Introduction

On 2 September 2026, the new Wikimedia CEE Hub Steering Committee began its term, following several months of nominations, eligibility checks, community engagement and voting. Eight members were elected: four by individual community members and four by CEE affiliates, and two more were later co-opted.

But this election was also a first test of putting the CEE Hub’s governance model into practice. We had the rules; we still needed to build the process around them. That meant establishing an independent Electoral Commission, translating eligibility rules into practice, working with two different electorates, and building Fala, our own voting tool on Wikimedia Toolforge.

From rules to an election

The election had two constituencies: individual CEE community members and CEE affiliates, each electing four members. That made eligibility one of the first practical challenges. Community voters had to meet both Wikimedia activity requirements and demonstrate a connection to the CEE community, while affiliates had to designate representatives to vote on their behalf.

To oversee the process, an independent three-member Electoral Commission was established: Antanana as Chair, Bencemac and Gdarin. The Commission verified candidates and voter eligibility, interpreted the rules when unclear cases appeared, supervised the election, and ultimately certified the results. Hub staff supported the process and its technical implementation, but decisions about eligibility and the application of election rules remained with the Commission.

Thirteen candidates entered the nomination process, and after the eligibility review, twelve were confirmed for the final ballots: six Community candidates and six Affiliate candidates.

Building Fala

One of the biggest practical questions was how to run the vote itself. The election had two different electorates, different eligibility rules, preferential voting, and the possibility that one person could be eligible to vote in both categories.

Instead of adapting the election to the limits of an existing tool, we built Fala on Wikimedia Toolforge. Voters logged in with their Wikimedia accounts, eligibility could be checked through the system, and Community and Affiliate voting were handled separately. Voters could also return and update their ballot before the deadline.

Privacy was part of the design as well. Fala recorded who had voted and when a ballot was submitted or updated, but it did not keep the voter’s candidate selections or rankings linked to their identity.

Building Fala also strengthened the Hub’s ability to run its own governance processes independently. We were not limited to whatever an existing election platform happened to support; we could build the voting process around the rules and needs defined by the CEE Hub itself.

Voting and results

Voting was open from 6 to 20 July 2026. On each ballot, voters could rank as many or as few candidates as they wanted. The candidate ranked first received six points, the second five, and so on, while unranked candidates received no points.

Fifty-two community members voted in the Community election, while 15 CEE affiliates participated through their designated representatives. The Electoral Commission then certified the results, including the  rules used to decide the winner when two or more candidates received the same number of votes in the Affiliate election.

The elected members were Shahen Araboghlian, Magda Barascu, Wojciech Pędzich, Mārtiņš Bruņenieks, Gorana Gomirac, Toni Sant, Klára Joklová and Vera Pelhan. They later co-opted Iglika Ivanova and Armen Mirzoyan, completing the ten-member Steering Committee.

The first meeting of the new Steering Committee took place on 2 September 2026, which marked the official start of its term. That is also when they selected the Chair: Toni Sant and Co-Chair: Vera Pelhan.

What we learned

The clearest lesson was how difficult it can be to turn governance rules into something a voting system can actually verify. Some criteria, such as account age, edit count and block history, could be checked directly from Wikimedia data. Others could not. For example, eligibility through membership in approved CEE mailing lists could not be verified by existing voting tools such as SecurePoll. That problem led directly to Fala: voters log in with their Wikimedia account, verify their email with a one-time code, and the address is checked against a whitelist built from the approved mailing lists. In other words, the election rules themselves shaped the architecture of the tool.

A different lesson came from affiliate participation. Some eligible affiliates never nominated a representative and therefore never voted. That showed us that simply giving affiliates a formal role in governance is not enough; they also need to see the election as part of their own responsibility and engage with the process early enough. After the election, the Electoral Commission followed up directly with non-participating affiliates to understand why they had dropped out. For future elections, earlier contact, clearer expectations and more active follow-up with affiliates will probably matter as much as the voting system itself.

