Contributors/Strategy

Strategy Brief - Contributor Experience

Wikimedia Foundation Contributors strategy summary

Authors: Sonja Perry and Benoît Evellin, July 2025

Opening note

This page contains a strategy perspective that was developed by the Contributors team of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), in conversation with the community around various components. We'd like to treat this strategy as a very iterative process, and in creating this page, we’re inviting the community to share feedback, now that we’ve connected the dots and formed a cohesive path forward from many disparate datapoints and conversations.

To inform our strategy, we used data collected over the last few years, for example through the Community Wishlist, conversations with the Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC), including their recommendation, qualitative research, experimentation, and discussions on Discord and Meta (more details and links can be found in the FAQ section below).

The purpose of this strategy is to provide focus to WMF Product teams over the coming years by means of a longer-term plan that looks at the Contributor experience holistically. While we used it to inform our plans for FY25-26 already, we will continuously validate and iterate on our plans as we gather feedback from the community. Please comment on the discussion page; we’d love to hear from you!

Why now?

Even as the world changes, we remain certain that we want the Wikimedia projects to be a multi-generational endeavor: We want free knowledge to continue to be available to many generations to come. To do this, we need to fuel volunteer growth, to enable volunteers to build trustworthy encyclopedic content, to fund our mission, and to evolve our offering to shape the changing internet. Read more about those four strategic pillars. 

Over the last decade, we’ve seen a steady decline in active editors (with the exception of some peaks we saw during the pandemic) for both returning and new editor cohorts, which poses a threat to the sustainability and neutrality of our projects. This strategy is aimed at increasing editor retention and facilitating recruitment of volunteers into underresourced roles through technological solutions to prevent our projects from drifting towards non-neutral or homogenous perspectives.

Alongside external trends, we’re convinced that a major reason for the decline in editors is that our experience is fragmented and confusing, causing a widening gap between the experience we offer and the advancing expectations of internet users. The teams working on the Contributor experience at the Wikimedia Foundation — Editing , Growth , Moderator Tools , and Connection (ex-Campaigns) — will be the main driver for developing tools and user experiences to fuel volunteer growth, and as such require a comprehensive strategy that spans across the full contributor user experience, which will provide us with the focus needed to make meaningful progress by guiding trade-off decisions. Of course, the effort to ensure a sustainable, multi-generational project is something everyone in the movement is encouraged to participate in — with this document we hope to provide a perspective for WMF Product teams that can complement all the great work that is happening within the movement at large.

Prioritized strategy

There are lots of ways to contribute to Wikipedia, but we don’t provide guidance and clarity to navigate them, which is stifling our efforts to fuel volunteer growth. To tackle this, the Contributor teams at Wikimedia Foundation will focus over the coming years on bringing clarity for both new and experienced contributors by:

1. Simplifying how volunteers receive recommendations, track their impact, and stay organized

1. What does this mean in practice?
   1. Homepage for volunteers to receive recommendations and see their impact
   2. Modular and customizable experiences to suit diverse community needs
   3. Enable communities to direct volunteers to where they’re needed most
2. What are some specific problems volunteers told us about that this could help with?
   1. A wish mirrors what we've been hearing in conversations on Meta: "editors have way too many tasks with no way to offload some of them to other contributors looking for tasks."
   2. From recent research, we know that many wikis have problems with retaining and recruiting users with extended rights. A modular homepage with recommendations customizable by wiki could help them point volunteers towards specific types of tasks that should be prioritized, enabling them to grow by taking on more complex tasks when they meet specific criteria set by their wiki.

2. Offering appropriately structured tasks to create more clarity and help volunteers make most of their time

1. What does this mean in practice?
   1. Guidance in the moment and through structured flows
   2. Automation of repetitive tasks
   3. Special focus on the mobile web experience
2. What are some specific problems volunteers told us about that this could help with?
   1. We repeatedly hear from volunteers who spend years reading articles and Talk pages to build confidence before they even start editing.
   2. Burnout is often a topic when we talk with volunteers about backlogs and patrolling. Structured flows could help newer editors take on entry-level patrolling tasks to alleviate the burden for experienced editors.
   3. We talked to a user who is interested in climate change denialism. They recruited a team of a few people and looked at different WikiProjects to find all the climate change articles in ~200 languages, using Google Translate. They then updated articles as needed manually. This is something that WMF could help automate in the future. A similar wish was recently published as well.

