I’m Berkay, also User:Piyanist on Wikimedia projects. I have been contributing to Wikimedia projects since 2020. I’m member of the Wikimedians of Turkic Languages User Group, CEE Youth Group, and WikiPortraits.

My Wikimedia activities mainly focus on edits and corrections to Wikipedia pages related to my area of interest, adding cited informations, photography, Commons, youth-related projects, and topics related to music and culture.

In this report, I will share my experiences, observations, and highlights from Wikimania 2026. I will also describe the events I enjoyed the most during the conference.

Wikimania 2026 in Paris was my first Wikimania. I had attended other Wikimedia events before, but this was my first time experiencing Wikimania itself. During the conference, I joined sessions related to my interests, volunteered as a photographer at some activities, met new people and spent time again with friends I already knew from the CEE community. Some of the sessions also gave me new ideas about how I want to contribute in the future, especially through photography, youth activities and music.

The time between sessions was also an important part of the conference for me. During coffee breaks, meals and while moving around the venue, I met Wikimedians from many different countries and had conversations that I probably would not have had through scheduled sessions alone.

And of course there was also no shortage of small things to bring home. I collected stickers, pens, postcards, badges, notepads and other materials from different Wikimedia communities and projects, along with considerably less permanent souvenirs in the form of snacks and food. I kept some of these for myself, but I also plan to use many of the printed materials, stickers, and other items as materials for events we organize in the future. They can help me create a more visual stand where people can see different Wikimedia communities, projects and events instead of only hearing about them.

During Wikimania, I moved between many different sessions and activities. Sometimes I stayed until the end of a session, while at other times I left to see something else. Below are the sessions that I enjoyed the most or that gave me ideas about things I may want to work on in the future.

AI, Wikidata and the opening ceremony

One of the first sessions I attended was “If AI becomes the first web interface, how can the Wikimedia movement adapt? Communities’ levers.”

The discussion focused on how different Wikipedia communities are dealing with generative AI. Matthias Schindler shared an example about a tool made to check ISBN numbers in Wikipedia references. The tool helped identify articles containing fake references generated by AI. Some of the text looked normal, but the books used as sources did not actually exist.

The speakers also discussed how language communities can experience AI differently. One point I found interesting was that language models can flatten different perspectives instead of understanding the context of each language and community. The discussion was not simply about accepting or rejecting AI. It was also about understanding where these tools fail and keeping human review in the process.

After that, I attended Philippe Saadé’s “Wikidata MCP: Grounded SPARQL Query Generation.”

He demonstrated how a language model can make a basic mistake while still producing something that looks technically convincing. In one example, a model trying to find female physicists who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics initially selected the QID of a dog breed instead of the Nobel Prize.

The workflow presented in the session separated discovery, structure inspection, SPARQL generation and validation. This made it easier to see where a mistake happened instead of only looking at the final answer.

Later, I attended the opening ceremony, which also celebrated Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary.

UNESCO’s Mariya Gabriel spoke about knowledge as a public good and about the responsibility of AI systems that depend on open knowledge. Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan talked about the people behind Wikimedia. She reminded us that readers normally only see the finished article. They do not see all the discussions, photos, translations, corrections and other work that happens behind it.

Jimmy Wales talked about assuming good faith and making newcomers feel welcome. He also spoke about freedom, equity and the importance of keeping Wikipedia reliable. He also discussed misinformation bubbles and unequal access to information. One point that stayed with me was his description of Wikipedia’s role in the age of AI: its value is not simply providing the fastest answer, but providing information that can be checked and verified.

He also described Wikipedia as something built gradually through edits, lines of code and discussions rather than around one person.

The ceremony continued with the Wikimedian of the Year awards. I photographed all of the award recipients and later uploaded my photographs to Wikimedia Commons. You can access these photos from the following Commons category

A morning inside the Sainte-Geneviève Library

The next morning, I joined an organised visit to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.

We met at the Wikimania venue early in the morning, received public transport tickets and travelled to the library together. Before entering, I walked around the Panthéon area with other photographers and took street and architectural photographs.

In the lower levels, we saw large collections of books, archive materials and older reproduction formats. Pauline showed us the microfilm archive: before digitisation, books and newspapers were copied on small reels, and readers can still use them today. She also explained how physical collections are digitised and made available through the Genovefa digital library. The library holds around two million documents in three buildings. When a reader requests a book, the request is printed in the stacks and the book is sent up with a small lift, in about twenty minutes. The rolling shelves stay only on the lowest level, because anywhere else their weight would harm the foundations of the building.

We also saw historical documents, rare books and materials connected to preservation and digitisation. For me, the most impressive piece was a planetary clock made in southern Germany at the end of the 16th century – one of the very few surviving in the world, and still working, showing the movements of the planets. The photos I took of the library and the archive area during these events are in this Commons category.

Photography and WikiPortraits

“Behind the Lens: WikiPortraits on a Global Scale”, presented by Kevin Payravi, Jennifer 8. Lee and other WikiPortraits contributors.

The problem behind WikiPortraits is simple: many Wikipedia biographies still have missing or poor photographs, but taking a good photograph of a notable person often requires being at the right event and having media access. WikiPortraits helps photographers attend and cover these kinds of events, so that useful photographs can later be uploaded under free licences and used across Wikimedia projects.

WikiPortraits now has more than 200 photographers from over 40 countries, and together they have uploaded more than 95,000 photographs. The group covered over 180 events in 2025, and another 169 events had already been covered in 2026 by the time Wikimania took place. These photographs are also widely used, receiving around 400 to 500 million views every month.

One part of the model was especially relevant to me. WikiPortraits encourages photographers to begin with events in their own area. As they build experience and a portfolio of Wikimedia work, the group can help with accreditation for larger international events. For some major coverage, there can also be support with travel or accommodation.

This connected closely with my own photography work. In Türkiye, I already photograph musicians, artists, concerts and other events. Until now, these photographs were usually produced for artists, organisers or their own media use, and I had not really connected this part of my photography with Wikimedia Commons.

The session made that connection much clearer for me. When licensing and other conditions are suitable, I hope to make some of my future artist and concert photography useful on Commons as well.

For me, this is a practical way to connect photography work I already do with my Wikimedia activities instead of treating them as completely separate things.

And after that session, I joined WikiPortraits. For me, this was one of the sessions I enjoyed most at Wikimania 2026.

Indigenous knowledge and responsible sharing

“Respecting Indigenous Knowledge in Open Spaces.”

The panel discussed Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property and Indigenous Data Sovereignty. The speakers explained why open knowledge is not only about copyright or whether something can technically be uploaded.

Cultural context, consent and the communities connected to that knowledge also matter.

The Wikimedia Australia team presented a guide that helps contributors think about culturally sensitive material and whether a source is culturally appropriate. One of the practical ideas was to ask not only whether material can be uploaded, but whether uploading it is the responsible choice.

Thérèse Ottawa also spoke about the Atikamekw-language Wikipedia project in Canada and its connection with education and language revitalisation. The project included work with younger people and schools, helping the language remain active in a digital environment.

This session connected with what I had seen at the library. Digitising cultural material can help more people access it, but we also need to think about how that material is shared.

CEE Youth and ideas for future activities

Youth participation was another part of my Wikimania programme.

“Bring in the Youth! Discussing Ways to Support Youth on a Regional Level.” Participants shared examples from different regions and talked about mentoring, universities, informal activities and ways to support young contributors who may not have an active local community around them.

One example I liked was the use of simple social activities such as board game meetings. These meetings helped young Wikimedians get to know each other, and some later developed projects together. The discussion also looked at the role of regional groups in connecting young people who may otherwise feel isolated in their local Wikimedia community.

Later, I joined the CEE Youth session and workshop.

Meeting WikiOrchestra

At the end of the day, I went to the WikiOrchestra rehearsal and met the conductor, Lukas Mezger

I told him that I am playing the piano and composing musics. I also mentioned that I had composed the opening music for the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 in Istanbul.

There is also a separate diff post on this topic here:

Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 Istanbul through the eyes of its designer

We talked with Lukas about music at Wikimedia events and possible future collaborations. I had discovered the information about the closing choir late, but after our conversation Lukas invited me to join.

Manuscripts and the closing ceremony

On the final day, I attended “From Wikilontar to Wikisami: How Regional Partnerships Power Community-Led Growth in Bali”, presented by Carma Citrawati and Sakti Hendra Pramudya.

The session explained how work around Balinese manuscripts developed through local community participation and wider partnerships. The discussion was not only about scanning documents. It also focused on trust, local leadership and giving communities a role in decisions about their own cultural heritage.

For me, this connected naturally with both the Sainte-Geneviève Library visit and the Indigenous knowledge panel. All three showed different sides of digitisation and cultural heritage.

After the session, I studied the score for “Oh, Wikipédia!” and joined the WikiOrchestra and choir rehearsal. I spent hours working on the music, pronunciation, stage positions and performance.

Near the end of the closing ceremony, the WikiOrchestra and choir went on stage and we performed the song together.

Performing with the choir at the main amphitheater stage, became one of the most memorable parts of my first Wikimania.

Lukas and I also talked about future music projects. I also plan to continue composing original music for Wikimedia events when there is an opportunity. For me, music is not only something separate from Wikimedia activities.

After the ceremony, we joined the Wikimania 2026 group photo.

On the final day of Wikimania, there was another very literal example of how many small contributions can create something much larger. Wikimania participants worked together on a giant version of the Wikipedia Puzzle Globe outside the venue. When it was finished, the puzzle covered around 100 square metres and had 944 pieces. It was one of the largest jigsaw puzzles ever assembled in France. It later became the backdrop for the final group photo.

I also kept one of the puzzle pieces as a souvenir. Together with the badges, postcards, stickers and other things I collected during the week, it will probably become one of the more unusual pieces of my future student club stand.

Looking back at my first Wikimania

My first Wikimania included discussions about AI, photography, cultural heritage, youth activities and music.

But the experience was not limited to the sessions. Meeting Wikimedians from different countries during breaks, seeing the projects people brought with them and simply spending time with other contributors were also important parts of the week.

I returned from Paris with several ideas for what I want to do next, like connect more of my photography with Wikimedia Commons and WikiPortraits, become more active in CEE Youth and youth-related activities, and continue exploring ways to bring music into Wikimedia events.

I also want to continue contributing to the topics I already edit while trying these different forms of participation.

One useful part of Wikimania for me was seeing that some of the things I already do outside Wikimedia can also become Wikimedia contributions.

The week ended with the group photo, the giant Puzzle Globe (Of course, I took one puzzle piece with me.) and the memories and small objects I brought home from Paris. It was a memorable end to my first Wikimania.

Imagine a world in which every woman on the planet finds a representative and diverse sum of all human knowledge about women+* available on Wikipedia and on the internet. This is what the Celebrate Women campaign has been trying to accomplish since 2022. 

Every March, during Women’s History Month and in celebration of International Women’s Day (March 8th), the Wikimedia community gathers both online and in person to edit and improve the content available on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects about women+. The editing happens as part of edit-a-thons, workshops, training sessions, and many other types of gatherings, which are spread around the world, with events on every continent. 

