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Global trendshave continued to shape not only the Wikimedia projects, but the broader internet. We want to hear more about how those trends are affecting you and how you think we should respond.
What are the most important changes you’re noticing in the world outside Wikimedia this year? These might be trends in technology, education, or how people learn. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
These include (and I think you mean only those relevant to Wikimedia) 1. Continued rise of adoption of AI uses in society such as searching information by asking an LLM or creating e.g. logos with other AI models or more news orgs like The NYT making their articles available in audio format using AI as well as improvements to AI systems 2. obviously the changes in world system relations & policy / politics related to the Russian war and second Trump election (including risks to everything stored or managed in the US & greater adoption/appreciation of open source software etc) 3. more polarization, more hysteria, more absolutist–extremist types of views, less constructive good-faith deliberation, and less prevalence of nuanced views (eg when it comes to AI and especially in the US). 4. small rise of awareness that digital literacy is sth of importance but usually limited to just AI-literacy and/or recognition of outright misinformation 5. continued trend of mobile phone use and continued trend of rising mundane online media consumption. --Prototyperspective (talk) 14:36, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
There are two major trends affecting our sustainability: the first one if pretty obvious, but the rise of LLM chatbots and automatically generated answers in search engines is affecting how people read us. This has been commented before, and solutions are not easy. The other trend goes in the opposite direction: LLMs are still text, but there's a continuous rise on media consumption for learning. Some communities are doing their best, but our platform is lagging behind, because the WMF sees it as text-based, instead of seing it as knowledge-centered, whatever form that knowledge has. -Theklan (talk) 17:31, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
There's a proliferation of the idea of banning social media access to children. That can come in many formats (from what is considered social media, what is the age limit, or how to impose the ban), but this is something we should be aware of and keep an eye on. A recent news item on an upcoming French law proposal refers an exception to Wikipedia -- which on itself means that they'd consider wikimedia projects as social media and within the scope, needing an explicit exception. That might mean that the French proposal is not "good enough" for us, and at least it means that we need to be alert for other proposals (at the very least making sure Wikimedia platforms are exempt). Mind Booster Noori (talk) 15:34, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
2025 saw the effects of decades of increasingly echo-chambered media. Media had become hyper-tailored at the scale of TikTok and Reels, while regard for truth eroded by political leaders eroded and overt political involvement by the billionaire class became normalized. Wikipedia, by contrast, remains built by volunteers, and every reader is still served the same page.Czarking0 (talk) 05:41, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Правый перекос становится всё сильнее, и это и про технологии, и про запросы к образованию, и про свободные ресурсы. Во многом про то, как люди мыслят, желая простых решений в сложное технологически и организационно время. Lvova (talk) 21:19, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Outside of the Wikimedia movement, what other online communities do you participate in? What lessons can we take away from tools and processes on other community platforms? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
Discord: It would be great to be able to have a space for informal Wiki-conversations such as those that happen on Discord while also be able, if the conversations turns valuable, they could be easily ported to a talkpage so they can have some permanence and conversations/ideas do not get lost. Right now we have many valuable and random conversations on the main and WikiNYC discord. Sometimes I feel that good ideas get lost in discord ether. - Wil540 art (talk) 16:50, 12 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
Hi @Wil540 art, thanks for raising this. Discord is definitely a great place for more informal discussion of new ideas. In particular, the WMF Readers teams have been having discussions about reader-facing features in channels like #technical and #administration-wmf on the Wikimedia server. We can always do better/more though! What kinds of topics or channels would you want to see better supported on Discord, and what would make it easier to carry those conversations back to on-wiki spaces? Also, are there any ideas floating around the WikiNYC Discord we should be thinking about for next year? KStineRowe (WMF) (talk) 18:35, 17 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
@KStineRowe (WMF) I think the WMF should consider creating it's own impermanent message board space/app similar to Discord and Telegram and Facebook groups but operated under the Wiki-ethos. This could centralize a lot of the informal discussions that are spread amongst a handful of apps/social medias. WMF could design a feature within this app that makes it easy to carry conversations back to on-wiki spaces. Maybe a "bring to a talk page" button or something like that. - Wil540 art (talk) 15:52, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Indeed. There are several free software projects Wikimedia can use for this (rocket.chat? Matrix?), replacing the current dependency on Discord's proprietary software and services. Mind Booster Noori (talk) 15:42, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Another mainstream suggestion here: Instagram I wish it was easier to interact and follow fellow editors on the Wikipedia mobile app and on the desktop version as well. Seeing what fellow Wikimedians are doing is inspiring. Sending "Thanks" and talk message are great; however, those interactions are mainly 1-on-1. I sometimes wish there was a public place more similar to a comments section where editors could converse with each other and acknowledge and talk about a specific edit or image upload. Perhaps a way to integrate the talkpage into a watchlist that makes it more like a instgram/youtube comments section. -Wil540 art (talk) 16:50, 12 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
@Wil540 art, thanks for sharing this ideaǃ You make a great point that editor connection & recognition on the wikis today (with things like thanks, wikilove, or talk page messages) can be really impactful, but it's often 1-on-1 rather than a collective or shared experience. Within the Connection team, we're also thinking about how to create more interactive and engaging opportunities for people to recognize good work and connect with one another. So, I love that you shared some ideas (like a "a public place more similar to a comments section where editors could converse with each other"). One follow-up question: Do you see this "public place" as different than the talk page—and, if so, how? Or is it more like making the talk page visible in different context/ways (such as following specific editors or seeing their comments in more places)? I'm curious to learn more, and thanks for the ideas shared so farǃ IFried (WMF) (talk) 18:44, 18 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
@IFried (WMF) Good to hear from you, long time no talk. It would be fun and perhaps build community to be able to comment on User's actions. Similar to giving "thanks" but more public, maybe allowing comments. This would not be on a User talk page or an article talk page but a place for comment specific to a user's actions. - Wil540 art (talk) 15:58, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think a more universal solution might be something like Matrix? I thought of this because not everyone has or wants to have a social media/Discord account (myself included). TheTechie (talk) 19:55, 12 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Reddit. Like Wil's Discord comment above, it's a great way to have informal conversations with people about Wiki. The only problem I have with r/Wikipedia (which is just my opinion, it's fine for other people) is that it is more of a "showcase" subreddit, being used more so for people to show off an article that they found interesting or is relevant in the news (mostly American politics tbh). Actual discussion about Wikipedia itself is relatively uncommon, other than the weekly pinned post on Wikipedia questions (which generally isn't that active). EatingCarBatteries (talk) 07:41, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Kialo – it's a fairly unknown small site but it's still the more or less only big genuine structured debate platform / collaborative argument mapping site. Briefly described instead of linear comments or essay written by a user arguments are integrated as atomic separated arguments/claims. These can then be individually addressed with Pros supporting it or Cons attacking/weakening/objecting it. They can but importantly do not necessarily need supporting sources. Claims that are wrong can be archived and claims can be flagged. They can also be rated for impact so an argument one thinks is quite strong and important can be ranked high and an argument that one sees as valid but not impactful can be ranked low. This makes it easy to see main Pros or Cons and e.g. not get wrong impressions or distracted with low-impact claims or convincing rhetorical style. Another advantage is that repetition is done away with. Instead of people claiming the same wrong things over and over and when addressing these one gets hammered for "bludgeoning" for responding to too many people to correct & scrutinize their claims, the argument is made once and then be addressed with a Con once, This is far better decision-making and deliberation infrastructure than available on Wikipedia where there's long walls of unoverseeable text, prevalent ignoring of points, repetition, unorganized arguments, etc. There are also some but few debates relating to wikipedia on that site, the largest being "[Should scientists contribute to Wikipedia?](https://www.kialo.com/should-scientists-contribute-to-wikipedia-28756)" where one can learn about the general conceptual ideas. There's lots of lessons one can take from this approach despite that this site is not ideal (not open source; some debates are biased as moderators can keep valid claims out, albeit these can just be cloned to new uncensored debates). In specific most broadly, that one can create technological infrastructure that directly facilitates and enables calm/constructive rational constructive discourse that is easy for other people to follow and to join in at any time where things can be iterateratively collaboratively be scrutinized and refined. As it's not open source, it's unlikely to be used much by the community for things like policy-change discussions, deletion discussions, Talk page article change requests, strategy discussions, etc but maybe similar things could be built. Relevant processes there include suggesters and moderators moving & linking claims to the place(s) where they relate directly to the claim above them so that from that place the relevant Pros & Cons can be seen and evaluated. All of this is also useful to find subjects that need data/research, decision-making transparency/understability, and for people to understand each other's reasoning and engage constructively despite (if not especially when) when there are strong differences in views. --Prototyperspective (talk) 18:07, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Also re What lessons can we take away from tools and processes on other community platforms? it would be that if we'd like to increase readers, potential contributors, reads per month, and reads of good/interesting/important articles with low pageviews, public engagement, and/or Wikipedia app installs, then let's consider adding a proper feed for article & content discovery to the Wikipedia app (if it's available, it doesn't mean you need to use it), similar to xikipedia which reddit users seem to enjoy a lot (700+ upvotes & see comments). Screenshot of that web-app on the right.
