What happens when people who are working to promote, preserve, and develop different languages come together?

They share experiences, learn from one another, discuss the challenges they face, and look for practical ways to strengthen their communities.

That is what the Language Diversity Conference 2026 is about.

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.

A community spotlight: Dagbani Wikimedians

The Dagbani Wikimedians User Group (DWUG) is one of the communities contributing to this conversation.

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 of new 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.

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.

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.

Pijri Paijar, Ayam Woku khas Sulawesi, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

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).

A Comprehensive Contribution Experience

Oceanmuse, Kopdar WikiRempah Bandung, Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY 4.0

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI, Wikidata and the opening ceremony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A morning inside the Sainte-Geneviève Library

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

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

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

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

Photography and WikiPortraits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indigenous knowledge and responsible sharing

“Respecting Indigenous Knowledge in Open Spaces.”

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

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

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

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

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

CEE Youth and ideas for future activities

Youth participation was another part of my Wikimania programme.

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

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

Later, I joined the CEE Youth session and workshop.

Meeting WikiOrchestra

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

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

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

Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2024 Istanbul through the eyes of its designer

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

Manuscripts and the closing ceremony

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Looking back at my first Wikimania

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikimedia Foundation’s support in 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wikimedia Foundation’s events

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

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

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

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

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

WikiWomen+ Summit 2026

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

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

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

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

On 15 August 2006, Wikiversity opened a new space within the Wikimedia movement: a place where people could not only access educational resources, but also create, share, and participate in learning together.

Wikiversity had grown out of work within Wikibooks and became an independent Wikimedia project in August 2006. Its creation expanded the educational possibilities of the movement beyond textbooks, with a focus on both learning resources and learning activities in English and other languages.

Twenty years later, that idea remains at the heart of Wikiversity.

Its motto, “Set learning free,” captures an approach to education built around participation, collaboration, open resources, and the ability for learners and educators to shape the learning environment themselves.

But what does learning in the open actually look like?

Find learning resources for teaching and learning

One of the simplest ways to use Wikiversity is to find and adapt learning resources. The project hosts lesson plans, course notes, reading lists, problem sets, activities, simulations, teaching aids, and other materials that educators and learners can use and develop.

For example, Student Success: Information Literacy introduces learners to library resources, database searching, digital media evaluation, evaluating online sources, academic honesty, and citation. It combines explanations with multimedia resources and activities that can support the development of research and information literacy skills.

Resources like these can be used as they are, adapted to meet a particular learning need, or developed further by other educators and learners.

That ability to build on what already exists is an important part of learning in an open environment.

Build a learning experience

Wikiversity is not limited to individual learning materials. Educators can also use it to bring together the different elements of a course or learning environment.

A Wikiversity course can include a syllabus, learning objectives, readings, activities, assignments, discussions, and other supporting materials. The project’s School and University Projects page documents examples of educators and institutions using Wikiversity in formal teaching and student assignments.

SPIR608 Political Simulation and Gaming, an open educational resource supported by the University of Westminster, shows what this can look like in practice. The module combines lectures, game playing, workshops, tutorials, presentations, and group discussions. Students analyse political simulations, participate in role playing exercises, research historical and contemporary conflicts, and eventually create and play test their own political simulation prototypes.

This shows how Wikiversity can become more than a collection of pages. It can become a shared learning environment, structured around a subject, a course, or a particular group of learners.

Learn by doing

Perhaps one of Wikiversity’s most distinctive features is its emphasis on learning by doing.

Learners can edit pages, contribute to course-related projects, write papers, conduct research, discuss what they are studying, and collaborate with others. Instead of simply consuming educational content, participants can become involved in creating and improving it.

Over the years, this approach has supported a wide range of school and university projects, including Technical Writing, Design for the Environment at the University of Toronto, Instructional Design at Indiana University, and Media Literacy at Temple University.

Wikiversity has also provided space for learners and educators to explore emerging subjects, including Artificial Intelligence.

This approach brings learning and knowledge creation together. Learners do not simply study existing knowledge; they can question it, contribute to it, document what they learn, and share their work with others.

That is one of the ideas that makes Wikiversity part of the wider Wikimedia ecosystem: learning can itself become a form of knowledge creation.

Explore research and scholarly learning

Learning on Wikiversity can also extend into research.

The project supports research activities and provides spaces where learners and educators can explore questions, develop ideas, and share their work. This reflects an aspect of Wikiversity’s original vision: creating not only educational resources, but also opportunities for people to learn through research and participation.

One example is Introduction to Scientific Journalism, an open course that connects scientific journalism with contributions to Wikimedia projects, giving participants opportunities to develop their skills while contributing to open knowledge.

Another is An introduction to the use and needs of Research Groups with WikiEducation tools on Wikiversity. The research examines how Wikiversity could support Scientific Research Groups through shared resources, documentation, collaboration, and the dissemination of research. It draws on questionnaires, interviews, and literature review to explore the needs and experiences of research groups using or considering Wikiversity.

