Annual Report 2023 Wikimedia Switzerland | Main Page

A word from the president

First things first: Merci, Grazie, Danke, Grazcha fich to the Wikipedians and Wikimedians, this community, the donors and partners – and to the members, the team and the board of Wikimedia CH. Every single one of you is helping create a world where information belongs to everyone – and an open, generous community where everyone belongs.

It has been an honour and great joy of my life to serve Wikimedia CH as president of the board. I am humbled by the commitment and passion in this community over the years. It’s rare – unique, even – for so many people to openly and genuinely share their knowledge, expecting nothing in return other than contributing to an informed society.

I’ve had the pleasure of watching the Wikimedia CH team and community grow in impact and sophistication. Wikimedia CH helped expand Swiss content on Wikipedia, built new partnerships to promote free knowledge, empowered the Swiss community of Wikipedians and became a trusted player in public affairs around important topics of our times.

I am inspired by the community and Wikimedia CH’s ongoing commitment to protecting, collecting and sharing free knowledge. With immense gratitude, I say goodbye as president of the board. While my tenure ends, my commitment does not. Quite the contrary: Endings are beginnings – and our shared mission is far from over.

Muriel Staub

Wikimedia CH Board President

A word from the executive director

The year 2023 was a year of both consolidation and growth for Wikimedia CH. We continued implementing the ambitious plans set out in the 2022-2026 strategy, which have helped us become a major player in the field of free knowledge. As our reach and reputation have grown, so has demand for our expertise, services and financial support.

Our challenge in 2023 was to meet increasing demand while both living up to our quality standards and remaining agile in an ever-changing environment. To that end, we continued to professionalise our operations and outreach, aiming to render our processes, team and communication more effective. We also recruited several new team members to fill empty positions and build our team’s capacity. We improved our membership engagement strategy and are working to secure our chapter’s financial future by developing new fundraising approaches.

From a programmatic perspective, 2023 was another important year for building relationships, developing new strategies and engaging the community. We celebrated the 175th anniversary of the Swiss Federal Constitution as an occasion to highlight our work advancing free knowledge and the importance of Wikipedia and other open knowledge projects for democracy.

The strategic work done in 2023 to create a more robust, efficient and holocratic organisation has created a strong foundation from which to expand our impact in 2024. We are well-placed at various levels of society – cantonal, federal and European – and across sectors to build on the momentum we have created since launching our five-year strategy in 2022. We are now beginning to have the team and processes in place to make significant strides towards our objectives.

Thanks to the work of our team and our community, we are well-positioned to make even greater strides towards our mission. I am exceedingly proud of what we have accomplished together and of how much we have evolved over the years. I look forward to our focus on impact and our work together in 2024 and beyond!

Thank you to everyone on our team, in our community and throughout our network of partners, donors and supporters for making Wikimedia CH what it is today.

Jenny Ebermann

Wikimedia CH Executive Director

GLAM

(Galleries, libraries, archives and museums)

GLAM's strategy focuses heavily on supporting inclusivity in cultural institutions. In 2023, this work centred around museums, as per the new definition of museums announced by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in 2022, but it also touched on more general efforts in the programme. We lent our expertise and time to amplifying access to cultural knowledge and enhancing gender equity both in the professional field and in the collections’ representation of female artists. We gathered best practices from other GLAM institutions and like-minded organisations and worked to translate them for the Swiss museum landscape. We continued to strengthen our relationship with ICOM, positioning our chapter as an important partner to help realise their strategic goals.

Education

Despite transitions within Programme Education, the team still implemented most of the annual plan. What’s more, not having an Education Lead for half of the year opened up opportunities for collaboration with other programmes and for other team members to advance Education projects. The Community Managers, in particular, stepped up to meet the demand for educational activities and support the new Education team members.

Community

This year was full of activities that engaged Wikipedians and volunteers in Switzerland’s three major language regions. It was also a year of strong collaboration with the other programmes. With a complete team and diverse language capabilities, the Community Managers played an important role in activities that technically fell under programmes such as GLAM, Education and Outreach. This was a testament to the team’s engagement and commitment to our mission, as well as their valuable individual expertise. Going forward, this collaboration will create a strong foundation for one of the programme’s core goals: to engage the Wikimedia Community around all programmes to multiply impact.

Partnerships & Outreach

In 2023, our focus was two-fold: continue our advocacy work by fostering our collaboration with like-minded organisations and strengthen our outreach work with an approach more aligned to communication, fundraising and association member management. In terms of advocacy, we continued to engage with partners like Parldigi and the Alliance Digitale in Switzerland, as well as European partners like the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU (FKAGEU) through Wikimedia Europe. At the national level, we provided feedback on two different public consultations on proposed laws. We also decided on a new thematic focus for the chapter, “Building a more inclusive future”, and we developed and began implementing a new membership engagement strategy.

Innovation

In 2023, we celebrated the one-year anniversary of our new strategic impact direction around experimentation and innovation. The goal of the Innovation programme is to create a space and a framework for Wikimedia CH to become a learning organisation while identifying and advancing projects that support our core purpose. The programme forged important partnerships around topics like the knowledge gap, AI and climate change, among others. It also continued to support innovation within the other programmes and advance internal systems and processes that improve coordination and efficiency.

Support free knowledge!

Join us in supporting access to free and unbiased knowledge. Besides being an active member in Wikimedia CH, or a contributor to Wikipedia and its sister projects, you can give tax-deductible financial support. Wikimedia CH is an independent non-profit. Your donations directly support some of the most popular collaborative reference projects in the world.