This is what this wish is about (voting open), you don't need to read it in full to get the idea and some potential benefits:
Thanks for this, @Prototyperspective. I’m a product manager on the Reader Growth team at the Foundation and I love the ideas you posit here around content discovery. xikipedia has been giving us a lot of food for thought! We're also currently thinking through ways to improve discovery of our wealth of content, both for article text and images. Do you imagine something like this living primarily in the apps, or do you think there’s also a role for it on web? Are there particular elements of xikipedia (e.g., the curation style, personalization, randomness, social signals) that you think are most important? SherryYang-WMF (talk) 20:29, 18 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Nice to hear, thanks! There is a lot of untapped potential in the areas of Discovery and Media files – reads, contributors, app installs, engagement & length of reads, and readers could be increased a lot. I'll give some feedback on the Image browsing separately on its talk page (briefly, I think some panel for media from the Commons cat would often be neat). As for the feed, I think it would best be mainly in the app but considering that only a small fraction of readers & contributors use the app instead of mobile or desktop and that people first need to discover sth they find interesting to install as app, I think it's about just as important to implement this as Web app (ideally within Wikipedia and linked visibly from the Main page). It's a better experience when using a native app for this and I think lots of users would install the app eventually if it can open that feed quickly and the user of the feed on Web is informed about the app. Moreover, it would be more difficult to make the feed interesting on Web if the user is not signed in because in the app one can select interests (specific articles) and on Web these or reading history would soon be lost if not signed in: it could in one part incentivize users to sign up and overall be there mostly just for giving the user some taste of it so they can see whether they like the feed or not (not everybody but many I think do like such). The best thing about this is that half of it is now already implemented via the Recommended reading list – just leverage what you've already built and make a scrollable feed out of it that's not limited to 20 items at max. Re particular elements, I think most important is that it's items that are interesting to the user via at least in part personalization, that one can just scroll, and that one can launch it quickly and simply. Not interested in one item? Just glance over to the next right beneath. Key is that it's fun and not cognitively exhausting – it's for relaxing and learning new things out of curiosity, not editing or sth you need to focus a lot. Social signals & interactivity is very important on social media apps but this is something of a new/different kind – if some aspects or type thereof is ever considered to be integrated I think this should be much much later and then only in a very thoughtful novel way but it's not unlikely it would be best to avoid such. Prototyperspective (talk) 21:21, 22 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for writing this, we followed up with you through the Community Wishlist about your suggestion for a discovery-style feed in the app, and we’ve now moved the broader discussion to the Explore Feed project talk page so everything stays in one place.
We’ve also added a Design research section with some early directions we’ve been exploring based on the survey and interview findings. If you’re interested, we’d love for you to take a look and share your thoughts on the project page talk page. Thank you for being part of shaping this work! ARamadan-WMF (talk) 11:39, 26 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Wikipedia was already well established by 2010, the "Year of Mobile," when social media became a way of life, driven by the the ubiquity of smartphones and their apps and Gen Z not knowing a world without them. A user of the Internet since its arrival as a dial-up novelty I quicky appreciated its potential but call me an old-fashioned Boomer, I have never used social media and however intensly I have contributed to Wikipedia over the last 20 years I have no intention of using it or even taking part in the gentle banter of Wikipedia's Discord channels. If Wikipedia feels it cannot exist without becoming a social media itself, then I see no reason why our server farms cannot provide the capacity to run our own 'Discord', and one which is only for registered users taking part under their registered usernames. At least that would add a grain of formality to what I have seen (by lurking) as little more than a distraction than a serious contribution to the work we do here. For me, our talk pages are more than adequate for getting serious work done, and they have always worked well for me, together with the very occasional email. Kudpung (talk) 00:26, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Многим российским онлайн-сообществам сейчас требуется VPN для выживания, хотя его реклама запрещена. Избегающие VPN люди теряют доступ к информации -- часть сайтов закрывает правительство извне, часть сайтов закрывает правительство внутри, вплоть до работы интернета по белым спискам. При этом многие не покупают свой VPN, пользуясь бесплатными, так как купить рискованно -- выбранный сервис может оказаться в любой момент заблокирован. Редактировать Википедию через VPN при этом, разумеется, нельзя. Онлайн-сообщества, желающие сохранить себя, помогают пользователям в обходе запретов; Википедия совершенно интертна. Lvova (talk) 21:19, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Has your relationship to AI changed in the last year? E.g., do you see or use AI-powered features and tools (like AI summaries when you use web search, or AI-powered features to summarize or write text in emails or documents) about the same, more often, or less often now than you did a year ago? Do you think or worry about the impact of AI on Wikipedia more, less, or about the same as a year ago? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
I generally try to avoid using it. I'm one of those people that install browser extensions to get rid of it in Google search. Part of my concern around it is not just that it can hallucinate information, but, to sound like a boomer, it can make people more lazy (without creating what it is generating yourself, you are missing out on the necessary practice in order to improve yourself). I participate at enwiki's Articles for Creation, and I see the amount of garbage that can come out of it. That being said, it still absolutely has its uses in tedious work. For example, I have recently started to go through the category for articles that are missing identifiers (isbn, doi, etc), and plugging the incomplete citation into ChatGPT to find the rest. I then put it into Citer, where it will double check the identifier with databases. So far, out of like 25, there has only been one error. While I don't think it has any business writing articles, I think it absolutely can do the uncontroversial maintenance stuff (such as adding basic categories to articles, edit filters) EatingCarBatteries (talk) 07:41, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I'm keen that we use AI to find potential anomalies within Wikipedia and other projects. For example phrases that are ambiguous when auto translated - LLMs should be able to give lists of where the Wikipedia phrase has low probability in their model. I predict that such lists would include stuff with a significant proportion of typos and other anomalies that we can fix. I've experimented with lists of probable typos. WereSpielChequers (talk) 15:05, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
AI and LLMs are pretty valid in English, good in some other languages, but not relevant for hundreds of languages we are serving. We should stop thinking about English as the only language that matters here. It's evident AI has a wide impact, it may be less than a year ago, because the boom and hype is not going to grow exponentially, while we are still alive. -Theklan (talk) 17:31, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
First, I don't like calling content-generating machine learning systems "artificial intelligence", because it's kinda misleading. We get shown scientific research MLSs to promote "AI" brand but its only purpose to sell us rather simple tool that is just recombining the existing knowledge and data. Second, MLSs are tools. And you decide how to use it: you can search for patterns in big data pools or, if we go more simple way, denoise your photographs; or, you can create what is called "AI slop" spending resources and creating meaningless or even misleading content. Therefore I don't think my relationship have changed.— The preceding unsigned comment was added by Красный (talk) 19:53 25 January 2026 (UTC)
My use of AI tools has been increasing, especially for translation—they’ve been a huge help to me. In fact, what you’re reading right now was translated by ChatGPT; the original text contained a lot of Traditional Chinese characters. While AI’s writing style can be a bit rigid, it has rescued many people who struggle with summarizing or paraphrasing, enabling them to produce appropriate, non-infringing text within a limited time.
