Pillar 5: Wikimedia Operates With Boldness

Wikipedia has no firm rules

Pillar 5 emphasizes that Wikipedia “is not carved in stone” and will “evolve over time” in line with our values. Since Wikipedia’s very beginning in 2001, when creating a free online encyclopedia was a novel idea, the projects have been evolving and maturing to meet new challenges, new audiences, and new ways of accessing information. 

Wikimedia adapts to meet the ever-changing needs of its users

As the world continues to change, we remain committed to adapting alongside it, consistently evaluating and striving to provide what the world requires of us. Throughout the 2021-2022 fiscal year, the Wikimedia Foundation stewarded Wikimedia projects to new aspects of reach and impact. 

• Strengthening the Wikimedia Endowment
  The Wikimedia Endowment is the permanent fund that supports the Wikimedia projects over the long term, and in 2022 the Endowment became its own independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the United States. The Wikimedia Endowment is now better positioned to help ensure Wikipedia thrives in perpetuity.

• Recognizing Wikimedia Content Across Devices
  In 2022, we announced a project to create “The Sound of All Human Knowledge” — a sound logo to inform people when they’re getting information from Wikimedia sites on their voice-activated devices, user-generated videos, podcasts, and other sound-based media.  Our content is on more integrated devices than ever, so our new sound logo will help communicate what the Wikimedia movement stands for — trustworthy, reliable, open, and accessible knowledge for all. You can read more and listen to the winning submission at soundlogo.wikimedia.org.

• Building a database for all knowledge: Wikidata
  Wikidata is another Wikimedia project that has become fundamental to the modern internet, providing virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, who rely on this open knowledge base, with answers to millions of queries. In 2022, we continued to support the growth of Wikidata, which now has 100 million content pages and is a critical project for the online infrastructure of free knowledge.

Pillar 5 encourages boldness as well as evolution, and bold is an apt description of all the Wikimedia projects and the Foundation’s commitment to stewarding their reach and impact.

Among our recent letters of gratitude was one from a user who said Wikipedia was “contributing to global peace” by freely distributing knowledge to the world, and one from a user who said they’d brought Wikipedia to a school in a refugee camp on the Myanmar/Thailand border that had no internet access. “We downloaded all the text and created a fantastic educational resource,” the user said. 

As part of our community you join us as stewards and champions of free knowledge. Thank you.  

Wikipedia is where people everywhere come to learn about the world, and where every pageview is a moment of learning something new. This is a reminder of the impact you make with your support. Thank you again for joining us in this mission.