From 2 to 4 October 2026, Accra, Ghana, will host the inaugural Language Diversity Conference under the theme
“Strengthening Language Communities in the Open Knowledge Movement.”
The conference will bring together language activists, Wikimedia contributors, researchers, educators, community organizers, and others working to ensure that languages that are often underrepresented online have a place in the digital world.
Language is not only about communication. It carries our history, culture, traditions, and knowledge. Yet many Indigenous and minoritised languages still have limited representation on the internet. This makes it important for language communities to take an active role in documenting their languages and making knowledge available in them.
The conference will provide an opportunity to discuss some of these issues, including language documentation, digital accessibility, Wikimedia projects, artificial intelligence, speech-to-text technologies, language rights, partnerships, and community-led approaches to language development.
Over the years, Dagbani Wikimedians have worked to increase the presence of Dagbani and other Ghanaian languages in the digital space through Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, training programs, edit-a-thons, Wiki Hubs, and other community activities.
The journey has also involved supporting the growth of other language communities. These experiences have shown the importance of local people taking ownership of the development and documentation of their languages.
At the Language Diversity Conference, members of the Dagbani Wikimedians community will share some of these experiences.
Among the sessions is “Language Rights Online: Preserving Dagbani Heritage,” which will look at the development of the Dagbani Wikimedia community, its work in the Wikipedia Incubator, community mobilization, Wiki Hubs, and the use of tools such as Mozilla Common Voice and Spell4Wiki. The Dagbanli Dictionary: Building a Sovereign Digital Language Infrastructure for an African Language session will also highlight efforts to build an independent digital foundation for Dagbanli by making the language’s words, meanings, and linguistic knowledge more accessible in the digital space.
There will also be a session on Sopala, an offline learning initiative designed to support Dagbani education in communities where internet access can be a challenge.
For DWUG, this conference is, therefore, an opportunity to share what we have learned, listen to other language communities, and explore ways of working together.
Come and meet the people working to give more languages a stronger presence in the digital world.
From 23 to 27 August 2026, Wikimedia Tunisia User Group, in partnership with the Association of Culture and Science in Metlaoui, organized Wikipedia Camp Tunisia 2026 at the Camping and Holiday Center in Bkalta, Tunisia.
The camp was the realization of a dream that had been growing within the Tunisian Wikimedia community for several years. Its main inspiration came from the successful WikiCamp Armenia, a pioneering project that brought Wikimedia contributors together through learning, collaboration, and community-building activities. The Armenian experience demonstrated how a camp could create a strong environment for both newcomers and experienced Wikimedians to learn from one another and contribute together.
Inspired by this model, Wikimedia Tunisia began developing the idea of creating a similar experience in Tunisia.
From workshops to the camp
The camp was developed in cooperation with the Scouts of Tunisia. Before the camp, a series of workshops was organized for young participants from different Scout groups. These workshops introduced participants to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects and encouraged them to discover how they could contribute to free knowledge.
Following these activities, participants who showed the strongest interest and engagement were selected to take part in Wikipedia Camp Tunisia 2026.
This approach allowed the camp to bring together young people who had already gained their first experience with Wikimedia projects while creating an environment where they could continue learning and improving their skills.
Five days dedicated to free knowledge
Throughout the five-day camp, participants took part in a wide range of activities focused on Wikimedia projects.
Editing sessions were organized on Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons, allowing participants to put their newly acquired knowledge into practice. They worked on improving articles, adding and enriching structured data, uploading and documenting media, and discovering the links between the different Wikimedia projects.
One of the most important outcomes was the creation ofnew articles on Arabic Wikipedia about Tunisia, with a particular focus on sports-related topics. Participants also worked on Wikidata, creating new items and improving information about books and authors using data from the National Library of Tunisia database.
These activities showed participants how different Wikimedia projects can work together: information researched for Wikipedia can be structured through Wikidata, while institutional sources such as library databases can help improve the quality and coverage of Wikimedia’s structured knowledge.
Group photo Wikipedia camp Tunisia
Learning from Wikimedia Libya
The participation of two representatives from Wikimedia Libya was one of the highlights of the camp. Their presence created an opportunity for exchange between Wikimedia communities in the region and added valuable experience to the program.
They organized a presentation about Wikidata, Wikidata items, and the role of Wikidata in relation to Wikipedia. The session helped participants understand that Wikidata is not simply a database, but an important part of the Wikimedia ecosystem that supports and connects information across different Wikimedia projects.
A second presentation focused on user rights on Arabic Wikipedia. The Libyan Wikimedians explained the different rights available to contributors, their importance, and how participants could develop their editing experience and become more involved in the community.
The session also encouraged participants to take the next step in their Wikimedia journey by requesting appropriate user rights on Arabic Wikipedia. By the end of the camp, several participants had already submitted requests for user rights, demonstrating the practical impact of the training and the motivation created during the event.
presentation About user rights on Arabic Wikipedia
Building the future of the Wikimedia movement
Wikipedia Camp Tunisia 2026 was more than a five-day event. It was an experiment in community development and a step toward creating a new generation of Tunisian Wikimedians.
The journey that began with inspiration from Armenia and continued through workshops with the Scouts of Tunisia has now resulted in a Tunisian WikiCamp of its own. The experience demonstrated the power of bringing young contributors together, giving them the tools to contribute, and connecting them with experienced members of the Wikimedia movement.
For Wikimedia Tunisia, the camp represents not an endpoint, but the beginning of a longer journey. The participants now have the opportunity to continue contributing to Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and other Wikimedia projects—and to share what they have learned with others.
From Armenia to Tunisia, the idea of WikiCamp has travelled across communities, adapted to a new context, and created new opportunities for free knowledge and collaboration in Tunisia.
Meetups (Kopdar) are always highly anticipated moments for Wikimedia volunteers. Aside from being a space to connect, meetups often spark extraordinary collaborations. Not too long ago, I had the opportunity to participate in a very unique meetup event titled WikiRempah in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia on Sunday, August 9, 2026.
True to its name, this event highlighted the richness of spices and culture, but with an interesting cross-cultural twist: we documented the culinary and cultural heritage of Eastern Indonesia, yet channeled it into Sundanese-language Wikimedia projects and other global platforms. This activity was not just about editing; it was a contribution marathon involving four Wikimedia projects simultaneously.
Crafting Recipes and Visualizing Flavors
The first session, which was highly memorable for me, was culinary documentation. Eastern Indonesian cuisine, famous for its rich herbs and spices, was the main star. We went to an authentic Eastern Indonesian restaurant, photographed, and documented these signature dishes, then uploaded the best visuals to the Wikimedia Commons repository so they could be freely used by anyone. One example I uploaded was a photo of a Ayam Woku Khas Sulawesi.
We then moved on to the Sundanese Wikibooks project, which is currently still in the incubator. There, we worked together to write down these authentic Eastern recipes in Sundanese. Translating the spice measurements, cooking methods, and ingredient names into our mother tongue offered a unique sensation, as if we were serving Eastern Indonesian flavors right in the kitchens of the Sundanese people. On that occasion, I tried writing down the recipe for grilled skipjack tuna (ikan cakalang bakar).
Bridging Cultural Heritage to the Sundanese Wikipedia
After being satisfied with crafting recipes, the meetup’s focus shifted from the dining table to historical sites. Eastern Indonesia has an abundance of cultural heritage sites whose histories are vital to the civilization of the archipelago. Unfortunately, information regarding these sites is still very minimal, especially in regional languages.
This is where we contributed through the Sundanese Wikipedia. We wrote and expanded new articles discussing cultural heritage in the eastern part of Indonesia. Writing about geographically distant topics in Sundanese is a tangible manifestation of Wikimedia’s mission: freeing knowledge for everyone, in the language closest to them. I wrote several titles, including Bénténg Middelburg (Middelburg Fort), Bénténg Amsterdam (Amsterdam Fort), and Bénténg Barneveld (Barneveld Fort).
Bringing the Dictionary to Life with the Sounds of Spices
The highlight of this WikiRempah Meetup, and in my opinion the most interactive activity, was the voice recording session. Since the overarching theme was “Spices,” we compiled a long list of vocabulary related to spices and typical Indonesian cooking ingredients.
Using the Lingua Libre software, we took turns recording the pronunciation of this spice vocabulary one by one. The atmosphere became very lively and fun as we had to ensure our Sundanese articulation sounded clear and precise. After the recording process was complete, the audio files were not just left there. We immediately embedded them into the existing entries in the Sundanese Wiktionary.
Now, the digital dictionary does not only present text but also “speaks.” Anyone looking for entries about spices in the Sundanese Wiktionary can instantly hear how the word is pronounced orally by a native speaker. Some of the recorded words included lauk (fish), sagu (sago), and sampeu (cassava).
Participating in the WikiRempah Meetup gave me a new perspective on how the Wikimedia ecosystem works. From a culinary dish and a historical story, we could unpack them into photos on Wikimedia Commons, recipes on Wikibooks, encyclopedic articles on Wikipedia, to audio pronunciation recordings on Wiktionary and Lingua Libre.
This activity proves that contributing to the Wikimedia movement is never boring. There is always room for creativity, cross-cultural collaboration, and new ways to preserve the richness of the archipelago in the digital realm. Endless thanks to the organizing committee for this incredibly valuable and memorable opportunity. My hope is that a multi-contribution meetup model like WikiRempah can inspire other communities to keep exploring!
Under the storm of Typhoon Dolphin, COSCUP 2026 commenced, bringing partners from around the world together to celebrate the value of open technology. The Conference for Open Source Coders, Users & Promoters (COSCUP) is one of the biggest open source events in Taiwan. This year, one topic dominated the community: Artificial Intelligence, or Agent in the concurrent stage.
This year, our joint track of Wikidata and OpenStreetMap not only showcased how our respective platforms contribute to the open community, but also explored how open data and open technology can support the rapidly developing world of artificial intelligence.
One highlight was our presentation with our partner from Wikimedia Deutschland, focusing on the Wikidata MCP Server and the Wikidata Embedding Project.
Artificial Intelligence has come to the stage like a storm and quickly become one of the most discussed technologies across every industry. No matter which side of the fence you are on, one thing is the same: we want to know more about it and how it may affect our lives.
However, much of the discussion throughout the internet is filled with empty buzzwords and misinformation from companies with various interests. The problem is not necessarily malicious intent but the fact that people, including the sources they are quoting, simply do not have enough access to the information they need to understand the technology they are discussing.
Just like previous technology ‘booms’, such as cryptocurrency and NFTs, Artificial Intelligence, and now the so-called Agents, is a market phenomenon of attention crowding around something new and potentially profitable, and thus money floods in. However, unlike its predecessors, AI is ‘real’ in a sense that it has the potential to reshape, and possibly damage, many systems of trust that we humans have built through centuries of mutual understanding and respect for ourselves and others.
AI Agents are not inherently disruptive or destructive; it is how we use them that is causing all the trouble. If we want the technology to become a tool for a better future, we first need to understand how the tool works.
The Problem with LLMs
A Large Language Model, or LLM, at its simplest, is an algorithm that predicts words based on the material it has been provided. Its strength comes from recognizing patterns in a given language and mimicking the ‘natural language’ according to the probability of words appearing together. But this also reveals its fundamental limitation.
All it captures is the distribution of words appearing in languages, not necessarily the why and how behind them. It can produce an answer that looks and sounds correct without having any understanding of whether the information corresponds to reality or is actually true. Hallucinations, gibberish, and blatantly false answers are ultimately extensions of this limitation.
The man in the box never understands Chinese; it just appears to.
This does not mean we need the LLM to become a genie in a lamp that knows everything. The bottleneck is never the generation of more knowledge. It is discovering, retrieving, and acting upon the right information. To achieve this, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel of synthesizing the generation of natural knowledge; instead, what we need is to have the preexisting systems align properly.
And this is where Wikidata comes into play.
A Beacon for AI Agents
Wikidata is a Knowledge Graph: a machine-readable database where information is connected through controlled and structured relationships. It is designed to work across languages, interfaces, databases, services, and users — human and machine.
More importantly, its information is human-pruned and anchored in reality. It can provide explicit and exhaustive relationships, traceable sources, and continuously updated information. This makes Wikidata particularly valuable to LLMs. Rather than leaving an AI Agent to decide whether a string of text is factual or fictional, it can reference Wikidata for additional information.
LLMs excel at semantics, but that strength is inherently imprecise. A Knowledge Graph provides the controlled structure underneath it. Instead of asking an Agent to know everything, we can let it discover relevant information through the web of knowledge and crawl through information more efficiently than we humans could.
This is where the Wikidata Embedding Project aims to establish its influence.
The project prepares a vector database from a Wikidata dump and an MCP Server that allows AI Agents to access knowledge residing in it through a standardized and LLM-friendly interface. It combines the fuzzy discovery capabilities of AI with the structured and human-pruned knowledge of Wikidata.