Many people are more concerned about AI being used to generate Wikipedia content and potentially affecting quality. Ironically, I think that’s actually the easiest problem to solve. We could even experiment with a specific prompt that guides LLMs to produce summaries aligned with Wikipedia’s tone and style—and then teach people not to ask AI to write articles directly, but to use that prompt to summarize sources instead. The results could arguably be better than what many editors produce on their own.
What worries me more is the use of LLMs in communication. Last year, I saw cases where people used LLMs to generate appeals against blocks. In such situations, no one can really tell whether statements acknowledging mistakes and promising to change reflect a person’s genuine intent—or are simply the most “appropriate” combination of words generated by an algorithm.--Reke (talk) 11:32, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
LLMs (specifically Gemini Pro with gemini-cli & Antigravity, along with aistudio) are great at formatting content and sources into Wikitext. Adding Wikitext tags & refs is tedious and interferes with user contributions. LLMs are great at producing proper wikitext from prose and a list of unordered references.
This would be a great tooling opportunity for WMF since it improves accessibility, while avoiding most of the hallucination risks (deterministic logic can be used to catch loss in article content or references introduced during the formatting phase).
LLMs are great for learning, since they present a Socratic interface that allows the student to probe into deeper curiosities as they desire. Tonymetz (talk) 18:58, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
The longer this AI bubble goes on, the more passionate my hatred of LLMs and other forms of “AI” slop becomes. I’ve spent months in the AFC trenches, and I am distressed by the number of obviously LLM-generated drafts I come across. It makes me worry about how much slop could be making it into mainspace, where it won’t necessarily show up in maintenance queues, or on other languages and projects with smaller userbases. — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 14:30, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for weighing in on this and providing your perspective, @Pythoncoder. I'm Sonja and I lead the Contributor Product teams at the Foundation. This is something that we've been hearing about throughout last year, so we looked into the data a bit to understand the magnitude and overall impact within AfC, but the results were somewhat inconclusive. Either way, you're not alone with your sentiment and we currently have 2 projects in flight that could help with this issue: 1) We have a team dedicated to improving the article creation flow with the goal to support editors in creating initial well-structured contributions that align with community policies and content quality standards; and 2) we built Paste Check, alerting people that pasting content may result in violations of WP:COPYVIO (and related policies). Do you have anything specific in mind that could further help with this from a tooling perspective? SPerry-WMF (talk) 00:05, 7 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@SPerry-WMF (1) I assume y'all already know about w:WP:AISIGNS. In addition, I've collected a large number of specific phrases that show up a lot in LLM-generated drafts, which I would be happy to provide via email (so they aren't publicly available for the AI companies to scoop up).
(2) Does Edit/Paste Check come with a log to track edits that get flagged, even if the user ends up deciding not to publish them? (à la our current abuse filters) — I'm intrigued by the idea and after a cursory glance the results so far look promising; I'm asking about logging because I don't want LLM users to see the paste check messages and have that prompt them to tweak the LLM output to make it harder to detect (while still having the underlying problems of vague language, bad sourcing, etc.) — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 02:48, 7 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Pythoncoder 1) tagging @PPelberg (WMF) here, the Product Manager leading this effort. It might be easiest to coordinate with him directly how to best exchange your findings. 2) Yes, edit checks can come with tags or other signals, and I know Peter is thinking about that very actively, so I'll let him chime in here as well. Something I'm interested in is how we can use those signals down the line to help experienced editors like you with reviewing these types of edits in a more structured way that could remove repetitive actions for you. Thinking beyond just filtering for these types of signals, are there any parts of your process that you think could benefit from us structuring the data for you in a more meaningful way (thinking along the lines of Suggested Investigations)? SPerry-WMF (talk) 21:49, 20 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@SPerry-WMF @PPelberg (WMF) Sorry for the delay in responding here. That Suggested Investigations link you sent seems like it would be a good starting point — it seems like a more polished version of my custom-search-based queues that I use right now to patrol for LLM slop. In this example, I think the "risk signals"-type section would be especially important in telling me what specific signs to look for.
The other main method I use is looking through the recent AfC submissions on the NewPagesFeed because there tends to be a lot of crap there. That got me thinking that perhaps an even better option would be to have a direct integration into RecentChanges and NewPagesFeed, similar to the existing ORES vandalism detection, in order to meet patrollers where they already are. Maybe work with the AfC helper script devs to hook it in there as well? This is all just brainstorming of course. — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 13:57, 28 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Special:NewPagesFeed only exists at the English Wikipedia, where The Community™ decided to only allow certain pre-approved editors to use it fully. It's not really possible to "meet patrollers where they already are" there, because they've been locked out of the system. An integration that works outside that one wiki would have to focus on Special:NewPages instead of Special:NewPagesFeed.
Something that's important to remember is that the spam pressures on the English Wikipedia are really, wildly, unbelievably different compared to the other wikis. For example, the English Wikivoyage, which "should" get all sorts of travel-related businesses trying to tout themselves, and which allows logged-out editors to create articles directly in the mainspace, only gets about 2 or 3 new articles per day, and most of those are from experienced editors. At enwiki, by contrast, there are 2 or 3 new articles created every 5 minutes, and 'unlocking' the system would result in undisclosed paid editors self-approving their clients' paid products. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:03, 28 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I realise AI is not going away, but I've not had good experiences with it. I try to assist blocked editors on English Wikipedia with their appeals, the amount that are AI-generated with little/no human input has skyrocketed over the past year. It takes seconds to ask an AI to generate an appeal - the blocked editor needs to understanding of the problems that led to the block nor knowledge of what they should be doing instead because they don't have to.
