GLAM/Newsletter/April 2026/Contents/From the team
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How the GLAM Community Can Shine in the 2026–27 Annual Plan
I'll be upfront: I haven't followed previous annual plans closely, nor tracked how priorities have shifted year to year. Even so, reading through the draft for 2026–27, I can see real opportunities for GLAM priorities, activities, and engagement to play a meaningful role.
For those who have been following GLAM activities — through the Global Calls, last year's conference, newsletters, mailing lists, and the Diff blog — the Strategic Pillars will be familiar: Small GLAMs, Minority Languages, Robust Technical Infrastructure, Community (Mental) Health, and GLAM recognition.
The first objective in the annual plan is Reach: ensuring that people searching for encyclopedic information online — including outside Wikimedia projects — find relevant, valuable results that draw them into Wikimedia projects. One of the key results under Reach is making content from more projects findable across platforms, search engines, and AI tools. As Nat Baca mentioned at the March Global Call, recent improvements mean Commons content is now more discoverable across the open web. In other words, the wealth of content that GLAM contributors and partners have spent 20 years building and improving is finally reaching new audiences — like light pouring through a newly opened arch. Better metrics and data management will also help translate the value of this content to other WMF teams, all GLAM partners and stakeholders. This is a meaningful tailwind for GLAM, and your contributions directly support it.
Attribution
A new attribution framework is also being designed and tested across Wikimedia projects, with the goal of drawing more people back to the Wikimedia projects. Attribution sits at the very heart of the GLAM sector. Beyond the familiar resource constraints — staffing, funding, and more — the lack of clear attribution is one of the most consistently cited barriers stopping cultural heritage organizations from making their collections openly accessible. This is an area where the GLAM community is uniquely positioned to help. Not only can improved content reuse attribution benefit individual Wikimedia projects, but GLAM contributors can help design and pilot successful use cases. Wikimedia tools and projects already serve as a reliable, low-barrier option for small and under-resourced GLAM organizations. Showing that open contribution can lead to broader impact — and bring audiences back — strengthens the case for GLAM engagement across affiliates and contributor communities worldwide.
Do you see other ways the GLAM community can benefit from or support the annual plan?
Share your thoughts and feedback directly in the draft. On 26 May we will have the next Global Call, and the recording from the April call is also already available on commons, from the meta-wiki page, and neatly organized on Metabase. Be sure to submit your proposals and requests for topics ahead of time.
All the best, Connor
- From the team
- Albania report
- Argentina report
- Asia report
- Australia report
- Brazil report
- Colombia report
- Italy report
- New Zealand report
- Nigeria report
- North Macedonia report
- Poland report
- Serbia report
- Switzerland report
- UK report
- USA report
- Biodiversity Heritage Library report
- Memory of the World report
- Calendar