For 2026, we had one of the biggest campaigns so far. Considering all the gatherings globally, we had 112 events listed on the official page, which were divided into these sections: 

• Global: 21 events
• Africa: 20 events
• Asia: 15 events
• Europe: 38 events
• Latin America: 12 events
• Middle East: 1 event
• North America: 3 events
• Oceania: 2 events

These numbers clearly demonstrate the global impact of this campaign, as well as serve as a testimony to Wikimedia’s reach and potential for collaboration, even when the world seems to be divided. In 2026, our communities were able to not only come together, but also edit and collaborate towards that one single goal.

In the last few years, this purpose was also achieved. By checking the pages for the previous campaigns, we had 59 events in 2025, 100 in 2024, and 121 gatherings in 2022. However, when we also consider the Programs & Events Outreach Dashboard campaigns (see more about this topic below), we have another 144 events in 2022; 137 events in 2024; 171 events in 2025; and 155 events in 2026. 

For 2026, we were able to assemble some statistics. In terms of engagement, considering the P&E Outreach Dashboard and gatherings using Event Registration (a new CampaignEvents feature), we were able to identify that this year’s campaign assembled 207 organizers and 2,658 event participants, which can be divided into:

• Beginner (less than 10 lifetime edits when participation begins): 1,388 users
• Junior (>= 10, <100 edits): 435 users
• Experienced (>= 100, <300 edits):  189 users
• Very experienced (>= 300 edits): 647 users

When it comes to content, or knowledge being added or improved through events, we had 238,222 unreverted content edits and 2,499,773,577 bytes added. After a few months from the end of the campaign (March 31, 2026), we have a total of 32,388 undeleted content pages added.

Celebrate Women is also responsible for increasing the number of events held in the Wikimedia community. Considering Event Registration usage only, we can see in the next image a major increase from 2025 to the 2026 campaign, and a peak in February and March compared to last year.

In March 2025, we had 152 events created using Event Registration, while in March 2026, we had 251 events. This is a 65% increase. However, for Celebrate Women, it’s also important to consider February, when a good portion of the events are created for organizers in preparation for the early March events, especially around International Women’s Day. In February 2025, 130 events were created, while in February 2026, 240 events were created. This is an 84.6% increase.

Wikimedia Foundation’s support in 2026

Celebrate Women is a community campaign and the result of volunteers and community members from all over the world. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has been helping this campaign by providing support for communities and organizers.

In 2026, we started the support by renovating the Celebrate Women portal. We changed the campaign’s header, reorganized it, and even added a press toolkit tab to help organizers develop a media plan or get media coverage from local journalists and media outlets. This new page includes sections about how to explain Wikipedia and the gender gap, key Wikipedia and gender gap facts and figures, inspiring gender stories, and a list of campaigns and groups dedicated to decreasing the gender gap on the Wikimedia projects. 

We also added resources and guides for how to use the CampaignEvents features, Content Translation Suggestion feature, and Central Notice Banner Editor. Additionally, we collaborated with the WMF Comms team on social media posts, which were shared throughout March on the Foundation’s channels.

We also contacted major gender organizers and community members (via email and talk page) and discussed the idea of adding the Event Registration header to help us understand the campaign’s participation. With Event Registration, the campaign reached 617 registered participants. According to the Connection team, who developed this feature, Celebrate Women 2026 is currently the 3rd biggest event in terms of participation so far, only behind Wikipedia 25 Virtual Celebration, with 3,187 participants, and the Africa Wiki Challenge 2025 with 790 participants.

During the pre-campaign community consultations, we received a request to not only have an Event Registration way to track the campaign, but also an Outreach Dashboard campaign dedicated to 2026. We created the campaign here.

Later, we chose to understand the impact of previous Celebrate Women years using the Outreach Dashboard too. We created campaigns dedicated to 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 and decided to search and include all gender events organized during those years using the dashboard. Now, we can better understand the impact of the gender content gap efforts for the past 5 years. 

Finally, by using Event Registration, we were able to communicate with the 617 participants who registered. Once a week, we sent a reminder with the events that were taking place that week, divided into regions, and including day, time, place, and how to register. This established a recurring way to connect with community members and remind them about the campaign as a month-long commitment.

Wikimedia Foundation’s events

The Wikimedia Foundation also organized three events to support the community in organizing their Celebrate Women gatherings. We planned the campaign’s kick-off event and 2 pre-campaign trainings dedicated to Wikimedia organizers.

• On February 25, we had the Content Translation training. This session aimed to empower organizers with the skills to use Content Translation, with a focus on the article suggestion feature. 

• On February 26, we had the Event Registration and Collaborative Contributions session. The training aimed to equip organizers to effectively accomplish event registration, metrics tracking, outreach, and sustained community engagement. 

• On March 5, we held the campaign’s Welcome Session, which covered the 2026 campaign, some of its events, and some of Wikimedia’s Gender Gap milestones presented by Chinmayee Mishra. Participants also learned a bit about Event Registration, Content Translation, and two tools that help organizers with small but powerful edits: Gender Bias Detector and Wikipedia Microtask Generator. 

On the page for the three events, all the resources are available: recordings, slides in different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French), and other useful information.

WikiWomen+ Summit 2026

In August 2026, the WikiWomen+ Summit 2026 took place during Wikimania’s pre-conference day. At this gathering, we were able to present about the Celebrate Women and the impact of this campaign in the context of Wikipedia’s content gender gap. 

Please find the recording for this presentation on YouTube. The slides are also available on Wikimedia Commons.

To understand more about the campaign or to stay tuned, check out the Celebrate Women portal on Meta-Wiki.

* The usage of the “+” sign after the word “women” means we are including anyone who identifies as a woman in some way, that being a cis woman, transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, or any gender identity not listed here.

The #SheSaid campaign 2026 officially launched on 1 September and will run until 31 December 2026. Now in its seventh edition, #SheSaid continues to grow as a global campaign, bringing together participants from around the world to add and improve women’s voices on Wikimedia projects.

As part of Wiki Loves Women, an initiative of Wiki in Africa, #SheSaid works to address the gender gap on Wikiquote by making women’s words, experiences and perspectives more visible and accessible.

This year is particularly special: Wiki Loves Women is celebrating 10 years of making women visible in the world’s largest open knowledge ecosystem. #SheSaid is part of this decade-long journey, building on the contributions of thousands of participants who have helped bring women’s voices into the Wikimedia movement and beyond.

More than numbers, SheSaid is a story of collaboration

Six editions. More than 42k contributions. 22 languages from English to Assamese. More than 25 communities from Indonesia to Italy, Ghana and beyond. . 

#SheSaid is more than just the numbers. It is a story of people coming together across languages, countries and cultures, united by one purpose: to make women’s voices more visible.

That spirit of collaboration has taken #SheSaid beyond Wikimedia. FrancAutrices, a card game created through a collaboration between Les sans pagEs, Wiki in Africa and French Wikiquote editors, brings the words of Francophone women writers to new audiences. The game features quotes from Wikiquote, alongside portraits of the authors by French illustrator Claire Gaudriot and a design by South African designer Theresa Shaw.

FrancAutrices is one example of how a contribution to an open platform can become the starting point for something new, connecting communities, cultures and audiences around women’s voices.

A community favourite

The Wikimedia community has celebrated the story of # SheSaid. At Wikimania 2026, the campaign was selected as one of “Wikimedia’s Coolest Projects”.

For this award, in-person and online attendees were invited to vote for the projects that best represented the creativity, diversity and collaborative spirit of the Wikimedia movement. The contest was revived in memory of its founder, Deror Lin, as part of the celebration of 25 years of Wikimedia.

Being chosen among the three coolest Wikimedia projects is a meaningful recognition of what the #SheSaid community has built together.

A campaign for everyone

As this year’s campaign begins, we’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has contributed to #SheSaid over the years; every quote, edit, translation, event and conversation has helped shape this global campaign and made a significant impact on Wikiquote. SheSaid belongs to everyone who takes part in it, and through this collective effort, women’s voices continue to find their place in open knowledge.

The story continues, and everyone can be part of it. Whether you contribute a quote, improve Wikiquote, organise an activity, translate content, or encourage someone else to participate – join us!

Be part of #SheSaid 2026 and help write the next chapter of this global story.
#SheSaid … Give Her A Voice!

Don’t forget to follow us on social media:

• Website: www.wikiloveswomen.org
• Twitter/X: @Wikiloveswomen
• Instagram: @WikiLovesWomen
• Facebook Page: @WikiLovesWomen
• Telegram Group: WikiGenderGap

A reflection from Wikimedia Kenya User Group on why skills development, shared leadership and opportunities for growth are essential to building resilient communities.

There was a point during Wikimedia Kenya User Group’s recent team-building day when somewhere between the conversations, laughter and uncomfortable moments of reflection, the room changed. The titles and responsibilities that usually defined us seemed to fall away, and for a while, we were simply what we had spent years trying to build: a community.

We spent the day competing in well-crafted games, laughing at our desperate attempts to win and the missteps that cost us points, while discovering just how differently each of us approaches a challenge. But beneath the fun, the activities revealed something more important; they showed us how much we rely on trust, communication and listening to work towards a common goal, and how leadership is not always about taking charge, but also about knowing when to step back and make space for someone else.

The people in that room were not only campaign organisers delivering projects and programmes. They were also members of the Core Team supporting Wikimedia Kenya UserGroup’s mission and governance. That made the day about more than team-building but also an opportunity to reflect on how we work together, the kind of leaders we want to become, and ultimately, the kind of community we are building.

“I really enjoyed the team-building activity because it gave us a chance to step away from our usual roles and understand each other differently. It reminded me that building a strong community is also about building trust within the team, understanding the different strengths each one brings to the table, reflecting on and learning from our mistakes, creating space for different people to belong and learning how to support each other better.”  Terry Boke, Community Organiser & Core Team Member

Building Communities Means Investing in People

It is easy to measure a growing community through the number of new contributors, articles created, events delivered, partnerships established or campaigns completed. But behind every one of those numbers are people: people who need the confidence to take initiative, the skills to do it well, the opportunity to take responsibility, and a community that recognises their potential and gives them room to grow.

For Wikimedia Kenya, leadership development is therefore not a separate activity sitting alongside our programmes. It is part of how we are building a resilient and sustainable community.

We don’t just want volunteers whose contribution is limited to editorial work. We want to build a community of people with the skills, confidence and agency to take on different roles, lead initiatives, solve problems and shape the direction of the movement. Whether they are organising campaigns, building partnerships, mentoring others, contributing to governance or creating knowledge, we want people to see themselves not just as participants, but as active contributors to the growth and future of the community across Kenya.

That means mentorship, nurturing talent and creating opportunities for people to practise leadership before they are formally given a leadership title. It means developing the skills to communicate strategically, make decisions, work across different perspectives, take responsibility for outcomes and, just as importantly, make space for others to contribute and lead.

This thinking is reflected in our 2026/27 Strategic Plan, which recognises leadership development as an important part of building a resilient and sustainable community.

From Team Building to Communicating for Impact

Drawing on more than a decade of experience in strategic communications, community building and leadership development, I wanted to inspire the team to think about how we could strengthen the way we work and grow as a community. I therefore led a practical session on “Communicating for Impact: From Strategy to Community Engagement,” built around a simple question:

How do we translate Wikimedia Kenya User Group’s strategy into action, communicate more effectively, engage our community meaningfully, and ensure that we can see, measure and document the impact of our work?