The advantage is not only accuracy. LLMs are trained primarily on mainstream data, with limited information from less represented communities. Wikidata can provide access to knowledge beyond an Agent’s original training, including information from smaller communities that would otherwise be extremely difficult for an AI to discover and access.
By equipping an Agent with Wikidata, it is like a sailor on a misty sea finally seeing the light of a beacon. The Agent can still navigate on its own, but it now has a solid reference point so it won’t get lost as long as it can see the light.
The Current and the Future
Wikidata is still one of the youngest WikiProjects. Though volunteers around the globe are working diligently, there are still gaps in the Knowledge Graph. If we want Wikidata to become the backbone to power the next generation of Artificial Intelligence, we still have a long journey ahead of us.
The emergence of AI Agents brings as many opportunities as it does challenges. For Wikidata Taiwan, our work is becoming increasingly relevant to making sure Taiwan’s audience and data won’t get left behind in the ever-changing landscape of Artificial Intelligence.
The challenge is not simply to make AI more powerful. It is to make sure that the knowledge it discovers is reliable, traceable, and based on reality, and most importantly, fair.
On 2 September 2026, the new Wikimedia CEE Hub Steering Committee began its term, following several months of nominations, eligibility checks, community engagement and voting. Eight members were elected: four by individual community members and four by CEE affiliates, and two more were later co-opted.
But this election was also a first test of putting the CEE Hub’s governance model into practice. We had the rules; we still needed to build the process around them. That meant establishing an independent Electoral Commission, translating eligibility rules into practice, working with two different electorates, and building Fala, our own voting tool on Wikimedia Toolforge.
From rules to an election
The election had two constituencies: individual CEE community members and CEE affiliates, each electing four members. That made eligibility one of the first practical challenges. Community voters had to meet both Wikimedia activity requirements and demonstrate a connection to the CEE community, while affiliates had to designate representatives to vote on their behalf.
To oversee the process, an independent three-member Electoral Commission was established: Antanana as Chair, Bencemac and Gdarin. The Commission verified candidates and voter eligibility, interpreted the rules when unclear cases appeared, supervised the election, and ultimately certified the results. Hub staff supported the process and its technical implementation, but decisions about eligibility and the application of election rules remained with the Commission.
Thirteen candidates entered the nomination process, and after the eligibility review, twelve were confirmed for the final ballots: six Community candidates and six Affiliate candidates.
Building Fala
One of the biggest practical questions was how to run the vote itself. The election had two different electorates, different eligibility rules, preferential voting, and the possibility that one person could be eligible to vote in both categories.
Instead of adapting the election to the limits of an existing tool, we built Fala on Wikimedia Toolforge. Voters logged in with their Wikimedia accounts, eligibility could be checked through the system, and Community and Affiliate voting were handled separately. Voters could also return and update their ballot before the deadline.
Privacy was part of the design as well. Fala recorded who had voted and when a ballot was submitted or updated, but it did not keep the voter’s candidate selections or rankings linked to their identity.
Building Fala also strengthened the Hub’s ability to run its own governance processes independently. We were not limited to whatever an existing election platform happened to support; we could build the voting process around the rules and needs defined by the CEE Hub itself.
Voting and results
Voting was open from 6 to 20 July 2026. On each ballot, voters could rank as many or as few candidates as they wanted. The candidate ranked first received six points, the second five, and so on, while unranked candidates received no points.
Fifty-two community members voted in the Community election, while 15 CEE affiliates participated through their designated representatives. The Electoral Commission then certified the results, including the rules used to decide the winner when two or more candidates received the same number of votes in the Affiliate election.
The newly elected members of the CEE Hub Steering Committee.
The first meeting of the new Steering Committee took place on 2 September 2026, which marked the official start of its term. That is also when they selected the Chair: Toni Sant and Co-Chair: Vera Pelhan.
What we learned
The clearest lesson was how difficult it can be to turn governance rules into something a voting system can actually verify. Some criteria, such as account age, edit count and block history, could be checked directly from Wikimedia data. Others could not. For example, eligibility through membership in approved CEE mailing lists could not be verified by existing voting tools such as SecurePoll. That problem led directly to Fala: voters log in with their Wikimedia account, verify their email with a one-time code, and the address is checked against a whitelist built from the approved mailing lists. In other words, the election rules themselves shaped the architecture of the tool.
A different lesson came from affiliate participation. Some eligible affiliates never nominated a representative and therefore never voted. That showed us that simply giving affiliates a formal role in governance is not enough; they also need to see the election as part of their own responsibility and engage with the process early enough. After the election, the Electoral Commission followed up directly with non-participating affiliates to understand why they had dropped out. For future elections, earlier contact, clearer expectations and more active follow-up with affiliates will probably matter as much as the voting system itself.
What comes next
The election also made us think more broadly about how the CEE Hub puts its governance into practice. If the Hub is going to make more of its own decisions through formal community processes, it needs infrastructure that can support them. In some cases, the available tools were designed for different purposes; in others, there was simply no dedicated tool for the kind of internal decision-making the Hub needed.
For that reason, we decided to build Iskara, a voting tool for internal CEE Hub decision-making. The aim is to give the Hub greater independence in implementing its governance and a practical way to run its own votes when they are needed. Fala was our first experience of building such infrastructure around a real governance process; Iskara takes that experience further and applies it to the Hub’s internal decision-making more generally.
To learn more about the Steering Committee and internal governance of Wikimedia CEE Hub, check out the dedicated Meta page.
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 2,658event 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.
Number of new events per month using the CampaignEvents features from 2025 to 2026 (Campaign Events – Dashboard, via Superset)
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
Social media campaign by the Wikimedia Foundation’s Comms team (public domain)
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.
Celebrate Women portal using the Event Registration header
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.
Celebrate Women 2026 campaign on the Programs & Events Outreach Dashboard
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.
* 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
Francautrices Poster at Wikimania 2026
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.
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!
A reflection from Wikimedia Kenya User Group on why skills development, shared leadership and opportunities for growth are essential to building resilient communities.
Wikimedia Kenya celebrates Wikipedia@25
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
Across Africa, teaching people how to edit Wikipedia is only the beginning. Africa Wikipedian Alliance (AWA)’s learning programme is exploring what contributors need to stay, grow and eventually lead.
Opening a Wikipedia account is easy. Learning to use it well is not.
A new contributor must learn how to judge the reliability of a source, navigate unfamiliar editing tools and make changes without disrupting the work of others. This often brings up harder questions. How should an editor respond to artificial intelligence that produces polished prose and invented citations with equal confidence? How can a patroller protect Wikipedia from vandalism without driving away a beginner who has made an honest mistake? What does it take for an African language to become not merely visible online, but usable across the systems on which digital knowledge increasingly depends?
These questions are at the heart of the work of the African Wikipedian Alliance (AWA): building communities capable of creating, protecting and sustaining their own knowledge.
Between February and May 2026, the African Wikipedian Alliance brought together 256 participants from its Anglophone and Francophone communities for eight learning sessions. The subjects ranged from AI and source editing to gender inclusion, storytelling, Wikidata and African-language infrastructure.
For many people, Wikipedia is the first stop when they want quick information about a subject, event or public figure. Far fewer know about AWA, a community of contributors, organisers, and knowledge advocates working to strengthen participation, leadership, and knowledge equity across Africa’s Wikimedia ecosystem.
When producing text becomes easier, judgement matters more
The arrival of generative AI has unsettled some of the basic assumptions of online knowledge production. It can translate a passage, improve its grammar or suggest the structure of an article in seconds. But, as we have often seen, it can also fabricate a source, distort a fact or produce a confident answer that is not supported by evidence.
For Wikipedia, a platform built on verifiability, this presents both an opportunity and a problem..
During AWA’s February anglophone session, “AI + Wikipedia: The Good, the Bad, and the Best Practices,” (Google Drive) participants examined how AI tools can assist with translation, summarisation, grammar and the early structuring of articles. They also considered the risks: fabricated facts, invented citations and misleading content that may initially appear credible.
Rather than presenting AI as either “good” or “bad,” the discussion encouraged contributors to think critically and ethically about how these tools are used. AI can assist editors, but it cannot replace human judgment, verification, and responsibility. At a time when misinformation and synthetic content continue proliferating online, the lesson was that AI is only useful when people know how to use it responsibly.
Attendees snapshot from the AI+Wikipedia, the Good, the Bad and the Best Practices
Attendees snapshot from Lingua Libre A Tool for Preserving African Languages
The francophone community tackled a related subject of patrolling. Patrollers review recent changes, detect vandalism and help maintain the quality of Wikipedia’s articles. At their best, they are caretakers of collaborative knowledge: people who protect quality while helping new contributors understand where they went wrong.
A damaging edit is not always an act of vandalism. It may come from a newcomer who does not yet understand Wikipedia’s rules or technical conventions. Treating those situations in the same way can protect a page at the expense of someone who was trying to improve it.
In both sessions, the technical tools were secondary. The real subject was responsibility: when not to trust a machine, when to undo a contribution and when a new editor simply needs guidance. Editorial quality and community health are not competing priorities. Over time, each depends on the other.
A language needs more than articles
If the February sessions were concerned with protecting knowledge, the language sessions asked who has the infrastructure to produce it in the first place.
Much of the internet treats language as content: words that can be translated and placed on a page. But for a language community seeking a sustained presence on Wikimedia, translation is only one layer of the work.
Editors need an interface they can use. They need agreed terminology, reliable sources and a community large and active enough to sustain a project. The language must also be represented in digital systems that can recognise its words, grammatical forms and meanings.
Expanding African languages and knowledge representation
AWA’s March sessions introduced participants to the Wikimedia Incubator and TranslateWiki. The Incubator allows communities to begin developing Wikimedia projects in languages that do not yet have independent sites. TranslateWiki enables contributors to localise the interfaces through which people navigate and edit those projects.
The work can appear administrative: translating menus, testing pages and building a consistent body of content. Yet these are the foundations on which an independent language project may eventually stand.
AWA returned to the question in April through a session on lexicographical data in Wikidata. Participants were introduced to lexemes, forms and senses-the structures used to describe a word, the shapes it takes and the meanings it carries in a machine-readable form.
Here is why the distinction matters: A word recorded only in an article can be read by the person who finds it. A word represented as structured data can potentially be connected to dictionaries, translation systems and other language technologies. It becomes easier to search, reuse and link across platforms.
Language work in this sense, is infrastructure work. It determines which communities can do more than appear on the internet: which can participate in building the systems through which knowledge will be organised and retrieved.
For African languages that remain poorly represented online, the stakes extend beyond Wikimedia. As digital tools become more deeply embedded in education, communication and public life, languages absent from their underlying systems risk becoming less usable in the spaces those tools create.
Being admitted is not the same as belonging
Building the right infrastructure also means building strong communities and creating the social conditions that allow people to participate consistently.
During AWA’s International Women’s Day discussions in March, contributors, fellows, organisers and movement leaders from the English and French speaking communities considered what sustainable participation looks like for African women in digital knowledge communities.
Training was part of the answer, but only part. A person may learn how to contribute and still lack the time, financial support, mentorship or recognition needed to remain involved. She may be welcomed as a participant without being given a meaningful opportunity to lead.
The discussions identified access, visibility, funding and mentorship as interconnected needs. They also raised the importance of care work: the often-unrecognised labour that supports families, organisations and communities, but can limit the time women have available for volunteer-led digital projects.
Inclusion cannot be measured simply by whether the door has been opened. A new editor is not integrated into a community simply because an account has been created. They need the resources, relationships and room to grow.
Communities must be able to tell their own stories
Some forms of community work can be easily counted: articles edited, references added or data entries created. Other forms such as mentorship or organising local networks are however invisible. Processes that are developed by one group can often disappear because the experience was not documented.
AWA’s April Francophone session focused on Diff, the Wikimedia movement’s platform for community news and learning. Participants considered how to structure an article, record measurable results and use photographs and testimony to communicate what a project accomplished.
When community work goes undocumented, the lessons can disappear, organisers cannot learn from the experience and future participants cannot see the history they are joining.
Storytelling is therefore part of a community’s infrastructure, too. It preserves memory, circulates knowledge and allows people to describe their work in their own terms.
That capacity is especially important in a movement concerned with representation. Communities seeking greater control over how African knowledge appears online also need greater control over how their own contribution to that work is understood.
From using tools to shaping a movement
By May, the programme had turned towards the mechanics of independent contribution.
To an experienced editor, headings, references, templates and wiki markup are just ordinary elements of a Wikipedia page. But to a newcomer looking at dense source code for the first time, they can make the platform feel closed and forbidding.
In the Anglophone source-editing session, participants were shown how breaking a page into its component parts can make an apparently complicated whole become a sequence of manageable decisions.
The francophone Wikidata session approached independence from another direction. Participants learned how structured data connects information across Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikivoyage and other projects. A well-structured item can help knowledge travel across languages and platforms rather than remaining confined to a single page.
These are practical skills that every contributor should have, but their knock on effects are much greater. Contributors who understand the tools can work with greater independence, and, with experience, they can help newcomers, lead training sessions, organise projects and strengthen the systems on which others rely.
