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

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

This is a short recap for those who missed it.

The Reality of the Digital Barrier

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

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

Measuring Missing Alt-Text

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

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

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

From Discussion to Action: The MediaWiki Accessibility Checker

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

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

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

A Legacy of “Wikiricci” and Community Care

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

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

Next Steps and Community Involvement

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

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

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

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Updates for editors

• The Reader Experience team is conducting an experiment to show the reading lists feature, which is still in development, to logged-out mobile readers to test whether it encourages account creation at a higher rate compared to the watchstar button. The experiment was launched on May 18th on German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, and Urdu wikis, and it will run for a month.
• The Wikimedia Apps team released Phase 1 of the redesigned Home Feed to the Android Beta app. The new Home Feed includes a refreshed “Community” tab and a personalized “For You” tab featuring daily updated reading recommendations. The redesign is part of a broader effort to improve content discovery and create more engaging learning experiences in the Wikipedia apps.
•  View all 18 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, an issue where images could fail to load for some suggested edits on Special:Homepage, leaving the thumbnail stuck in a loading state, has now been fixed. [1]

Updates for technical contributors

•  Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

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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.

After a few years away from Thai Wikipedia, I returned to find that the Main Page had become stagnant. It lacked the dynamic energy a landing page needs. So, my colleagues and I decided to revitalise it—and here is exactly how we did it.

Before diving into the details, let me explain the structure of Thai Wikipedia’s Home Page. It was heavily inspired by the original English edition‘s layout, featuring four core content sections:

• This Month’s Featured Articles (TMFA): An excerpt of a well-written article (Thai Wikipedia lacks the volume to change this daily like the English site).
• Did You Know (DYK): Interesting facts pulled from recently expanded or created articles.
• In The News (ITN): Recent global (and occasionally space-related) events.
• On This Day (OTD): A look back at historical events on the current date.

When I returned to active editing in mid-2024, I realised these sections were frozen in time. Sometimes, content remained identical for days. After a thorough review, I found the issues were threefold: stagnant content, unpredictable update schedules (except for the strictly automated OTD), and complex, opaque backend procedures for publishing content to the Main Page.

To build a sustainable solution, we had to attack the problem from two angles: community contribution and technical infrastructure.

On the contribution side, we introduced clear, easy-to-follow Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) to ensure nominators and reviewers wouldn’t feel overwhelmed. We also lifted several legacy constraints that were discouraging newbie and intermediate editors.

On the nerdy side, we introduced a “Nested Transclude Template System” to make pulling content to the main page seamless. No more messy, bespoke coding required. All nominations can now be tracked and recalled without digging through a chaotic page history.

For the less tech-savvy, here is how simple it is now: You no longer need to deal with any messy, complicated coding. As shown in the diagram, everything is built like a set of nesting dolls:

• Write your content: You just write your proposal or excerpt in a standard form.
• Name it with the date: You save it inside a specific date format (like YYYY-MM-DD).
• The system does the rest: When that day arrives, the Main Page template automatically fetches the correct date’s content and puts it live—completely on its own!

This means no one has to lift a finger to update it manually, and we can track past nominations without digging through a chaotic page history.

Did You Know it’s now easier than ever to nominate your articles?

The first backlog I tackled was the DYK section. There, I crossed paths with Taweethaも, a renowned Thai Wikipedian. That chance encounter inspired a complete revolution of our process. We teamed up to clear backlogs that had been sitting untouched for over six months. Together, we drafted new SOPs and built a backend system to support them—queuing content chronologically by nomination date, enforcing character limits, and scheduling release dates.

Once the system stabilised, we launched a content contest to diversify the topics and test our new workflow under pressure. The campaign was a massive success: 16 contributors created or improved over 90 articles. Crucially, three of those contributors remain highly active “DYK editors” today.

We also noticed that while some nominators were incredibly prolific, they rarely helped review others’ work. To keep the backlog manageable, we implemented a Quid Pro Quo (QPQ) policy, requiring nominators to review a peer’s submission to qualify their own.

Opening the Gates: Allowing Good Articles onto the Main Page

With DYK running smoothly, we turned our attention to TMFA. This section had suffered from a decade-long drought of new Featured Articles (FAs) to showcase. Beyond adapting our new DYK SOPs, we made a major policy shift: we lifted the strict FA constraint and allowed Good Articles (GAs) to be featured. To reflect this, we renamed the section from This Month’s Featured Article to Recommended Articles.

Whilst long-form, high-quality writing requires significantly more energy from contributors—meaning it wasn’t as explosive as the DYK campaign—the initiative still successfully brought 7 brand-new, high-quality articles to the front page from 7 different writers.

A new solution brings a new quirk

Every new system has its bugs. Just a day into the DYK campaign, a participant noticed that logged-out readers were seeing stale, outdated main page content, while logged-in users saw the updates perfectly.

We spent days hunting for a fix. Thankfully, User:Chlod—a perennial savior of Wikipedia infrastructure—pointed out that the server cache just needed to be manually “purged” (which simply means appending ?action=purge to the URL string).

To automate this, I sat down for some classic “vibe coding” and wrote a Python script. Hosted on Toolforge (Wikimedia’s dedicated server for customised scripts within the Wikimedia Movement) and linked to my bot account, it now runs via a cron job twice a day to keep the page fresh. I also added a secondary feature to the script: it automatically archives the Main Page to the Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine daily.

For those unfamiliar with the tech jargon, here is the simple version: I asked the AI chatbot, Google Gemini, to help me write a program in the Python language. After testing it repeatedly until I was sure it worked, I uploaded the code to Toolforge—which is essentially a free, 24/7 computer server available to Wikipedia volunteers. I set the server to run my code twice a day to automatically fix the glitch and keep the Main Page fresh. As a bonus, I also programmed it to save a daily copy of the Main Page to the Wayback Machine (a digital archive of the internet) so we always have a historical record.

I’ve published my source code in GitHub if you’re looking for: https://github.com/sarawutkhs/wthpurge

What about the other two sections?

You might be wondering why I haven’t mentioned ITN or OTD. To be completely honest, I tried to implement similar reforms for OTD, but couldn’t find anyone in the community available to jump in. If you have ideas on how we can spark interest and bring that same magic to the remaining sections, please drop a comment!

Acknowledgements

This transformation wouldn’t have been possible without an incredible support system. Beyond those already mentioned, I want to thank the original architects of the Main Page structure, as well as every single campaign participant who dedicated time to improving Thai Wikipedia. Finally, my deepest respect goes to Taweethaも, whose guidance both on- and off-wiki was invaluable.

Declaration: This case study was previously presented at the ESEAP Conference 2026 and the October 2025 ESEAP Community Call. The initial phase of this project was also published on the ESEAP’s Substack.