For people taking on leadership and coordination roles, communication is not simply about writing better outreach emails, designing social media posts or making event announcements. It is about understanding people and audiences, listening well, building trust, navigating differences, working collectively and creating the conditions for others to contribute and lead. It is also about connecting the decisions we make and the work we do every day to Wikimedia Kenya’s strategic priorities and the wider movement’s goals.

Developing these skills is an essential part of developing people who can take on greater responsibility, support others and help shape the future of the community.

We explored a simple progression:

Strategy → Communication → Engagement → Action → Impact

The aim was to help us see that communication cannot sit separately from strategy. It should help people understand the purpose behind our work, see where they fit and feel empowered to contribute.

What stood out to me was not simply what people learned, but how quickly the boundaries between training, team building and strategy began to disappear. The conversations moved naturally from how we communicate to how we work together, take responsibility and create opportunities for others to contribute. The session became a practical exercise in leadership development, building the skills needed not only to deliver our work, but to shape what comes next.

That shift was reflected in the feedback from one of our Core Team members:

“This was really great for understanding the bigger picture of our work and learning how to move more strategically. I feel empowered to think differently about how I plan and engage with the community and external stakeholders in future projects and campaigns that I lead.” Faith Mwanyolo, Core Team Member & Lead Organizer, Wiki Loves Africa

One practical lesson from the communications training was the need to make strategic alignment part of our planning process, rather than something we consider after a project is already underway. Going forward, we want every project and campaign to begin by asking how it advances the Wikimedia Kenya Strategic Plan and contributes to what we are working towards as a community.

To support this, we are developing a standard project planning template for organisers and a review checklist for the Core Team. The template will help teams identify the strategic objective their project contributes to, the activities they will undertake, the outputs they expect to deliver, the outcomes they aim to achieve and the metrics they will use to track progress.

The checklist will provide a consistent and transparent approach to reviewing internal proposals, helping us assess not only whether an activity is well designed, but also how clearly it contributes to our strategic priorities and how responsibility for results is shared.

The intended outcome is a more deliberate approach to how we plan, implement and evaluate our work. Over time, this should help us understand which activities are contributing to our goals, where we are making significant progress, where gaps remain and where we need to adapt.

Four Lessons That Have Shaped How We Build Our Community

For emerging communities, especially those building themselves with limited resources, investing in leadership can easily become an afterthought-something to address once the community is larger, programmes are more established or funding is more secure.

Our experience over the past five years has taught us something different: leadership development is not something that should follow community growth; it is one of the things that makes sustainable growth possible. As more people develop the skills and confidence to take responsibility, lead others and shape the direction of the community, growth becomes something the community can build and sustain collectively.

Below are four lessons that have shaped how we build our community.

1. Make leadership development part of the strategy

Don’t wait for people to emerge as leaders by accident. Create deliberate opportunities for mentorship and for people to take responsibility, experiment, make decisions and learn from experience.

Leadership grows when people are trusted with meaningful roles and supported as they take them on. This also means recognising that people develop at different stages and may need different opportunities to grow—from taking on their first organising role to leading a major campaign, mentoring others or contributing to governance.

2. Don’t separate team building from organisational development

Games, reflection and informal conversations can reveal things that formal meetings don’t. A team that understands how its members communicate, solve problems and respond under pressure is better equipped to collaborate when the real work begins.

Team building therefore has a role beyond creating a good atmosphere. It can help people understand one another’s strengths, identify areas where they need to work differently and build the trust needed to share responsibility.

3. Connect activities to purpose

People taking responsibility for campaigns and community activities should understand not only what they are doing, but why it matters and how it contributes to the community’s wider goals and the Wikimedia movement’s strategy.

When people understand the connection between an edit-a-thon, partnership, training or outreach activity and the bigger organisational goal, they are more likely to take ownership of the work and see how their contribution fits into the community’s growth.

As one of our Core Team members reflected:

“When we understand why we are doing something and how it contributes to our wider goals, the work takes on a different meaning. We are no longer just delivering activities; we are making deliberate contributions towards the kind of community and movement we want to build.” Lebu Ayiga, Community Organiser & Core Team Member

4. Create room for leadership to move

Volunteer burnout can quietly undermine growing communities when too much responsibility rests on a small number of committed leaders. Those who help build a community can easily become the people expected to organise every campaign, solve every problem and keep everything moving. Over time, this can limit both their capacity and the community’s growth.

We have learned that investing in people also means creating room for leadership to move. This means creating pathways for members to take on new responsibilities, develop the skills and confidence to lead, and step back when others are ready to step forward.

For us, this is not only about preventing burnout. It is about building a wider base of people who can share responsibility, mentor others and take on greater leadership roles. When leadership is shared, the community becomes less dependent on individuals and better able to sustain its growth.

Invest in Leaders at Every Stage

Wikimedia communities are built around knowledge, but they are sustained by people. If we want our communities to grow and remain sustainable, we have to invest in people at every stage of their journey.

That means creating pathways for new leaders to emerge, while also giving existing leaders opportunities to deepen their skills, take on new challenges and progress into new roles. Leadership development should create space for people to build confidence, share responsibility, mentor others and continue finding meaningful ways to contribute.

Leadership should not be viewed only as a pathway towards replacing one person with another. People who have already taken on leadership responsibilities also need opportunities to learn, evolve and take on new challenges. In a volunteer movement, creating those opportunities can be just as important to sustaining engagement as bringing new people into leadership.

Over time, this creates resilient communities where people at different stages can continue to grow, contribute, lead and support others.

Winnie Kabintie is the Executive Director, Wikimedia Kenya User Group

The Igala Wikimedia Campus Outreach was successfully implemented across three higher institutions in Kogi State:

• Kogi state Polytechnic Lokoja
• Federal Polytechnic Idah
• Prince Abubakar Audu University, Anyigba

The outreach served as a capacity-building initiative designed to recruit, train, and mentor new Wikimedia contributors while promoting the documentation of Igala language, culture, history, and notable personalities on Wikimedia platforms. Through practical editing sessions, mentorship, and collaborative learning, participants gained the skills required to contribute quality knowledge to Wikipedia and related Wikimedia projects.

Project Objectives

The primary objective of the outreach was to increase the number of active Igala Wikimedia editors and improve the availability of Igala-related knowledge on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Specifically, the project sought to:

• Train new editors in Wikipedia editing and Wikimedia policies.
• Increase the number of contributors to the Igala Wikimedia community.
• Document and preserve Igala language, culture, history, and notable personalities.
• Improve the quality and accessibility of Igala-related content online.
• Build a sustainable campus-based Wikimedia community through mentorship and continuous engagement.

Project Activities

• Attah Igala – Traditional rulership and the history of the Igala Kingdom.
• Igala Language – Grammar, dialects, and language usage.
• Idah, Kogi State – Historical significance, culture, and landmarks of the ancestral home of the Igala people.

Participants also improved existing Wikipedia articles and enhanced Wikidata items relating to Igala language, places, and distinguished personalities. These contributions help bridge the existing knowledge gap affecting indigenous Nigerian languages on Wikimedia platforms.

Mentorship and Community Growth

Mentorship remained a central component of the outreach. Experienced Wikimedia volunteers provided continuous guidance throughout the training sessions, ensuring that participants understood editing standards and best practices.A significant outcome of the mentorship process was the growth in participants’ confidence and editing skills. Many attendees joined with little or no prior Wikimedia experience but successfully progressed to independently creating and improving articles by the end of the outreach. This demonstrates the importance of sustained mentorship in retaining new editors and strengthening the local Wikimedia community.

Experience

The outreach was both impactful and inspiring. Participants showed enthusiasm throughout the training sessions and demonstrated a genuine interest in preserving and promoting Igala knowledge online. The collaborative atmosphere encouraged peer learning, teamwork, and active participation.It was particularly rewarding to observe participants transition from beginners to confident contributors capable of independently editing Wikipedia. The project also strengthened relationships among the participating institutions and laid the foundation for future Wikimedia activities within the campuses.

Benefits and Impact

The outreach produced several positive outcomes, including:

• Increased awareness of Wikimedia projects among students and academic communities.
• Development of new editing skills among participants.
• Improved representation of Igala language, culture, and history on Wikipedia.
• Strengthened collaboration among campus communities and the Igala Wikimedia user community.
• Contribution towards reducing the content gap affecting indigenous Nigerian languages.
• Establishment of a growing network of volunteers committed to documenting Igala knowledge.

These contributions will continue to benefit researchers, students, and the wider public by making reliable information about the Igala people more visible and accessible globally.

Challenges Encountered

Despite the success of the outreach, several challenges were experienced during implementation:

• Inconsistent internet connectivity affected editing sessions in some locations.
• Limited availability of laptops among participants reduced hands-on participation.
• Power supply interruptions occasionally delayed training activities.
• Some participants required additional time to fully understand Wikipedia editing guidelines and policies.
• Time constraints limited the depth of practical editing during some sessions.

These challenges were addressed through mentoring, flexible training schedules, collaborative editing, and continuous follow-up support after the events.

Outcomes and Contributions

The outreach successfully expanded the Igala Wikimedia community while increasing the quantity and quality of Igala-related content across Wikimedia projects.

Project Metrics Indicator

• Campuses Reached 3
• New Editors Trained 102
• Articles Created 514
• Articles Improved 516
• Total Edit Contributions 2.64k
• Commons upload 266

See also: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event:Building_Igala_Wikipedia_Community_Through_Campus_Engagement

Next Steps

The Igala Wikimedia Outreach continues to play an important role in promoting language equity and representation within the Wikimedia movement. Future activities will focus on:

• Sustaining mentorship for newly recruited editors.
• Organizing advanced editing workshops and edit-a-thons.
• Expanding the outreach to additional tertiary institutions and communities.
• Encouraging regular contributions to Wikipedia and Wikidata.
• Building long-term partnerships with educational institutions to strengthen the Igala Wikimedia community.

Conclusion

The Igala Wikimedia Campus Outreach successfully achieved its objective of empowering new contributors to document and preserve Igala knowledge on Wikimedia platforms. Through training, mentorship, and collaborative editing, participants contributed meaningful content that enriches Wikipedia and improves global access to information about the Igala people, their language, history, traditions, and achievements.The project represents a significant step toward addressing the underrepresentation of indigenous Nigerian languages online while building a sustainable community of editors committed to preserving Igala heritage for future generations. Continued mentorship, institutional collaboration, and community engagement will further strengthen the impact and sustainability of this initiative..

The difference in the number of women editors and men editors on Wikipedia affects the representativeness of articles and the quality of content, to the detriment of the project’s aspiration to create a universal encyclopedia that compiles all human knowledge. Only a fraction of those who edit are women, and there are entire countries in Latin America whose local reality, municipalities, communities, and history barely appear on Wikipedia.

The Escuela de lideresas of the UG Muj(lh)eres latinoamericanas en Wikimedia was founded on a simple premise: to create a safe space exclusively for women from different Latin American countries where they could learn, without feeling embarrassed or intimidated, the technical and editorial tools of Wikipedia and its sister projects. The school’s mission is to develop editing and management skills, foster women’s leadership, and provide support to women’s communities to collaborate with Wikimedia projects, so that they can sustain the Wikimedia community in Latin America in the long term and, at the same time, reduce the content gaps that disproportionately affect some countries in the region.

