When we were in the process of creating last fiscal year’s annual plan, the COVID-19 pandemic had just started to tighten its grip on our planet. In the United States, many millions of people had already lost their jobs, the Dow Jones had dropped dramatically, and large parts of our country were in lockdown. Wiki Education, like other nonprofits at that time, faced a high level of uncertainty, both with regard to its immediate financial future as well as to the effects of the pandemic on its programs.
Today, we’re proud to report that Wiki Education not only weathered the storm, but emerged stronger and more resilient from the crisis than many others. It’s certainly not an exaggeration to say that our organization has been extremely successful in mastering one of the biggest challenges nonprofits faced in the early 21st century.
Over the last year, staff at Wiki Education worked hard in order to maintain as much of the impact our organization has on Wikimedia projects, program leaders in the Wikimedia universe, and on the many millions of readers it serves. Not only were we successful in supporting an impressively large number of courses in our Student Program, we even grew the number of subject-matter experts Wiki Education brings to Wikipedia and Wikidata through our Scholars & Scientists Program.
As our fiscal year transitions on July 1, this is a good moment to reflect on our successes from the last year and look forward to our goals for the upcoming year. Both of these are reflected in our 2021–22 Annual Plan, approved by our Board at their June meeting and now available on our website.
In the next year, we’ll focus on making content on Wikimedia projects more accurate, representative, and complete.
- Across both of Wiki Education’s programs, we will strive to improve the quality of information available on Wikipedia and Wikidata, particularly in content areas related to science and equity.
- In line with our current strategy, we will also seek to broaden the Wikimedia community by supporting diverse program participants. We will also improve our support resources to reflect the needs of participants we recruit through these initiatives, with an eye toward scalability of our work.
- Our work in the area of Technology will focus on providing better services to the international community of Wikimedia Program leaders. For that purpose, we’ll cooperate with at least two other Wikimedia movement organizations to explore the feasibility of Dashboards-as-a-service. In order to better serve the needs of a growing number of Programs & Events Dashboard users, we will conduct a survey among existing users of our platform and create a road map based on the results.
Details on all of these initiatives and more are available in the Annual Plan. I look forward to working with my colleagues at Wiki Education in enacting our plan, with support from our program participants, funders, and partners.