What comes next

The election also made us think more broadly about how the CEE Hub puts its governance into practice. If the Hub is going to make more of its own decisions through formal community processes, it needs infrastructure that can support them. In some cases, the available tools were designed for different purposes; in others, there was simply no dedicated tool for the kind of internal decision-making the Hub needed.

For that reason, we decided to build Iskara, a voting tool for internal CEE Hub decision-making. The aim is to give the Hub greater independence in implementing its governance and a practical way to run its own votes when they are needed. Fala was our first experience of building such infrastructure around a real governance process; Iskara takes that experience further and applies it to the Hub’s internal decision-making more generally.

To learn more about the Steering Committee and internal governance of Wikimedia CEE Hub, check out the dedicated Meta page.

As the Iranian Wikimedians User Group (IWUG) started preparing its plans for the coming year and its next grant proposal, we wanted to hear directly from the community about what kinds of activities they were interested in and where we could do better.

In June 2026, we conducted a survey asking people around the user group about their current involvement with IWUG, their interest in future activities, and the kinds of programs and training they would find useful.

We received 147 responses. The results are now helping us shape our plans for the next year.

Who responded?

The survey ran from 8 to 23 June 2026. It was mainly intended for IWUG members and people connected with the user group community.

We shared it through the IWUG Telegram group and channel, as well as the Persian Wikipedia Village Pump (قهوه‌خانه). Anyone who had the link could respond.

Because participation was open and self-selected, the results should not be treated as representative of the entire Persian Wikipedia community. The survey was intended to help us understand the community around IWUG and what people in that community expect from the user group.

Almost all respondents were active on Wikipedia. 146 of the 147 respondents selected Wikipedia as one of the Wikimedia projects where they are most active. Some also reported contributing to Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, Wikiquote, Wiktionary, Wikisource and other Wikimedia projects.

Interest is high, but participation is much lower

One of the clearest results was the difference between people’s interest in IWUG activities and how much they currently participate.

85% of respondents reported at least a medium level of interest in participating in IWUG activities. Of those, 44.9% described their interest as high or very high.

Current participation was much lower.

65.3% said their current participation in IWUG was none, very low or low. Only 9.5% described their participation as high or very high.

The survey also showed that many respondents were not very familiar with IWUG. 70.1% said they had no, very little or low familiarity with the user group, while only 11.6% reported high or very high familiarity.

Taken together, these results suggest that there are people who are interested in getting involved but do not yet participate regularly, and in many cases may not know enough about IWUG or how to take part.

This is something we want to work on during the coming year.

Online education was the most popular activity

Education was one of the strongest themes in the responses.

When we asked which types of activities people would be interested in joining, online educational and skill-building programs were the most popular option, selected by 92 respondents (62.6%).

Article-writing campaigns and competitions were selected by 70 respondents (47.6%), while 62 respondents (42.2%) were interested in in-person social gatherings.

We also asked what people would like to learn through online programs.

97 respondents (66%) selected introductory training about Wikipedia and editing. 83 (56.5%) were interested in tools and scripts. 78 (53.1%) wanted to learn more about contributing to other Wikimedia projects such as Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons and Wikisource, and 67 respondents (45.6%) were interested in learning more about the wider Wikimedia movement.

Some of the written responses also mentioned that learning how Wikipedia works can be difficult, especially for newer contributors. Several respondents asked for clearer and more accessible educational material in Persian.

This fits closely with some of the programs we were already considering.

During the coming year, IWUG plans to create short educational videos in Persian and organize online workshops and webinars introducing users to different ways of contributing to Wikimedia projects. The survey results will help us decide which topics to prioritize.

What other activities are people interested in?

Respondents also showed considerable interest in collaborative campaigns and competitions.

The most popular option in this area was competitions organized together with other countries or Wikipedia communities, selected by 79 respondents (53.7%).

Among established Wikimedia campaigns, Wiki Loves Earth was selected by 74 respondents (50.3%), followed by Wiki Loves Folklore with 70 (47.6%). Wiki Loves Monuments was selected by 49 respondents, while Women in Red and Wikipedia Asian Month each received 38 selections.

