Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conference Fund/WikiCredCon 2026:"Addressing Reliability in an Era of Information Erosion"

Feedback on your proposal

Dear WikiCredCon organizing team,

Thank you for submitting the proposal for the next edition of WikiCredCon. After reviewing it carefully and considering input from several colleagues, I’m glad to share the following feedback for your consideration.

Objectives, focus, and target group

Your proposal continues to build on a highly relevant and timely theme: disinformation/misinformation, information accuracy, and knowledge integrity. The objectives and target groups align well with last year’s edition and have proven their value in bringing together Wikimedians and professionals from related fields. At the same time, the current list of ten objectives feels quite ambitious. We encourage you to distill these into three to five core goals to maintain focus and ensure deliverability. One idea raised in our review was to consider whether journalists, given their expertise in source reliability, could be an additional target group.

Organizers and capacity

We are confident in your team’s ability to deliver another strong event. Last year’s conference was well executed, and your continued engagement through monthly meetups and newsletters demonstrates both commitment and momentum.

Budget-wise, the proposal looks good and requires no further input from our side.

Program design and improvements

Based on observations from the previous edition, a few specific suggestions emerged:

• The unconference day last year felt somewhat unstructured and led to early departures. If you plan to include an unconference again, we recommend limiting it to a half-day, introducing a clearer process for refining and selecting topics, and integrating a brief share-out session into the main program.
• If press or journalists are invited, please communicate this in advance to attendees and consider simple ways (e.g., badge stickers) to identify media representatives.
• If you would like to include a session with Wikimedia Foundation staff, more advance notice would help with planning and participation.

Further considerations

The Internet Archive remains an excellent venue, and your ability to sustain engagement year-round is a clear strength. We also appreciate how you have incorporated participant feedback into this new proposal.

The main logistical challenge remains travel for non-US participants, which could limit attendance. Additionally, as a “thematic conference”, WikiCredCon would normally follow a biennial funding cadence going forward. Due to the critical importance of this topic and the proposed budget, the team is willing to consider holding this event two years in a row at least until the biennial funding cadence for thematic conferences is formalized in 2026. We encourage you to expand upon how the 2026 event will build on the 2025 event and elaborate on why two consecutive years feels important given the topic area.

Given the known circumstances, please also indicate (or share with us via email) what security measures will be implemented for this event. WMF’s Trust & Safety team is available to advise you on this.

Overall, this is a strong and impactful proposal. I encourage you to revisit the proposal with the points above in mind. Please feel free to update the proposal in Fluxx by September 29. After that date, it will be reviewed by the volunteer Conference Fund Committee, with a final decision expected by mid- to late October. I am happy to discuss any questions regarding the points raised, just email me to arrange a call.

Best regards, --Cornelius Kibelka (WMF) (talk to me) 17:28, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Note from WikiCredCon to WMF

(submitted on Fluxx, copying it over for documentation purposes --Cornelius Kibelka (WMF) (talk to me) 18:54, 30 September 2025 (UTC))

Updated budget

This version of the proposal has an updated budget of $75,000, which in part addresses communication with WMF during planning:

> WikiCredCon organizers agree that communicating and coordinating with the Foundation is critical to developing and convening a successful and useful event, and we would have preferred it if there were no surprises for Foundation attendees in 2025. A constraint in 2025 was that we were somewhat under-resourced when planning WikiCredCon 2025, so we prioritized reaching out to potential attendees and develop programming, plus logistics such as meals and accommodations. Media outreach was opportunistic, and conducted quite late in the planning process. So, we’ve added more time for coordination, which will include communications and outreach with the Foundation ahead of time.

> Since WikiCredCon is regarded as a valuable event for building relationships among the movement, its allies and collaborators, and Foundation leadership, we’ve also added funding for 5 more travel scholarships, to 30 in total. We will reach out to more researchers, technologists and others who focus on credibility and emerging technologies, and who are aligned with the movement and the Foundation.

Acknowledgement of ability to fund in future consecutive years:

The WikiCred team appreciates the Foundation’s openness to consider funding WikiCredCon for a second consecutive year in 2026, and we acknowledge that this is no guarantee of funding a 2027 version of the event.

We think that each WikiCredCon builds on the success of the past year – by incorporating what we learned about what worked and what didn’t, we can refine each subsequent annual WikiCredCon to improve impact. As well, at this time it seems likely that there will continue to be challenges to online reliability as the information landscape continues to erode and transform.

Therefore, depending on the Foundation’s resources and priorities, we think it will be critical after 2026 to continue to regularly convene WikiCredCon that bring together like-minded researchers, technologists and activists with stakeholders inside the Wikipedia movement.