One session is rarely enough, and even eight sessions cannot resolve the structural barriers facing African Wikimedia communities. Training is just a starting point, one that can open a path towards transformation.
Monthly meetups can help people move from observing the Wikimedia movement to contributing to it; and, in time, to shaping where it goes next.
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.
Igala Wikimedia Campus Outreach at Prince Abubakar Audu University Anyingba
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.
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.
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..
As we get closer to the next Wiki Loves Monuments competition in Iran, we wanted to take a moment to look back at the 2025 edition.
A year has passed since photographers across Iran once again took part in Wiki Loves Monuments Iran. The 2025 edition was organized by the Iranian Wikimedians User Group, with the help of volunteers and members of the Wikimedia community. The competition invited people to photograph Iran’s registered cultural and historical monuments and share their images freely on Wikimedia Commons.
We now have some distance from the competition and its results. This gives us a good chance to look at what happened, what we learned, and what we want to take with us into the next edition.
Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai, first place in Wiki Loves Monuments Iran 2025 and first place internationally. Photo by Hossein Pourakbarian, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Wiki Loves Monuments Iran 2025
The Iranian competition ran from 1 to 31 October 2025.
This was a small decrease, but the number of uploads tells only part of the story.
Iran has more than 33,000 registered monuments, spread across the country. Some are famous and already have many photographs. Others are much less known, and many still need better documentation on Wikimedia projects.
The goal of Wiki Loves Monuments is not simply to collect as many photographs as possible. We want to create a useful and freely available visual record of cultural heritage. A good photograph can illustrate a Wikipedia article, help people learn about a monument, or preserve a view of a place that may change in the future.
This was also an important lesson from our 2024 competition. Each edition helps us understand a little better how we can improve the contest and how we can encourage people to document more of Iran’s cultural heritage.
Selecting Iran’s finalists
After the competition ended, the national jury reviewed the photographs and selected the ten images that would represent Iran in the international round.
The first-place photograph showed Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai, photographed by Hossein Pourakbarian.
Second place went to Mohammad Ataei for a photograph of the historic district of Gorgan, and third place went to Hadi Dehghanpour for a photograph of Arak Bazaar.
Historic district of Gorgan, second place in Wiki Loves Monuments Iran 2025. Photo by Mohammad Ataei Mohammadi, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The ten selected photographs covered different parts of Iran’s heritage. They included caravanserais, historic urban areas, mosques, a bazaar, a castle, a monastery and other monuments.
These ten photographs then moved on to the international stage of Wiki Loves Monuments.
An exceptional international result
The 2025 international competition brought together photographs from 56 national contests. In total, almost 228,000 images were contributed by around 4,000 photographers around the world. Each national competition could send up to ten photographs to the international round.
The final result was especially memorable for Iran.
Four photographs from Iran were selected among the international winners, including both first and second place.
The Iranian winners were:
1st place: Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai, by Hossein pourakbarian
2nd place: Mehmandust Tower, by Mehdi Akbari
5th place: Arak Bazaar, by Hadi Dehghanpour
22nd place: Seyyed Mosque in Isfahan, by Siavash Banaei
Seeing an Iranian photograph take first place was already something to celebrate. Having photographs from Iran in both first and second place made the result even more special.
The first-place photograph of Dayr-e Gachin Caravanserai had also won first place in the Iranian competition. It was chosen as the best image first by the national jury and later by the international jury.
But another result was just as interesting for us.
The photograph of Mehmandust Tower, which finished second internationally, had been ranked sixth in the Iranian competition.
Mehmandust Tower, sixth place in the Iranian competition and second place internationally. Photo by Darabad andromeda (Mehdi Akbari), CC BY-SA 4.0.
This is a good example of why each country sends ten photographs to the international round instead of only its national winner. Different juries can see different strengths in a photograph. An image that places sixth in one jury may become one of the strongest photographs in the international competition.
The same happened, to a smaller degree, with other Iranian finalists. The photograph of Arak Bazaar was third nationally and fifth internationally. The photograph of Seyyed Mosque was fourth nationally and later finished 22nd in the international results.
Arak Bazaar, third place nationally and fifth place internationally. Photo by Dehghanpourpix (Hadi Dehghanpour), CC BY-SA 4.0.Seyyed Mosque in Isfahan, fourth place nationally and 22nd place internationally. Photo by Siabanaei (Siavash Banaei), CC BY-SA 4.0
For us, this showed the strength of the national top ten as a group, not only the strength of the first-place photograph.
More than the winning photographs
The international results were a great achievement for the photographers and for Wiki Loves Monuments Iran. But the winning images are only a small part of what the competition produced.
The 2,513 eligible photographs from the Iranian competition are now part of Wikimedia Commons.
They are freely licensed. They can be used on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. They can also be reused outside Wikimedia by anyone who follows the terms of their licenses.
Many of these photographs will never win an award, but that does not make them less useful.
A clear photograph of a little-known monument can be more valuable to Wikipedia than another beautiful photograph of a landmark that already has hundreds of images. A photograph can also document a building, detail, landscape or condition that may not look the same ten or twenty years from now.
This is one of the reasons Wiki Loves Monuments continues to matter.
What we learned from 2025
Looking back, one lesson is clear: the success of Wiki Loves Monuments cannot be measured only by the number of uploads.
Iran received fewer eligible photographs in 2025 than in 2024, with 2,513 compared with 2,722. At the same time, the photographs selected by the national jury had an exceptional result internationally.
This does not mean that the number of contributions is unimportant. We still want more people to take part, and we want to document more monuments. But we also want to help participants create photographs that are useful for Wikimedia projects.
The international results also reminded us of the importance of having a strong and varied national selection. The ten photographs sent to the international round should represent different photographers, places, styles and ways of looking at cultural heritage.
Another important goal is to encourage more photography of less-documented monuments.
With more than 33,000 registered monuments in Iran, there is still a great deal of work to do. Famous places naturally attract photographers, but Wiki Loves Monuments can have an even greater long-term impact when participants visit places that have few photographs or no useful images on Wikimedia Commons.
We also want to keep making the connection between photography and open knowledge clearer.
Uploading a photograph is an important first step. Correctly identifying the monument, adding useful information, using the right monument ID, and eventually adding the photograph to Wikipedia articles can make that contribution much more useful.
We want to reach new photographers while welcoming returning participants. We want to encourage people to explore monuments that receive less attention. We want more high-quality photographs, but also more photographs that fill real gaps in Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia.
Most of all, we want to continue building a free visual record of Iran’s cultural heritage.
The international success of the 2025 competition gave us something special to celebrate. Four Iranian photographs were among the international winners. Two of them took the first and second places in the world.
But the lasting result of the competition is much bigger than four photographs.
It is the thousands of freely licensed images that are now available to everyone.
The Iranian Wikimedians User Group would like to thank every photographer who participated, the members of the national jury, the volunteers who helped organize the competition, and the international Wiki Loves Monuments community.
As we prepare for the next edition, we hope even more people will join us in photographing, documenting and sharing Iran’s cultural heritage.
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.
The WikiWomen+ Summit brought together fellow Wikimedians in Paris, as well as online via the livestream chat channel. We gathered to reflect on and discuss gender equity, empowerment, and closing content gaps within the Wikimedia movement. This year, participants of the Summit were invited to wear something yellow to celebrate WikiWomen, and I proudly wore my yellow shirt.
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.
Photo de groupe du Wiki Women Summit à Wikimania 2026.jpg by Pierre-Selim Huard, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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.
As the Iranian Wikimedians User Group (IWUG) started preparing its plans for the coming year and its next grant proposal, we wanted to hear directly from the community about what kinds of activities they were interested in and where we could do better.
In June 2026, we conducted a survey asking people around the user group about their current involvement with IWUG, their interest in future activities, and the kinds of programs and training they would find useful.
We received 147 responses. The results are now helping us shape our plans for the next year.
Who responded?
The survey ran from 8 to 23 June 2026. It was mainly intended for IWUG members and people connected with the user group community.
We shared it through the IWUG Telegram group and channel, as well as the Persian Wikipedia Village Pump (قهوهخانه). Anyone who had the link could respond.
Because participation was open and self-selected, the results should not be treated as representative of the entire Persian Wikipedia community. The survey was intended to help us understand the community around IWUG and what people in that community expect from the user group.
Almost all respondents were active on Wikipedia. 146 of the 147 respondents selected Wikipedia as one of the Wikimedia projects where they are most active. Some also reported contributing to Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikisource and other Wikimedia projects.
Interest is high, but participation is much lower
One of the clearest results was the difference between people’s interest in IWUG activities and how much they currently participate.
85% of respondents reported at least a medium level of interest in participating in IWUG activities. Of those, 44.9% described their interest as high or very high.
Current participation was much lower.
65.3% said their current participation in IWUG was none, very low or low. Only 9.5% described their participation as high or very high.
The survey also showed that many respondents were not very familiar with IWUG. 70.1% said they had no, very little or low familiarity with the user group, while only 11.6% reported high or very high familiarity.
Taken together, these results suggest that there are people who are interested in getting involved but do not yet participate regularly, and in many cases may not know enough about IWUG or how to take part.
This is something we want to work on during the coming year.
Online education was the most popular activity
Education was one of the strongest themes in the responses.
When we asked which types of activities people would be interested in joining, online educational and skill-building programs were the most popular option, selected by 92 respondents (62.6%).
Article-writing campaigns and competitions were selected by 70 respondents (47.6%), while 62 respondents (42.2%) were interested in in-person social gatherings.
We also asked what people would like to learn through online programs.
97 respondents (66%) selected introductory training about Wikipedia and editing. 83 (56.5%) were interested in tools and scripts. 78 (53.1%) wanted to learn more about contributing to other Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource, and 67 respondents (45.6%) were interested in learning more about the wider Wikimedia movement.
Some of the written responses also mentioned that learning how Wikipedia works can be difficult, especially for newer contributors. Several respondents asked for clearer and more accessible educational material in Persian.
This fits closely with some of the programs we were already considering.
During the coming year, IWUG plans to create short educational videos in Persian and organize online workshops and webinars introducing users to different ways of contributing to Wikimedia projects. The survey results will help us decide which topics to prioritize.
What other activities are people interested in?
Respondents also showed considerable interest in collaborative campaigns and competitions.
The most popular option in this area was competitions organized together with other countries or Wikipedia communities, selected by 79 respondents (53.7%).
Among established Wikimedia campaigns, Wiki Loves Earth was selected by 74 respondents (50.3%), followed by Wiki Loves Folklore with 70 (47.6%). Wiki Loves Monuments was selected by 49 respondents, while Women in Red and Wikipedia Asian Month each received 38 selections.
For possible in-person programs, educational workshops were selected by 90 respondents (61.2%). Informal meetups were selected by 81 (55.1%), Wikipedia birthday celebrations by 79 (53.7%), and technical sessions focused on bug fixing and tool development by 63 (42.9%).
We also asked how people would like to hear about future IWUG activities. 114 respondents, or 77.6%, said they would like to receive information about programs by email.
These responses give us a useful picture of both the programs people are interested in and how we can do a better job of informing them about those opportunities.
Using the results in our planning
The main purpose of this survey was practical. We are currently preparing our annual plan and our next grant proposal, and we wanted community feedback to be part of that process.
Some of the results have confirmed ideas that were already under discussion, particularly our plans for educational videos, webinars and online workshops.
Other results, especially the difference between interest and current participation, showed us that we also need to pay more attention to outreach and communication. It is not enough to organize activities if interested contributors do not know about them or are unsure how to get involved.
We hope to use the coming year to make IWUG’s activities more visible and make it easier for interested contributors to participate.
A larger Persian Wikipedia survey is coming
This survey was focused on the community around IWUG. We are also planning a much larger survey aimed at the wider Persian Wikipedia community.
There is some history behind this. From 21 May to 20 June 2016, Iranian Wikimedians conducted a large survey of the Persian Wikipedia community that received 1,780 responses. It was promoted very widely, including outside the usual Wikimedia community channels. The results of that survey were never formally published.
Later in 2026, we plan to conduct another broad survey of the Persian Wikipedia community. Like the 2016 survey, it will be promoted well beyond IWUG’s own channels and will also use outreach outside Wikimedia spaces.
The purpose of that survey will be different from the June IWUG survey. We want to hear from a much wider range of Persian Wikipedia users and contributors and get a broader picture of the community.
After the new survey is completed and its results are published, we also plan to prepare a separate report comparing the findings with the 2016 survey.
For now, the June survey has already given us useful information for our immediate planning. It showed strong interest in educational activities, identified areas where contributors want more support, and highlighted a clear gap between people’s interest in IWUG and their current level of participation.
Those findings will be part of how we shape our programs for the coming year.
I’m a volunteer with the Wikimedia Tanzania community, contributing to Wikimedia Commons, Lingua Libre, Wikidata, and Swahili Wikipedia. I also work as a Program Coordinator for the Digital Youth Clubs Program in Tanzania. I attended Wikimania 2026 in Paris on a Tandem Scholarship funded by Wikimedia Deutschland, and here is a report of my experience.
