Event:CEE Catch up Nr. 9 (April 2025)

Join us at the Next CEE Catch up!

April 23^rd at 16:00 UTC (18:00 CEST; check your local time)

This time we will be hosting a Foundation Annual Planning Workshop focused on global trends that are affecting our movement. Together (the CEE Communities and the Wikimedia Foundation staff) we will discuss the trends related to our projects, our readers and editors.

Topics will include:

• Neutrality policies
• AI
• sustainability of our communities

We will explore how those trends show up in the CEE context and discuss what our projects need to address those trends, and how we can support them.

The workshop is a part of continuous conversations that the Foundation is having with the communities about the Annual Plan.

Agenda

1. Welcome by the organizers
2. Ice breaker
3. Introduction to the Foundation Annual Plan (Maryana Iskander)
4. Global trends that affect our movement (Maryana Pinchuk)
5. Peacock Check demo (Peter Pelberg)
6. Q&A
7. Breakout room discussions
   1. Neutrality
   2. AI
   3. Contributors
   4. Users with extended rights
8. Shareouts
9. Goodbye

Report

The meeting was focused on the Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan and the global trends. We had 54 participants from and outside the region.

After the short presentation of the Wikimedia Foundation annual plan approach, we learned about the Global trends that affect our movement, and watched the demo of the Peacock check - a tool that will detect non-neutral and promotional language whilst an editor is typing.

After that the participants went into group discussions about the trends. Below you can find notes from these discussions:

AI

• AI can be used to boost daily productivity, help in designing wiki-workshops, support translations
• AI is widely used by participants of edu-wiki projects: there is a need to create on-wiki rules and recommendations for how AI can be used in editing
• AI could be used to present our content in a more attractive way and keep users interested in Wikipedia
  • A human-like bot summarizing articles and presenting the content
  • Creating short videos based on Wikipedia articles
  • Articles read by voice actors
• The use of AI to look for information is rising, but people interested in well sourced and reliable information come back to Wikipedia

Contributors

• Contributors want to have a connection going beyond the projects
• Entry barriers for projects have become higher because many topics are already covered
• Sense of belonging is harder to achieve online than in person
• Engaging young people is easier than keeping them as editors - they lost motivation over time
• Existence of many unwritten rules in Wikipedia makes participation harder, people need to “fight their way in” to the projects
• We need to upgrade the interface to lead people through the project in a more visual way.
• Local trainings can be helpful to bring in new editors
• There are regional specifics that have come to Wikipedia due to the war, for example writing biographies of people deceased in the war.

Neutrality

What problems are we seeing?

• Neutrality is especially challenging for the smaller communities, which are more vulnerable to any influence attempts from bad actors
• Neutrality is a complex policy, one of the most difficult to explain to newcomers.
• Political polarization in the world and in the media makes neutrality more difficult
• Neutrality is especially challenging in regions with complex shared history (like the Balkans), where people from different countries can have strong and contradictory opinions about shared historical events
• We can see problems with non-neutral sources: in many countries in the region the media (especially state owned) can be very biased in reporting current events, and this makes writing neutral articles more challenging

What solutions can help?

• Through campaigns like 1Lib1Ref we can bring more contributors who are good in citations, sources and cross checking information.
  • Librarians are great allies and CEE communities are working with them.
• More awareness about how Wikipedia works and why contributing matters, especially to well educated people
• We need guidelines and best practices shared across the projects addressing neutrality across different political and cultural context

Users with Extended Rights

We see a decline of admins in the project, what can help?

• Regular meetings for admins organized by an affiliate help to build a sense of community.
• Admins and young contributors often can’t express their needs clearly. Their voices need to be strengthened.
• While not scalable, personal encouragement and human connection keep being the most successful way to encourage people to apply for adminship. Campaigns and banners don’t have that effect.
• Conflict resolution projects are needed.
• Ukrainian Wikipedia is testing temporary administrators to address admin decline, especially related to war-related challenges.
  • it helped reduce the perceived pressure of becoming an admin, it's just a three-month role, so it feels less intimidating, less permanent, and more approachable.
• Close ties between administrators and affiliates help.
  • Affiliates can assist when unrelated education projects cause problematic edits by contacting institutions and clarifying policies.
• Training on how to become admins for non-admins