The future of Wikipedia
Wikipedia started with an impossible idea: to build a free encyclopedia for and by the world. Seventeen years later, we’ve made some serious progress. Nearly 300 languages, more than 45 million articles, hundreds of millions of monthly readers, and millions of contributors over the years.
In spite of our tremendous growth, we are still a long way from realizing our vision of free knowledge for all. The world and the internet have changed substantially around us, fact-based information is being called into question, and free, open knowledge is more important than ever.
At the beginning of 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation began a global discussion to imagine our movement’s collective future, under the name Wikimedia 2030. We’ve been collaborating—building a broad strategic direction, with the goal of uniting and inspiring people across the world around our vision of free knowledge for all.
To develop this direction, we trusted our movement’s greatest strength, our local communities. Thousands of volunteers, readers, partners, experts, and donors came together to identify the challenges and greatest opportunities for the future of free knowledge. We complemented these discussions with 150 expert interviews across education, science, technology, media, policy, and the arts. We looked at future trends that will affect our mission on our way to 2030.
Wikimedia 2030 directs us to expand our horizons, build on existing projects, and attract new contributors to add the knowledge we’re missing. It asks us to be bold and experiment in the future, as we did in the past. It remains rooted in the Wikimedia vision of “a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.”