Pre-Conference Experience: WikiWomen Summit and Wikimedia Deutschland Dinner
A pre-conference for women across Wikimedia communities. One of the things I gained from the pre-conference was discovering the Wiki Women Conference. I had never known that such a conference existed within the Wikimedia movement. It was inspiring to see a dedicated space where women could openly share experiences, and encourage one another to take on leadership roles and contribute to closing gender gaps across Wikimedia projects.
The summit continued after lunch on gender equity, I learned about the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign which inspired to give women the visibility and acknowledgement they deserve by uploading quality images to Wikimedia commons.
Later, Wikimedia Deutschland hosted a dinner with Tandem partners, creating another opportunity to connect. The pre-conference and dinner expanded my network and inspired me to contribute more in Wikimedia. Many thanks to Wikimedia Deutschland for generous sponsorship.
An Impactful Session: Learn How to Grow Your Local Wikimedia Project Initiatives
One of the most impactful sessions I attended at Wikimania 2026 was “Learn How to Grow Your Local Wikimedia Project Initiatives,” facilitated by Mattia L. Nappi, board member of Wikimedia Italia, and Ferdinando Traversa, President of Wikimedia Italia. I chose it because I want to strengthen Wikimedia initiatives in my local community and learn practical ways to build a sustainable team.
The message that stayed with me most: you don’t need to know everything before starting. The facilitators encouraged us to begin with the skills and resources we already have, and improve as we go. It was a reminder that progress starts with a first step, not a perfect plan.
The workshop included a group exercise where we designed an imaginary local group and planned its first activity. As writer and mentor for my group, I documented our ideas and guided discussion. We focused on building a community around GLAM and universities, proposing an online event for students, with mentorship and partnerships with university leaders to attract new contributors. I then presented our work to the room my first time presenting at Wikimania, and it gave me real confidence speaking to an international Wikimedia audience.
The session pushed me to think harder about improving the Digital Youth Clubs program, which just finished its pilot phase in Tanzania. Successful projects don’t need big resources at the start, they need commitment, teamwork, and people willing to act.
This experience reinforced how much collaboration and international connections matter in growing Wikimedia communities lessons I hope to apply to empower more contributors locally.
What I personally gained and what I can pass on to others
Wikimania 2026 introduced me to new ways of contributing to free knowledge. Beyond the sessions, I built friendships with international Wikimedians, gained mentors and collaborators, and discovered ideas to bring home.
One highlight was learning about Open Food Facts, a project I had never encountered before. I learned how to contribute, installed the app, and exchanged contacts with the team for future guidance. I was also introduced to the Wikidata tools Cradle and TABernacle.
In return, I shared my Wikimedia work in Tanzania with participants, connected fellow Tanzanians with my Tandem partner and Mattia L. Nappi, and invited another participant to a session that led to a valuable discussion with Asaf Bartov. I also shared Tanzanian Kilimanjaro Premium Blend tea with attendees. I returned home inspired to strengthen my contributions and share what I learned with the Youth Digital Clubs Program, where I serve as Program Coordinator.
Fellow Tanzanians with my tandem partner from Deutschland
“From Wikilontar to Wikisami” session at Wikimania 2026, presented by Sakti Pramudya & Carma Citrawati
At Wikimania 2026 in Paris, Carma Citrawati and I presented “From Wikilontar to Wikisami: How Regional Partnerships Power Community-Led Growth in Bali.” The session explored how a local initiative to preserve Balinese manuscripts gradually developed into a regional learning program and, later, engagement with international memory institutions.
Carma opened the session by introducing the audience to lontar, traditional Balinese manuscripts containing knowledge about history, literature, spirituality, medicine, and everyday life. Many of these manuscripts are fragile, difficult to access, or held in collections outside Bali.
To make the story more tangible, Carma brought a copy of a lontar manuscript from Bali, written on palm leaves. Seeing the manuscript in person helped the audience understand that this work is not only about digitizing old documents. It is also about reconnecting communities with living knowledge passed down through generations.
Balinese Manuscript Presented at Wikimania 2026.
We shared the journey through three connected stages. Wikilontar began with the Balinese community’s own concern for preserving its manuscripts. Volunteers learned to digitize, describe, transcribe, and upload the materials while building trust with manuscript owners and cultural custodians. The initiative showed that effective partnerships should begin with community-defined priorities, rather than externally designed projects.
Through Wikisource Loves Manuscripts, or WILMA, the experience from Bali became part of a broader regional learning process. The community was no longer only receiving support; it was also sharing its experience with other language communities facing similar challenges. This helped build confidence and encouraged longer-term thinking about cultural heritage stewardship.
The next stage, Wikisami, seeks to connect Balinese communities with digitized manuscript collections held by institutions such as Leiden University Libraries and the British Library. The goal is not simply to place images online but to improve metadata, add cultural and linguistic context, involve students, and help reconnect collections held abroad with communities in Bali.
The session also highlighted how the role of regional partners should evolve over time. At the beginning, they may provide technical support, help communities navigate institutional processes, and open doors to new relationships. But as the community’s experience and confidence grow, regional partners should gradually step back and create space for community members to represent their own knowledge, priorities, and aspirations directly.
We were grateful to receive positive feedback from the audience about the initiative and its community-led approach. The discussion reinforced that success should not be measured only by the number of manuscripts digitized or pages uploaded but also by stronger community ownership, confidence, capacity, and the ability to engage institutions as equal partners.
The journey from Wikilontar to WILMA and Wikisami shows what becomes possible when regional partnerships invest in trust, stay beyond a single grant cycle, and create space for communities to lead.
Technology can preserve a digital file, but relationships preserve its meaning.
Wikimania 2026 brought the Wikimedia movement together in Paris this summer, and the Content Partnerships Hub (CPH) was there in full force. It was a fantastic opportunity for us not only to speak to the whole Wikimedia movement about our achievements and activities, but also to spend time together and have valuable discussions about the future of our project in person. Spread across several countries and time zones, from Chile to Sweden, we do not get this opportunity often!
Over the course of the conference, CPH members ran a number of sessions focusing on different aspects of our work as well as a physical helpdesk. They were all well-attended and we were excited to hear your thought-provoking questions and input. In this post, we re-cap what we did – if you find it interesting, make sure to look at the recordings.
Cultural heritage collections remain inaccessible in the digital realm for myriad reasons, this workshop addressed at least two common obstacles with practical solutions: how to digitize both 2D and 3D collections, and how to do so with limited resources. The workshop introduced a toolkit — now available on Meta-Wiki in multiple languages, with more translations welcome — that walks through the entire process from start to finish. To illustrate the workflow in practice, we digitized a collection of antique French postcards that had been gathered in Portugal.
We invite you to explore the toolkit, and to help us bring it to even more languages through translation!
We wanted the CPH to be a presence at Wikimania, not just as sessions that people would have to seek out. That’s why we used the opportunity to have a stand at the conference, which we held on Thursday and Friday. The focus of the stand was our Helpdesk initiative – one of the most important parts of the Hub. The Helpdesk provides hands-on support to Wikimedians who want to form a content partnership, especially for local groups in the underserved and underrepresented communities. And is there a better way of advertising it to the community than inviting them to a physical helpdesk?
If you were there, our table was hard to miss, located conveniently where everyone passed several times a day. And it definitely got a lot of foot traffic. We had great conversations with people, some of whom learned about the CPH for the first time, others who had heard of it before and had concrete ideas for projects we could work on together. This physical Helpdesk resulted in over 20 requests that we are now prioritizing and following up on.
UN workshop
The UN system has spent more than 75 years building up a vast body of knowledge: tens of thousands of publications and hundreds of thousands of images, videos, and audio recordings, much of it multilingual, high-quality, and increasingly released under Creative Commons licenses. UN agencies and Wikimedia have many of the same goals and compliment each other’s work.
The workshop provided participants with practical examples of work that has been done, thoughts from UN staff and a time for participants to reflect on how they could work with the UN. John Cummings shared examples of the kinds of projects that have been done with UN agencies, from sharing text images and data to collaborations on social media, exhibitions, editathons and working together to collate data.
Suzanne Lapstun from The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations who has worked on Wikimedia projects for several years shared her experiences and thoughts on working with Wikimedia and the benefits and challenges.
John then took participants through a guided reflection to create a plan for working with the United Nations or other organisations in their context. Participants explored what they wanted to achieve in the short, medium and long term, their current situation and resources, their skills, knowledge and connections and what they plan to do to make a start.
Metabase workshop
Metabase is a platform built to collect and connect information about Wikimedia movement activities and resources, developed as part of CPH’s work to strengthen the capacity of the global community. At Wikimania, Connor Benedict and Alicia Fagerving ran a hands-on workshop introducing the project to a room full of participants.
As always when running a practical workshop, we were worried that it would be boring or too hard, but our fears did not come true in the slightest! At no point was there awkward silence. Several participants registered user accounts on Metabase and dove straight into editing. We discussed several issues, from concrete technical questions to more broad ones about the future and scope of the Metabase project. We also demonstrated MEOW, a recently launched browsing interface for Metabase, which allows users to explore the data without writing a single SPARQL query. Truth to be told, it was nerve-wracking because MEOW is so new – but thankfully, it did not break down during the demonstration!
By the end of the workshop, participants had a sense of what Metabase is and how to contribute to it, but the session provided a lot of insight for us as well. The questions about the future of the project were thought-provoking and at the same time filled us with hope, because they show that people care about Metabase and would like it to develop into a strong and sustainable project.
A great thing about being at Wikimania is that not everything needs to be super formal, quite the opposite, less structured activities are great for brainstorming and exchanging experiences. That’s why we arranged a lunch meetup for everyone with an interest in developing and contributing to the culture and heritage community across the Wikimedia movement. The meetup was designed as a space to mix people from different corners of the movement. It was great to see new connections being made as well as lots of reconnecting with colleagues and peers.
Looking ahead
We returned from Paris full of new ideas as well as, which is even more important, a sense that the community is excited about the different initiatives that are part of the Content Partnerships Hub. Hopefully we’ll see each other next year in Santiago as well! Until then, have a look at the CPH portal on Meta.
At Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda (WCUGU), we believe free knowledge thrives when communities, institutions, and innovators work together. Formal partnerships, sealed through signed Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs), allow us to scale impact, build sustainable programmes, and ensure Ugandan voices, languages, culture, and heritage are better represented on Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and related platforms.
In recent months we have formalized three particularly exciting collaborations: with the Community Libraries Association of Uganda (COLAU), Sunbird AI, Uganda Premier League (UPL) and Kabale University. Each partnership strengthens a different pillar of our work libraries and GLAM, language technology, and higher education while advancing our shared commitment to inclusive, locally relevant open knowledge.
Community Libraries Association of Uganda (COLAU): Mapping Knowledge Access Across the Country
Libraries are vital gateways to information, education, and community development. Our partnership with COLAU, formalized through a signed MoU, focuses on expanding access to knowledge and documenting Uganda’s cultural and educational resources under the GLAM-Wiki banner.
Signing of the MoU with COLAUSigning of the MoU with COLAU
A flagship joint effort has been the Ugandan Libraries Geo Quest. Together we mapped community and public libraries, collected high-quality photographs (now available on Wikimedia Commons), created and enriched Wikidata items with locations, descriptions, and images, and produced an interactive map of libraries across the country. COLAU staff participated in fieldwork, shared records, and advised on practical approaches, while our volunteers trained librarians and association members on contributing to Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Commons.
WebMap Showing Community Libraries in Uganda
This collaboration embeds Wikimedia skills within library institutions, supports the creation of Wikimedia clubs linked to libraries that already have computers and internet access, and helps ensure that even remote communities can discover and contribute to free knowledge resources. It is a practical step toward stronger institutional ownership of open knowledge work in Uganda.
Sunbird AI: Accelerating Local-Language Content with Homegrown Technology
Many Ugandan languages remain under-represented online. Our partnership with Sunbird AI, a Ugandan non-profit developing practical AI systems for African languages directly addresses this gap, especially for the Runyankore (Runyankole) Wikipedia incubator and other local languages.
Through a formal collaboration, Sunbird AI’s Sunflower model (a large language model trained on dozens of Ugandan languages) has been integrated into Wikimedia workflows. This led to a customised Wiki Translate tool that supports unlimited-character translations, dramatically speeding up content creation. Editors report roughly a 50% reduction in time spent on initial drafts: the AI handles a large share of the translation work, while human contributors focus on cultural accuracy, nuance, consistency, and quality.
Signing of the MoU with SunbirdAi
The results in the Runyankore incubator have been striking rapid growth in articles, editors, and edits within a relatively short period. Feedback from Wikimedia volunteers also helps improve the model itself, creating a valuable local feedback loop. This partnership exemplifies how open-source, context-aware AI can serve the free knowledge movement rather than replace human expertise, and it positions Uganda as a leader in using technology for linguistic equity.
