Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2024-2025

Draft plan feedback

Tech grants

Will this plan include the reintroduction of grants for technical projects not fundable under the rapid grants program? Such a program was available before the grants refresh, was promised after the grants refresh, but never materialized. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 01:07, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for this question, @AntiCompositeNumber, and I’m sorry it took a while to provide an update on this. Over the past year or so, we’ve been working with the Product & Tech department to better align grantmaking to technical projects. In the past, we recognized that we would from time to time fund projects that seemed like a good idea, but that were not sufficiently aligned with WMF’s Product & Tech roadmap. This would lead to very understandable community frustration about the plethora of unmaintained tech in the ecosystem.

As you noted, when we launched the grants refresh strategy, we put the Tech Fund on hold so we could ensure that when we started funding technical work again, it was in alignment with Product & Tech. Since then, WMF hired a new CPTO, so we further put this work on hold to allow her and her leadership team time to align on their strategy.

That brings us to today, and I now have an update on this work. We will also update the relevant page on the Community Resources page on Meta.

We will not have a dedicated Tech Fund in the near future. Instead, if community tooling is needed, the Product & Tech department will work directly with volunteers to develop a plan for building it (potentially using contract agreements vs. grants), alongside a plan for maintaining it.

Relatedly, as part of the changes being made to the Community Wishlist Survey, the WMF Comm-Tech team intends to invite and support volunteer developers to join in the effort to help resolve technical issues raised by community members. The broad objectives are aimed at improving participation in the wishlist survey process towards wish submission, and wish resolution (details). In March 2024, WMF conducted the first Community Wishathon - a virtual event for community developers and WMF staff to work on technical issues submitted through the recent wishlist surveys. From the later half of 2024, the community wishlist survey will remain open permanently as an intake mechanism for technical wishes. As a result, we will introduce changes to address those wishes with better engagement and collaboration. Besides periodic events like community wishathons, we would like to continuously support volunteer developers willing to take up some of these technical issues by providing guidance, reviews, mentorship, and assistance with long-term maintenance plans for that software. If the need arises for specific work to be done via contractual agreements, we will explore those opportunities as well. RWeissburg (WMF) (talk) 13:28, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Got it. The work that would have been done will continue to not be done. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 13:29, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

So if I understand correctly, WMF is planning to enhance the collaboration between WMF themselves and volunteer developers, and funding / contractual agreements will become a part of the collaboration and support? I am concerned about if developing maintenance plan (e.g. setting up the schedule) will affect the motivation of volunteers as it will limit their flexibility. Thanks. SCP-2000 15:56, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Getting hired/contracted by the Foundation is a lot higher bar than grant-funded work, and it absolutely won't work for previously grant-funded work including the building and maintenance of community tools. AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 20:20, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

This will inevitably bring much less attention to the problems and wishes of non-English speaking communities. Tech grants allowed people to start developing tools that didn’t need a buy-in from English Wikipedians, making everything depend on CWS only re-inforces the systemic biases of both the WMF and the Wikimedia movement at large. stjn^[ru] 14:46, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

Financial Model

What do you mean by "Invest in longer-term strategies that will provide increased revenue in a future where Wikipedia content is primarily consumed off our platform."? --Mervat (talk) 02:27, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Hi @Mervat, as we see in the external trends section of the plan, the ways people are searching for content online and the type of content they’re searching for is changing. People are increasingly consuming Wikipedia content off our platform, which poses challenges to the banner fundraising model that has been the primary revenue stream historically. The changing online environment and a future where readers may no longer primarily read content directly on Wikipedia requires us to invest in longer-term strategies that are more resilient to changing readership trends: Wikimedia Enterprise, the Wikimedia Endowment, and a growing Major Gifts program. We discuss these revenue streams in the long-term revenue strategy section of the plan. The movement strategy revenue working group also discussed the need for these long-term strategies as knowledge becomes more granular, remixed by others, and served through other interfaces. MeganHernandez (WMF) (talk) 21:06, 17 April 2024 (UTC)