3. Making contribution meaningful with an experience centered around human connections and impact

1. What does this mean in practice?
   1. More surfaces for contributors to understand their impact
   2. More avenues for human connection and feedback / recognition
   3. Goal setting and collaboration
2. What are some specific problems volunteers told us about that this could help with?
   1. One topic that keeps coming up is that volunteers would like to have better ways to provide positive feedback to each other, for example, by improving how volunteers can give thanks to each other.
   2. Volunteers we talked to mentioned that they love being able to track their impact, specifically those organizing collaborations, listed understanding impact as their #1 pain point.

We can fuel volunteer growth by creating a virtuous cycle for contributors, starting with making it easy to discover compelling opportunities, then ensuring that they are equipped to act on those opportunities with clear next steps, and finally offering a meaningful experience that highlights the contributor's impact. Our approach is balanced and holistic, taking all the different roles involved into consideration.

Current state

From the Community Wishlist and other community insights, such as the recent Product and Technology Advisory Council’s recommendation on mobile editing, we know that our current contributor experience is lacking clarity and posing myriad technical barriers for volunteers. The experience is fragmented because, over the years, we gradually ported some desktop experiences to mobile surfaces, made some new mobile-only experiences, and fixed user problems largely by focusing on ad-hoc needs rather than following an overarching and unified product vision. This results in the fact that volunteers are not guided through the contributor journey in a way that enables them to identify opportunities to contribute, act on those opportunities with efficiency, or understand their impact and what to do next. This makes it difficult, on the one hand, for contributors to stay engaged and grow, and on the other hand, for communities to attract new volunteers to their projects.

Newcomers and junior editors continue to experience three main barriers to editing: technical, conceptual, and cultural barriers. With the launch of the VisualEditor , followed by Edit Check , and Growth features , such as the Newcomer Homepage, Structured Tasks, and Suggested Edits, we’ve already taken steps to offer a more intuitive and coherent experience through smaller, targeted actions, especially for users who aren’t as familiar with wikitext. However, we still see attrition at key moments in their journey, for example when their edits get reverted. We believe that this is at least in part the case because newcomers in particular are confused and have yet to build positive social interactions that could help retain them. At the same time, the default on wikis is that good edits don’t generally get positive recognition, so volunteers don’t get much feedback on their impact, which can be especially discouraging for new volunteers who are still trying to navigate a complicated contribution system. Additionally, we’ve seen a decline in account registrations in recent years, so we need to start thinking more about how we can attract new and different users long-term as we try to solve these issues. One factor that we believe is playing into this is the increasing expectation of newcomers to use mobile web, specifically in communities with restricted access to desktop devices, which matches a recent recommendation from the Product and Technology Advisory Council, pointing to deficiencies in the mobile editing and newcomer experiences.

While more experienced editors may be more comfortable with the open-endedness onboarding to Wikipedia requires, we know they too can be frustrated by how difficult it can be to find rewarding contribution opportunities. Where this becomes especially prevalent is when creating backlogs: editors currently have to create backlogs manually with no guidance, prompts, or standard process to do so, leaving the burden of discovering opportunities and prioritizing them entirely on them. Additionally, we’ve seen continuous engagement from experienced contributors with the Community Wishlist, specifically around improvements to the editing experience more broadly.

Similarly, patrolling and administrative tasks are not streamlined and users have myriad gadgets, scripts, and tools available to create, navigate, and address workflows. While having all these solutions to choose from can be helpful and illustrates the importance of enabling a system that allows wikis the freedom to use the tools that work for them, volunteer-maintained solutions are often re-implemented across multiple Wikimedia projects, which highlights missing functionality in MediaWiki software. Plus, moderation tasks are often poorly supported on mobile devices, but especially shorter tasks might be well suited for smaller screens and small pockets of time. Additionally, patrollers and administrators generally receive little-to-no positive feedback on their contributions, making their work thankless rather than rewarding. These problems, combined with large administrative backlogs, often lead to frustration and burnout.

Across all roles, the burden of finding interesting and relevant ways to contribute is currently on the volunteer, and while we have some ways to provide and receive constructive or positive feedback (for example through Talk pages , Thanks , Barnstars, etc.), most contributors either don’t receive feedback at all or receive it only when their content needs to be reverted, deleted, or updated, meaning they don’t have an accurate understanding of their contribution impact on the community.

So what's different?