El Salvador is an example of a double absence: gender-based and territorial gap. In this new training program, one of the participants, Kat, from El Salvador, identified a specific gap: following the legislative reform that restructured the country’s territorial organization in 2023, several of the new municipalities had no article of their own at all, or had only scattered mentions on other pages. From this observation came the idea of creating three new articles about the municipalities of Santa Ana Oeste, Santa Ana Norte, and Santa Ana Este. Kat researched, looked for official sources, read the new Special Law for Municipal Restructuring, verified demographic and geographic data, and applied Wikipedia’s policies on reliable sources and encyclopedic style that she had learned during the school’s training sessions. She also learned how to categorize and correct articles.

Other articles created by Kat include Las 14 familias de El Salvador, a term coined by the press to describe the Salvadoran oligarchy, and Las Dignas, a feminist political organization founded in El Salvador in 1990. She is now drafting a rather ambitious article on the history of feminism in El Salvador. Each of the articles that Kat created during the training represents Salvadoran territory that was previously, in terms of free knowledge, practically invisible. When a locality does not have an article on Wikipedia, it does not appear in search results, does not feed voice assistants or artificial intelligence systems that are now trained on this open data, and remains outside the shared knowledge ecosystem that millions of people consult every day.

In addition, Kat created an article about Brenda Cerén and another about Claudia Ortiz on Wikiquote, and has been learning to edit Wikidata. She also uploaded photos of her country to Wikimedia Commons. Kat tells us about her experience in her own words:

Bubulina26, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

P: Before participating in the Women Leaders School training sessions, did you have any previous experience in writing, research, or history?

A: -I have been a Wikipedia reader for almost my entire life, for academic reasons and simply out of curiosity. When I want to learn more about a topic, I go to Wikipedia to read. I studied social communication, so we did cover a lot of national and international history, as well as writing techniques. That helped me feel “at home” during the courses and familiar with some resources such as Google Scholar and academic repositories.

P: What motivates you to edit?

A: -I like to think that there are more women and people in general like me who are curious. I want to give them a starting point on the topics I edit, so that they can then do further research and, hopefully, contribute so that the cycle of learning continues.

P: What topics did you edit, and why did you choose those topics?

A: -I have edited articles related to the area where I live. It is little known, and through the links within other articles, it can gain greater visibility. I am also interested in topics related to feminist organizations and national history. I came to these topics when I noticed the “red links” within other articles, especially because they refer to important, interesting, and useful topics that no one had yet had the opportunity to create. When I saw my first article published, I felt proud of my effort, even though on Wikipedia we are all really anonymous. Seeing the article you researched and corrected published, learning about the topic along the way, and knowing that people visit it is a really wonderful feeling.

P: How did you feel, and what difficulties did you encounter when editing?

A: -For now, only paid resources have been an obstacle, because some publications are restricted and can only be accessed by purchasing permission, so you have to work with what is available. Another challenge is finding time to edit, between work and other commitments. Even so, it is worth trying. During the course, I felt welcome. At all times, I felt like an equal, and that the course was a place to learn. There is no need to be ashamed of making mistakes or asking questions, no matter how simple they may seem. From the facilitator to the other participants, we all helped each other. In addition to learning how to write an article from scratch, I learned very useful tricks that make editing easier, resources and websites that can help, things that should not be done while editing or that a published article should not contain, among other things.

P: What would you say to another woman who is thinking about starting to edit but is still hesitant?

A: -It is necessary for women to be editing Wikipedia. For a long time, we have been made invisible in art, science, and many other spaces, both as people and in terms of the topics that interest us. Editing Wikipedia is an opportunity to share what you know or to complement and contribute to biased or incomplete articles.

After 21 years as a Wikimedia contributor, I consider myself a veteran Wikimedian. I have attended many Wikimedia conferences around the world, but Wikimania always feels special. They create incredible opportunities to meet fellow Wikimedians, listen, and learn. However, the highlight of the event for me this year was not the main conference itself, but a pre-conference event: the WikiWomen+ Summit, where I was also honored to give a talk.

During the icebreaker, we shared stories about the first articles we ever wrote and whether we had ever experienced the deletion of a biography about a woman we created. When the talks began, I learned more about the Celebrate Women Campaign and fell in love with its vision, which is deeply inspired by Wikimedia’s overall mission: “Imagine a world in which every single woman can freely share in the sum of all knowledge, and where representative information about all women and non-binary individuals is accessible to everyone, everywhere.”

Sukkoria’s presentations gave us a lot to think about in a short time, from what could potentially go wrong from a WikiWomen+ perspective to how we can responsibly integrate generative AI into wiki workflows.

Leila Zia from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) gave a presentation about Wikipedia readers, revealing that women are underrepresented not only as editors but also as regular readers. I was surprised by this statistic: roughly 65% of readers are reported to be men. This was the first time I had seriously considered what we can do to encourage more women to become frequent Wikipedia readers. 

Among the many great tools and projects introduced at the summit, we were also introduced to a new Wiki Gender Stats tool. I was delighted by Natacha’s roleplay, which brilliantly illustrated what features were needed and why male editors with technical skills often struggle to understand and prioritize those needs. Her roleplay perfectly captured the moment when women decided to take charge:

“Now I want to be a woman in progress! I will design our own tool according to our own needs, doing it ourselves.”

In my presentation, I addressed how governance and editorial decisions on Wikimedia projects can have consequences far beyond individual content disputes. I shared my concerns about contributors, particularly women+, being blocked or banned because of off-wiki disputes rather than their actual editorial work, and discussed how this can affect both content neutrality and the health of our communities. I explored these questions further in my presentation, “How Editorial Decisions Reach Beyond Wikipedia”, which you can watch here.

This blog post is an interview with Sana Sabir (User:CosmicCodex) reflecting on how WikiWomen+ Summit 2026 influenced her perspective on community, technology, AI, and women’s participation in Wikimedia. She highlights the importance of women supporting one another, the value of human-curated knowledge in the age of AI, and the many ways women can contribute to technical spaces without being programmers. Most importantly, Sana shares concrete plans to take her learnings back to her community through workshops, translation, documentation, and efforts to address knowledge gaps. 

For young Wikimedians, in-person events offer something that online collaboration often cannot – the chance to build genuine relationships, find mentors and peers, exchange ideas across communities, and return home with the confidence to turn inspiration into action. Over the years, the WikiWomen+ Summit has been one such space where women and allies from across the Wikimedia movement come together to share experiences, learn from one another, and explore how they can shape a more inclusive and sustainable future for free knowledge. 

As part of the WikiWomen+ Summit Core Organizing Team, I spoke with Sana about her experience at the Summit, the sessions that influenced her thinking, and the actions she plans to take after returning to her community.

Finding strength in community

When asked about the most valuable part of the Summit, Sana’s answer was not about a particular session or speaker. It was about the women she met.

“The women themselves. Being surrounded by resilient, welcoming leaders who uplifted and encouraged each other without judgment was transformative.”

For Sana, one of the most powerful aspects of the Summit was the openness between participants. Whether someone was an experienced Wikimedian or relatively new to the movement, people were willing to share, discuss, care and support one another.

That experience gave her a stronger sense of belonging within the global Wikimedia community.

“Realizing I’m part of a global network of women actively shaping the future of knowledge gave me renewed energy and solidarity,” Sana said.

Rethinking Wikimedia’s role in the age of AI

One session that particularly changed Sana’s perspective was Christophe’s talk on the next 25 years of Wikimedia.

The discussion about artificial intelligence made her reconsider how she viewed the relationship between AI and Wikimedia. Rather than seeing AI only as a challenge, she came away thinking about the unique value of human-curated and contextual knowledge.

As AI becomes increasingly widespread, Sana believes that Wikimedians have an increasingly important role to play in safeguarding & preserving knowledge that is grounded in human experience and context.

The idea of Wikimedians as “spearheads of knowledge” particularly stayed with her.

It shifted her perspective from asking how Wikimedia might simply respond to AI to thinking about what human contributors can uniquely provide in an increasingly automated information environment.

Looking for what is missing

Another important takeaway for Sana was the need to focus not only on what exists in Wikimedia projects, but also on what is still missing.

Inspired by the discussion around Women in Red, she wants to bring this approach into her own community by organising workshops that help contributors identify gaps in local knowledge.

For Sana, this means looking for overlooked subjects, stories, and perspectives that may not yet be adequately represented.

“We must preserve human context and ensure overlooked stories are documented before they’re erased by generic data models.”

This idea connects the work of individual contributors with a much larger question: whose knowledge gets documented, and whose stories remain invisible?

Making technology more accessible

Experience and insights from this year’s Summit also prompted Sana to think about the challenges women continue to face in Wikimedia’s technical ecosystem.

She highlighted issues including translation gaps, AI-related bias, copyright transparency, declining readership, and the need for more women to participate in technical contribution.

But one of her strongest takeaways was that technical contribution does not have to mean becoming an expert programmer.

Bee Piovesan’s session particularly influenced this perspective.

Sana realised that women can contribute to Wikimedia’s technical ecosystem in many ways: by usage of translating tools, documenting them, improving accessibility, and helping communities build or use technology that responds to their actual needs.

“I don’t need to be an expert coder; I can contribute by translating tools, documenting them, and making them accessible to other communities.”

For someone who wants to see more women participate in the Wikimedia technical ecosystem, this can be an important shift in thinking. Technical spaces can become more inclusive when contribution is understood beyond writing codes.

An unexpected lesson about editing

Not every takeaway from the Summit was technical.

One moment that surprised Sana was hearing contributors describe editing Wikipedia as something that could be personally meaningful and even therapeutic.

Some contributors shared how focusing on one edit at a time could provide attention, purpose, and a sense of visible progress.For Sana, this offered a different perspective on editing. Contributions are not only about adding knowledge to Wikimedia projects; they can also be personally fulfilling.

It was an unexpected reminder that community participation can affect contributors in ways that go beyond the measurable output of edits or uploads- Satisfaction is a success too 🙂

What should come next?

When asked what she would like to see at a future WikiWomen+ Summit, Sana had a practical suggestion: more hands-on workshops for non-technical participants.

She would like women to have more opportunities to learn how to translate, document, and work with Wikimedia tools, rather than feeling that technical contribution is reserved for experienced developers.She also suggested exploring ways to make Wikipedia more reader-friendly for women, particularly in conversations around gender gaps in readership.

For Sana, inclusion is not only about bringing more women into existing spaces. It is also about making those spaces easier to understand, participate in, and shape.

“You don’t need to code”

Sana’s message to women who are interested in Wikimedia but have not started contributing is simple:

“You don’t need to code.”

There are many ways to begin: editing an article, translating a tool, documenting technical resources, or helping others use Wikimedia projects.

She encourages women to start small and find a form of contribution that feels meaningful to them.

“The community is welcoming, and your perspective matters. Just start small; your voice is essential.”

It is a message that reflects one of the central themes of her Summit experience: there is no single correct way to become a Wikimedia contributor.

Turning a Summit into action

Perhaps the clearest indication of what the Summit meant to Sana is what she plans to do next.

Her first step is to share her learnings with the women of Wiki Club AMU and discuss what their community could address together.

She also plans to document and translate a Wikimedia tool for her community, simplify complex articles to make them more accessible, and continue exploring editing as a personally meaningful practice.

These are concrete actions that connect the Summit to community work beyond the event itself.

When asked to describe her WikiWomen+ Summit 2026 experience in one sentence, Sana called it:

“An empowering revelation that women can code, translate, document, heal, and lead in shaping the future of knowledge, addressing AI bias, simplifying language, and building tools we actually need.”