For possible in-person programs, educational workshops were selected by 90 respondents (61.2%). Informal meetups were selected by 81 (55.1%), Wikipedia birthday celebrations by 79 (53.7%), and technical sessions focused on bug fixing and tool development by 63 (42.9%).

We also asked how people would like to hear about future IWUG activities. 114 respondents, or 77.6%, said they would like to receive information about programs by email.

These responses give us a useful picture of both the programs people are interested in and how we can do a better job of informing them about those opportunities.

Using the results in our planning

The main purpose of this survey was practical. We are currently preparing our annual plan and our next grant proposal, and we wanted community feedback to be part of that process.

Some of the results have confirmed ideas that were already under discussion, particularly our plans for educational videos, webinars and online workshops.

Other results, especially the difference between interest and current participation, showed us that we also need to pay more attention to outreach and communication. It is not enough to organize activities if interested contributors do not know about them or are unsure how to get involved.

We hope to use the coming year to make IWUG’s activities more visible and make it easier for interested contributors to participate.

A larger Persian Wikipedia survey is coming

This survey was focused on the community around IWUG. We are also planning a much larger survey aimed at the wider Persian Wikipedia community.

There is some history behind this. From 21 May to 20 June 2016, Iranian Wikimedians conducted a large survey of the Persian Wikipedia community that received 1,780 responses. It was promoted very widely, including outside the usual Wikimedia community channels. The results of that survey were never formally published.

Later in 2026, we plan to conduct another broad survey of the Persian Wikipedia community. Like the 2016 survey, it will be promoted well beyond IWUG’s own channels and will also use outreach outside Wikimedia spaces.

The purpose of that survey will be different from the June IWUG survey. We want to hear from a much wider range of Persian Wikipedia users and contributors and get a broader picture of the community.

After the new survey is completed and its results are published, we also plan to prepare a separate report comparing the findings with the 2016 survey.

For now, the June survey has already given us useful information for our immediate planning. It showed strong interest in educational activities, identified areas where contributors want more support, and highlighted a clear gap between people’s interest in IWUG and their current level of participation.

Those findings will be part of how we shape our programs for the coming year.

Welcome to “Don’t Blink”! Every month we share public policy developments from around the world that shape people’s ability to participate in the free knowledge movement. In case you blinked last month, here are the most important advocacy topics that have kept the Wikimedia Foundation busy.

The Global Advocacy team works to advocate laws and government policies that protect the volunteer community-led Wikimedia model, Wikimedia’s people, and the Wikimedia movement’s core values. To learn more about us and the work we do with the rest of the Foundation: follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Bluesky; sign up for our quarterly newsletter or Wikimedia public policy mailing list; and visit our Meta-Wiki webpage.

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Understanding online age verification and its impact on the Wikimedia projects

Over the past several years, lawmakers around the world have been passing a wide variety of legislation and regulations aimed to make using the internet safer for children. These laws differ in the kinds of platforms they target, the age ranges they intend to protect, and whether they apply to specific content, entire platforms, or even to devices. What they share in common, however, is the idea that minors should, in some way, have a different experience online than adults, whether that includes restricting access to certain features or types of content or banning them completely from using certain types of websites and services like social media.

This practice, called age gating, relies on a website or service host identifying and verifying the age of its users through a process called age verification. Age verification typically requires that a user, regardless of age, show a government ID and submit to a facial scan to prove that the ID is theirs. In fact, you may have already seen some of these requirements popping up on websites you use every day or have read headlines about users’ personally identifiable information (PII) being stolen. While the effectiveness of these laws remains to be seen, the Wikimedia Foundation has been raising concerns about how versions of these laws can impact important human rights like privacy, freedom of expression, and access to reliable information, as well as advocating that these laws be narrowly tailored to address some of the riskiest websites and services online. 

Explaining the basics of online age verification
[Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of our explainer blog post series]

To provide context on this complicated legal and technical shift in internet policy, the Foundation published a three-part blog series, which explains the history of age-based restrictions online, basic concepts and technological measures of age verification, and the specific types of laws repeated across many different government initiatives. 

