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Welcome to the 2026-27 Annual plan guide. This is hopefully a much more condensed version of the actual Annual plan. This specific guide is concerned with the tech side of the project and tries to cover everything that the WMF Product and Technology department is planning on doing in the next year. With any luck, this is easier to parse and reason about the actual set of OKRs. When in doubt, please consider the actual version of the OKRs to be authoritative.
Overall, WMF's Product and Technology department this year has four goals driven by the WMF audience funnel (pictured to the right) which they plan to broaden. The four goals are:
The technical side of the project accounts for roughly atleast 48%[1] of the annual plan and by extension the budget allocated by the WMF. The rest of the plan focuses on marketing Wikipedia to the world and funding affiliates and GLAM initiatives to bring in new contributors, organizing initiatives like The Wikipedia Library to engage content creators, protecting users through onwiki trust and safety enforcement and legal advocacy to make sure laws and regulations protect Wikipedia and hosting events to engage community members like the Futures Lab or Wikimania among others.
The technical part of the plan is (and consequently this guide) is broken down into 4 sections corresponding to each goal which is further broken into specific areas (the level 3 headings) which have their own OKR which corresponds to the table rows.
Overall coordinator: Maryana Pinchuk
| Initiative | How success will be measured | WMF
Coordinator |
Who will be impacted |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMF is going to stop page-views from Google from declining | < 10% pageviews drop by the end of December | Nat Baca | Readers |
| WMF internally will be able to track how much traffic is coming in better | By the end of the year, there is a reliable way to figure out if their work brings more people | Maryana Pinchuk | WMF Internal |
Overall coordinator: Rita Ho
| Initiative | How success will be measured | WMF Coordinator | Who will be impacted |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMF will work on developing the Attribution framework that they released this year | At the end of the year, WMF will use data sent to the server by readers to figure out how many people came from sites using the framework | Pau Giner | All reusers of Wikipedia content |
| The Future Audience team will keep experimenting with new ways to bring people to Wikipedia | At least one other team will adopt an experiment that the team creates | Damian Lin | WMF Internal |
| WMF will look into creating partnerships with different companies to feature Wikimedia content in a prominent and properly attributed way | At least four companies take them up on their offer | Pau Giner | All reusers of Wikipedia content |
Overall coordinator: Amy Tsay
| Initiative | How success will be measured | WMF
Manager |
Who will be impacted |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMF will make sure that Abstract Wikipedia does not cause major technical issues | Abstract Wikipedia does not cause major technical problems and remains editable | James Forrester | WMF internal |
| WMF will figure out if people actually want to create Abstract Wikipedia articles | Abstract Wikipedia article will have more sentences per article and more elements to construct the sentences with | Laura Morgantini | Editors of Abstract Wikipedia |
| WMF will try to figure out whether other Wikipedias want to use Abstract Wikipedia on their wikis | At least one proof-of-concept article can be created and can be displayed on three pilot Wikipedia | Satdeep Gill | Editors of small wikis |
| WMF will replace Wikidata Query Service code with newer + more robust software | By the end of the year, nobody will be using the old software to query Wikidata | Brandon Tracy | WMF Internal |
Overall coordinator: Olga Vasileva
| Initiative | How success will be measured | WMF
Coordinator |
Who will be impacted |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMF will work on features that present Wikipedia's existing content in ways that make visits helpful and memorable, so that first time readers are more likely to return. | More casual readers who visit Wikipedia will come back for a second visit, on both the website and the app. | Sherry Yang | Readers |
| WMF will work on features that encourage active readers to engage more deeply with content, so they are more likely to keep coming back. | More logged-in readers will return to Wikipedia within a week of their last visit on the website, and more app users will return to the app daily, with separate goals for each. | Hsuanwei Fan | Active Readers |
| WMF will work on features that encourage readers to create Wikipedia accounts, so they can personalize their experience and build a deeper connection to Wikipedia over time. | More readers will create Wikipedia accounts in the first half of this fiscal year (July-December) compared to the same period last year. | Jan Drewniak | Readers/Donors |
| WMF will encourage web visitors to download the Wikipedia app by promoting the app directly on Wikipedia's mobile website, since app users read significantly more pages per month than mobile web visitors. | Get 4 million new installs across all apps from the promotion | Nazneen Nawaz | ?? |
