Wikimedia Foundation Scales Back Targets in Just Released 2012-2013 Plan

From The-H Open:

The organisation behind Wikipedia has scaled back its targets for future growth of the online encyclopaedia. The Wikimedia Foundation’s plan for the 2012/2013 financial year, released over the weekend, admits that the US-based organisation last year failed to meet key targets.
For the financial year to June, the foundation had set itself the target of increasing the number of active contributors from 90,000 in March 2011 to 95,000. Instead, user participation has once again fallen. In March 2012, Wikipedia statisticians counted just 85,000 editors who were active more than five times a month. For July 2012, the foundation calculates that this figure has fallen to just 79,000. The proportion of women contributors continues to hover around nine per cent.
The long-term goal of increasing the number of active contributors to 200,000 by 2015 looks a long way off. The foundation does not say why contributor numbers are falling, but does suggest that the drop would have been greater without its wide range of initiatives. It believes that the trend could have been slowed, “but not stopped or reversed.” The foundation hopes to stabilise these figures in the coming financial year. The plan calls for weak growth to 86,000 active editors by June 2013. An expansion of the global education program (from 79 to 150 classes with at least 50 per cent female participants) aims to increase the amount of quality content added by students from 19 million characters to 25 million characters.

Read the Complete Article
Direct to Wikimedia’s 2012-2013 Annual Plan and Annual Plan Question and Answers

Filed under: News