Introduction
Celebrating growth through advocacy, education, outreach and partnerships.
The years since late 2019 have been unprecedented for the majority of us, not just personally but societally and globally; social movements demanding change to historical structures of repression, a global pandemic, natural disasters. For the final two years of our three-year strategy we have had to be agile, adapt our activities to maintain engagement, communicate through a variety of tools when we couldn’t be together, and understand and respond to the shift in priorities across audiences, donors and funders.
- Public domain
Figure 53: Display of Fireworks on the Seine, Paris , from Chemistry, Developed by Facts and Principles Drawn Chiefly from the Non-Metals by John Howard Appleton, 1844-1930. Providence, Providence Lithograph Co., 1884. Author: John Howard Appleton. Public domain
Details
The following report celebrates the achievements made by Wikimedia UK staff and UK community members towards demystifying and increasing open knowledge engagement, especially during 2021, and including the previous strategic period. As a fully digital strategic report, we can bring activities to life and show the diversity of content and people who are contributing to the online space and open knowledge.
Among hopes that the grip of the pandemic is now loosening, new threats have emerged, and others, such as our changing environment and climate, demand to be addressed. This latter theme has been emerging across Wikimedia UK’s programmes, and Looking Forwards and Wikimedia 2030 introduces how it will be incorporated into the 2022-25 strategy.
While as a small, agile charity we were quick to pivot and learn how to deliver activities online with the first wave of lockdowns, the reintroduction of in-person meetings has been deliberately slower, ensuring the opportunity to learn what is wanted and needed from each interaction. 2021 was the first full year of wholly virtual delivery, and Our Impact in Numbers highlights that this did not diminish the output; in fact it was the highest-performing year for newly registered users in the strategic cycle.
The increase in new users, along with Aim 3: Changing Policy and Practice and through engagement with Wikimedia UK as a source of expertise on open knowledge, means that we are continuing to move closer to our vision of a more tolerant, informed and democratic society through open knowledge.