The result is a swathe of identically-worded appeals that take up the time of editors and admins alike. The biggest issue is when they're asked to explain things further, which often results in a circular discussion and the AI repeating things because it doesn't understand that we're asking the same questions again because they weren't answered in the first place. It's often trained on old policies & guidelines, so will frequently misquote, misapply or hallucinate them.
AI can generate text incredibly quickly and with so little effort on the part of the user, yet it takes many, many times longer for a human to check and fix those errors.
I'm seeing editors and admins who are becoming disillusioned and exhausted by trying to address indiscriminate AI-use, so I'm worried about burnout; AI may overwhelm human editors to the point that we give up.
It's not unusual to see an editor who registered a week ago with two dozen AI-generated articles under their belt.
It's almost paradoxical - the less time an editor spends generating each article means more are created at once, therefore they're less likely to be suitable for inclusion, meaning others need spend more time and effort to fix those same articles. In the time they've spent investigating & fixing the article, five more could have been created.
If you look at the ANI noticeboard on English Wikipedia, there are times where a good quarter of reports are about indiscriminate AI-use alone. There's even a specific noticeboard just for fixing AI-generated edits.
Patience is wearing thinner and thinner and I'm honestly worried.
For some reason, it's incredibly difficult to get these editors to admit to (and stop) using AI; it gets in the way and is a barrier to discussion with those editors, because the AI will never confirm that it's being used.
We need solid policies to deal with this, however it's such a hot-button topic and AI is developing so quickly that discussions end up stalling because we just can't reach a consensus.
Everyone agrees that something needs to be done, but we can't agree on what that something is. I'm not sure what the answer is to this situation. Apologies if this comes across as catastrophising (I think this is a word!), but it's just how I honestly feel right now. Blue-Sonnet (talk) 00:19, 9 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
It pains me to hear that you and other experienced editors are having this experience @Blue-Sonnet! Maybe being a Wikimedia movement old-timer makes me a little overconfident, but I'm also aware that there were past moments in Wikipedia's history where this sentiment was abundant and the community and projects made it through, and that gives me hope that we can manage it this time around. I'm thinking specifically about the 2005/6 era, when Wikipedia's visibility suddenly shot through the roof and an influx of new readers and editors started pouring in (not all of them good-faith, of course). I talked to a lot of experienced editors who said it felt like an Eternal September moment, and they had to scramble to create anti-abuse policies and tools to protect the projects (and reduce their stress levels). But these policies and tools didn't just prevent vandalism and spam – I helped with some research a few years later that showed that they also prevented some good-faith newcomers from joining the projects. The "decline" in active editors on English Wikipedia ended up stabilizing around 2014, but more recently there's been a severe drop-off in account registrations and new active editors that's pretty concerning. I think we might be facing a similar dynamic where the desire to protect the content is coming into conflict with the ability to attract and retain good-faith new contributors.
I'm curious how you & others here think about what a good future for Wikipedia would look like in 2036 if we assume that the use of AI tools for content creation isn't going to go away anytime soon. Would it be: "the experienced editor community stays the same size or shrinks but has better tools to handle the growing influx of AI content/contribution"? Is it "the experienced editor community grows substantially by engaging & retaining good-faith newcomers who can help with content patrolling and moderation?" And if the latter, how do we keep the door open to good-faith newbies who may increasingly be used to using AI tools in many other contexts (e.g., for research, writing, coding)? Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 16:09, 19 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
That's a really good question, AI isn't going to go away and we're in a strange time where it's being used a lot despite it being unregulated and pretty much untested in real life situations (my employer is absolutely in love with it, even though I've had it introduce errors in my work).
The companies who create AI programs are starting to realise that it doesn't make much money on its own, and are considering introducing advertising - then there are models that may be created with a specific NPOV (e.g. Grok). I genuinely don't think it's reliable right now & it's future reliability will depend on how it's programmed and what it's used for - honestly, I've got no idea what that will look like as it could go either way.
Since AI draws heavily from Wikipedia, I've encountered it using hoax drafts as sources - Gemini insisted that a fictional estate existed because the editor had spammed multiple Wikimedia projects with hoax articles and AI-generated images!
I really hope that we keep Wikipedia as human-centric as possible, because AI will always need oversight. I don't know what the future will look like, but AI will get harder to detect as it improves.
Maybe in the future, we could have an AI that knows how to properly create articles & pages for different projects (or reliably help humans to do this), but I think the difficult part will be the next decade as we try to figure out what that will look like.
Out of the two options you've given I'd much prefer the latter, but we need a clear policy that we can direct newbies to so they can understand how to use tools properly & when to avoid them altogether. If the future of 2036 includes AI, then I'd want a clear policy that everyone can read and follow, with a list of pre-approved, reliable AI tools that we know we can trust. In an ideal world, there could even be one specifically for Wikipedia - then the human editor would have a clear process to follow for prompting and output verification.
My original post was written after seeing that the community is still unable to agree on any solid guidelines here. We all agree something needs to be done; despite being discussed for literal months this proposal is unlikely to go through because it's not worded perfectly. That means a new proposal with new wording and more weeks or months of discussion.
Usually this wouldn't be too much of an issue, but AI is progressing so quickly and being used so heavily that the need for action is unusually urgent. At the same time, Wikipedia is community-driven so we have to agree on policies/guidelines before they can come into force. There's even a dedicated noticeboard just for fixing AI-generated errors! It's everywhere I look at the moment, but we still don't have a good way of dealing with it beyond cleaning up the mess afterwards.
Unfortunately there's no simple solution; AI is changing the way we work and I really hope that we can keep humans at the heart of Wikipedia. Grokpedia is a future I really want to avoid.
I guess that I'm primarily concerned with what happens over the next decade, as indiscriminate AI use is causing so many issues at ground level for everyday editors & I'm seeing them become genuinely upset over it. I'm hoping we've got a better handle on this new technology in 2036.
As far as Wikipedia goes, I hope it can weather things out in the long term - after all, AI needs Wikipedia, but Wikipedia doesn't need AI!
Люди уходят из проекта, громко объявляя, что не видят больше смысла в создании контента; да, это порождает тревогу и длинные неплодотворные обсуждения, по сути это демотивация по цепочке, так как внутри самого сообщества ставится под сомнение идея важности работы. Как агент VRT я обнаружила, что стало значительно сложнее подтверждать авторство просьбой показать не для публикации исходник большего разрешения. Лично я использую ИИ в сотни раз чаще, чем год назад, он встроен во многие привычные процессы (это не значит, что ИИ не раздражает своей тупостью и не требует постоянной перепроверки). В контексте Википедии -- создание модулей, переписывание внесённого кем-то другим копивио, улучшение плохих переводов (тех, в которых авторы не стали переносить источники, перенося текст) полуавтоматизированной расстановкой источников в нужных местах, упрощение проверок текстов типа "действительно ли этот факт упомянут в другой формулировке в длинном тексте мелким шрифтом на другом языке". Lvova (talk) 21:19, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
For me the most important trends are; 1. AI 2. The continuing social political polarization and associated attempts to destroy institutions and 3. The rise of primary over secondary sources.
