WMF Annual Plan 2025-2026: Key Priorities for Wikipedia and Its Global Community

The Wikimedia Foundation isn’t just keeping Wikipedia running-it’s reshaping how free knowledge reaches people in places with little or no internet access, in languages no one thought could be digitized, and for communities that have been left out for too long. The WMF Annual Plan 2025-2026 isn’t a budget document. It’s a roadmap for survival, equity, and relevance in a world where misinformation spreads faster than facts, and where the very idea of open knowledge is under pressure.

Building Knowledge for Everyone, Not Just the Connected

In 2025, over 3 billion people still don’t have reliable internet. That’s more than a third of the world’s population. The WMF knows Wikipedia won’t survive if it only serves those with fiber-optic connections. So this plan doubles down on offline access. Partnerships with local NGOs in rural India, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia are expanding Kiwix and Wikipedia Zero-style projects. These aren’t just apps. They’re USB drives handed out at schools, preloaded with 50,000 Wikipedia articles in local languages like Yoruba, Quechua, and Igbo. In Nepal, community librarians now train women to edit Wikipedia using solar-powered tablets. The goal? No one should be told their knowledge doesn’t matter because they live too far from a cell tower.

AI Isn’t the Enemy-It’s the Tool

You’ve heard the warnings: AI will replace Wikipedia. The WMF’s answer? Use AI to make Wikipedia better. The 2025-2026 plan includes a $12 million investment in AI tools that help editors spot vandalism faster, translate articles between languages with human-level accuracy, and surface underrepresented topics. But here’s the catch: every AI tool must be open-source, auditable, and trained on Wikipedia’s own data-not corporate datasets. The foundation is working with universities in Germany and Brazil to build models that understand context, not just keywords. A bot in Indonesia now flags articles that cite unreliable sources by cross-checking them against peer-reviewed journals in local languages. That’s not automation. That’s augmentation.

Fixing the Gender Gap, One Edit at a Time

Women make up only 16% of Wikipedia editors globally. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a system failure. The 2025-2026 plan targets this with concrete actions: funding for edit-a-thons led by Indigenous women in Canada and Latin America, partnerships with women’s colleges in Nigeria and Pakistan to make editing part of coursework, and a new tool that anonymously tracks gender bias in article language. If an article about a female scientist uses phrases like “she was married to a famous physicist” instead of focusing on her research, the system flags it. Editors get nudges-not punishments. The result? In 2024, articles about women scientists grew by 38% in Swahili and 52% in Bengali. That’s the kind of change that sticks.

Protecting the Platform from Abuse

Wikipedia isn’t just under attack from bots and trolls-it’s under attack from governments. In 2024, Turkey, Iran, and Russia blocked access to Wikipedia for months. The WMF is responding with decentralized hosting, encrypted edit logs, and legal defense funds for editors who face arrest for editing controversial topics. The plan allocates $8 million to support editors in authoritarian regimes. That includes secure messaging apps for coordination, encrypted backups of articles at risk of deletion, and a global network of lawyers ready to file appeals. In Egypt, an editor who added facts about political prisoners had their home raided. The WMF didn’t just tweet support-they funded their relocation and published the article in 14 languages within 72 hours.

Money Isn’t the Problem-Trust Is

The WMF’s budget for 2025-2026 is $150 million. That sounds like a lot. But here’s the real number: $0.0003 per Wikipedia view. That’s less than a penny per thousand reads. The foundation gets 98% of its funding from small donations-under $100-from 7 million people. That’s why transparency isn’t optional. Every dollar is tracked publicly. The plan includes a new dashboard showing exactly how money flows: how much goes to server costs, how much to translator stipends, how much to legal battles. No more vague “operational expenses.” You can see that $2.1 million went to training 1,200 editors in Mozambique. That’s accountability.

What Happens If This Plan Fails?

If the WMF doesn’t act, Wikipedia becomes a museum. A static archive of 2010s knowledge, edited mostly by Western men, accessible only to the privileged. The alternatives are already here: AI-generated summaries that sound authoritative but are made from scraped Reddit threads and corporate blogs. Search engines that prioritize ads over accuracy. Platforms that reward outrage, not evidence. Wikipedia’s survival isn’t about technology. It’s about who gets to write history. This plan is a bet that people still believe in truth, even when it’s hard to find.

How You Can Help-Even If You’re Not an Editor

You don’t need to write an article to support this. You can donate $5. You can share a Wikipedia link instead of a TikTok clip. You can ask your school to teach students how to edit. You can tell your local library to offer offline Wikipedia access. You can report a misleading article. These aren’t small acts. They’re the foundation of the whole system. The WMF doesn’t run Wikipedia. You do.