Wikimedia Foundation's new plans announced
Last week the Wikimedia Foundation released its annual plan for July 2013 to June 2014. It provides a surprisingly frank view—of past achievements and failures, and future goals and risks—that could be afforded only by a non-profit that is confident and beholden to no commercial or political interests.
The document sets out the blueprint for how the Foundation intends to evolve during the coming fiscal year—the fourth in the five-year strategic plan it launched in 2010. In backgrounding the 2013–14 plan, the document describes progress over the past two years. In 2011–12, the WMF was "capacity-building, conducting research and analysis, and experimenting". Last year this shifted into an "execution phase", building on the introduction of the strategy of "narrowing focus", developed and introduced by the Board of Trustees and executive director Sue Gardner a year ago. The key aspects of this new strategy are a primary focus on product development and engineering, and on grantmaking; it involves a willingness to "shut down or deprioritise" areas deemed not to be supporting these areas.
The document admits that the 2015 targets were "audacious guesswork" and will not be achieved, although progress towards them has been "steady and real" in the key indicators of site uptime, site performance, time-to-rollout, number of readers, and number of articles. The disappointment continues to be the number of editors, which has proven to be "our most difficult challenge", but the claim is made that there is "a good outlook for materially impacting the overall size and diversity of Wikimedia's community in the year ahead".