Wikiversity also hosts WikiJournals, where scholarly articles can undergo external peer review before being published in an indexed, citable, open access format.

These examples show how learning can move beyond the classroom: a question can become a research project, a course activity can become an open contribution, and work developed by learners can become part of a wider knowledge ecosystem.

Learning that remains open

A learning resource does not have to remain fixed. A course does not have to belong to a single classroom. A learner does not have to remain only a consumer of information.

On Wikiversity, educational materials can be created and adapted collaboratively. Courses can evolve. Learners can participate in shaping the resources they use. Educators can share what they develop with others. And learning activities can contribute to a growing body of open knowledge.

For educators looking to experiment with open and collaborative approaches to teaching, Wikiversity offers many examples through its School and University Projects. WikiConecta, a free course for university educators, is one example of how learning resources can remain openly available beyond the original course and participants, allowing others to explore and build on them.

Learners can also explore resources such as the Open Educational Resources lesson, German Home Immersion School, and UrSchool to see different approaches to self-directed and community-based learning.

For subject-based and university learning, examples include Environmental Ethics, Programming with Wikidata, and Hindi Literature.

The EduWiki Hub also maintains an OER Documentation page that brings together resources and examples from across the Wikimedia education community.

Twenty years of learning in the open

Twenty years after its launch, Wikiversity with over 166,000 learning modules on the platform, continues to embody a simple but powerful idea: learning does not have to happen behind closed doors.

It can be created, shared, adapted, questioned, and developed together.

That is what makes Wikiversity’s model relevant today; not simply as a repository of educational materials, but as a space where learning and knowledge creation can happen together.

Set learning free.

Happy 20th anniversary, Wikiversity!

This Diff post is brought to you by the EduWiki Hub team, as part of our ongoing effort to highlight practical ways Wikimedia projects can support teaching and learning. As Wikiversity celebrates 20 years of open learning, we hope this overview helps educators and learners discover how the project can support courses, learning activities, research, and collaborative knowledge creation.

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.

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.

Join the AWA community here to connect with Wikimedians across Africa and take part in future learning sessions.

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.

Wiki Loves Monuments Iran 2025

The Iranian competition ran from 1 to 31 October 2025.

During that month, participants contributed 2,513 eligible photographs. In comparison, the 2024 competition received 2,722 eligible photographs.

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.

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

The full international results are available on Wikimedia Commons.

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.

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.

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.

Looking toward the next edition

As the next Wiki Loves Monuments Iran approaches, we want to build on what we learned from both 2024 and 2025.

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.

There are more than 33,000 monuments to document.

There is still a lot to photograph.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

P: What motivates you to edit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every August 19, the world celebrates the camera as a tool of connection — and for the free knowledge movement, it’s also a reminder of what a single photograph can unlock. On Wikimedia Commons, a well-lit image of a market stall, a sacred hill, or a rare frog isn’t just decoration. It’s the visual backbone that lets millions of Wikipedia readers actually see the subject they came to learn about.

Copyleft was never a synonym for “low quality”

There’s a persistent myth that free-licensed photography is a compromise, that the “good” images live behind stock-photo paywalls, and Commons gets the leftovers. Our community’s work says otherwise. Across campaigns like Wiki Loves Africa, Wiki Loves Earth, and Wiki Loves Monuments, Malagasy wikimedia contributors have uploaded more than 7,000 photographs to Wikimedia Commons; many shot with the same care, composition, and technical rigor as a commissioned assignment. Free licensing describes who can use an image, not how well it was made.

The real ROI of a free photograph

For a professional photographer, “return on investment” usually means a sale. But contributing to free knowledge pays out differently and almost certainly further. A single well-tagged image uploaded once can illustrate an article read in dozens of languages, get pulled into news graphics, textbooks, museum panels, and other Wikimedia projects, and keep circulating indefinitely without another transaction. For our Malagasy contributors, individual campaign contributions have gone on to be reused across as many as 46 different language editions of Wikipedia and its sister projects: a reach no single print sale or stock license could match in a such tight timeframe, and without any marketing budget. That’s the ROI that matters here: not one payment, but compounding, borderless visibility and most importantly a meaningful added value to the global knowledge.

That’s the ROI that matters here: meaningful added value to the world’s shared knowledge.

A two-way exchange, not a donation

Framing this as simple generosity undersells it. Contributing quality images to Commons is a genuine exchange:

• The global community gains verifiable, freely reusable visual documentation of places, cultures, and species that were previously invisible or poorly represented online, closing real gaps in the world’s shared reference library.
• The contributor gains a public, permanent portfolio with real analytics of reuse and reach, skill-building through structured campaigns and peer feedback, and a credited body of work that follows their name across every project it touches.

It’s less a donation and more a long-term investment both sides keep drawing value from.