In Part 1, we take you through an internet policy timeline, which explores how age verification and its various requirements to show different content depending on the users’ age have evolved over time. We also shed light on why the trend of child safety online has escalated the calls for age verification in recent years. In Part 2, we spell out the meaning of terms related to age verification and explain the technical processes behind complying with age verification laws. We also highlight how age gating on public interest educational content like the Wikimedia projects could impact the human rights of Wikimedia users, especially those of minors. In Part 3, we discuss the specifics of the types of platforms and content that these laws typically target, and highlight some of the public policy advocacy work we have done in the form of “friend-of-the-court” briefs related to challenges to certain state laws requiring age verification in the United States.

If you want to be informed about the recent developments around age verification regulations, as well as the potential effects these developments might have on your rights and freedoms online, this blog post series is a great place to start learning more.

Read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of our online age verification explainer blog post series.

Contributing to a public consultation on the Brazil’s ECA Digital child safety regulation
[Learn more about our response in our blog post]

As we shared early this year, Brazil has joined the global conversation around child safety and age verification online by passing the Digital Statute of the Child and Adolescent (ECA Digital). The ECA Digital established a new framework for protecting minors in digital environments, and included a sweeping requirement that app stores and certain online platforms implement age verification mechanisms to show only content deemed appropriate for minors given their age. During the drafting of the law’s regulations, we submitted comments urging the Brazilian authorities to customize the application of these regulations proportionally to a platform’s risk level, and to consider an interpretation of the law that would exempt digital public goods entirely from the age verification requirements in order to protect crucial rights like freedom of expression and access to reliable information on the internet.

In July 2026, we responded to another public consultation: Brazil’s National Data Protection Authority (ANPD) solicited comments on their proposed guidelines about how to conduct age verification. In our submission, we explained that because the draft guidelines were too broad in their definition of social media, they could potentially end up capturing digital public goods like open-source software repositories, citizen science portals, and collaborative encyclopedic platforms such as Wikipedia as well.

Addressing this overbroad definition is important because, under the guidelines, platforms considered to be social media are assumed to be accessed by minors and, consequently, are required to perform age verification. If public interest projects are mistakenly defined as social media, they will be required to do the same. We suggested that the ANPD narrow their definition to focus on platforms with high-risk features, and even to go even further by creating a framework for digital public goods that recognizes their low-risk nature and that, accordingly, prevents them from being regulated the same as social media platforms.

Learn more about our response in our blog post.

Wikimedia’s value in conversations about artificial intelligence

The Foundation has illustrated how the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) companies and services have impacted the Wikimedia projects. We have discussed the negative impact that web scraping to create AI training data has on our technical and human resources, shared how AI companies threaten the social contract behind free and open knowledge, and talked about the technical solutions we are employing to identify and counter this impact. While the vast increase of web scraping is one of the more urgent changes arising from AI’s influence on the internet landscape, there are many other ways that AI tools interact with the Wikimedia projects. The voice of the Foundation and volunteers can contribute significantly with its experience to conversations about maintaining information integrity, making sure that AI-generated content does not entrench existing knowledge gaps, and enabling community moderation so it can remain sustainable while dealing with an influx of synthetic content on the web. 

Sharing how Wikimedia safeguards reliable information at the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance
[Learn more about why participation at the UN is important for our advocacy goals in our blog post]

Jan Gerlach (Public Policy Director) joined the first official session of the United Nations (UN) Global Dialogue on AI Governance to discuss the impact of AI web scraping on Wikipedia and the broader knowledge commons. The UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance was established by the UN General Assembly based on recommendations in the Global Digital Compact to provide a platform for governments, academics, technology companies, civil society, and other interested parties to come together to participate in open discussions about how AI should be governed and to share their best practices. In a panel titled “Safeguarding Reliable Information in the Age of AI: Finding Common Ground,” Jan shared the negative impacts that web scraping by AI tools have on the Wikimedia Foundation’s servers and resources. He shared how Wikipedia can serve as a “canary in the coal mine” for the digital commons as a whole, establishing an early warning when these valuable shared resources are put under strain by new technologies.