Her answer brings together the different ways she now sees participation in Wikimedia: through technology, documentation, translation, community building, and leadership.

The Summit gave her new perspectives, but the next step is turning those perspectives into action.

And perhaps that is one of the most valuable outcomes of a community event—not simply leaving with new ideas, but returning home with the confidence and motivation to do something with them.

About the interview

This interview was conducted by Gauri Gupta on behalf of the WikiWomen+ Summit Core Organizing Team.

Sana Sabir (CosmicCodex) is a Wikimedia contributor and member of the Wiki Club AMU community.

The responses have been lightly edited for clarity and flow while retaining the substance of Sana’s reflections.

After three years of development, Capacity Exchange (CapX) has entered a new cycle. Funded through a Wikimedia CH grant, from July to December 2026, we will be working to bring the tool to communities around the world and gather feedback from users, with a particular focus on community managers and leaders.

In this cycle, we are focused on building relationships with community managers and leaders, introducing them to CapX and exploring how it can help them carry out their work more easily and with better data to inform their decisions. We also want to understand how the tool could be improved for this audience and explore ways of adapting it to their needs.

Finally, we are presenting the possibilities of working with the CapX API to develop tools and solutions tailored to specific community needs.

Read more about these activities below.

A new cycle: outreach and community engagement

This new cycle is focused on outreach, community engagement, and understanding how CapX can be useful in the everyday work of Wikimedia communities.

Benny Lin, Joris Quarshie and Amanda Jurno are scheduling workshops, meetings, and conversations with communities and organizations around the Movement. These conversations are an opportunity to introduce CapX, demonstrate what the tool can do, and, most importantly, listen to what communities need.

We are particularly interested in talking with community managers, organizers, and leaders about how CapX could support activities such as finding people with specific skills, connecting communities, sharing knowledge, organizing learning opportunities, and building capacity.

We are also reaching out to Wikimedia organizations and networks to better understand where CapX can fit into existing community practices.

And, in true Wikimedia spirit, we are asking Wikimedians to help us reach other Wikimedians. If you know a community, organization, or community leader who might benefit from learning about CapX, please help us connect with them!

You can get in touch with us by email at capx@wmnobrasil.org, send us a message in our Telegram group, or contact us directly through your CapX profile.

We want to hear from you

Alongside our outreach activities, we have launched two new feedback surveys to help us evaluate the current version of CapX.

The first survey focuses on usability and user experience. We want to understand how people experience the tool, what works well, and what could be improved. (Access it here).

The second survey is aimed at community leaders and managers. It seeks to understand how CapX could better support their everyday work and what they would need from the platform to make it genuinely useful for their communities. (Access it here).

Both surveys are anonymous and will remain open until December 2026.

We encourage everyone to participate and, especially, to share the surveys with their communities and networks. The feedback we receive will help us assess whether another development cycle is needed and, if so, what it should focus on.

CapX is open to new (tech) possibilities

Although the main development cycle has ended, CapX is not a closed platform.

CapX has an open API, which means that developers and organizations can build upon the data and functionalities of the platform according to their own needs and interests. We hope this can open the door to new uses, integrations, experiments, and tools built by the community.

Whether you are a developer interested in building something with CapX, a community leader looking for ways to use it, or simply a Wikimedian who wants to explore the platform, there is room for you to help make CapX more useful for the Movement. 

Volunteers with technical skills can also contribute to CapX by helping with bug fixes, code maintenance, and other technical improvements.

To contribute, developers need a GitHub account and access to the project repository. Contributions should be linked to a GitHub issue and submitted through a pull request for review. Routine maintenance can be carried out by volunteers, while significant changes or new features must be discussed and approved by the CapX Committee beforehand.

For more information, please see these documents:

• CapX API Documentation (Backend)
• CapX API Documentation (Front-end)
• Capacity Exchange Technical Report (2023-2026)

Reach out to us if you need more information, by email or through our Telegram group.

Explore CapX, share it with your community, give us your feedback, and build upon it. Find out more about our activities and documentation on our Meta-wiki page.

From Tsuvadi to Shingini: Building a Wikimedia Community for the Kambari Language in Nigeria

What began as an outreach project focused on the Tsuvadi language grew into a broader initiative to introduce Wikimedia projects to speakers of the Kambari language and lay the foundation for a sustainable Kambari Wikimedia community.

The project was initially designed around Tsuvadi, but consultations with the Language Development Translation and Initiative (LDTI), traditional leaders, and community members revealed that Tsuvadi is one of the varieties of the broader Shingini (Kambari) language. Based on these consultations, the project was expanded to include three major varieties: Tsishingini, spoken in the Salka area; Cishingini, spoken in the Agwara area; and Tsikimba, spoken in the Auna area.

This change made the project more representative of the Kambari-speaking community and provided contributors with the opportunity to work in the variety they were most familiar with.

Bringing Wikimedia to the Kambari Community

The outreach took place over three days in Salka, Niger State, and brought together community members interested in language preservation, digital knowledge, and Wikimedia projects. Attendance exceeded the original expectation of 43 participants, with 46 on the first day, 36 on the second, and 37 on the third. In total, 45 editors participated in the project. Danjuma Anthony coordinated the project. Experienced Wikimedia facilitators Kambai Akau and Kuyet Friday Musa guided participants through editing on the Wikimedia Incubator and introduced them to Wikimedia’s broader ecosystem. Additional support from the community, Danladi Matthew and Dr. Aliyu Dantata, also helped make the event successful. Participants received practical training, learning materials, internet support, meals, transportation assistance, and follow-up support to help them participate effectively.

The support of the Language Development Translation and Initiative (LDTI) and traditional leaders, including the Mogono Salka, was particularly important in building trust within the community. Their involvement helped encourage participation and demonstrated the value of combining local community leadership with Wikimedia activities.

More Than Expected

The results went far beyond the project’s original targets. The initial plan was to create 200 new articles, improve 200 existing articles, upload 100 images, and recruit 40 new editors. Instead, participants created 647 new articles, improved 736 existing articles, and made 2,980 edits. They also uploaded 430 images to Wikimedia Commons, while contributing approximately 71,700 words and 53 references.

These contributions provided a substantial amount of new Wikimedia content in the Kambari language varieties and helped establish a foundation for continued work toward a Kambari Wikipedia. The project also created a Kambari Wikipedia Post-Outreach Engagement Program, allowing participants to continue receiving support and contributing online after the physical training ended.

What We Learned

Several factors contributed to the project’s success. Working closely with local language organizations and traditional leaders helped the organizers understand the community’s linguistic situation and encouraged people to participate. Experienced facilitators also provided the mentorship needed to help new contributors understand Wikimedia editing.

Providing internet access, transportation reimbursement, meals, learning materials, and follow-up data support helped participants remain engaged during the outreach. At the same time, the project faced some challenges. The poor road between Abuja and Salka made transportation difficult. The original venue was also changed from Kontagora to Salka after consultations showed that Salka provided better access to speakers, language experts, and literacy materials.

The team also planned to introduce participants to Translatewiki, but contributors could not begin practical translation work because the necessary permissions were not granted before the event. After the physical outreach, some participants also struggled to continue editing because of the cost of internet data. These challenges highlighted the importance of beginning technical preparations earlier, extending post-event mentorship, and providing dedicated internet support for contributors after physical training.

Building for the Future

One of the most encouraging outcomes was the community’s commitment to continue the work. During the closing discussions, Kambari-speaking participants expressed their willingness to continue translating and developing content for the Kambari Wikipedia Incubator.

Community members also asked facilitators to be patient during the rainy season, when many participants are busy with farming and may have less time for editing. They explained that activity may increase during the dry season, when participants expect to have more time to contribute.

The experience showed that Wikimedia outreach can do more than create articles. It can bring together language experts, community leaders, new editors, and experienced Wikimedians to build the foundations of a sustainable digital language community.

The Kambari project is only a beginning. With continued mentorship and community participation, the contributors who started editing during this outreach can continue expanding Kambari-language content and help bring a future Kambari Wikipedia closer to reality.

If you speak a Shingini (Kambari) language variety or are interested in helping preserve Kambari knowledge online, you can join the community, learn Wikimedia editing, and contribute to the growing body of content in Tsishingini, Cishingini, and Tsikimba.

Wikimedia Kinyarwanda Community Hub (Wikipedia Kinyarwanda): A Wikimedia language community in Rwanda (Africa). The main focus is to build a sustainable community, increasing free content in Kinyarwanda on open Wikimedia projects in Rwanda.

Mentorship program focuses on overcoming specific technical, organizational, and outreach barriers to sustainable growth. This was a good program for Kinyarwanda language, we had a significant participation, a lot of contributions on Kinyarwanda Wikipedia. Number of articles has been increased and article quality has been improved.

The LDH mentorship program was very important for the whole community. We appreciated the time our mentors ( John & Tochi) took to train us , to teach us new things, and to gain technical knowledge about language diversity. The mentorship also helped better understand how to develop sustainable activities, engage the Kinyarwanda community, and create meaningful impact for the Kinyarwanda language. 

Recruitment of new contributors:

Recruit and train new editors : This goal has been well achieved, currently we have new active editors 42.4% new Wikimedians recruited, 15.2 % are trained from scratch and they are contributing without any issue.

Created new articles and improve content on Kinyarwanda Wikipedia

During this period, we organized 3 different events, On the 1st dashboard, period of April-May 2026, we had an event: Kwibuka edithaton Kwibuka32, On the second dashboard Kinyarwanda Editathon – LDH 2025–2026, 81 articles created and 432 improved, Finally we had the last dashboard of online event organized on 20 July 2026 where up to now 11 articles created and 116 articles improved articles improved.

The main objective of all 3 events was to create and to improve articles on Kinyarwanda Wikipedia and this was well done with success!

Community Health

The community is motivated, collaborative, well engaged as you can see on the above dashboard the results show how much they were. On the side of organizers, working with a motivated, collaborative community is a pleasant experience.

Are large language models widening the digital divide between majority and minority languages? Or can they be harnessed in preserving language diversity?

On Day 3 of Wikimania Paris, representatives of many different language and cultural communities shared their experiences in working within the Wikimedia movement.

Respect for indigenous communities

Erroneous information about indigenous languages and cultures can alienate potential contributors. During the keynote panel, Michelle Collipal, a member of the indigenous Mapuche community in Chile, shared how she has started to motivate Mapudungùn speakers and cultural authorities to engage with the Mapudungùn Wiki project. 

Moderator Dr Terri Janke underscored the importance of involving indigenous communities, respecting their knowledge as well as their right to self-determination. What this means in practice for wiki spaces is discussed in the white paper “CutureStrong Platforms: Setting the Standard at Wikimedia”.

Automating and improving translation

During “Language Diversity in the Digital Commons”, Pau Giner of the Wikimedia Foundation shared that the MinT (Machine in Translation) was designed from the start to support diverse language models. The platform currently supports 200 languages.

His ideas for the future include making Wikipedia articles more accessible on mobile phones, and to offer a collection of tools to help people create their first wiki, going beyond translation.

During the Q&A, Kepa Sarasola (User:karasola) of University of Basque reflected on the improvement of translation tools available since he started working on Basque Wikipedia in 2011. The tools, he said, had made it possible to grow minority language Wikipedias – while giving them the flexibility to choose which parts of articles to translate and where to start from scratch. The integration of AI tools has accelerated the process significantly.