I see a lot of disruption of old models and that disruption is not coming to an end very soon. It is also going VERY fast. I think it is very important for us to be aware of that. We should not be naive. As someone stated during Futures lab this year.. "wikipedia.org, as we know it, will be dead within 3 years". That definitely is provocative, but I do believe there is significant truth to that. We will become either significantly less relevant, or we will have changed, grown and adapted.
Now, this disruption works both ways. We can ALSO disrupt, as we have in the past. We should stay true to our values of knowledge sharing and the human aspect that is such a key part of that process. But we also need to look outward. We have to find new ways to build our knowledge base. Maybe new projects in the direction of primary sources, source verification, or the evaluation of the producers of knowledge. We should look what AI can do for us, and how we can influence how AI provides information to end consumers. Experimentation will be key.
I also would like the Foundation and our communities to consider diversifying. We should not be betting on just wikipedia.org, or rather the encyclopedic format of wikipedia.org. If we want to thrive we have to recognize that strict and inflexible formats are very vulnerable. Likewise betting on just the USA makes us vulnerable. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:05, 14 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
The new generation is shifting toward watching short videos across many social media platforms that are full of scientific inaccuracies as well as advertisements. From my point of view, targeting this segment of the global community should be done by creating short, freely produced videos designed by volunteers, supported with reliable sources and available in multiple languages. In this way, long and often tedious Wikipedia articles can be transformed into short, reels-style videos. We can also make use of the stunning images available on Commons so that the world can experience them in this format.--Mohammad hajeer (talk) 23:14, 18 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks @Mohammad hajeer. I’m Liv Burke, and I oversee the Wikimedia Foundation's social media and short-form video strategy. I completely agree that social media is one of the key areas that will help Wikipedia better engage with the existing community and build community with younger and emerging audiences. In the year ahead, we’re looking to set some ambitious goals for using these tools to help more people around the world know and love Wikipedia. You can check out some of our past work, but looking ahead we plan to experiment with new things to try because the social media platforms (and their algorithms) evolve quite quickly. For example, we have worked with volunteers to produce content in the past, but are also curious to explore how we can partner with existing social media creators who align with our educational mission and values to reach more people who already follow them. Question for you: Are there any creators you think do a good job making videos that educate and inspire? What could we learn from them about how to showcase the work of volunteers? @TheDJ this touches a bit on your point about experimentation as well; I know your comments about experimentation and disruption were not specifically about social media, but I agree that diversifying where we are visible is really important and this is one avenue where we’re trying. LBurke-WMF (talk) 20:56, 20 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you @LBurke-WMF for sharing these valuable insights. But I would like to propose the idea of creating a free short-video platform that allows any editor to produce their own open content, with the possibility of selecting the best videos to be shared across other social media platforms.
This approach reinforces the Wiki principle of enabling everyone to create and innovate, rather than limiting visibility to celebrities or specific individuals. It also provides an opportunity for the Wikimedia Foundation to develop a new project that is aligned with current trends, attracting younger audiences to engage with and contribute to open knowledge.
Latest comment: 13 days ago35 comments19 people in discussion
In order to meet the current moment with urgency and focus, we need to experiment and try new things rapidly, in ways that are healthy for our communities. We are striving to find new ways to experiment alongside our communities.
What ideas or changes have you wanted to test on your wiki? Are there things you wish you could measure but can't? Do you have specific questions about impact or causality that we should consider - for example, whether a feature or a bug is causing something that you are observing on the wikis? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
We need more interactive features:
A graph/chart system that works (at least, as good as we had three years ago).
A texturized 3D viewer: hundreds of cultural institutions have digital 3D objects, but don't have a place to show them. Currently, mobile phones can make photogrametry, and we could be leading allowing those in Commons.
A better system to subtitle and translate videos. There were some free/open projects for that, but now there's no good place. There's a large community of people interested in subtitles that we could be serving.
Media statistics. We can't know how many people watch a video or listen to an audio. Cultural institutions would be interested on that when they contribute with media.
Interactive ways to learn physics, math, geometry, programming... there are very good examples out there, non of those free.
I strongly agree with Theklan, especially the points 1 (the extension Chart is a regression from the extension Graph), 2 (a part of the Wikimedia community already worked on that, it should be fairly easy to deploy) and 4 (and not just media ;) ). Cheers, VIGNERON * discut.17:55, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@TheDJ: thanks. It's good to know the team is working on improvements (especially as being beginner-friendly is indeed very important) but will they also fix what is already broken? (all the ten of thousands graphs that used Wikidata for an obvious example) Cheers, VIGNERON * discut.16:36, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I agree with all of Theklan's points, and especially having better support for 3D files. Wikimedia UK is working on a project (Commons:UK Heritage 3D Data at Risk) to explore how UK GLAMs are storing and using 3D data. There is uncertainty about the future of Sketchfab as a platform for sharing 3D files with the public. If there is support for textured models, Wikimedia Commons becomes a much more interesting venue for GLAMs with 3D data and it can help advance the cause of open knowledge. Richard Nevell (WMUK) (talk) 11:21, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
We need a system that will display links to the templates that were directly used in a particular edit near the edit summary in the History page. It's because using a template creates a derivative work from the template. But nobody usually provides the attribution (like a link to the template in the edit summary). But templates can have text inside them, for example, that is provided via the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. Such mechanism can be realized by determining sets of templates (counting them by their name) that were directly used in the previous edit and in the current edit. The difference between the sets can be displayed near the edit summary as links to the templates (the sufficient attribution according to the terms of use of the Wikimedia Foundation). D6194c-1cc (talk) 12:23, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
A system for fixing attribution in the edit summary is needed. Many translators write something like "Translated" in the edit summary or even don't write anything at all. I use hacks like dummy edits to fix incorrect attribution, but it's difficult for an ordinary Wikipedia editor to use them, and dummy edits don't fix copyright violations in the previous releases of a page (i. e. that are accessible by the permanent link). D6194c-1cc (talk) 19:54, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Лично я была бы счастлива протестировать, что изменится, если всему разделу отключить commons:User:Jack_who_built_the_house/Convenient_Discussions/ru. Я вижу по меткам, что его используют многие, и когда включила попробовать сама, едва не утонула; в споре хорошо иметь время остыть, а этот популярный в разделе гаджет делает автоматическую подписку на все дискуссии и повышает вовлечённость в них. Я могу оставить сообщение на форуме и заглянуть в следующий раз через сутки, если тема для меня не так важна; с этим гаджетом я чувствовала, как меняется время, которое я провожу в проекте. При этом я уверена, что предложение удалить его будет воспринято плохо, так как он "удобен"; удобен подливать масла в огонь в сообществе с неидеальной атмосферой, про удобство с упором на контент и его качества -- сомневаюсь. Lvova (talk) 21:36, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
A key part of our experimentation with new tools and features is communication and collaboration with our communities. Do you have ideas about how we can deliver improvements quickly while working together with communities? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
hi @Kowal2701 – to be doubly sure I'm accurately understanding, could you please let me know what (if anything) about the below seems out of alignment with the issue you're describing here?