Kabale University: Building Digital Skills and a Runyankore Wikipedia Community
Higher education institutions are natural homes for Wikimedia engagement. Our MoU with Kabale University, signed by Vice Chancellor Dr. Joy Constance Kwesiga and WCUGU Executive Director Michael Kaluba (with witnesses including Joan Nantumbwe), formalises a shared commitment to free knowledge, digital skills, and student participation on Wikimedia platforms.
Signing of the MoU with Kabale UniversitySigning of the MoU with Kabale University
Key outcomes so far include:
The launch of a Wikimedia Club at Kabale University.
The joint inauguration of the Runyankore/Rukiga Wikipedia Incubation Project (theme: “Digitising Our Heritage, Building Our Community”), held on campus.
Training sessions, edit-a-thons, and mentorship programmes that introduce students and scholars to Wikipedia editing, translation tools (including the Sunbird-supported Wiki Translate tool), style conventions, and Wikimedia ethics.
Steady growth in Runyankore content, with hundreds of pages and articles created and thousands of edits contributed by a growing community of editors.
Located in a region where Runyankore and Rukiga are widely spoken, Kabale University provides an ideal base for nurturing native-speaker contributors and ensuring the incubator reflects local knowledge, culture, and perspectives. The partnership also expands Wikimedia presence beyond the central region and builds long-term capacity among the next generation of knowledge creators.
Uganda Premier League: Raising the Visibility of Ugandan Football
We have also signed an MoU with the Uganda Premier League. This partnership focuses on enriching coverage of the league, its member clubs, players, coaches, stadiums, and history across Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and other Wikimedia platforms. The collaboration increases global visibility of Ugandan football and gives our volunteers access to stadiums during matches for documentation and photography. It forms an important part of our broader Wiki Loves Sport efforts, helping ensure that the stories and achievements of Uganda’s football community are freely accessible to the world.
Signing of the MoU with Uganda Premier League
Other Active Collaborations
Beyond these formal MoUs, we continue working closely with a range of partners who share our goals, even without signed agreements in every case. These include Makerere University, Busitema University, Soroti University and Lira University (through thriving Wiki Clubs and student engagement), the Uganda Community Museums Association (UCOMA) on museum mapping and heritage documentation, and longstanding collaborators such as OpenStreetMap Uganda on mapping and open data initiatives. These relationships keep growing through joint activities, shared training, and mutual support.
Looking Ahead
These four partnerships; COLAU for libraries and cultural institutions, Sunbird AI for language technology, Uganda Premier League (UPL), and Kabale University for education and language incubation illustrate how formal collaboration multiplies impact. They help us train more people, create more relevant content, document Uganda’s heritage more thoroughly, and close knowledge gaps in both English and local languages.
We are grateful to our partners for their commitment and look forward to deepening these relationships through joint activities, shared learning, and measurable results. Partnerships make knowledge stronger. If you are a librarian, educator, technologist, student, or community member interested in contributing, we invite you to join us. Together we can continue building a richer, more inclusive open knowledge ecosystem for Uganda and the world.
For more information about Wikimedia Community User Group Uganda and our programmes, visit our Meta-Wiki page or follow @WikimediaUganda on social media.
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
Amanda Jurno presenting CapX at Wikimania Paris in July 2026.
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.
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.”
For the second time in a row a Ukrainian edition of Wiki Loves Monuments international photo contest had a special category dedicated to Polish heritage in Ukraine — almost 4600 photos by more than 100 authors were submitted. This special category was a joint project of Wikimedia Polska and Wikimedia Ukraine.
A collage of the winning photos of the 2025 Polish Heritage in Ukraine campaign
Mykola Kozlenko (NickK), a member of Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine organising team, Board member of Wikimedia Ukraine, commented:
“As a background, Wikimedia Ukraine has been organising Wiki Loves Monuments since 2012, with a goal to collect photos of all cultural heritage monuments of Ukraine on Wikimedia Commons, notably for use on Wikimedia projects. One of the main problems we encountered early on was that our official state lists are biased, especially regarding communist heritage, which was the main reason to have monuments protected or not back when Ukraine was under Soviet rule. And it really matters, as participants are more likely to upload pictures of monuments they associate themselves with.
So we started to organise special categories for less represented monuments of national minorities in Ukraine as early as 2013 — Armenian, Greek, later Crimean Tatar, Jewish, German, Polish, and the most recent one, Bulgarian. It does require more work from us, as we also need to find information about monuments that are not listed officially, or read additional sources to add this or that object to the special categories lists. But it helps us to expand the database of cultural heritage, make it less biased. And it helps us to increase awareness, and motivate veteran participants to continue taking part in the contest, and attract new participants, either interested in the multicultural past of Ukraine, or being a part of those national minorities themselves.
The Polish Heritage in Ukraine campaign was conducted for the second time, and we are very pleased with the results — almost 4600 pictures uploaded by more than 100 authors, depicting 373 monuments, and out of them — 41 are not officially protected by the state, so they are even more endangered, as they can be not only destroyed or damaged by russian drones or rockets, but they can be demolished or repurposed with no oversight by the cultural heritage protection authorities.
The main purpose of a separate special category continues to be to draw attention to these monuments and their condition, and to document them for Wikipedia. And we are very grateful for the support of Wikimedia Polska, that made this project possible, and also to our volunteers and participants for their continued active involvement in the project”.
The Polish Heritage in Ukraine campaign was happening alongside the main contest period for Ukraine in October 2025. Volunteers updated the lists for the special category, so as of now it is containing 1358 monuments (488 out of them with no official protective status). During the campaign itself 102 participants submitted almost 4600 photos, picturing 373 monuments (41 out of them are not registered as monuments) from 15 regions of Ukraine. 24 monuments were pictured for the first time.
A Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine barnstar
Due to a considerable number of submitted works, there was a pre-selection round. 16 volunteers from Poland took part in reviewing the images. Some Polish volunteers shared their reflections on the photos, their motivation to help, and the process.
Piotr “PMG” Gackowski, Polish volunteer helping with preselection, an editor with almost 9 mln edits on Wikimedia Commons, a Polish Wikipedia administrator, reflected:
“I participated in the preselection of photos for many reasons. One of them is patriotism. In this way, I can support the memory of Poland and the Polish people. The second point is the curiosity typical of every Wikipedian: I took part in the Polish WikiLovesMonuments and wanted to see what photographs from other countries look like. For me, the difference was that the photographs from Ukraine that I was rating much more frequently showed objects in rural areas. In Poland, large cities dominate, so in my opinion it was a significant difference. At the same time, it is important to me that I can help Wikipedians from Ukraine in their work. I am aware that every monument they commemorate by taking photographs could be destroyed”.
Teukros, a Polish pre-selection volunteer, and a Polish Wikipedia administrator, commented:
“I have participated in the photo preselection process for the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign (Polskie Dziedzictwo w Ukrainie) twice now, and I have genuinely enjoyed doing so. To be honest, I did not have any particularly special reasons for joining this initiative – the simple fact that the Wikimedia community in Ukraine had asked for assistance was reason enough for me.
My experience of participating has been a mixture of sadness and joy. Sadness, because it is plainly visible that Polish heritage sites in Ukraine are often damaged, neglected, and that there is little indication that this situation will improve in the near future. Joy, because the very fact that the Ukrainian community has taken on such a challenge allows us to believe that at least the memory of the Polish presence in these lands will endure.
If I were to say what inspired the greatest sympathy in me during this project, it would, paradoxically, be the photographs that I had to reject. Crooked, overexposed, blurry, taken by amateurs without any special preparation – they were perhaps the strongest testimony that, among completely ordinary people, the memory of the shared history of Poland and Ukraine is still very much alive”.
The pre-selection volunteers reviewed 4571 images (the organising team removed images submitted by the participants with conflict of interest, like organisers and jury members), divided in such a way, that each image was viewed by 3 volunteers.
Archiwald, a Polish pre-selection volunteer, and a Polish Wikipedia administrator, commented:
“In February of this year, I received an offer through WMPL to participate in the preliminary selection process as a person assisting with the initial evaluation of photos. I was happy to join the effort, especially since I already had some experience with similar initiatives at the time. As an editor who focuses, among other things, on historical matters, I realize just how useful the files I’ve been reviewing will be. I’m not just referring to the winning photos here; even those that ultimately didn’t receive any awards add significant value to the Commons resources.
It’s a very pleasant feeling to look through the contest results and notice instances where the judges rated a photo just as highly as I had earlier. I felt that way, for example, when I noticed that the photographs of the palace in Pryozerne by Oleksandr Malyon had been recognized. Photographs like these have immense historical value, which usually becomes apparent only after many years; therefore, the author’s decision to make them available under free licenses deserves recognition”.
Adrian Tync (Gower), another Polish pre-selection volunteer, active on Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Polish Wikipedia, shared:
“I got involved in the photo pre-selection process because I’d taken part in the ‘Wiki Loves Monuments’ competition a few times myself as a photographer, and I was curious to see what it was like from the other side. I enjoy browsing and evaluating other people’s photos on Commons, for example in the Quality Images nominees section, so this was the perfect task for me. I’m interested in Polish historical monuments and Polish cultural heritage, and thanks to the pre-selection process, I got to see many of them”.
Out of this round 815 photos proceeded to the next round. The organisers reviewed the images more closely, and removed the ones that were not up to the technical standards (like lower resolution), so 711 images proceeded to the main jury, which included Polish Wikimedians and partners of Wikimedia Polska:
Damian Kujawa — Wikimedian, volunteer, activist;
Julia Szablowska — photo editor, photographer, curator;
Magdalena Lachowicz — Assistant Professor at the Department of Eastern Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland;
Each work was viewed by all three jury members. 120 pictures made it to round two, where each jury member was asked to evaluate each work from 1 (minimum) to 10 (maximum) points. The guidance when evaluating pictures was:
from 0 up to 3 for technical quality (sharpness, use of light, perspective etc.);
from 0 to 3 for usefulness of the image for Wikipedia;
from 0 to 3 for originality.
1 additional point for something special in the picture.
The results are presented below, and they are grouped thematically, to showcase the breadth and depth of Polish Heritage in Ukraine, so the awarded works are from different regions of Ukraine, and are grouped by different objects depicted (churches, castles etc). No separate award for active participation — people awarded are among active contributors.
Best photos – Churches (pol. Najlepsze fotografie – Kościoły)
Holy Trinity Church (2022). Velykyi Ostrozhok, Vinnytsia Oblast
The author uploaded the first ever pictures not only of the church, but even from the village itself. And his pictures are now illustrating the article about the village on Wikidata and local Wikipedias (Wielki Ostróżek in Polish Wikipedia, for example). The version in Ukrainian did not even contain the mention of the church, as the building is not a listed monument officially.
Best photos – Palaces, Estates (pol. Najlepsze fotografie – Pałace, Majątki)
Potocki Palace (2025). Tulchun, Vinnytsia Oblast
Rej manor (2025). Pryozerne, Ivano-Frankivsk
Best photos – Other Buildings (pol. Najlepsze fotografie – Inne budynki)
The building was built by a Polish architect Mikołaj Tołwiński, there is no article about the school itself on Polish Wikipedia yet. Due to the Russian occupation of Mariupol, getting new free pictures (or even up to date information about the state of the building) is not going to be a trivial task.
Former house of the Branicki estate manager (2022). Rozkishna, Kyiv Oblast
This is also not a listed building, which makes its status to be more endangered — it is now privately owned, and there were news about it being on sale.
Best photos – Chapels (pol. Najlepsze fotografie – Kaplice)
The results of the joint project and winners were celebrated at the Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine hybrid awards ceremony on May 30, 2026.
At the 2025 Wiki Loves Monuments Ukraine Awards Ceremony
Polish heritage in Ukraine Special category statistics
Winners present offline
Olena Suhak, one of the winners, commenting on her works
Serhii Plakhotniuk, one of the winners, commenting on his photo
Volodymyr Tarasov, one of the winners, commenting on his contributions
Oleksandr Malyon (on screen), one of the winners
The winners absent at the event will receive their prizes by post.
Iryna Boiko, communications manager of Wikimedia Ukraine, commented:
“This is the second time we are organising the “Polish Heritage” special category in the Ukrainian edition of the Wiki Lobes Monuments contest. The request to organise a separate category for Polish sites has been repeatedly expressed by the participants themselves, because many such sites are now falling into disrepair and simply collapsing in the absence of an active community to care for them.
The main focus of the special category was churches, Polish cemeteries, castles and fortresses, but the jury also paid attention to residential and other buildings. Of course, the parameters of inclusion in the contest lists are quite wide, because the very idea of the “Wiki Loves Monuments” competition is to collect photos to illustrate Wikipedia articles, and in order for the article to illustrate the life of a community or a certain period, the parameters of inclusion should be quite wide. So, the special category lists contain buildings created by Polish architects for Polish activists, or buildings where Poles lived, or buildings that were important for the Polish community of a particular settlement — like a bookstore in Kharkiv, that became a center of a local Polish community life.