We have decided to prioritize contributor clarity over the next 3 years, allocating the 4 contributor teams at the Wikimedia Foundation (Editing, Growth, Moderator tools and Connection) towards a combined effort, which is a departure from operating on a plan that historically has been more reactive and short-term, often spanning only over one fiscal year. In practice this means that we will continue to base our decisioning heavily on feedback from the community as well as the Community Wishlist and other input sources, but instead of working on these requests in disparate ways, we will focus specifically on those requests that can help with editor clarity and retention to fuel volunteer growth.

Frequently asked questions

Can you point to more data to support your hypothesis?

We based this strategy on data collected over the last few years, including through the Community Wishlist, qualitative research, experimentation, and discussions on Discord, Meta, Talk pages, or at conferences. Here is a bibliography of sources used to compile this document:

• April 2025 Movement Metrics
• New Editor Experiences
• Community Wishlist
• PTAC Recommendation
• Volunteer Archetypes
• Reference Check A/B Test
• Newcomer Tasks Experiment Analysis
• New Editor Retention
• Impact of the Wikipedia Teahouse
• Registration Decline
• 2025 Global Trends
• Administrator Retention and Recruitment Report

Since we drafted this strategy, we’ve done more research and had engaging discussions with the community:

• Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2025-2026 Community Space Statistics
• Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2025-2026 Talk Page
• Centralized Contributions for Moderation Activity
• Crowdsourced Content Moderation
• Definition of Moderation Activity

What is your current investment in mobile web improvements?

We have a strong commitment to a mobile-first approach. WE1.1 is specifically aimed at creating smaller, structured, and more task-specific editing workflows that are well suited for small screens. Additionally, we see an opportunity in bringing more workflows to mobile web that are suited for small pockets of time on small screens, including simple patrolling or maintenance actions. We also launched an internal working group to uncover and summarize gaps, issues, and opportunities in the mobile web editing experience as a response to the PTAC recommendation put forth in February. The goal is to produce an artifact that we can use to make prioritization decisions for the latter part of FY25-26 and beyond.

Will you continue to implement contributor features in native apps?

We are not going to focus editor interventions on the mobile apps in the near term, so that the apps team can fully focus on improving the reader experience there.

If you’re not focused on adding and curating citations, are there other teams or groups who might work on this?

Yes! The Technical Wishes team at WMDE is dedicating the next couple of years towards the topic of references, and we continue to encourage volunteers to develop solutions to mitigate the challenges their communities might be facing.

What is your strategy for AI?

The WMF continues to prioritize human-created knowledge and aims to invest in using AI to support editors in areas where AI can have the highest impact, for example by automating routine and repetitive tasks that do not require human judgment or discussions, or by retrieving content to create and prioritize work lists. So far we've been using our own Small Language Models validated through community input. More details can be found in the overall AI strategy.

How might this impact the work of a volunteer? To contextualize this with tangible examples: Finding articles and surfacing tasks within specific query parameters could be something that WMF could help automate in the future. Other examples include surfacing non-neutral language or other potential issues, either when volunteers are just browsing and are unsure what to work on next, during their editing session, or as they are patrolling edits.

How does this tie into the reader experience?

The Contributor and Reader teams within the WMF will work very closely with each other to ensure smooth transitions along the entire user journey. This can include things like non-editing participation and account registration improvements.

How will you take into account community requests?

We will continue to rely heavily on community input through the Community Wishlist, Phabricator tickets, discussions with the community on social channels, Talk pages, village pumps and other surfaces. We have sessions planned for Wikimania 2025 and will continue to seek feedback on this strategy from the Product and Tech Advisory Council (PTAC).

How are you going to support the community in enforcing NPOV and other policies?

Global trends are suggesting that threats to neutrality are on the rise, and we’re taking them seriously. Something we’re particularly focusing on is the threat the decline in editors overall, but in particular of users with extended rights, is posing for the sustainability, diversity, and neutrality of our projects. This strategy is aimed at increasing retention and facilitating recruitment through the following means:

• Explore the idea of a customizable homepage to help volunteers prioritize the most impactful tasks and understand their impact. This could also help wikis recruit new volunteers into under-resourced tasks/roles.
• Continue to find new ways to reduce backlog size, for example through automation of repetitive tasks and by creating smaller, structured, and more task-specific editing workflows aimed at increasing the constructive edit rate
• Increased investment in facilitating a more meaningful and positive experience for editors to boost retention

How will you measure success?

Our core metric will be editor retention, and we'll have a series of indicator and health metrics that will help us track our progress on a more granular level.