Collaboration across communities

The need for collaboration across language communities was a recurring theme across multiple sessions. One example of a cross-border network is Linguatec-IA, an EU project for the digitization of languages in communities in the Pyrenees region, including Basque, Catalan, Occitan, and Aragonese.

David Castillo Parra of UNESCO discussed the launch of the New Commons Incubator for indigenous-led capacity building programs. Applications will be accepted for indigenous-led teams through 14 August.

The need for the Wikimedia movement to remain true to its mission – and to aligning on milestones that matter – was an inspiring message from Audrey Tang in “The State of Wikimedia & AI 2026”. “Don’t let it be a race…Wikipedia never tried to win. We tried to make sure there were many winners at any one time.”

As Jimmy Wales told Le Monde, “It’ll be all right. We’ll adapt, change, use AI in our own way. We’ll find a way.”

When people think about Wikimedia projects, most only know the world’s largest online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Many do not know that Wikipedia has dozens of sister projects, including Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, and Wikiquote. One of the lesser-known projects is Wikiquote. It is a collaborative project that collects and preserves notable quotations from famous people, films or series, fiction and non-fiction books, proverbs, and well-known sayings.

In Indonesia, Wikiquote is currently available in three languages, Sundanese, Banjar, and Gorontalo. In Wikimedia Bandung Community, we believe that community collaboration is essential to enriching Wikiquote’s content and introducing the project to more people. With this goal in mind, we launched WikiSuarana, a community initiative to enrich the Sundanese Wikiquote with quotations related to memorable events and popular trends from 2025.

Project outcomes

WikiSuarana project was carried out by four members of Wikimedia Bandung community: Hasnanf, Raflinoer32, Zulaihamaryam, and Sonofbrahma from March to May 2026. Together, we created 224 Wikiquote articles featuring quotations related to events that took place throughout 2025. Each team member contributed 56 articles to Sundanese Wikiquote.

In addition to our work on Wikiquote, we also contributed to Sundanese Wikipedia by creating 56 articles about notable events from 2025. We know that many Sundanese speakers still use Sundanese Wikipedia as a source of information. By enriching Wikipedia with these articles and linking them to the related Wikiquote pages, we make it easier for readers to discover and explore our collection of quotations on Sundanese Wikiquote.

Community outreach through training and meets up

Community outreach for Wikisuarana was carried out during the month of April 2026, consisting of a series of training and meet-up activities. As a warm-up activity, in the first week of April, we conducted a community meet-up to edit on Sundanese Wikipedia together focusing on creating new articles regarding remarkable events that happened throughout the year 2025 and the notable figures related to it. This event was attended by 13 participants, both online and offline, which created 14 new articles on Sundanese Wikipedia. By starting WikiSuarana with this thematic edit activity, it was expected to provide a thematic context regarding the purpose of this project, which is to document remarkable events and notable figures in Sundanese Wiki projects. Some of the articles that were the results of this event, for example Tambang Grasberg, Satelit Nusantara Lima, and Sri Rejeki Isman.

On April 18, the Asia-Africa Conference is annually commemorated in Bandung, since the city was the first host of the conference back then in 1955. On that day this year, we conducted a Wikiquote training activity partnering with an independent library in Bandung, which carried out the theme of anti-colonialism spirit. In this activity, we focused on training new contributors to edit and create new quotation articles on Sundanese Wikiquote regarding anti-colonial figures, anti-colonial literatures, and those related to the Asia-Africa Conference. The training was attended by 13 participants, which created 15 new articles. Hopefully, other than attracting new contributors, this event could be the beginning of a consistent effort to amplify and document the voice of anti-colonial figures through Sundanese Wikiquote. Some of the articles that were the results of this event, for example Behind The Scenes – Story of The Bandung Conference Committee, Teh dan Pengkhianat, and Leila Khaled.

The series of WikiSuarana was concluded with another community meet-up as a continuation of the prior training, which was focused to create and edit quotation articles on Sundanese Wikiquote regarding the theme of anti-colonialism and remarkable events that happened during the year 2025. This event was attended by 11 participants, both online and offline, which was also attended by some of the participants of the previous training event, and produced 14 new articles. Some of the articles that were the results of this event, for example Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Yamin, and Ali Sastroamidjojo.

Lesson learned

Through WikiSuarana project, we all learned two valuable lessons:

The first is the importance of partnerships. As a local community, collaborating with organizations that share our mission is essential to promoting free knowledge, especially about the Sundanese language and culture. These partnerships help introduce Wikimedia projects and our community to a wider audience. During this project, we collaborated with an independent library in Bandung. In the future, we hope to work with more partners to organize Wikimedia activities such as workshops, research projects, and community meetups.

The second lesson is about promotion and outreach. In today’s digital world, many people get information through social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. Throughout the project, we created promotional content, from the project launch to activity announcements. However, we learned that relying on just one or two social media platforms is not enough. Recently, Threads has become increasingly popular, and one of our team members found that project posters shared there reached a wider audience and received positive engagement. Based on this experience, Wikimedia Bandung plans to use Threads alongside our other social media channels to promote future Wikimedia activities.

What’s next?

Documenting and amplifying the voices of the people who are part of history is a way to preserve our collective memory. By narrating them in their own voices, hopefully we can make sure that the history being told is honest-to-goodness. Through contributing it to Wiki projects, especially Sundanese Wikiquote, we also hope to be able to preserve them in our mother tongue.

Our plan forward is to keep documenting other voices that are still unheard while also promoting the sister projects of Wikipedia, which already has the Sundanese version, such as Wikiquote. We also plan to reach outward to other parts of West Java to attract many other contributors so that our community can keep growing while also adding much other knowledge to the Wiki projects itself.

Hatur nuhun!

I started working as a volunteer community manager for Wiki for Human Rights, Nigeria, in November 2025 with a focus on organizing trainings and retaining LGBTIQ+ Nigerian editors as active contributors to Wikimedia projects. Although I created my Wikimedia account on 1 March 2024, I did not understand how editing worked and never made any contributions after creating it. 

The same year, I attended a Wikimedia session on Queerpedia. As a writer who is passionate about volunteering, particularly in the open knowledge movement, I still left without knowing how to contribute. The session ended with participants creating accounts but without a practical understanding of how Wikimedia actually worked. This is something I have observed among newcomers: navigating Wikipedia, the most well-known Wikimedia project, can be a daunting experience.

That changed when I attended Wiki Loves Pride 2025, held on 29 June. It was my first in-person Wikimedia event, and with my laptop beside me, everything about contributing to Wikipedia suddenly became much clearer. Through editing Wikipedia, I also discovered the wider Wikimedia ecosystem and its sister projects. Even after the training, I still encountered a few challenges, particularly with adding awards, information tables, and infoboxes. However, through conversations on WhatsApp with the Wikimedia Nigeria Project Officer, Ayokanmi Oyeyemi (user: Kaizenify), who facilitated the training, as well as guidance from Wikipedia help pages and Wikimedia Commons documentation, I was able to overcome those challenges.

Since assuming the role of Community Manager and Project Officer for Wiki for Human Rights, Nigeria, I organised monthly virtual and physical training sessions aimed at improving editor retention. Organising both the physical and virtual Wiki Loves Pride campaign this June felt like a full-circle moment; déjà vu. It also became an opportunity to reflect on the learning experiences from reviewing participants’ contributions and identifying areas where new editors commonly struggled. 

Since becoming an active Wikimedia contributor in July 2025, I have made more than 3,000 edits across Wikimedia projects, with a primary focus on LGBTIQ+ and Nigerian topics. Beyond editing, I have also taken on leadership positions, including serving as a committee member for the Nigerian National Funding program and as a core organizing member for Queering Wiki, scheduled to take place later this year in Canada.

Alongside the online Wiki Loves Pride campaign, we partnered with the Centre for Population Health Initiatives (CPHI),  a health organization that serves both the general population and minority communities, to host Wiki Loves Pride. The program combined a Pride celebration with Wikimedia training for both experienced and new editors. It also marked the first time I independently facilitated an entire Wikimedia training session from the beginning to the end: account creation, making edits, and introducing participants to the broader Wikimedia ecosystem.

As someone who has always dreaded public speaking because of a minor speech impediment, becoming part of the Wikimedia movement as a community leader has helped me grow tremendously. Standing in front of more than 15 participants and leading a session on documenting queer knowledge, I did not freeze or lose confidence. Community advocacy for LGBTIQ+ people in Nigeria has always required me to speak publicly from time to time, but Wikimedia has made it a consistent part of my work through monthly virtual and physical trainings. It has taught me that confidence in public speaking is often built through practice, and that many of the fears we carry can gradually be overcome through repeated experience.

How can the Wikimedia community defend freedom, equity, and reliability on the internet? Are we in a global information crisis?

Several sessions on Day 2 of Wikimania Paris explored these questions from different angles. The morning kicked off with breakout sessions on how global trends are impacting government regulation – with attendees joining Wikimedia Foundation board members in small group discussions. Protecting free knowledge was a core theme throughout the day.

Misinformation on climate change

During the 2025 Iberian peninsula blackout, misinformation was spread that the main cause was renewable energy. In “Climate Conversations: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Knowledge Sharing”, moderator Tatjana Baleta said that rapid response editing on Wikipedia was one way that the scientific community combats misinformation during extreme weather events and other major incidents.

Many readers have also shifted from reading about climate change to reading more about other issues such as the cost of living crisis. Dr. Femke Nijsse (User:Femke) discussed the importance of meeting readers where they are – and explaining the science related to these issues.

While AI-generated content may have the sheen of reliability, it often turns out that the sources they cite are hallucinations or that they do not actually verify the claims made by the LLM. Editors on Wikipedia are now starting to use tools such as AI Source Verification (which itself uses LLMs) to predict the verifiability of claims made in a article.

AI crawlers: Encroaching on creativity?

“Collateral Damage? Human Creativity and Interaction in the AI Crawling Era” explored how organizations in the free knowledge ecosystem are responding to the massive increase in AI scrapers.

There was a consensus among panelists that attribution is a critical concern for authors. Creative Commons CEO Anna Turnadóttir and Monica Westin of Cambridge University Press discussed the need to educate authors about the benefits of open access models – while also acknowledging the need to experiment.

Mark Graham discussed how the Internet Archive is reaching out to news organizations to discuss alternatives to blocking the Wayback Machine, such as rate limiting and allowing access only for certain uses.

Striking a balance

Throughout the day, speakers debated the complexities of regulation – and how the rush to “do something” can backfire. Turndóttir said, “What used to be the internet handshake online is now the middle finger. And that sort of environment forces lawmakers to reach for blunt tools like regulation. The community needs to establish norms, but sometimes regulation does cause real harm.” 

The keynote session on “Protecting Free Knowledge – The New Battlegrounds of Digital Freedom”, Nnenna Nwakanma (from the internet) discussed the discourse around regulation – and how European approaches may not be applicable in Africa. Panelists during the session, including Axelle Lemaire, architect of the 2016 loi numerique, emphasized the need for balance in protecting openness and freedom online, while also protecting the privacy of individuals.

The conference is making waves in France with media coverage in 25 outlets – including La Croix‘s print edition, a Radio France podcast, and more.

Before joining the On‑Wiki Skills mentorship program, my engagement with Wikimedia projects was mostly as a reader. I was curious about open knowledge but unfamiliar with how data works or how contributors actively build and maintain Wikimedia projects.