Leading up to the official session, the Global Dialogue also hosted several consultations in 2026 , including a discussion held by the Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights (OHCHR) that the Foundation attended last May, and will host its next official session in May of next year, 2027. It is vital that civil society organizations like the Foundation are invited to participate in discussions like these in order to continue sharing how new technologies are impacting the online information ecosystem, especially open knowledge, and to work with UN Member States to determine how to best address these impacts and build a more sustainable future for the digital commons.

Learn more about why participation at the UN is important to our advocacy goals in our blog post.

Wikimania sessions showcased how the volunteer communities are considering the relation between the Wikimedia projects and AI
[Check out our blog post for public policy advocacy sessions at Wikimania and learn in Creative Commons’ blog post about their participation at the conference]

A popular topic at the 2026 Wikimania was the implications of a world that is rapidly adopting AI at scale. The conference, held in Paris, France, this year, began with a full Day Zero of advocacy-related sessions, including a Creative Commons (CC) salon, which celebrated 25 years of the organization and included several CC staff reflecting both on their beginnings there as well as new considerations AI presents to open licensing. 

Several sessions during the week also highlighted discussions about AI: from AI’s impact on creativity to what gets lost when data is scraped without important context, and from open legal and technical questions about AI to how we can best defend Wikipedia’s reliability in the age of rapid AI-generated content. Beyond the official schedule, a pre-conference event and several side events focused on AI were also organized alongside the conference. This wide variety of topics not only shows that developments in AI are top of mind in the Wikimedian communities, but also the depth of wisdom that open knowledge communities can share in relation to this new digital landscape.

Check out our blog post for public policy advocacy sessions at Wikimania and learn in Creative Commons’ blog post about their participation at the conference.

Wikimedians denied a voice at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) for a sixth time
[Read our Foundation statement to learn how and why China has vetoed the Foundation’s observer status once again]

For a sixth time, the Foundation applied to become a permanent observer at WIPO and was excluded due to a single veto from China. Despite 25 years of experience hosting one of the world’s most visited open knowledge platforms and navigating complicated and innovative copyright issues on a global scale, and even counting with the positive endorsements of many other Member States, a global community of 250,000 volunteer contributors was denied a seat at the table where the future of intellectual property policy is decided.

Even more worryingly, this year the denial was not only spurred by misrepresentations about the accuracy and neutrality of Wikimedia’s community-driven policies and practices, but also seems to signal a broader trend in suppressing legitimate participation by civil society, as evidenced by the recent cancellation of the world’s largest digital rights conference, RightsCon. The Foundation will continue to pursue accreditation at WIPO and advocate the representation of digital public goods in the world’s most influential intellectual property policy forum. 

Read our Foundation statement to learn how and why China has vetoed the Foundation’s observer status once again.

Check out the latest issue of the Global Advocacy quarterly newsletter!
[Read the newsletter and subscribe for quarterly updates]

The eleventh issue of our Global Advocacy newsletter looks closely a the topic of online age verification, launching our three part blog series on the topic with an introduction from Stan Adams (Public Policy Specialist for North America) and Amanda Jardine (Lead Counsel) explaining the value of pseudonymity online to freedom of expression and how both are threatened by these new regulations.

The newsletter also contains a cautiously optimistic update on the Foundation’s category status under the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act (UK OSA), which will determine Wikipedia’s duties under that law. We also celebrated the Foundation joining the Digital Public Good Alliance (DPGA), highlighted a recent New York Times interview with Bernadette Meehan (CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation), and shared news about the Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards recipients and the cancellation of RightsCon.

Read more in the newsletter and subscribe for quarterly updates!

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“Don’t Blink” is for you! Please take one minute to complete our survey about how our monthly public policy advocacy recap meets your needs and reflects your interests. Thank you for reading, every month, about how the open knowledge movement shapes discussions and decisions about the future of the internet!

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Follow us on LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and Bluesky; sign up for our quarterly newsletter to receive updates; join our Wikipedia public policy mailing list; and visit our Meta-Wiki webpage. We hope to see you there!