WMF cuts budget for 2016–17 as scope tightens
The Wikimedia Foundation has published its revised annual plan for the 2016–17 financial year (July–June), which has been finalised for board approval after a month-long community consultation on Meta. Responding to a challenging fundraising environment, the organisation is cutting its planned expenses for the first time after more than a decade of unabated growth—from US$65m in 2015–16 to $63m in 2016–17. While the organisation has a track record of underspending actual expenses, the reduction of about 3% represents a shift in its planning. The change includes a slight reduction in planned headcount and adjustments to budgets such as that for grantmaking. Among identified risks, the ongoing Executive Director transition and relatively high rates of staff departure over the past months stand out as significant challenges alongside structural issues like the decline in readership, the increasingly challenging fundraising environment, and the well-being of the volunteer communities.
The centrepiece of the annual plan is "reach"—the WMF's ability to effectively reach our readers and distribute the community's free knowledge to them. This priority emerged from the strategy draft and from related community consultation in early 2016. There are a number of highlights. Field research in Nigeria and India will help WMF Tech's Reading Department to launch a new reader interface for one of the targeted regions—readership in Mexico have been studied in 2015–16. WMF Product will continue to improve the editing interface by upgrading tools such as VisualEditor (which is expected to reach mobile), and expanding the content translation tool. Community Tech will continue to work through the top 10 of the community wishlist, which includes improving diff comparison, numerical sorting in categories, cross-wiki talkpage communication, and the plagiarism detection bot; and the pageview stats tool; the creation of a central global repository for templates, and an integrated cross-wiki watchlist.
The Foundation is rolling out a new process to work with the communities in researching and building better software products. How best to integrate community voices in product decision-making has traditionally been controversial, leading to repeated stand-offs. In cooperation with Wikimedia Germany, Wikidata—which now has the third-largest community after those of the English Wikipedia and Commons—will be more deeply integrated into key aspects of all projects, such as search and infoboxes. WMF Technology is investing in better analytics and research capabilities, APIs, Tool Labs (for community developers working on tools and bots that help users maintain and use wikis), privacy protection, and site reliability.
Following the debates on how to address harassment in 2015–16, the staff aim to build online learning modules on the subject, including one on how to improve the safety of offline community meetings. The Foundation is also restructuring its grantmaking schemes and is resuming support for GLAM volunteers with a staff facilitator. The Communications Department will be enhancing the movement's reach by researching and interacting with new audiences, especially on social media, while the Advancement department (formerly Fundraising) is expanding Wikipedia Zero and new types of partnerships to foster readership. Advancement aims to raise $5m for the Foundation's newly established endowment on top of the $63m target for funding regular operations. WMF Legal will continue its input into the NSA lawsuit.