| WMF will create new giving experiences within Wikipedia itself that evolve as readers engage more deeply with the site, guiding them naturally from reading to donating. | Recurring donor signups will increase by at least 8%, and donors who sign up will continue donating into the following month. | Jazmin Tanner | Donors |
| WMF will encourage donors to create Wikipedia accounts, so they can build a deeper personal connection to Wikipedia across every visit. | By the end of the year, donors with Wikipedia accounts will give more on average than donors without accounts. | Jan Drewniak | Donors |
Overall coordinator: Sonja Perry
| Initiative | How success will be measured | WMF Coordinator | Who will be impacted |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMF will work on creating structured editing experiences, for example through adding inline suggestions in Visual Editor | More new editors will start make constructive edits from mobile devices | Peter Pelberg | New editors |
| WMF will work on a features to motivate editors to keep coming back to work on articles (which might include some kind of shareable work list?) | Editors who use the (yet to be decided) feature will be more likely to edit the wiki every week | Illana Fried | Editors who participate in (or like creating campaigns) |
| WMF will work on unifying the moderator dashboard and the newcomer homepage | Editors who see the intervention come back within 2 weeks and edit again | Kirsten Stoller | Editors who want to become extremely active Wikipedians |
| WMF will work on Article Guidance | Articles created using this method will be more likely to survive deletion than others | Gerard Galofré | New editors wanting to create articles |
Overall coordinator: Eric Mill
| Initiative | How success will be measured | WMF Coordinator | Who will be impacted |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMF will invest in some kind of automated AI? system that will detect and take actions to stop LTAs[2] | The system should allow LTA edits to be acted upon 20% faster | Kosta Harlan | Oversighters/Edit filter manager |
| WMF will work on figuring out good automated signals of vandalism to admins, CUs and stewards (which might include some form of SuggestInvestigations for admins) | The system should allow admins to react to vandalism sprees 10% faster | Ollie Kryva | Admins |
| WMF will work on improving the userscript infrastructure, and enforce 2FA requirements on accounts with a lot of permissions | Editors on their second week or beyond will be more likely to keep editing | Roan Kattouw | Editors with 2FA-gated permissions |
Overall coordinator: Birgit Müller
| Initiative | How success will be measured | WMF Coordinator | Who will be impacted |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMF will create systems to automate ad-hoc SRE work that was previously required to stop scrapers | SREs will spend 50% less time fighting scrapers | Chris Danis | WMF Internal SRE team |
| WMF will deprioritize certain types of media rendering and file uploading to make sure that Wikipedia's servers will not be overburdened | WMF will be able have some reserve capacity to serve high-traffic media without major incidents | Jonathan Tweed | Anyone who consumes media on Wikimedia projects? |
| WMF will migrate more scrapers to Enterprise | 95% less scrapers! | Chris Petrillo | Enterprises running scrapers |
| WMF will create a new API platform that will make docs about APIs easy to find and advertise the correct way to use APIs | The API portal will be live | Halley Coplin | Volunteer developers |
| WMF will convert older APIs to use the new API platform | Atleast some APIs will be coverted to use the API portal | Halley Coplin | Volunteer developers |
I'm going to skip most of this since this is 90% uninteresting WMF internal stuff. TLDR, they make sure they cannot be compromised by supply chain attacks and there is effort to make sure they can sustain + get metrics on new reader accounts.
| Initiative | How success will be measured | WMF
Coordinator |
Who will be impacted |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMF will deploy Parsoid (the new parser) on all wikis | All wikis will use Parsoid all the time | C. Scott Ananian | WikiGnomes who like maintaining templates |
Overall coordinator: Chris Ciufo
| Initiative | How success will be measured | WMF
Coordinator |
Who will be impacted |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMF will create a system where MediaWiki developers can ship code in a day of being merged/approved | By the end of the year, all developers can have their code go live on wikis in 1 day | Tyler Turley Cipriani | Volunteer MediaWiki developers |
| WMF will work on a system that will allow existing deployers to use a web interface to deploy fixes/config changes to productions | 80% of deployers who will be shown this feature will choose to use it | Scott French | Deployers |
| WMF will develop a web interface to create, run and manage Toolforge tools | 80% of active tool maintainers have taken action on alerts that will show up on this to be built web interface | Arthur Puthin | Folks who maintain Toolforge tools |
Overall coordinator: Marzanne Collins
| Initiative | How success will be measured | WMF
Coordinator |
Who will be impacted |
|---|---|---|---|
| WMF will internally publish metrics that the C-suite will use to gauge how much progress they are making towards the goals in the Annual Plan | The metrics were published | TBD | WMF Internal |
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