Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-07-08/News and notes
Wikimedia Foundation annual plan released, news in brief
Wikimedia Foundation publishes annual plan
Executive director Lila Tretikov this week posted an email to the wikimedia-l mailing list announcing the final publication of the Wikimedia Foundation's 2015 annual plan. It contained a succinct summary of her organizational thinking at the moment, and so is worthy of being replicated below:
All,
I want to provide an update on the Annual Plan. I am happy to let you know that the Board of Trustees has approved the proposed 2015-16 Wikimedia Foundation annual plan. Thank you for your patience as we have worked to incorporate your feedback and review with the Board.
The approved plan includes $68.2 million in revenue, with $65 million of spending and $3.2 million for the reserve. In addition, we will raise $5 million for our endowment, which will help secure long-term support for our mission. In total, this accounts for a 17% growth in total budget. The plan also includes a stretch goal of exceeding the fundraising target by 20% to contribute additional funds to the reserve. The approved and updated plan is now available here <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2015-2016_Annual_Plan>.
In our last Metrics Meeting, I presented an emerging strategy for the Wikimedia Foundation that focused on building a strong core in the near-term, allowing for innovation in the long-term toward our mission of ubiquitous shared knowledge. Strengthening our core has been our focus over this past year. We published the Call to Action <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Communications/State_of_the_Wikimedia_Foundation#2015_Call_to_Action>, which refocused us on community and technology, introducing new thinking and skills to the WMF, and improved products for the world.
We have made significant changes this past year that are showing early results. But this is just a start. The world is changing rapidly in areas like mobile, user behavior, media formats, and access to knowledge. In order to make free knowledge available for generations to come, we need to continually improve our work and challenge our thinking. The Annual Plan for this year is focused on building our capabilities as a springboard for future innovation.
In this year's plan, budget adjustments are designed to fill in the gaps in current user needs, in particular in the areas of community (including affiliates and partners), technology, and communication. The plan builds on the foundational work from this past year, when we set up team structures and introduced new focus to align our organization with communities and demands for knowledge. For the first time, this year's plan also introduces a Quarterly Metrics Scorecard to track our progress on delivering on our commitments. We will use both top-level and departmental metrics to measure our progress and report back.
I also want to acknowledge some of the issues with this year's Annual Plan process. We shared the first draft with you late, giving you limited time to provide feedback. We introduced a new, lighter weight format in the first iteration that left some of you with questions about proposed changes. This final, approved version has been updated to clarify our rationale, incorporate the feedback we did receive, link our plans to success metrics, and orient the next year within a broader strategy. As always, we continue to iterate toward a better process. Going forward we plan to have an extended window for your review and comments so we can refine our plan with your valuable feedback in mind.
Thank you. I look forward to working together as we continue to strengthen our core capabilities to support our mission and prepare for our emerging strategy.
For a fuller Signpost report see our coverage of the release of the draft version of this plan two months ago—the final version is broadly the same, with minor differences and addendums. For further details refer to our summary of the comprehensive State of the WMF report published earlier this year. It is worth highlighting the contrast between this year's slim 13-page brief metrics with last year's effort, which the Signpost reported at the time as being "indigestible"; most of the non-monetary and non-metric content of these reports has been spun off into the State of the WMF report.
Brief notes
- Wikisource needs your input: In a blog post this week, the members of the Wikisource Community User Group are asking for input on a survey they are now distributing, from which they hope to glean insights into the future of the project.
- Discussion of interest: A discussion occurred on the Wikimedia-l mailing list this week when a user pointed out confusion as to the presence of the Waray-Waray and Cebuano Wikipedias in the top ten Wikipedias by article count. Naturally, the Signpost has ample to say about it: see previous coverage here, here, and here. You can help make Signpost stories more obvious and accessible by contributing to our tagging initiative.
- Image manipulation in photo-competitions?: A blog post this week titled "A manipulated picture, a manipulated competition?", points to a discussion on the talk page of the German Wikipedia's Kurier about possible photo-manipulation in one of the ranking (fifth place) images from last year's Wiki Loves Earth competition.
- Wiki Edu outreach pilot concludes The Wiki Education Foundation this week published the outcomes report for their outreach pilot, an experiment in collaboration with students and Wikipedia outside the classroom. Attendees to sessions hosted by the organization ranged from 13 to 2 people, with the conclusion, perhaps expected, that "The greatest challenge in targeting extracurricular editing was the absence of external incentives ... with a grade, field trip, or staff visit, students contribute to Wikipedia. Without those incentives, they contribute significantly less, or not at all." As this approach is not reasonably scalable, the pilot has now concluded.
- Wikipedian in residence for gender equity at West Virginia University: West Virginia University has announced its new position of Wikipedian in Residence for gender equity, funded by an Inspire Campaign Grant. Wikimedians with experience in GLAM-Wiki, the Education Program, working on the gender gap and other related projects, are invited to apply for the position.
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