My personal favorite photo, a very symbolic embodiment of what we are trying to achieve through this joint project with Wikimedia Polska, was the work of Valentyn Mahovkin, our long-time participant, which depicts the process of restoring an epitaph on a tombstone in a Polish cemetery in the village of Chornyi Ostriv in Khmelnytskyi Oblast. And, by the way, this cemetery is not officially protected, and only its gate has an official status as a cultural monument…”
Restoration of the epitaph (2024). Polish cemetery. Chornyi Ostriv, Khmelnytskyi Oblast
Wikiquote training in Bandung (Hasnanf, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons)
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.
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.
After-session group picture
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.
Tony Obinna facilitating a session
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.
Participants engaged throughout the session
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.
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.
Group photo of the Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Hyderabad 2026, Image by Nivas
Program Purpose
Fifty-six contributors gathered at IIIT Hyderabad for three days to improve Wikimedia’s technical ecosystem. Unlike traditional hackathons that focus primarily on rapid prototyping, the Indic Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 introduced dedicated refinement sessions that encouraged participants to improve code quality, documentation, usability, and long-term maintainability.
Wikimedia hackathons are spaces for developers, designers, content editors, and other community stakeholders to collaborate on building technical solutions that help improve tools, workflows, and overall user experience across Wikimedia projects.
This hackathon is designed for:
Technical contributors active in the Wikimedia technical ecosystem, which includes developers, maintainers (admins/interface admins), translators, designers, researchers, documentation writers, etc.
Content contributors having an in-depth understanding of technical issues in their Wikimedia projects, like Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wiktionary, etc.
Contributors to any other open-source community or those who have participated in Wikimedia events in the past, and would like to get started with contributing to Wikimedia technical spaces.
Participants worked on a curated set of technical tasks prepared by mentors and organizers. They were also encouraged to propose their own project ideas, provided they included a clear problem statement, implementation approach, and were reviewed by mentors before the event.
Building on the experience and learnings from previous hackathons, this event was more efficient, inclusive, and collaborative.
The event aimed to involve more developers who have experience with the Wikimedia ecosystem and had prior experience already contributing to tools, extensions, gadgets, or other technical projects. Editors were paired up with developers to provide domain knowledge, helping them better understand editing workflows, user needs, and the intended behaviour of the applications/ extensions/ gadgets being developed.
Unlike other hackathons where rapid development is the primary focus, this event was not completely hacking but also incorporated dedicated refinement sessions.These sessions encouraged participants to improve the quality of the works by refining design, UI, data privacy, code optimization, documentation and overall maintainability. Additionally, the program also included brainstorming sessions, group discussions, workshops to help participants understand a broader perspective of this ecosystem beyond their individual projects.
Scope and Timeline
The hackathon was conducted as a three day in-person event at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H), a long-standing partner that provides space for technical and community events. The venue supported collaborative work through dedicated hacking spaces, mentor interactions, and discussion areas.
The scope of the event was flexible enough to encourage participants to work on a curated set of Wikimedia-related technical projects and tasks suitable for a hackathon which prepared by mentors or a custom project proposed by their own and reviewed by experienced developers and organizers, along with Team Challenges from Wikimania Hackathon 2026.
The program was structured into distinct phases. The first half of the event (approximately one and a half days) focused entirely on development where the first part of the first day was catered to some introductions and welcome notes, ground rules, ice breaker activities, followed by continuous hacking. On the second day, the event had a social activity and the morning session was mostly catered to workshops, brainstorming sessions, and getting to know about OKI work. The second half started with refinement phases. The third day focused completely on refinement, wrap-up and showcase.
Attendance
Total Attendees: 56
Organisers: 11
Mentors: 15
Participants: 25
Editors: 5
The majority of participants were developers with prior experience in the Wikimedia technical ecosystem. A smaller group consisted of experienced Wikimedia editors with technical knowledge, who collaborated with developers by providing domain expertise and user perspectives during the hackathon.
Activities Conducted
Prior to the hackathon, an orientation call was conducted for participants to give an overview of the program, the Wikimedia technical ecosystem, team formation details, and some logistical and operational arrangements. The session also introduced participants to Wikimedia, its technical ecosystem, guided them through basic account setup, and explained the overall hackathon format.
Following the orientation, participants were encouraged to have a call with their specific teams and mentors. These discussions helped participants better understand their assigned projects, including the scope, objectives, expected outcomes, and technical requirements. Mentors introduced project-specific workflows, outlining the scope, objectives, and tasks for each participant to help them engage effectively during the hackathon.
During the event, participants worked on pre-curated tasks across multiple Wikimedia-related projects and collaborated closely with mentors to understand issue tracking, patch submission, and debugging workflows. Mentors supported participants across different projects, helping them navigate both technical challenges and Wikimedia-specific contribution processes.
To complement the technical program, the hackathon also included community-building activities. An icebreaker session at the beginning of the event helped participants interact and build connections. On the second day, interested participants joined a social walk around Hyderabad, providing an informal opportunity for networking. A dedicated women’s dinner was also organized to foster stronger connections among women participants, encourage inclusion, and support long-term retention within the Wikimedia technical community.
Towards the conclusion of the event, a project showcase and presentations session was conducted, during which participants demonstrated their work and shared learnings with fellow participants, mentors, and organizers.
Outputs and Outcomes
The hackathon enabled participants to work on pre-identified tasks across multiple Wikimedia-related repositories, resulting in code contributions, feature enhancements, bug fixes, and documentation improvements. Throughout the event, participants gained practical experience with Wikimedia development workflows, including issue tracking, patch submission, code review, and collaborative problem-solving, with guidance from experienced mentors. Several participants continued engaging with their assigned projects after the event, indicating effective onboarding into Wikimedia technical workflows.
During the hackathon, participants submitted a total of 56 Phabricator tickets across multiple Wikimedia-related projects. The distribution of contributions is summarised below:
Clip2Commons: 9
Deployr: 7
Language Selector Rewrite: 1
Lingua Libre: 5
Montage: 4
NPOV Drift Detector: 1
Observability Tool: 7
Onboarding of New Wikipedia Editors : 2
OpenSpeaks Subtitler: 5
OpenSpeaks Tome: 3
Pywikibot : 3
Scribe: 6
Translate Tagger: 8
ULS Extension :8
Wanda Extension: 4
WikiEval Tool : 3
Wikievol Tool : 3
WikiLinkua : 2
Wikimedia Commons Android: 4
Wikisource Reader App: 2
Total: 87 Repo/Phabricator tickets linked
As part of the Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Hyderabad 2026, several teams worked on projects that directly align with the official Team Challenges announced for Wikimania 2026.
Lingua Libre – Boost multimedia experience, Connect multilingual knowledge
WikiLinkua – Gamify knowledge, Stream data with Wikidata
Wiki Translate Tagger – Connect multilingual knowledge
Wanda / WandaScore / WandaScribe – Welcoming newcomers, Fix the sources / Update the obsolete, The editor of the future
Scribe – Stream data with Wikidata, Connect multilingual knowledge
WikiEvolution – Explore knowledge
WikiNPOV Drift Detector – Deciphering biases
Language selector rewrite – Connect multilingual knowledge
These contributions included code changes, improvements, and related updates submitted under mentor guidance.
What went well:
Program design:
The overall event design enabled participants to collaborate with peers from diverse backgrounds and work effectively on technical projects.
The combination of structured onboarding, continuous hacking, and dedicated refinement sessions supported steady progress throughout the event.
Refinement sessions encouraged participants to improve code quality, documentation, user interface, and maintainability rather than focusing solely on completing tasks.
Mentorship and technical contributions:
Clear project introductions and continuous mentor support helped participants engage confidently with their assigned tasks.
Most of the identified hackathon tasks were actively worked on during the event.
Several participants continued contributing to their assigned projects after the hackathon, demonstrating successful onboarding into Wikimedia technical workflows.
Collaboration:
Pairing editors with developers proved valuable, as editors helped developers better understand user workflows, expected tool behaviour, and usability considerations.
Workshops and discussion sessions complemented the hacking sessions by providing participants with a broader understanding of the Wikimedia technical ecosystem.
Diversity and inclusion:
The hackathon achieved approximately <>% women participation, the highest among events organized by the User Group to date.
The women’s dinner helped foster stronger connections among women participants and contributed to a more welcoming environment.
What can be improved/Learnings?
Program schedule
Participants requested additional time for the project showcase and presentations.
Fifteen-minute breaks were considered too short and could be extended in future editions.
Starting sessions at 9:00 AM posed challenges for some participants because of commuting time.
Project selection
Hackathon tasks require more review before the event to reduce duplication of effort.
Greater emphasis should be placed on improving existing Wikimedia tools rather than developing new ones where similar solutions already exist.
Mentorship
Participants experienced delays when waiting for scheduled online mentor support.
Increasing mentor availability or ensuring more mentors are physically present during the event could improve the overall experience.
What’s next:
Based on the outcomes and observations from the Indic Wikimedia Hackathon Hyderabad 2026, the following recommendations are proposed for future editions of the event:
Prioritise improving existing Wikimedia tools and applications over developing new ones, where appropriate.
Continue incorporating dedicated refinement sessions to improve the quality and sustainability of contributions.
Allocate more time for project showcases, presentations, and participant discussions
Review the event schedule by extending break durations and considering a later start time where feasible.
Continue initiatives that promote diversity and inclusion, including activities that support participation and retention of women contributors.
Strengthen post-event follow-up and mentorship to encourage continued contributions beyond the hackathon.
Explore organizing additional hackathons, workshops, and technical events in college campuses to improve accessibility and encourage new technical contributors.
When people think about hackathons, they often imagine coding sessions, project demos, and late nights spent debugging. For me, Wikimedia Hackathon 2026 in Milan was something much more meaningful: a reminder that some of the most impactful ideas begin as simple conversations between passionate people.
Like many Wikimedia Commons contributors, I have often found it difficult to discover media through traditional search. Commons hosts millions of images, videos, and audio files, but today’s search relies mostly on filenames, categories, descriptions, and structured data not on what is actually visible or audible in the file itself. Hundreds of campaigns, contests and content initiatives add new media every year, which only makes the problem bigger. I kept wondering, half as a joke and half seriously: what if we could search Commons based on what an image or video actually shows, rather than what someone happened to type into its metadata?
It felt like a wild idea at the time, so I shared it with the Wikimedia technical community mostly to see if anyone else found it interesting.
Eugene, David and Gopa at WMHACK 2026
A researcher and developer named David, who had recently joined the Wikimedia community, came across the discussion. David had been working on a technology called WISE.. at the University of Oxford research focused on semantic understanding of visual and multimedia content, enabling people to search images, videos, and audio using natural language. What started as a random online exchange quickly turned into a collaboration. David hadn’t originally planned to attend the hackathon in Milan, but as we kept talking, we both got excited about bringing this kind of search to the Wikimedia ecosystem, and decided to meet in person and try to build it.
Looking back, that decision changed everything.
For two intense days at the hackathon, we worked side by side to integrate and demonstrate WISE for Wikimedia Commons — architecture, datasets, search quality, the usual string of small technical fires. One moment that stuck with me: the first time we typed “horse in an airplane” into the prototype, half-expecting nothing, and watched it actually return the right video. That was the point it stopped feeling like a demo and started feeling like a real tool.
What inspired me as much as the technology was David’s approach to problem-solving. In an era where most developers reach for an AI assistant the moment something breaks, David would just as often dive into technical documentation, research papers, and manuals first. Watching him methodically work through a problem rather than skip to an answer was a good reminder that strong engineering fundamentals haven’t gone anywhere.
What we built
The result of those two days is WISE, a new experimental search experience for Wikimedia Commons. It currently indexes Media of the Day content around 5,000 videos and is built to understand the actual visual and audio content of a file rather than its metadata.
Project Wise showcasing Semantic Image Search
Semantic search. Search using natural language and find media based on what appears in the image or video itself. A few examples that worked surprisingly well:
“man at a train station”
“horse in an airplane”
“man with a flower”
“pirate with a pistol”
Audio search. Search within audio content to find relevant recordings and segments.
Face search. Upload a photo of a face, and WISE can locate that person across images and videos… for video, it can even surface the timestamps where they appear.
Multilingual search. Queries work in multiple languages, including Hindi and Telugu. This matters more than it might first appear: most of Commons’ existing search tooling is built around English-language metadata, which quietly shuts out a large share of Wikimedia’s global, non-English-speaking contributor and reader base. A search experience that understands a query in Hindi or Telugu as well as it understands one in English is a small but real step toward making Commons more usable for the movement it actually serves.
This is only the beginning. We’re already discussing:
Expanding indexing beyond Media of the Day to cover Commons at a much larger scale.
Finding visually similar images after an upload.
Suggesting categories, filenames, and metadata based on visual similarity.
Improving search quality and broadening multilingual support further.