Through the mentorship, I was introduced to Wikimedia as a collaborative ecosystem that offers structured ways of organizing and connecting knowledge. The learning curve was initially challenging especially understanding items, properties, statements, and references but with guidance from mentors and hands‑on practice, these concepts gradually became clearer.

Skill Acquired

During the training, I developed skills in sourcing and referencing information and understanding structured data. These experiences changed how I view knowledge creation and reinforced the idea that learning continues beyond formal lessons.

Some of my image uploads

Participating in practical exercises and guided contributions helped build my confidence and showed me that I could engage meaningfully with a global open‑knowledge communication.

My Gratitude

I am grateful to the Wikimedia community, mentors, and program organizers for their support and encouragement. Completing the mentorship marked a new beginning for me, and I look forward to continuing to explore and contribute to open knowledge

Commons Quality Images (COM:QI) was created during June 2006. The purpose of COM:QI was to identify high quality photographs taken by Wikimedians and made freely available to the community at large through Commons. As of 14 June 2026 over 450,000 media files, mostly photographs, have been recognised through this process. Alongside photographs, QI has Microscopic images, animated GIF’s, and graphical works including our own QI seal (pictured).

From the Beginning

In September 2005 Commons became live, just 6 months later I was encouraged over by User:Pfctdayelise who had been there from the first month. In June 2006 User:Pfctdayelise was searching to put together collections of images created by Commons users as rotating background images, or calendars to help promote the project. I tried to help, we could not even find a common subject matter consisting of reasonably sized and quality printable images. Wikimedia Commons had some great photos, some of which had been featured, but a substantial portion were images scraped from other sites like NASA and Flickr.

That started me thinking about how we raise the profile of community uploaded images and encourage efforts to improve them. Having already contributed to some Good Articles over on en.Wikipedia I thought we could create a similar project but for photographs.

Creating the project I saw some key necessities: it needed to be efficient with clear standards, while not taking weeks to decide the outcome. Most importantly it needed to focus only on images that had been taken by members of the Commons Community and that once recognised it could not be taken away. From there working with User:Wikimol and others we built the project. We also created image guidelines which would enable consistent reviewing of nominations.

The image guidelines started out as;

1. Photographic images
   1. Low resolution / thumbnail. Photographic QP has to have at least 1.92 megapixels (=1600×1200, for example)
   2. JPEG problems. Too much compressed, too low JPEG quality settings in camera / when saving. Visible jpeg artifacts. => Use better quality settings (e.g. set JPEG “superfine”, shoot RAW, save in photoshop with max. quality)
   3. Noise problems, too much noise. Be it chroma noise, luminance noise, visible grain, scratches in scans… QP should not have distracting amount of noise when viewed in 100%
   4. Bad exposure. Overexposure, blown out highlights, underexposure, shadows details replaced by jpeg maps… In incorrectly exposed images, significant details in a significant part are lost.
   5. Color problems. Bad white balance. Distracting (typically purple) hazing at 100%. Color aberration. QP must have reasonable colors (which does not necessarily mean natural colors).
   6. Improper or undefined focus, insufficient depth of field. QP should have clearly defined focus, e.g. main subject in focus, foreground and background out of focus. Or the whole scene in focus. Counterexample – main subject blurry, foreground even more blurry, focus is somewhere between main subject and background. DOF could be low on purpose.
   7. Blur. Images blurred just because of shaking hand or subject moving too fast. Motion blur in QP has to have purpose.
   8. Poor lighting. Including: distracting reflections (usual problem with built-in flash), unintended vignetting, distracting harsh shadows. Generally bad lighting makes scenes with space look flat.
   9. Overfiltered. There are so many PS/Gimp filters. Rarely a better image is created just by applying more and more filters…
   10. Bad or nonexistent composition, unclear or nonexistent subject. QP should have subject and composition of the image should support depiction of that subject, not distract from it.
   11. Bad perspective, tilt, and other distortions. An eye (or, more precisely, a brain) is a sensitive detector capable of spotting even a small tilt … falling trees, churches, inclined water surfaces,… Images of architecture should usually be rectilinear and without too much perspective distortion.
2. Stitched images, panoramas.
   1. Panoramatic QP has to have a height of 800px min.
   2. Stitching problems. Stitched images should be without artifacts, colors and lightness should be the same across the image.

All of these may look familiar to many of you as they are still present as Commons:Image guidelines, the very same guidelines that every WikiLoves or similar competition uses as their rules. 

Now we had a process with guides, we approached User:LadyofHats who was known for the drawings she was uploading at that time. LOH was asked to create a seal which we could use to help identify successful photos, that seal is the one we continue to use. Some time during this the QI seal itself got recognised as a Quality Image.

In those early months every image was reviewed and the pages manually updated, a time consuming process that would occasionally be interspersed with edit conflicts. The community embraced QI and a new project called Valued Image emerged for recognising sets of image rather than individual images. It was the efforts of User:Dschwen, who had also taken on maintenance tasks, decided to create a bot that would do most of the work for us. Mike Peel continues to maintain the QICbot and has been invaluable at keeping it working, as of 16 June 2026 QICbot has performed 922,000 edits looking after QI tasks.

QI grew fast once the QICbot came on board. I stepped into the background watching the community grow QI. Over time many contributors have made QI. Like User:Poco a poco who presented at Wikimania in London on how QI helped him improve his contributions. For the curious there is an opt-in unaudited list of QI by photographers. Whether it’s one successful image or 20,000 of them they all make QI what it is. 

The future

I think some of QI’s potential still hasn’t been realised. I saw it as a historical record of the growth of photography, of something researchers could look back over and see how it has matured. Perhaps more could be done to integrate QI images in content on other projects as they are recognised as our better works. Maybe a bot could triage nominations to identify the more regular issues that cause images to be rejected, though the human touch should always remain the final judge. 

In the future, QICbot will reach 1 million edits, QI will reach 500,000 very soon. QI carries within itself a lot of untapped potential. 

Could it be time to consider creating a sister project for Quality Videos? I know one thing: there will always be enough high quality images created by Wikimedians to make a calendar for any subject. The challenge will be in choosing just 12.

I would must take a moment to acknowledge everyone who has already helped Commons Quality Images along it’s 20 year journey there has been so many as well as everyone who joins the efforts in future. It’ll always be nice to reflect and be able to say I was able to open the door to something so special. The future of Quality Images is now a journey the Wikimedia Commons Community will decide. 

QI’s prosperity comes from the collective effort of everyone! Perhaps this will encourage you to join the QI club.

For 25 years, the Wikimedia movement has been constantly innovating to promote the values of free and universal sharing of all human knowledge for the benefit of humanity. In 2026, as we face the challenges of connectivity, misinformation, and the rise of AI, our ability to innovate collectively is more essential than ever.

To address these developments, we are introducing a new program focusing on Team Challenges in the lead-up to Wikimania. This year, we are inviting experts and newcomers to the Wikimedia community to join forces with participants in our Wikimania Hackathon. The idea is not to replace the hackathon format, but to offer a different approach. We want to bring together diverse perspectives and skills by pairing Wikimedians from all walks of life (not just developers!) with professionals from other fields. The goal is to share our best practices and design digital tools that are sustainable, inclusive, and accessible to all.

Next week, we are kicking off our first online orientation sessions training newcomers on wiki tools. In the coming weeks, they will form teams with Wikimedia community members to undertake one of the 2026 challenges. Stay tuned for further updates as the teams work together toward the Team Challenges showcase concurrent with Wikimania Paris. 

We can’t wait to see what the cross-pollination between different disciplines, perspectives, and skill sets will bring. Good luck to all!

10 challenges for maximum impact

The goal is simple: To turn the community’s needs into concrete solutions. We have selected 10 major technical challenges that address the complex issues encountered on a daily basis across Wikimedia projects. 

These challenges are based on the three pillars of Wikimania 2026:

• FREEDOM: Ensuring the interoperability of free software to facilitate its reuse and maintenance, and to guarantee its long-term viability.
• EQUITY: Promoting multilingualism. Designing tools capable of overcoming language barriers to bridge gaps in sources and contributions on a global scale.
• RELIABILITY: Developing AI-based detection tools to assist volunteer moderators in their work of verifying and protecting information.

Discover the 10 Challenges
	Fix the sources Automatically detect outdated, retracted or broken sources in articles, and facilitate their updating or archiving.
	Welcoming newcomers Reinvent how we onboard newcomers through chatbots, guided micro-edits, and gamification lower the barrier to entry on wikis.
	Update the obsolete Identify and flag outdated articles, obsolete illustrations and screenshots, and outdated graphics to: encourage the community to update them.
	Boost multimedia experience Enhance the audiovisual experience on wikis: playlists on Commons, a modernised video player, annotation of audio segments, and games focused on accents and pronunciations.
	Deciphering biases Develop tools to detect gender, geographic, and cultural biases in Wikimedia content to: encourage the community to correct them.
	Gamify knowledge Create serious games and playful experiences using Wikimedia data to: learn, contribute, and explore in new ways.
	Stream data with Wikidata Take advantage of Wikidata content to: generate lists, tables or up-to-date visualisations, semi-automatically, for other projects in the Wikimedia galaxy or further.
	The editor of the future Improve the editing experience: search & replace in the source editor, a standardized citation toolbar, a better visual table editor, and text alignment in VisualEditor to modernise and streamline contributions.
	Explore knowledge Design and experiment new ways of sharing knowledge, in interactive and visual ways…for the modern web!
	Connect multilingual knowledge Facilitate translation, the reuse of content across Wikimedia projects, and collaboration with other Open Source projects so that knowledge can flow freely in all languages.

For more information on the Team Challenges and how to participate, please visit the Team Challenges section of the Wikimania wiki. Please note that registration for the Team Challenges does not grant access to the rest of Wikimania.

Web accessibility is not merely a technical feature. It is a prerequisite for truly free knowledge. During the recent Wikimedia Hackathon 2026, held in Milan, we came together as a dedicated group hailing from Italy to confront a quiet yet persistent issue: the barriers that prevent visually-impaired individuals from fully engaging with Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Thus, Valcio, Daimona Eaytoy, and Piergiovanna Grossi (WMIT) led the unconference session “Wikipedia for Everyone: Closing the Accessibility Gap”, which served as both a wake-up call and a collaborative workshop. By examining how community-made templates and interface elements often fail our users, we aimed to transition from identifying problems to building sustainable solutions.

This is a short recap for those who missed it.

The Reality of the Digital Barrier

The session opened with a candid look at the current state of our interfaces. While MediaWiki provides a robust foundation, years of community-driven customisation have inadvertently introduced many accessibility violations. Key issues discussed included:

• Missing Alt-Text: Images essential for understanding content often lack descriptions or alternative text which is readable by screen readers, assistive technologies that read out graphic content to visually impaired users.
• The “HTML Wall”: Many tables and templates lack proper semantic markup, forcing text-to-speech tools to read out raw code rather than structured information.
• Contrast and Colour: Numerous gadgets and banners still fall short of the WCAG 2.2 AA (a web-accessibility standard) minimum contrast ratios, rendering them invisible to users with colour blindness or low vision.

