Capstone: Making History, Building the Future Together

Abstract

The Wikimedia Foundation's executive director reflects on the past, present, and future of Wikipedia, informed by Wikimedia 2030, the vision and strategy project by the global Wikimedia movement and free knowledge partners. Wikipedia turned fifteen years old on January 11, 2016. Later that same year, in a time of concern about "fake news" and disinformation, I attended an event focused on the future of the news media. Wikipedia isn't a news organization, so I was an outlier in the room. I seated myself at a small roundtable on the topic of trust with some hesitation: after all, journalists are frequently skeptical about Wikipedia's reliability. One by one, the attendees went around the room, introducing themselves and the reason they'd joined the session. When it was my turn, I said: "Wikipedia has gone from being a punch line about the unreliability of people on the internet to becoming one of the most trusted sites online. I'm here to see what we can learn from one another." To my surprise, there were nodding heads around the table. It was a moment that would have been difficult to imagine even a few years ago. As Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement and projects enter our third decade, my expectation is that we'll continue to confound expectations. Today, Wikipedia includes fifty million articles across three hundred languages, ranging in size from six million articles on English Wikipedia to just over one thousand articles on Tulu Wikipedia. It is joined by a number of other successful free knowledge projects, including Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikisource. Every single month, we estimate that around one billion people spend a collective sixty thousand years reading