Most of all, this experience reminded me why I love being part of the Wikimedia movement. A passing idea shared on a community forum connected two people from different backgrounds and different parts of the world. An online discussion became an in-person collaboration. A concept became a working prototype. And a hackathon became the place that vision came to life.
Sometimes the most valuable outcome of sharing an idea isn’t the idea itself it’s the people who find it, connect with it and decide to build something together. For me, WISE for Commons is more than a search tool. It’s proof of that.
When I applied for Train the Trainer (TTT) 2026, I expected to learn how to organize better events, facilitate workshops, and become a more effective trainer.
Over three days in Hyderabad, I certainly learned those skills but I also came away with something far more valuable: a new understanding of how strong Wikimedia communities are built and sustained.
Rather than focusing only on editing or technical skills, the program explored the people behind Wikimedia the contributors, organizers, mentors, and volunteers who make free knowledge possible. Through discussions, hands-on activities, and collaborative exercises, TTT encouraged participants to think beyond individual contributions and toward building welcoming, resilient communities.
Here are some of the lessons that stayed with me long after the program ended.
Communities come before content
One of the biggest surprises on the first day was that very little time was spent talking about editing, and all.
Instead, sessions explored trust, belonging, leadership, contributor motivation, and community participation.
The panel discussion “What Makes Us Stay? Trust and Participation in Communities” highlighted something every Wikimedia community experiences: attracting contributors is only the first step. Helping people feel welcomed, supported, and valued is what encourages them to stay.
Another activity challenged participants to analyze contributor data across language communities. Looking at the gap between the large number of people who consume knowledge online and the relatively small number who actively contribute made me rethink community growth. I realized that successful outreach is not measured only by how many people join an event it is also measured by how many continue contributing afterwards.
The sessions on leadership, trust, and the Universal Code of Conduct reinforced another important message: healthy communities are built intentionally. Trust is earned through respectful collaboration, inclusive spaces, and consistent support for newcomers.
Wikimedia Commons is about preserving knowledge not just photographs
Before attending TTT, I believed I already understood Wikimedia Commons.
I had uploaded photographs, organized Wiki Science competitions, and knew the basics of licensing and file uploads.
The Commons sessions completely changed that perspective. Rather than focusing on uploading more images, the discussions emphasized documenting knowledge in ways that remain useful for future contributors. We explored why metadata, categories, descriptions, geolocation, and licensing all play an essential role in making media discoverable and reusable. One idea particularly stayed with me. Commons does not necessarily need another photograph of a monument that has already been documented hundreds of times. It needs photographs that document the subject well.
That simple idea changed the questions I ask before uploading an image. Instead of asking whether I can upload a photograph, I now ask whether it genuinely helps someone understand a place, object, or tradition better.
The photo walk around the IIIT Hyderabad campus gave participants an opportunity to apply these ideas immediately. Rather than simply taking attractive photographs, we practiced documenting subjects from angles that communicated information clearly and added educational value.
The licensing session also helped demystify Creative Commons licenses through practical examples, making it easier to understand how open licensing enables collaboration across Wikimedia projects.
Good communication keeps communities growing
The final day focused on communication an area that is often overlooked but essential for sustaining volunteer communities.
A session on Visual Storytelling in Practice demonstrated how photographs and personal stories can help communicate knowledge more effectively than facts alone. It reminded me that contributors often remember stories long after they forget presentations.
Another workshop explored communication strategies for different audiences. Working in groups, participants designed outreach plans tailored to specific communities rather than relying on a single approach for everyone. That exercise reinforced a simple but important lesson:
There is no single Wikimedia audience. Students, teachers, heritage enthusiasts, language learners, and professionals all engage with Wikimedia for different reasons. Effective outreach begins by understanding those motivations.
The session on Wikivoyage also introduced me to another Wikimedia project that I had not previously explored in depth. It demonstrated how documenting travel knowledge, local culture, and places contributes to the broader free knowledge ecosystem.
Finally, a session on community communication platforms highlighted how mailing lists, Telegram groups, discussion forums, and social media help communities stay connected long after events have ended.
Building a community is not only about organizing an event. It is about creating ongoing conversations.
Learning by doing
One aspect of TTT that I particularly appreciated was its emphasis on practical learning.
Rather than relying entirely on presentations, participants engaged in group discussions, storytelling exercises, communication planning, case studies, and hands-on Commons activities.
These exercises encouraged us to apply ideas immediately instead of simply listening to them.
The collaborative nature of the program also created opportunities to learn from participants representing different language communities, projects, and experiences across the Wikimedia movement.
That diversity of perspectives became one of the most valuable parts of the training itself.
What changed after TTT?
The impact of Train the Trainer extended well beyond the three days of the program.
It changed how I think about community building.
Instead of focusing primarily on organizing events, I now think more about contributor retention, mentorship, and creating welcoming spaces for newcomers.
It changed how I contribute to Wikimedia Commons.
I now pay much greater attention to documentation quality, metadata, licensing, and preserving local heritage through meaningful photographs.
It also influenced my later work within the Wikimedia movement. Many ideas that I developed while preparing proposals for WikiConference India, as well as my growing interest in documenting local heritage and strengthening community communication, can be traced back to discussions and activities during TTT.
Most importantly, the program encouraged me to think beyond individual edits and toward strengthening the communities that make those edits possible.
Why programs like Train the Trainer matter
Every Wikimedia community faces different challenges, but many of those challenges share common themes: welcoming newcomers, retaining contributors, building trust, documenting knowledge responsibly, and communicating effectively.
Train the Trainer creates a space where volunteers can exchange experiences, learn from one another, and return home with practical ideas that can be adapted to their own communities.
For me, the greatest takeaway was not a single workshop or activity.
It was a shift in perspective.
Wikimedia is sustained not only by articles, photographs, or software, but by people who collaborate, mentor, listen, and continue learning together.
That is what I brought home from Train the Trainer 2026 and it is why I believe programs like TTT continue to play an important role in strengthening the Wikimedia movement.
This conference is a space to create, share, and lead, not only to attend. This year, we are building around the theme Re-imagining the Knowledge Commons, and extending an invitation to you to find out together how we build and care for shared knowledge. We’re looking for proposals that go further than traditional editing, uploading, and coding, trying out new ways of taking part and making knowledge as a community.
WikiConference India will happen in Kochi, Kerala on 4th- 6th September 2026, in the spirit of Namukku Othukoodam (Let’s meet!).
The Evolving Knowledge Commons
The Knowledge Commons, in its digital form, has come to be defined by the Wikimedia ecosystem. Emerging trends in AI-based search and summarization, content generation, language translation, and new forms of interaction have brought new challenges to the way in which we contribute to the knowledge ecosystem and the way in which consumers unknowingly draw from it.
To ensure that knowledge remains open, inclusive, safe, and accessible, we cannot simply maintain what exists: we must actively shape ourselves to tackle what comes next and this is at the core of our Programming vision. Our theme aligns closely with broader Wikimedia movement priorities and also the global trends tracked by the Wikimedia Foundation. In a time of declining trust in online information and the rapid rise of AI-generated content; strengthening community-led, human-created knowledge becomes more critical than ever.
Key Questions We Are Exploring
How efficiently are we bringing traditional stores of knowledge- from people, libraries, academia, galleries, and museums- into the Knowledge Commons?
How do we protect the integrity of our knowledge, keep the Knowledge Commons verifiable, and protect the agency of our contributors?
What do all these changes and future possibilities mean for those of us contributing to Wikimedia projects focussing on Indic languages?
Core Focus Themes
We welcome submissions that address our core objectives and align with the following strategic directions:
Strategic Roadmap Building: Sessions that help us navigate the shifting digital landscape, the rise of new technologies, along with Sustainability and future pathways for Wikimedia in India and South Asia.
Community Leadership and Governance: Sessions that highlight community-led initiatives and how grassroots leadership can sustain open knowledge.
New Models of Participation and Contribution: Sessions related to technological enhancement, GLAM, EduWiki, and Knowledge-resource-content partnerships.
Knowledge Equity and Inclusion across Languages and Regions: Sessions focused on strengthening Indic-language projects and ensuring underrepresented histories remain at our heart.
Technology, Tools, and the Evolving Digital Knowledge Ecosystem: Exploring infrastructure, platform engineering, and the role of AI.
We especially encourage proposals that:
Share collective practical experiences and learnings, offering generalizable knowledge.
Highlight independent/community-led innovations that are reproducible in wider contexts.
Create space for dialogue, skill-building, and co-creation that travels beyond a single community.
If you have received a scholarship to attend, we especially encourage you to propose a session or be a part of one! Whether you are an experienced contributor or a newer community member, your ideas and experiences are essential to building a meaningful and inclusive program.
Submission Tracks & Formats
To help organize our collective program, we invite proposals across a variety of formats. Please review the session formats and suggested durations below to see where your idea fits best:
Poster presentations: Posters will be presented at the Conference Venue, allowing one-on-one discussions with participants.
Community meetups
Note: Unconference sessions are intended for informal meetings after 5:00 PM (following main conference hours) and will not be listed in the primary program schedule. Even if your idea does not fit perfectly into one of these exact buckets, we still want to hear it!
“WikiConference India is, at its core, a space for communities to meet, reflect, and reimagine- not just a conference, but a moment where communities see themselves and the impact of their work more clearly. WCI 2023 brought that vision to life by bringing Wikimedians from across India and South Asia together in Hyderabad for the first time since 2016, under the theme ‘Strengthening Bonds.‘ It reminded us that reimagining the knowledge commons is ultimately about people, how we connect, collaborate, and care for the spaces we build together. We hope WCI 2026 continues this journey forward.” – Nitesh and Nivas, Organisers of WikiConference India 2023
“WikiConference India 2026 is shaped by the community, and the program is at its heart. Through this call, we invite contributors to bring their ideas, experiences, and questions to the table and help co-create the conversations that matter most.”
As we prepare to meet in Kochi this September, remember that the “Knowledge Commons” belongs to you. We cannot reimagine it without your voice, your leadership, and your creativity. Submit your proposal today and help shape the roadmap.
The Wikimedia movement’s commitment to preserving and sharing knowledge took on a uniquely South African flavour last month as newly appointed Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan embarked on one of her first major international visits since assuming the role.
Accompanying her was Bobby Shabangu, a respected South African open-knowledge advocate and the first African ever elected to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees. Together, they spent time with Wikimedia South Africa volunteers, partners, and community members, exploring how local initiatives are helping ensure African languages, histories, and cultures are represented online for generations to come.
Cape Town: Where Ancient Stories Meet the Digital Future
The South African tour began in Cape Town with a visit to the Iziko Museum, where participants experienced a guided tour that perfectly reflected the Wikimedia movement’s belief that knowledge is created, shared, and preserved by people.
Among the highlights was a presentation of some of South Africa’s oldest rock art. Created over centuries by multiple generations, these artworks offered a striking parallel to the way Wikipedia itself is built today — collaboratively, incrementally, and collectively. Just as countless hands contributed to preserving stories on stone, volunteers across the world continue to build humanity’s largest collection of freely accessible knowledge.
Conversations with Cape Town-based Wikimedia South Africa board members and partners took visitors further “down the WikiRabbit Hole,” exploring innovative language preservation projects currently underway. Particular interest was shown in efforts supporting the incubation of Afrikaaps, a Cape Town dialect of Afrikaans, as well as initiatives enabling KhoeKhoe language speakers to contribute directly online through the development of specialised keyboards and editing tools.
Johannesburg: Showcasing Local Innovation
The visit continued in Johannesburg, where Wikimedia South Africa members presented a range of projects addressing the digital knowledge gap facing African languages and communities.
Many South African languages have rich oral traditions but limited representation in written and digital archives. Community members demonstrated how Wikimedia projects are helping address this challenge through locally led initiatives.
Decolonising Language Through Knowledge Creation
Editors showcased work on smaller and underrepresented language editions of Wikipedia, including Siswati, Tshivenda, Sepulana, and Xitsonga. Through the creation of high-quality educational content in local languages, volunteers are helping ensure that knowledge is accessible to communities in the languages they speak and understand.
Jo’burgpediA and Community Partnerships
The chapter also highlighted collaborations with universities, libraries, museums, and cultural institutions. Through initiatives such as Jo’burgpediA, students and community members are trained to document local history, ensuring that communities can tell their own stories rather than having them told by others.
Preserving Oral Knowledge
Discussions also focused on innovative approaches to documenting verified oral histories and indigenous knowledge. These efforts challenge traditional archival models that have often excluded African perspectives and lived experiences, creating new pathways for preserving cultural heritage within Wikimedia platforms.
A Global Mission Powered by Local Communities
Addressing chapter members, Bernadette Meehan emphasised the Foundation’s commitment to community-led knowledge creation and governance:
“Wikimedia’s global mission relies entirely on the local communities who understand the nuances of their own culture. Listening to the brilliant initiatives run by Wikimedia South Africa proves that the future of free knowledge is inherently multilingual and diverse.”