"In the patrolling/moderating I do on en.wiki, I am seeing an increase in, what I perceive to be, changes made by LLMs and I've not yet seen improvements that I think are sufficient to mitigate this pattern."
Assuming the above is reasonably aligned with what you meant, a couple of follow-up questions and comments in response...
Clarifying questions
Might there be specific edits (or styles of edits) you were thinking about as you drafted this comment?
What do you think it might look like for us to be responding quickly and effectively to the pattern(s) of problematic edits you're seeing?
Context
As you think about the above, I thought you might value knowing a few things the Wikimedia Foundation is working on that are designed to help in this area. If anything you see (or don't see) here brings questions to mind, I hope you will ask.
Paste Check: a prompt that requires newcomers pasting ≥50 characters of text into the visual editor to confirm the text they're pasting is not at risk of creating a copyright violation. While this prompt does not explicitly include language around LLMs: A) it could be adapted to do so [i] and B) Paste Check is showing signs that causes newcomers to publisher higher quality edits. Note: in the coming weeks we will be sharing a proposal to enable this feature for all newcomers at all Wikipedias.
AI Tells: a suggestion that will appear within the soon-to-be released Suggestion Mode beta feature that will enable experienced volunteers to quickly detect if any signs of AI writing are present within the article they are editing/reviewing using the visual editor.
Edit Check: "AI Tells" and "Paste Check" are two examples of Edit Check, a platform that meant to empower volunteers to help prevent problematic contributions before people publish and also identify potential issues with effort.
Labeling edits with pasted content: while we've not yet prioritized work on it, we have started thinking about a way to tag edits that involve people adding new text they pasted from another source
Please note: the above is not meant to suggest we consider the problem “handled.” Rather, it is an effort to demonstrate the priority we are placing on this issue, how we are thinking about addressing it, and crucially, identify gaps you see in what we're currently doing and thinking.
---
i. In November 2024, we investigated whether it would be possible to identify pastes likely to be from LLMs so that we could issue stronger and more specific feedback in this case. Although at the time, we did not think the HTML included in pastes from popular LLMs is stable enough for Paste Check to be configured off of it. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 00:08, 21 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi Peter, thank you very much for the response. To elaborate, on en.wiki (as you probably know), despite the community generally being anti-LLM use and now a few years out from the launch of LLMs, we’re yet to formulate proper policies addressing it, and only recently was a clean-up operation set up. The scale of the task and very high clean-up to problem-making ratio for effort required makes this appear existential, and the vast majority of editors are unaware of the problems surrounding LLM-use and of the little on-wiki guidance there is. Regarding specific edits, copy-pasted raw output is the low-hanging fruit, but output that has been somewhat copy-edited while retaining WP:V failures is what worries me.
Thank you for listing those initiatives, I wasn’t aware of any of them. “Paste check” looks brilliant (happy it excludes copying within WP), though I’m sceptical re how prevalent exact copies of 50+ words are in LLM output to warrant including that in the notice. Also impressed by “Edit check”, I hope it’d help with onboarding and reduce negative experiences for newbies. Is it possible to do something along the same lines as “Paste check” for AI signs, so edits with such signs get a notice? In my (limited) experience, most people adding LLM-generated content are doing so in good-faith, and all they need is a notice (human-written edits can ignore the notice and maybe click an option to not receive it in future). The hard part would probably be keeping it updated and applicable to all the various models, though I struggle to think of many more topics more deserving of resources. Kowal2701 (talk) 01:04, 21 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Kowal2701: thank you for following up with this additional context!
The scale of the task and very high clean-up to problem-making ratio for effort required makes this appear existential...
Question: would it be accurate for me to understand you as making the following three points?
You perceive there to be a large a amount of LLM-generated content on the wikis
You do not see volunteers (and maybe staff too?) discussing this topic with the frequency and urgency you think it demands
You think we are in need of better tools/signals to detect LLM-generated content (perhaps this speaks to point "2."?).
...output that has been somewhat copy-edited while retaining WP:V failures is what worries me.
Understood. There are two ideas we've been exploring that I think are relevant to what I understand you to be describing. Could you please let me know the extent to which you agree with me in thinking these ideas would help you in identifying content that is at risk of failing en:wp:v?
T399642 would introduce a signal (for the purpose of this discussion, you can imagine it as an edit tag) that would enable you to identify cases where a reference does not support the published claim it is purported to verify.
T276857 would, similarly, introduce a signal that would enable you to easily see how likely a given reference is to "survive" on a Wikipedia article by using historical editorial activity of revisions involving web domains as references. This probability would serve as a proxy for source reliability. This idea draws inspiration from projects like User:Headbomb/unreliable from @creffett, @Headbomb, @Jorm, and @SD0001, CiteUnseen by @SuperHamster and @SuperGrey, and CiteHighlighter by @Novem Linguae.
“Paste check” looks brilliant (happy it excludes copying within WP), though I’m sceptical re how prevalent exact copies of 50+ words are in LLM output to warrant including that in the notice.
I'm glad to know mw:Edit check/Paste Check resonates. With regard to the paste size that causes the Check to activate, that is actually something that you all (volunteers) will be able to configure on a per project basis using on-wiki configuration.
Also impressed by “Edit check”, I hope it’d help with onboarding and reduce negative experiences for newbies.
It's proving to be quite effective at exactly this! In fact, a recent A/B experiment of Reference Check showed the feature caused new content edits made by newer editors (≤100 edits) to be 17.5x more likely to include a reference and 23.6%less likely to be reverted.
Is it possible to do something along the same lines as “Paste check” for AI signs, so edits with such signs get a notice?
What you described is possible. However, I think there's a discussion to be had about how we might go about surfacing such feedback while mitigating the risk @Chaotic Enbyhelpfully raised below.
PPelberg (WMF), would it be accurate for me to understand you as making the following three points? Yes, on en.wiki there's disagreement between people who want to ban LLMs outright, and others who want to leave an allowance for constructive use, and despite loads of discussions we haven't come to a consensus (right now the community is sick of lengthy RfCs about LLM-use). I also hadn't seen this discussed much on the WMF-side.
The first phab report looks like a great idea that'd massively improve WP's reputation, I expect the results would be quite sobering. The second phab report also looks good, though an issue with general indicators is that reliability is on a per-claims basis (though partly because of WP:RSP people just treat sources as blanket un/reliable).
Does Reference Check exclude the lead (en:WP:LEADCITE)? It's not a big issue if it doesn't because like the page says, it's to Increase the likelihood that newcomers find the guidance, but maybe it could be limited to editors with say <100 edits (I can't see that that's a condition)? Those experiments are really promising
Re an edit notice for LLMs, yeah, en:WP:BEANS probably applies. It probably shouldn't link to WP:AISIGNS. Maybe just vaguely say the content appears to be LLM-generated, and ask them to check the sources first, then rewrite the content in their own words while making sure it reflects the sources. It's difficult if the project doesn't have a proper policy on LLM-use though Kowal2701 (talk) 14:20, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Kowal2701: thank you for engaging critically with the links I shared!
Re: ...an issue with general indicators is that reliability is on a per-claims basis (though partly because of WP:RSP people just treat sources as blanket un/reliable). Great spot. Could you please review the question I added to T276857 and let me know how (if at all) the question I drafted could be improved to more fully/accurately reflect the point you're raising here?