Measuring Missing Alt-Text

The unconference session also sparked a small follow-up experiment. CristianCantoro set out to measure how widespread the issue of missing alt-text is on Italian Wikipedia and Lombard Wikipedia, combining the Wikipedia HTML dumps provided by Wikimedia Enterprise with the XML dumps published by the Wikimedia Foundation. The initial results confirm the scale of the challenge: more than 90% of images used in Italian and Lombard Wikipedia articles lack alternative text.

This is not an isolated finding. In 2023, a team of researchers from Stanford University and Google Research presented a cross-lingual analysis of image accessibility across 108 Wikipedia language editions finding that, on average, only around 10% of images had alt-text. This research was presented at the 2023 edition of the Wiki Workshop.

These numbers are a reminder that missing alt-text is still an open and large-scale challenge across languages. If we want Wikipedia to be truly open to everyone, we need better tools, workflows, and community practices to help editors add alt-text and meaningful descriptions to images.

From Discussion to Action: The MediaWiki Accessibility Checker

To move from awareness to action, one of the session participants — Super nabla from the Indic MediaWiki Developers User Group — built a concrete solution during the hackathon itself. The tool, available on Toolforge, assists editors and developers in meeting accessibility standards: the MediaWiki Accessibility Checker. Try it out: https://accessibility-checker.toolforge.org/

Built on the industry-standard axe-core engine and Playwright, the tool is specifically adapted for the MediaWiki ecosystem. It allows editors and developers to (i) perform deep audits (queryable both from the frontend interface as well as from a dedicated RESTful API) based on WCAG 2.2 AA (and other standards) on any wiki URL, including project pages; (ii) generate professional reports in multiple formats, including PDF and Wikitext for easy sharing on-wiki; (iii) utilise a modern interface designed with the Wikimedia Codex design system, ensuring a seamless experience for contributors.

This tool represents a small yet important step forward in democratising accessibility auditing, allowing gadget authors — even those without formal expertise — to identify and rectify errors before they impact our readers.

A Legacy of “Wikiricci” and Community Care

The roots of this technical collaboration extend back to 2018 at itWikiCon in Como (Italy), where the “Officina” (the Italian Wikipedia’s technical project) was honoured for its quiet, essential labour, carried out by the smanettoni (hackers) — the tinkerers and wizards who operate behind the scenes to ensure the platform’s gears continue to turn. This community recognition is personified by the Wikiriccio (wiki hedgehog), a physical trophy whose travel history has become something of a legendary saga within the Italian community. Traditionally held in rotation, after years of near-misses, it finally found its way to Daimona Eaytoy during this hackathon, reminding us that accessibility work is also about human connections and shared care.

For us, this light-hearted tradition and award serve as a reminder: behind every accessibility tool or interface fix is a human connection, a shared community-based vision and history, and a commitment to “making the shop run” for the benefit of all users.

Next Steps and Community Involvement

The hackathon session was only the beginning. The outcomes of our session are being synthesised into a formal proposal in the Italian Wikipedia and a Phabricator task to help standardise CSS custom properties and automated linting workflows.

Yet, technology alone cannot solve a cultural challenge. We invite all UI/UX designers, developers, and experienced wiki-editors to join the effort. Whether you are improving the alt text on a high-traffic policy page or helping modernise an old template, your contribution ensures that Wikipedia remains truly accessible, enabling everyone to share in the sum of all knowledge.

A special thanks to the hackathon organisers and all the participants who shared their lived experiences; your insights are what drive these technical improvements forward.

The second cohort of the Africa Wiki Women (AWW) On-Wiki Skills Mentorship Program successfully concluded with a vibrant graduation ceremony celebrating the achievements, growth, and resilience of participants from across Africa. The event marked another major milestone in Africa Wiki Women’s ongoing commitment to empowering women and underrepresented communities through digital literacy, Wikimedia editing skills, mentorship, and leadership development.

About the On-Wiki Skills Mentorship Program

The On-Wiki Skills a 3 month mentorship program designed to equip emerging Wikimedians with practical knowledge and hands-on experience in navigating Wikimedia projects effectively. The program is facilitated through structured mentorship sessions, peer learning sessions , practical exercises, and community engagement activities. Additionally, the mentorship offers a safe learning space for women across the African region to collaborate, learn from each other and strengthen their bond in the wikimedia space creating a rich environment for peer learning, collaboration, and cross-cultural exchange. The second cohort graduated 20 women from 5 African countries, including: Benin, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, DR Congo, Ghana, Madagascar, Nigeria, Republic of Congo,Tanzania and Togo.

To ensure effective mentoring, mentees were organized into Anglophone and Francophone cohorts, each supported by mentors who delivered sessions in their respective languages.

Throughout the program, participants received intensive training on key Wikimedia projects including Wikidata, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia Commons. The sessions covered topics such as:

• Wikidata principles, policies, item creation, and item improvement
• Wikipedia’s Five Pillars, article creation, and notability guidelines
• Wikimedia Commons policies, copyright and free licenses, media preparation and uploads, captions, descriptions, metadata, and responsible reuse of Commons content

A Journey of Learning and Transformation

Over the course of the mentorship cycle, participants showed strong commitment throughout the mentorship, consistently attending sessions, completing assignments, and contributing to Wikimedia projects growing from beginners into confident, independent editors.

Mentees contributed in various ways;including:

• Creating and improving 316 Wikipedia articles
• Uploading 50 media files to Wikimedia Commons
• Created 287 Wikidata items
• Participating in campaigns and edit-a-thons
• Learning effective research and sourcing techniques
• Becoming active contributors within Wikimedia communities

These accomplishments reflect the growing impact of mentorship-driven capacity building within the Wikimedia movement, and the Wikimedia Outreach Dashboard created for the mentorship program also provides a detailed record of mentees’ contributions and activities throughout the program.

Highlights from the Graduation Ceremony

The graduation ceremony served as both a celebration and a reflection on the achievements of the cohort. The event featured welcome remarks, mentor appreciations, mentee testimonials, presentations of achievements, and inspiring words from special guest Amanda Jurno.

Speakers commended participants for their resilience, commitment to learning, and willingness to contribute to open knowledge initiatives. Mentors were also recognized for dedicating their time, expertise, and encouragement toward nurturing the next generation of Wikimedians.

Some of the most memorable moments of the ceremony came from mentees sharing personal stories about how the program transformed their confidence, expanded their digital skills, and introduced them to global collaborative communities

Recognizing the Mentors and Organizing Team

The success of the second cohort would not have been possible without the dedication of the guidance of mentors, facilitators, and the organizing team who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to ensure a smooth and impactful learning experience.

Anglophone Mentors

• Chidi Chinonso – Wikidata Mentor
• Muib Shefiu – Wikipedia Mentor
• Baluku Brian – Wikimedia Commons Mentor

Francophone Mentors

• Konan N’Da N’Dri – French Wikipedia Mentor
• Alexandra Tchuileu – French Wikidata Mentor
• Abdel KARIM – French Wikimedia Commons Mentor

In the last month of the program, participants were introduced to Wikimedia Diff, with the session facilitated by Andikan Eduok.

The organizing team and AWW management played a vital role in ensuring the success of the program. Special appreciation goes to:

• Ruby D-Brown , Bukola James, Pellagia Njau
• Coordinating team: Blessing Ojewuyi Timothy, Andikan Eduok, Adel Bigata, Mammysou17, and the AWW Communications department headed by Pascaline and Adeyinka. Their commitment to mentorship, knowledge sharing helped mentees remain motivated and supported throughout the program.

Looking Ahead

As the second cohort has graduated, the On-Wiki Skills Mentorship Programme continues to empower participants as active contributors and future leaders in the Wikimedia movement. Africa Wiki Women remains committed to creating inclusive spaces where women and marginalized communities can build digital skills and contribute to free knowledge. Congratulations to all graduates for their growth and impact. Follow us on all social media handles at Africa wiki women and stay tuned for the announcement of the next cohort. Be a registered member today and be part of the vibrant community.

There was a time when Wikipedia was the go-to source for information and one of the most trusted tools for research across the world. From students and journalists to researchers and everyday internet users, millions relied on the platform for quick and accessible knowledge. However, as technology continues to evolve, the way people consume information has also changed.

Today, Wikipedia faces growing competition from emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and social media platforms, which now shape how many people search for and engage with information online. As a result, the platform has experienced a decline in page views over the years, raising important questions about its future relevance and visibility in the digital age.

To address these concerns, about 100 Wikimedian affiliates, volunteers, and external experts gathered in Frankfurt am Main from 30 January to 1 February 2026, for the Wikimedia Futures Lab event organised by the Wikimedia movement. The Futures Lab serves as a space for research, experimentation, and forward-thinking conversations on the future of free knowledge.

At a time when technology is rapidly transforming the internet and information-sharing, the event provided an opportunity for participants to reflect on how Wikipedia can continue to remain relevant, visible, and trusted in an increasingly digital and AI-driven world.

From the attendees

The conversations and ideas shared during the event formed the AWW Voices Podcast episode “Can Wikipedia Evolve with the Digital Age?”. In this episode, host Oluwapelumi Aina joined by Ruby D Brown, Co-Founder of African Wiki Women, Tochi Precious, Language Advocate and Co-Founder of the Igbo User Group, and Olubusola Afolabi, Community Engagement Lead at Free Knowledge Africa. 

Having attended the Wikimedia Futures Lab event, the guests shared their experiences, reflections, and key takeaways from the discussions held in Frankfurt. 

“The world around us is changing really fast. When you think about how people trust information online, AI-generated media, new laws, and shifting technologies, it becomes important to understand how these trends affect us as the Wikimedia community,” says Tochi.

Wikipedia vs Digital Age

Despite technological advancement, Wikipedia, once regarded as one of the most trusted digital information platforms, has seen a decline in page views since 2016 as more people turn to AI tools for information. However, it is important to recognise that many AI systems are trained using content from platforms like Wikipedia.

“For example, when you search for something on Google, the AI overview provides a summary alongside references. Very few people actually click on the Wikipedia link for the longer version. This shows that people are still consuming Wikipedia content, but AI tools now act as middlemen,” explains Olubusola.

According to her, this shift means Wikipedia can no longer rely solely on users visiting the platform directly. Instead, it must adapt to changing online habits and find ways to bring information closer to the spaces where audiences already spend their time.

She adds that Wikipedia must adapt by meeting audiences where they already are, bringing information directly to the platforms people use instead of expecting them to always visit the main website.

The solution

The rise of AI and social media has also changed how people consume information. Many users now prefer short-form content over long-form reading because of shrinking attention spans. Since Wikipedia is traditionally a long-form platform, there is growing pressure for it to evolve alongside these changing habits.

For many younger internet users, information is no longer consumed through lengthy articles alone. Videos, creators, podcasts, and short-form explainers are increasingly becoming the preferred way to learn and engage online.

“People are moving away from institution-based information and increasingly relying on personalities. They want direct interaction, and video content makes information easier to consume. As Wikimedia, we need to pay attention to these shifts so we can meet people where they are,” says Ruby.

The Dilemma

Wikimedia exists because of the volunteers who edit and write the content on the platform. While keeping up with technological change is necessary, the movement also faces the challenge of ensuring that technology does not overshadow the human element that has always been at the centre of Wikimedia projects.

As conversations around AI continue to grow, many community members believe the focus should remain on supporting contributors rather than replacing them.

Last year, the Wikimedian community launched its AI Strategy, which clearly showed that AI should not replace the human writers and editors but rather support their work.