Her remarks recognised the vital role that local volunteers play in ensuring the internet reflects the richness and diversity of the communities it serves.
For Bobby Shabangu, the visit was also a reminder of how far the African Wikimedia movement has come.
Reflecting on his own journey, which began with editing Siswati Wikipedia because, as he puts it, “if I didn’t edit it, no one would,” Shabangu highlighted the growing influence of African contributors within global internet governance and knowledge-sharing spaces:
“We are moving past the era where Africa is merely a consumer of global knowledge. Through the hard work of our chapter members, we are ensuring that our grandfathers’ stories, our traditional customs, and our beautifully diverse languages are permanently archived for the next generation.”
Looking Ahead
The visit reaffirmed the importance of community-driven knowledge creation and the growing role South Africa is playing in shaping the future of free knowledge globally.
From ancient rock art in Cape Town to digital language preservation projects in Johannesburg, the message was clear: preserving knowledge is not only about recording the past — it is about ensuring that future generations can access, contribute to, and share their own stories.
As Wikimedia South Africa continues to champion linguistic diversity, cultural heritage, and open knowledge, partnerships between local communities and the Wikimedia Foundation will help ensure that South Africa’s rich tapestry of languages and cultures remains visible, accessible, and thriving online for decades to come.
Wiki Indaba 2026: Passing the Baobab
Joining the Wikimedia South Africa chapter were members of the core organising team for Wiki Indaba 2026 from Côte d’Ivoire, including Emmanuel Gueh and Donotein. Their participation provided an opportunity not only to engage in discussions with the South African community but also to share an update on preparations for Wiki Indaba 2026, Africa’s premier gathering of Wikimedians.
A special highlight of the visit was the ceremonial handover of the Wiki Indaba Baobab Tree statue to the new organising team. The Baobab, often referred to as the “Tree of Life” in Africa, symbolises wisdom, resilience, community, and the sharing of knowledge—values that closely align with the spirit of Wiki Indaba and the Wikimedia movement.
Wikimedia South Africa leadership proudly passed the statue to the Côte d’Ivoire organising team, marking the beginning of what is hoped will become a lasting Wiki Indaba tradition.
As the creator of Wiki Indaba, Wikimedia South Africa Board Chair and long-time Wikimedian Dumisani Ndubane reflected on the significance of the moment. He expressed his pride in inaugurating this new tradition and shared his hope that, in years to come, the Baobab statue will continue its journey across the continent before eventually returning to South Africa when Wikimedia South Africa once again hosts Wiki Indaba.
The handover symbolised more than a transfer of responsibility—it represented the continued growth of the African Wikimedia movement, the sharing of leadership across communities, and a collective commitment to ensuring that Africa’s knowledge, languages, cultures, and stories remain visible and accessible to future generations.
For years, rites and rituals have shaped the identity of communities across Nigeria. From naming ceremonies and traditional weddings to religious observances and everyday customs, these practices preserve values, beliefs, and collective memories. Yet many of these cultural expressions remain underrepresented on Wikimedia projects.
Wiki Loves Africa 2026 for Creatives in selected Nigerian universities broughtt together photographers and storytellers to document and share Nigeria’s rich cultural heritage under the theme “Rites and Rituals.” The campaign was held from February to April 2026.
Creating awareness and recruiting creatives
Between 1 and 28 February 2026, the campaign focused on awareness and participant recruitment. Outreach activities targeted creatives across six institutions and communities, while social media campaigns and sponsored advertisements on Facebook and Instagram helped expand participation.
These efforts introduced creatives to Wikimedia Commons and encouraged them to contribute freely licensed media that celebrate Nigeria’s diverse traditions.
Flyer for Awareness
Launching the campaign and introducing Participants to Wikimedia Commons
The campaign officially kicked off with a virtual launch held on 4 March 2026. The session introduced participants to the Wiki Loves Africa 2026 theme, “Rites and Rituals,” and provided an orientation on contributing to Wikimedia Commons.
Participants learned about:
Wikimedia Commons and its role in preserving open knowledge;
Creating Wikimedia accounts;
Understanding free licenses;
Best practices for successful contest submissions.
The virtual launch provided a foundation for participants, which some were first-time contributors to Wikimedia projects.
Training sessions
Throughout March and April, participants joined several training sessions organized by the international Wiki Loves Africa team. These sessions equipped creatives with technical and ethical skills required for documenting cultural heritage responsibly.
Audio creation and sound design training for Wikimedia Commons on 19 March 2026;
Ethical storytelling training on 27 March 2026;
“Documenting our Rites and Rituals with Respect and Integrity” on 28 March 2026;
Pattypan mass upload training on 4 April 2026;
Uploading photographs, videos, and audio files to Wikimedia Commons on 10 April 2026.
These learning opportunities strengthened participants’ understanding of visual storytelling, copyright, ethical documentation, and the technical processes involved in contributing multimedia content to Wikimedia Commons.
Taking the campaign to communities through photowalks
Beyond virtual engagement, the campaign emphasized practical documentation through physical meetups and photowalks.
Creatives in Rivers State held their meetup and photowalk between 3–5 April 2026, where participants explored their communities and documented the Easter Rites.
On 11 April 2026, creatives in Abuja gathered for their meetup and photowalk, providing opportunities for collaboration, peer learning, and hands-on experience in capturing images related to the theme. Gombe creatives hosted their physical meet-up on 25th April 2026, and so did Edo State and Oyo State.
Physical meet-up of creatives in AbujaDuring physical meet-up
Every photograph, audio recording, and video uploaded to Wikimedia Commons contributes to a growing repository of freely accessible knowledge, ensuring that Nigeria’s rites and rituals are visible to people around the world and preserved for future generations.
As participants continue contributing beyond the campaign, Wiki Loves Africa remains a reminder that documenting culture is not only about preserving the past. It is also about ensuring that African stories are represented and shared openly with the world.
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.
WikiConference North America 2026 will take place in Edmonton, Alberta (Canada), on September 25–27, 2026, with the Culture Crawl happening on September 24.
We expect around 250 people to attend. This will include scholarship recipients, guest speakers, and affiliates from across the region. The conference will feature workshops, presentations, and networking opportunities, fostering connections among Wikimedians, educators, and cultural organizations.
Building the Future of the Commons
“Building the Future of the Commons” is about reimagining how we create and share free knowledge in a rapidly changing world. As technologies like AI reshape how information is produced and consumed, the Wikimedia movement has a unique opportunity to ensure the commons stay open, human, reliable, and inclusive.
This theme aims to spark conversations across communities, the tech world, and cultural and educational ecosystems. Together, we will explore the evolving relationship between Wikimedia and AI, highlight underrepresented voices in our communities, and deepen our work with GLAMU institutions.
One of the conference days will also focus on empowering contributors at every level: from newcomers making their first edits, to everyday contributors looking to develop or improve their skills, to experienced users with extended rights and the issues that are most relevant to them.
Registration will open on Wednesday, June 3, 2026.
Wikimedia Korea and Wikimedians of Japan User Group held 「日本・韓国 友好編集月間」”the Korea-Japan Friendship Editing Month” from March 23 to April 17, 2026. This was the second Korea-Japan editathon, following the event held during Asia Month in 2024.
Results report
It appears that 106 articles were created and edited by 29 participants. Thank you all for your participation.
When organizing events like this, I often worry about what will happen if there aren’t enough participants, but Wikipedians are so kind that they always end up joining in before I even realize it.
From the perspective of someone who reviews articles as part of the management team, there are benefits to this kind of opportunity, such as gaining knowledge that you wouldn’t otherwise learn, and satisfying your intellectual curiosity. It’s very educational and good. Wikipedia is a wonderful tool that allows you to share the knowledge you have and the things you want to know with people all over the world.
Article introduction
It would be impossible to introduce all the articles contributed to this editorthon, so I will only introduce the articles that were selected for the April Monthly New/Improved Article Award.
・「老松堂日本行録」…上野ハム…This article was written by Ueno Ham. It is said to be the oldest surviving travelogue of Japan written by a Korean. Apparently, it is something that is studied in high school Japanese history, and when a certain Wikipedian showed me a glossary of Japanese history terms, I was excitedly saying, “This is in there!”
・「朝鮮半島のヒスイ製勾玉」…のりまき…This article was written by Norimaki. I wonder if his experience writing about 「糸魚川のヒスイ」 “Itoigawa Jade” is proving useful. According to the article, it seems that these magatama (comma-shaped beads) may be of Itoigawa origin.
・「朝鮮半島の建築」…犭…This article was written by 犭. It’s surprisingly difficult to summarize such a broad topic into this size, so I think it’s truly impressive.
・「柳川一件」…This is an article I wrote. I will explain more later.
summary
When I first joined Wikipedia (around 2019), my impression was that the only editing event on Wikipedia was “Asia Month,” so I’m very happy to see an increase in these kinds of international events. I’m not very good at socializing, so I’ll leave the initiation of those kinds of conversations to those who are good at it, and I’ll focus on organizing these kinds of events.
Quokka (ESEAP’s mascot character) and souvenirs from Korea（Lin Xiangru, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia commons）
Perhaps because of this connection, at the ESEAP Conference in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, I received a gift related to Korea (probably a notepad) from, 韓国のウィキメディアン, a Wikimedian in Korea, and I really like the design of it.
My own view
「朝鮮通信使」狩野安信 “Korean Envoys to Japan” by Kano Yasunobu（I, PHGCOM, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia commons）
Now, this is my own view. I thought it would be strange to criticize the merits and demerits of other people’s articles without writing one myself, so I completely revised one of my own articles. It’s an article called「柳川一件」 “The Yanagawa Incident”
I usually write about the various feudal domains of the Edo period, so I didn’t want to stray too far from that if possible. However, 「対馬府中藩」”the Tsushima-Fuchu Domain”, which has some connection to Korea, was too heavy for me. While searching for a subject of just the right difficulty level, I came across this theme.
The Tsushima clan Sou, determined to repair the broken Korea-Japan relations caused by the Bunroku-Keicho War. But couldn’t find a way. They even resorted to tampering official documents to the capital in Japan(apparently they had been doing so regularly before), and managed to send a Korean envoy again, and restore diplomatic relations. However, one of their retainers (Yanagawa), who played a key role in this effort, became dissatisfied with his position and sought independence, ultimately taking the outrageous step of exposing the forgery of the official documents. This family feud is known as the “Yanagawa Incident.” It’s a very interesting story, and I enjoyed writing it. I was thinking, “These guys are tampering with official documents again (lol),” while I was writing it.
It was selected for 月間強化記事賞 “the Monthly Featured Article Award for April”. All’s well that ends well.
For close to two years, my involvement in the Wikimedia ecosystem was mostly technical. I contributed through code during hackathons as a member of Wiki Mentor Africa. I understood the connections among platforms such as Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons. I knew their importance, but I also felt there was more I could do. Something was missing in how I was contributing.
I came into the program with one clear goal: to gain a deeper, practical understanding of how to contribute beyond the technical side of Wikimedia. I wanted to move from simply supporting the ecosystem to actively building knowledge within it.
The training opened my eyes to the structure and responsibility behind Wikimedia contributions. I learned that every Wikimedia project is guided by strong principles that protect the quality and reliability of information.
On Wikipedia, content must be notable, verifiable, and supported by reliable sources. On Wikidata, data must be structured, accurate, and referenced. On Wikimedia Commons, files must follow copyright and licensing policies.
These are not just guidelines; they are what make Wikimedia a trusted global knowledge resource.
Learning Through Practice
One of the strongest aspects of the mentorship program was its practical training. The program did not simply explain policies and standards; it required us to apply them through real contributions.
I learned how to properly reference articles, structure content, improve neutrality, and contribute according to Wikimedia standards. At first, this process was challenging. Finding reliable sources, understanding notability requirements, and writing neutrally required patience and attention to detail.
However, through continuous practice and guidance from the trainers, these concepts gradually became clearer and easier to apply.
The trainers also played a major role in making the experience impactful. Complex policies and technical concepts were broken down into simple, understandable steps, making the learning process accessible and encouraging.
Milestones That Changed My Confidence
One major milestone for me during the program was creating two articles and receiving a barnstar in recognition of my contributions.
That moment shifted my confidence completely.
For the first time, I felt that I was no longer just observing how open knowledge is built behind the scenes. I was actively contributing to the preservation and sharing of knowledge myself.
The experience helped me see Wikimedia differently. It became more than a technical ecosystem I contributed to during hackathons. It became a collaborative space where I could directly improve content, document knowledge, and support representation online.
Growing Beyond the Program
Beyond technical editing skills, the mentorship program also changed my perspective on community contribution and leadership.
Looking ahead, I plan to share what I have learned with my community and support the onboarding of new contributors. I am also stepping into a new role as a trainer for an April editathon, which reflects how much this experience has shaped my growth within the Wikimedia movement.
This journey has been both challenging and rewarding. It pushed me to learn, adapt, and contribute more meaningfully.
Wikimedia is more than a platform. It is a collective effort to make knowledge accessible to everyone.
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