Madagascar is bringing professional-level work to the table

What stands out in our community’s activity isn’t just volume: it’s intent. Wiki Loves Earth contributors documented Madagascar’s biodiversity with the eye of field photographers. Wiki Loves Folklore campaigns paired careful photography with multilingual article-writing, treating imagery as genuine documentation tool, not an afterthought.

Then comes the real richness of being part of a community. With proper support, new contributors gain lasting skills on composition, licensing, and metadata: the fundamentals that separate a snapshot from a usable, professional-grade Commons file.

This World Photography Day, We want to remind that free knowledge photos never had license to be anything less than good. It never was.

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Wikimedia Community User Group Madagascar contributes to Wikipedia and its sister projects.
Learn more on Meta-Wiki, Facebook and Linkedin

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

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

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

Recruitment of new contributors:

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

Created new articles and improve content on Kinyarwanda Wikipedia

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

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

Community Health

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

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

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

Respect for indigenous communities

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

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

Automating and improving translation

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

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

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

Collaboration across communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

Project outcomes

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

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

Community outreach through training and meets up

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

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

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

Lesson learned

Through WikiSuarana project, we all learned two valuable lessons:

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

Hatur nuhun!

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

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

Misinformation on climate change

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

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

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

AI crawlers: Encroaching on creativity?

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

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

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

Striking a balance

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

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

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

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

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

Skill Acquired

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

Some of my image uploads

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

My Gratitude

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

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.

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.

Some of the sessions included:

• The Wiki Loves Africa International Virtual Launch on 5 March 2026;
• A photo essay writing workshop on 11 March 2026;
• 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.

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.

Submissions can be explored through the event page , the dashboard or through the category

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

About the On-Wiki Skills Mentorship Program

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

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

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

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

A Journey of Learning and Transformation

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

Mentees contributed in various ways;including:

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

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

Highlights from the Graduation Ceremony

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

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

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

Recognizing the Mentors and Organizing Team

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

Anglophone Mentors

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

Francophone Mentors

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

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

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

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

Looking Ahead

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

From mentee to trainer — how mentorship transformed my Wikimedia journey

From Silence to Curiosity

When I joined the Wikimedia community in 2025, I was excited but unsure of where to begin. The platform felt vast and intimidating, and for a long time I remained passive, watching others contribute while I struggled to find my own entry point.

That uncertainty began to shift when I discovered a community ready to support me. I realized that even small steps — reading articles, observing edits, and asking questions — could open the door to something bigger.

The Turning Point – Africa Wiki Women Mentorship

Everything changed when I was selected as a participant in the On WikiSkills Mentorship Program organized by Africa Wiki Women. Over three months, I received structured, hands‑on training across Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.

I learned how to create and edit articles, add structured data, and contribute images. More importantly, I discovered how mentorship can transform hesitation into confidence.

Growth – From Mentee to Trainer

This mentorship gave me more than technical skills — it gave me courage. I moved from being an inactive member to someone who contributes meaningfully to open knowledge.

A major milestone was writing and publishing a Wikipedia article about Samuel Gbadebo Odewumi, a respected Nigerian academic and transport expert. Contributing that article gave me a sense of pride and responsibility, as it ensured that his work and impact are documented for a global audience. It also reminded me that mentorship is not only about learning but about creating knowledge that others can build upon.

The highlight of my journey was becoming a Wikidata trainer, guiding Africa Wiki Women newbies during the April EditHer Africa Contest. In that session, I introduced participants to Wikidata, helping them navigate the same learning curve I once faced. Each edit and training moment became a symbol of empowerment, showing that knowledge grows stronger when shared.

Gratitude and Reflection

I am deeply grateful to the organizers and mentors of Africa Wiki Women for their guidance. Their support helped me find my voice and leadership within the Wikimedia movement.

The testimonial poster created for the program captures this transformation — from mentee to confident contributor — and stands as a reminder of how mentorship can change lives. It is more than an image; it is a symbol of growth, courage, and community.

Looking Ahead

As I continue my journey, I look forward to expanding my contributions and mentoring others. The Program taught me that belonging comes not from knowing everything, but from being willing to learn, share, and grow together.

I now see myself not just as a participant, but as a builder of community — someone who can help others find their own voice in the Wikimedia movement. In particular, I want to encourage more women to come on board, to see themselves as knowledge creators and leaders. Their voices and perspectives are vital, and through initiatives like On WikiSkills Mentorship Program organized by Africa Wiki Women, we can ensure that the Wikimedia projects reflect the richness and diversity of our world.

If you are a woman curious about contributing, now is the time to join us. Your story, your knowledge, and your perspective matter — and together, we can make Wikimedia stronger and more inclusive.

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

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

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

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

From the attendees

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

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

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

Wikipedia vs Digital Age

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

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

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

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

The solution

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

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

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

The Dilemma

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

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

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

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.

That changed when I joined Africa Wiki Women and was introduced to the On-Wiki Skills Mentorship Program.

Entering Wikimedia Beyond the Technical Layer

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.

And now, I am fully part of that effort.

Happy editing.