Re: Does Reference Check exclude the lead (en:WP:LEADCITE)?
@PPelberg (WMF), thank you. Regarding reference survival, the policy at en.wiki is en:WP:CONTEXTMATTERS (and en:WP:EXCEPTIONAL). So something like How can we encourage people to consider (or assist people in considering) the reliability of the source in the context of the specific claim they are using it for? Pointing to en:Help:Find sources would also probably be helpful (I wish we could surface that to everyone who makes an account, far too many people aren't aware of Google Scholar etc.) Thank you for the link to the Edit Check config! I'll leave a comment. You/I can also put a notice at en:WT:AIC? Kowal2701 (talk) 01:02, 21 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks a lot! Edit Check is certainly a brilliant project, and I'm just finding out about the AI Tells plugin, which is very promising. Two questions regarding it, the first of which I also commented on Phab: First, I wonder if it could be possible to integrate regular expressions to the rules? For example, we currently have:
"stands as a testament",
"stands as a reminder",
"serves as a testament",
"serves as a reminder",
"is a testament",
"is a reminder",
Would it be more future-proof to have a single rule "(stands as|serves as|is) a (testament|reminder)"? This would also allow us to include phrasal templates in the list, which are much more prevalent as tells in more recent models (GPT-5 for instance), while individual words/phrases were more commonplace in earlier models.Second, will feedback from this plugin be visible to the user making the potentially AI-written edit, or only to later users reviewing it? If the former, there is the risk that the feedback might be used as a tool to make the AI output read less like an AI (and thus be harder to detect, while not fixing underlying issues such as hallucinations). I'm thinking of this in the wake of a Claude plugin released a few days ago, which feeds on our very own signs of AI writing to make its writing read as more human. Chaotic Enby (talk) 06:27, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
The other problem is that pretty much all of those phrases are more characteristic of GPT-4, in 2023-early 2024. They are much less common in AI writing now. Gnomingstuff (talk) 12:18, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Gnomingstuff Based on a demo I saw at WCNA, my understanding is that these phrases can be set up and changed by the community! I also had a conversation with @PPelberg (WMF) that in my opinion, being able to define fuzzy rules (something like maybe "has_hallucinated_refs && feels_npov || has_obvious_ai_markers") would be a nice addition to the system. Sohom (talk) 13:41, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
In terms of experimentation more broadly, I am very happy that A/B testing is being actively worked on. I'm not very informed on the exact status of that project, but my dream for that is that communities can run their own A/B tests to see what works and what doesn't. This kind of testing could be the key to improving conversion of readers into editors. Toadspike[Talk]21:00, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you! I'm Julie van der Hoop, product manager for the Experiment Platform team. If you're curious about what the team is working on, what we're testing, and what decisions have been made, you can always check out https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Experiment_list
The experiments here have a discuss button to "Share your feedback" but users such as myself cannot create the discussion page. I wanted to leave a comment on the live experiment. Czarking0 (talk) 00:17, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
If I could leave such a comment. It would be: This experiment invites analysis about how many edits that get the suggested notice are revised to not include peacock words. One of the concerns will be changes that made the claims not include peacock words but are still non-neutral. This simply makes non-neutral content harder to find via semi-automated processes. How does the analysis plan to investigate this? Czarking0 (talk) 00:20, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi @Czarking0, thanks for pointing out that some of the button links weren't working. I've fixed them so they should all direct to an experiment's talk page or relevant Phab ticket. Here's the Revise Tone Structured Task talk page which I believe is what you were hoping to comment on. Let me know if you have any further thoughts on how this page can be more useful to you. EBlackorby-WMF (talk) 19:28, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
One of our problems when deploying something new is that there are few examples of how to use, so they are only adopted if someone takes those and makes a lot of effort understanding how they could be used. The migration of graphs to charts it's a good example of how not to do things. -Theklan (talk) 17:43, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Сообщество русскоязычной Википедии как-то раз согласилось на включение DiscussionTools при условии нужной разделу доработки. Баг про доработку (T313165) был заведён в июле 2022 года. Теперь сообщество сопротивляется включению Вектора, пока всё не будет доработано заранее. Высоковероятно, что сотрудничество с сообществами зависит не от канала общения, а от соблюдения обещаний в краткие сроки. Lvova (talk) 21:36, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think experimentation is key to deal with the changes that are coming at us. All of this however needs to be done taking the principles of our community at heart. It should not be disruption for the sake of an experiment, it should be experiments that disrupt what we can achieve. The upcoming A/B experiments and Test Kitchen will surely help with that. However we also need to think about completely changing what the homepage of projects can/should be. Maybe some things should be 'fullscreen' experiences ? Maybe we should have mini-apps to do dedicated tasks ?
One problem I have noticed with experimentation within our projects is the continuous need to bring everything within our eco-system up to a level of standard that is suitable for production level deployment (for good reasons btw). I'd really like to implore the foundation to keep looking at ways to stimulate and simplify experimentation by non-wmf within our eco system. Some of the best innovations have come out of volunteer experiments, but the gap between 'playing around' and 'becoming usable' is too big for many people to bridge. We need more stepping stones that are easier to identify and simpler to follow. This includes defining the levels of support the foundation can deliver, help experiments 'depart' our bubble or how to halt them completely. We probably have to consider how we can use things like OWID and scholia as parts of our content. How can we provide a dedicated platform for something like a sketchlab community and then use that content from within our other web properties. Improved OATH2 support to allow external sites to liaison with us. etc etc. The more freedom we can provide where possible to do so responsibly, the more opportunities will arise.
Lastly however.. Do not loose sight of the obvious. The fact that we had a slow developing SEO deathblow at Commons should be a wakeup call that we cannot afford to not pay attention to the basics of what makes websites work. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:08, 14 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Agree with your main points here regarding making experimentation easier and more accessible. As a brief note, re OWID and Scholia: there is a) now a functional gadget that allows interactive data visualization using OWID images (not yet enabled in the Wikipedia app) b) a built and largely ready OWID gadget for truly-interactive data visualizations (eg select which country lines are shown in graph) c) and a place on English Wikipedia where issues with the OWID visualizations could be noted (I'll soon add a list of limitations and issues eg affecting whether or not the chart has a useful display that would be nice to see fixed in the code). And for Scholia, the biggest problem is that Wikidata only has a small slice of studies (not even the most notable ones) so charts of it will often or usually be heavily inaccurate and misleading. The only currently feasible way to fix this I think is an import by some user(s) of the readily importable study+books metadata talked about here. I'd also like to note that while SEO things have recently improved, there are still major unresolved related issues (I'll make separate wish(es) for some of these later). Prototyperspective (talk) 15:21, 16 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Agreed with you both @TheDJ & @Prototyperspective on SEO – there have been some heroic efforts on the part of WMF staff & volunteer devs to triage SEO issues ad-hoc recently, but I think a bigger, more coordinated effort is needed. I'm drafting a new objective for next year's annual plan related to this and would very much welcome input on the list of known issues so far! There's this and this Phab board that I'm aware of. Are there issues not captured there that you have in mind @Prototyperspective? Of the issues that are captured there, do you two have a sense of what's having the biggest negative impact? Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 15:37, 19 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the question and great to see you're working on something relating to this and seem to recognize the importance/impact. I'm planning to create 2 or so Community Wishlist wishes about SEO/indexing-related things with probably some more details but for now:
the remainder parts of W303 (reasonable to separate these out): bad indexing of Commons categories in Web search engines and…
…often too few or no files showing in the Images even when there are good-quality (substantially better than the files shown) files in Commons with file names and/or category names (+ description) quite close to the search phrase
relating to issue 1 and 2, when searching things like 'free drone videos' or 'free-licensed photos', or 'free stock images', and other common phrases people search for when searching the kind of content Commons has, Commons (main page or if a specific subject was searched the subject's category) should show up. Currently, it seems like most users probably go to various other sites despite that in many cases Commons has far more files and/or has them better organized and/or they're more free than at those sites (and is integrating files from these sites). I noticed recently a discussion occurred about this here (see "Insights") and I mentioned this on some Commons VP discussion (will have to check if there were some more details).
