation #2), and Evaluating, Iterating and Adapting (Recommendation #10), decision makers from across the Wikimedia Movement must have access to reliable, relevant, and timely data, models, insights, and tools that can help them assess the impact (both realized and potential) of their work and the work of their communities, enabling them to make better strategic decisions.

In the Signals & Data Services bucket, we have identified four primary audiences: Wikimedia Foundation staff, Wikimedia affiliates and user groups, developers who reuse our content, and Wikimedia researchers, and we prioritize and address the data and insights needs of these audiences. Our work will span a range of activities: defining gaps, developing metrics, building pipelines for computing metrics, and developing data and signals exploration experiences and pathways that help decision makers interact more effectively and joyfully with the data and insights.

Future Audiences

The purpose of this bucket is to explore strategies for expanding beyond our existing audiences of consumers and contributors, in an effort to truly reach everyone in the world as the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge. This bucket aligns with Movement Strategy Recommendation #9 (Innovate in Free Knowledge). More and more, people are consuming information in experiences and forms that diverge from our traditional offering of a website with articles – people are using voice assistants, spending time with video, engaging with AI, and more. In this bucket, we will propose and test hypotheses around potential long-term futures for the free knowledge ecosystem and how we will be its essential infrastructure. We will do this through product and technology work, as well as through research, partnerships, and marketing. As we identify promising future states, learnings from this bucket will influence and be expanded through Buckets #1 and #2 in successive annual plans, nudging our product and technology offerings toward where they need to be to serve knowledge-seekers of the future. Our objectives for this bucket should drive us to experiment and explore as we bring a vision for the future of free knowledge into focus.

Sub-buckets

We also have two other “sub-buckets” which consist of areas of critical functions, which must exist at the Foundation to support our basic operations, and some of which we have in common with any software organization. These “sub-buckets” won’t have top level objectives of their own, but will have input on and will support the top level objectives of the other groups. They are:

Infrastructure Foundations. This bucket covers the teams which sustain and evolve our datacenters, our compute and storage platforms, the services to operate them, the tools and processes that enable the operation of our public facing sites and services.
Product and Engineering Support. This bucket includes teams which operate “at scale” providing services to other teams that improve the productivity and operations of other teams.

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-|<translate><!--T:30--> Increased growth in encyclopedic content is achieved through tools and resources that are easier to access, reuse, improve, and can reliably ensure trustworthiness of the content as per policies and guardrails used on Wikimedia projects.</translate>
+|<translate><!--T:30--> Communities are supported to effectively close knowledge gaps through tools and support systems that are easier to access, adapt, and improve, ensuring increased growth in trustworthy encyclopedic content.</translate>
 |<translate><!--T:31-->
 Encyclopedic content primarily on Wikipedia can be increased and improved through continuous engagement and innovation. Tools and resources (both technical and non-technical) that are available for contributors to use for their needs can be made more discoverable, and reliable. These tools should be better supported by WMF, through feature improvements achievable in short cycles. In view of recent trends around AI assisted content generation and changing user behaviour, we will also explore groundwork for substantial changes (e.g. Wikifunctions) that can assist scaled growth in content creation and reuse. Mechanisms to identify content gaps should be easier to discover, and plan with. Resources that support growth of encyclopedic content, including content on sister projects, projects such as Wikipedia Library, and campaigns can be better integrated with contribution workflows. At the same time, methods used for growth should have guardrails against growing threats, that can ensure that there is continued trust in the process while staying true to the basic tenets of encyclopedic content as recognised across Wikimedia projects.