Meeting:2025 AGM/President's Report

President’s Report for 2025 AGM

Elliott Bledsoe 12 Sept 2025

As we get ready for Wikimedia Australia’s Annual General Meeting this weekend I want to share my reflections on a busy year. The 2024–25 financial year was a period of growth and momentum across all areas of the organisation.

Starting high level, we worked together to develop a 10-year Strategic Plan for WMAU. This roadmap will guide our work through to 2035. It is forward-looking and ambitious. This plan gives us a clear direction and a stable foundation, balancing our high aspirations with long-term sustainability.

For me, this was a key highlight because it was co-created with our members and community. It wasn't a top-down exercise. It was a genuinely collaborative effort. Thank you again to everyone who participated in co-developing the strategy. This is more than just a plan – it's a shared commitment to a long-term future.

I know that ten years is a long time – longer than the focus period of previous strategic planning the organisation has undertaken – but as we grow I think it is important to have a long-term vision for what we want to achieve together. It gives us motivation and a clear direction, setting us up for a future of even greater impact. And we have designed the strategy to have plenty of flexibility in its delivery so it can adapt and change.

Using the pillars of our new Strategic Plan, I want to share the incredible impact we've made together this year.

Growing free knowledge

When it comes to growing free knowledge, WMAU delivered more programs and partnerships this year than ever before. We hosted or participated in 72 events – many with our dedicated volunteers and partners – engaging more than 1,400 participants. Our collective efforts saw more than 1,100 new Wikipedia articles created, nearly 14,000 improved articles, and thousands of new images and data points across Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata. Australia's contribution to free knowledge has never been stronger.

We've also amplified our voice this year. We've become a trusted source for media commentary on critical topics and have significantly increased our engagement in policy and regulatory processes. This year, we authored more submissions, proactively monitored government activities, and met with ministers and departments to advocate for our mission. We also participated in government consultation sessions and became a participant in the Attorney-General’s Department Copyright and AI Reference Group (CAIRG).

We have also grown our influence off our shores. This year WMAU joined the TAROCH Coalition to champion open cultural heritage, we participated in international fora including RightsCon in Taipei and we had a strong Australian delegation attend the ESEAP Strategy Summit. Speaking of ESEAP, WMAU also took on a greater leadership role in the region, and I want to extend a special thank you to Belinda Spry for her tireless work in helping establish the ESEAP Hub.

Striving for knowledge equity

We continued our important work to address knowledge inequality on the wiki platforms. We extended on our previous work addressing the gender gap and improving the visibility of women artists, through edit-a-thons and partnerships with galleries and libraries including the National Gallery of Australia, Artbank, the Women’s Art Register in Melbourne, and the Art Gallery of South Australia. Additionally, our Partner Projects collaboration with the State Library of Victoria, the Radical Acts project with two Wikimedians in Residence highlighted Australian feminists and women’s suffrage in Victoria. While the 2SER-FM community radio station expanded content on Australian women in journalism and broadcasting. Many other editathons covered women in bio-mechanics, cyberneticists, health, medicine and STEM.

And we continued to explore how best to be a good ally to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. Informed by the crucial research by Distinguished Professor Bronwyn Carlson and Lotus Rana on the experiences of First Nations Australian wiki users and that undertaken by Dr Kristen Thorpe, Nathan Sentance and Lauren Booker on how the Wikimedia movement could better support First Nations content, data, and contributors, we engaged Indigenous law firm Terri Janke and Company to scope an Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) and Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDSov) protocol for the organisation. This work received grant funding from WMF and will commence next month. It will take time but it is really important for Wikimedia Australia to operate in a culturally safe, and respectful way. A guide for Wikimedia Australia led by First Nations voices and expertise, and a white paper exploring ways forward for protecting Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) on the wiki platforms is the first phase. As the project progresses we will be consulting with the Wikimedia community.

Building a stronger organisation

Behind the scenes, we've focused on strengthening our foundation. We've made our Board meetings more efficient and transparent, we have been reviewing our policies and procedures and our staff have worked tirelessly to refine our processes.

While we were unsuccessful in attracting greater investment from the Wikimedia Foundation through the multi-year grants program, we have modestly grown our financial resilience through increased donations, more fee-for-service activities, and smarter financial practices. We now have a three-month operating buffer, and our goal is to grow that to six months next financial year.

Celebrating our community

Our community is the heart of everything we do. This year our community welcomed over 700 new Wikipedia editors and contributors through our programs, and we saw an increase in our financial members, particularly women. We also offered more scholarships and bursaries to attend our own local WikiCon Adelaide, as well as Wikimania and other wiki conferences overseas, strengthening our international connections.

None of our achievements would be possible without our incredible volunteer community. I want to take a moment to acknowledge your deep commitment and tireless contributions to free knowledge.

And in that spirit, I want to say a special farewell to a cherished community member we lost this year, Tom Hogarth, also known as JarrahTree. No one embodied the spirit of the Australian Wikimedia community more than Tom. It is for this reason that I am delighted to inform our members that we will be establishing an in memoriam opportunity. We will release more details on this in the near future.

Looking forward

As we look to the year ahead, we will continue to deepen our partnerships with universities, libraries, and cultural institutions, finding new ways to bring open knowledge to more people. We will champion free knowledge in key policy discussions around copyright, online safety, digital literary and other relevant areas, ensuring WMAU remains a trusted and influential voice. And our commitment to First Nations knowledge will be strengthened as we embed cultural safety across all our projects and partnerships.

I am immensely proud of what WMAU has accomplished despite our modest resources. We are a small team with a big impact, and that's thanks to every single person in our community.