Strategy

The original Wikipedia strategy may have been little more than 'produce 1000 Nupedia drafts in a year', but it has developed significantly over time.

Background

The Wikimedia Foundation was formed in 2003, when it became clear that Wikipedia was becoming an important online project, too big to reside on Bomis' servers. Previous to this, most "strategic planning" discussions revolved around the evolving Wikis; many decisions (additional languages, additional projects, core policies) were boldly made by community members that helped shaped future organizational development. Most "Foundation-level" work was done by volunteers, from financial planning to technical scaling.

When the first elected Trustees took their seats on the Board, there were a variety of discussions about where the Foundation should set its sights.

• Early discussions: mailing list threads from Anthere and Angela from late 2004 were often about related topics
• Strategic goals: a few open meetings about goals, and some discussions on the wiki (1), ensued

The Mission and Vision statements were revisited in 2006/2007 to help lay uniform foundations for future work. The idea was for this to happen at least once a year, though we seem to have skipped 2008 – hence our 2009 strategy planning.

In late 2006 there was also an internal discussion of strategy with facilitated meetings of Board members and others, resulting in a few one-year planning documents. These do not seem to be public, though many resulting conversations are.

Most discussions about project and Foundation-wide planning have been held on mailing lists (first wikipedia-l, then foundation-l); or on Meta.

Wikimedia strategic planning efforts

eventually, this could use a timeline

• Founding the Board in the first place... involved some strategic planning
• SWOT -- the Board undertook a SWOT analysis in 2006
  • brainstorming ideas related to the above
• Strategic planning 2009 -- formal large scale planning process first announced in May 2009.

As of May 2009, a formal process of strategic planning is being planned for the coming year. Threads about how to proceed have been floated on foundation-l, and three one-year contracts to facilitate the process have been posted. The strategic planning process focuses on finding actionable strategies for the Wikimedia Foundation/Movement, answering what and how questions concerning participation (outreach), reach (non-editing users) and quality. Wikimedia strategy doesn't coincide with Wikipedia strategy.

Proposals, related discussions

• Three-year_plan, One-year_plan, and Five-year_plan
• OWPP
• Planning for the future

Project pages

There have been many projects over the years related to the topics likely to be addressed in stategic planning efforts. These are some of their current and future pages. Please help build this out.

outreach

• Outreach, the (beautiful!) home of public outreach

distribution, offline content

• static content committee

partnerships

languages, translation

tech, scaling

quality, content

chapters, events

new projects

Wikipedia strategic planning efforts

See related discussions on Wikipedia itself, from WP:1.0 to w:WP:WikiProject Council (for quality and participation)...

• Many of the big discussions across Wikipedia (BLPs, Civility, language editions) relate ultimately to what Wikipedia is and what we want it to be.