Various important topics relate to Web search engine indexing that would warrant systematic (but still small-scale low-cost albeit ideally quickly repeatable) investigations such as whether Wikipedia sections are directly linked and their contents shown when people search for sth relating to that, whether Commons Category redirects are taken into account when people search for things (eg Commons has c:Category:Spheniscidae with c:Category:Penguin being a redirect: does the category and [many] files from it show when searching eg 'free-licensed penguin photos' and 'free penguin photos' etc), does the description of the Wikidata infobox display for categories without cat description, and how things are when people search in languages other than English (see W214: Add machine translated category titles on WMC). Prototyperspective (talk) 18:53, 19 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hello! I'm Julie, product manager for the experiment platform team. Your point about stimulating and simplifying experimentation for volunteer contributors really resonates. This came up at Futures Lab and @Sohom Datta and I discussed some paths forward as well.
How might we help you and other volunteer contributors test the impact of concepts or ideas? What might that look like? Could we partner to help you test some concepts that have the potential for bigger impact? JVanderhoop-WMF (talk) 19:29, 19 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hello! We need better community functionalities implemented in every wiki. We need better project UX and UI. Right now, it's very complicated to actually know who we are working with on projects, and it's difficult to have a discussion about what needs to be done.
We need a way to show project membership within the Talk section. I think 'Talk' needs a complete upgrade. Projects should also be more visible. Furthermore, we need the ability to create smaller groups so we can focus on one subject with 5–6 people for a month or two before moving on. Finally, we need better UI standardization across different wikis. Maxime2024 (talk) 16:36, 28 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 9 days ago53 comments22 people in discussion
Research has shown that newcomers struggle to edit and continue editing Wikipedia. We have built a set of features that have been shown to increase engagement by newcomers, and Edit Checks to help them follow some of the policies and guidelines necessary to make constructive edits. How else can we help newcomers become effective contributors?
Good article review was instrumental to my growth as a new editor. I was introduced to the most important content focused policies and a collaborative experience that greatly improved an article I was interested in and my ability to understand how to write an encyclopedia. It is also much more interesting than copy editing or finding citations. We could prompt users who have got to the 100 or 500 edit mark to start taking part in good article review via their talk page. If you want to go high tech with it, an AI assistant to do something like a good article review which helps an editor bring a page from C to B level is currently attainable. Czarking0 (talk) 20:04, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Czarking0 Thanks for sharing your experience! That resonates strongly with what the Growth team hopes to explore next fiscal year. A progression system, with the goal of offering clearer milestones, suggested next steps, and lightweight recognition as editors build experience. Thoughtful pathways into higher impact work, such as good article review, are exactly the kind of contribution progression this work aims to support. KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:13, 6 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Мне точно помогло то, что стандарты были иными и цена ошибки была ниже. Многие первые мои статьи сейчас не соответствовали бы минимальным требованиям, но тогда я получила опыт успеха и у меня было время научиться делать лучше, у современных новичков его будто нет, они должны сходу делать так, как я начала, может, через полгода-год. Я не представляю, как реалистично можно было бы это исправить; из нереалистичного -- требовать от сообществ снижать задранную планку (а она сейчас очень во многом задрана). Lvova (talk) 21:54, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks, @Lvova! You raise an important point. It was simply easier to get started editing years ago, when expectations and overall content quality were lower. The Growth team’s approach is not to ask communities to lower their standards, but to reduce the cost of early mistakes and help newcomers build skills before they are exposed to higher stakes editing workflows.
In practice, that means focusing on smaller, more guided contributions where expectations are clearer and the risk of harm is low, such as Structured Tasks, and in context guidance like Edit checks that help people learn norms as they work. The goal is to recreate some of that earlier runway you describe by giving newcomers more opportunities to experience success, learn incrementally, and gain confidence before moving into more complex editing. It aims to make the path toward meeting those standards more learnable, supportive, and forgiving, especially in the earliest stages. Do you think this approach to the problem makes sense? - KStoller-WMF (talk) 19:07, 6 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
В рамках исследований вам виднее, имеет ли это смысл и работает ли подход, но навскидку описанный путь не воспроизводит достижение вида "я пришла в знаменитую энциклопедию и она действительно открыта для всех, потому что вот написанная мной в первый же день статья и её никто не удаляет". Lvova (talk) 19:13, 6 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
If you have experience in training, teaching or mentoring newcomers, what have you learned about how newcomers can gain the skills to contribute? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC
Explain it to them simply; nothing scares someone off like using short links (such as WP:NPOV). Explain it in a plain way that anyone can understand, and they will get why certain policies or customs are in place. Unfortunately, I don't think enough people do this. I frequently see editors use jargon in newcomer's talkpages if they did some problematic edit. EatingCarBatteries (talk) 05:37, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
The most evident UX problems I see with newcomers are: there's no "Save" button in the Sandbox, only publish, which leads to two assumptions: "Publish" means publish, so when clicked, all the job is done OR, "Publish" means that I can't save it for latter. The other one is adding a title to the page below the title. We could easily check if there's a h1 starting a new article. -Theklan (talk) 17:47, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
As part of the Article Guidance experiment we are exploring ideas to provide better guidance to editors trying to create new articles. One of the aspects we are considering is to enable community-defined guidance that is specific to the type of articles the user is trying to create. We want to try those ideas in an experimental set-up so that we can measure their impact (in terms of improving the survival rate, editor retention, etc.). So we are open to incorporate ideas that can help in that space. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Pginer-WMF (talk) 09:24, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
There are broader cultural issues leading to discouragement which are clear from the trends. Wikipedia continually laments over reducing numbers of editors despite more access to tools & technology to make contributions. So culture & community must be driving new editors away.
New members deserve encouragement and mentorship, but negative cultural and community experiences interfere with that. Although there are mentorship programs, they don't seem adequate to outweigh the volume of overwhelmingly critical and demanding comments on talk pages, unnecessary reverts, along with other bureaucratic demands to follow the rules. Petty admin escalations are far too common. It certainly doesn't live up to "anyone can just edit any article".
A concrete way to address this would be to create a dashboard for new users onboarding experience and the network of those engaging with them. How many reverts, negative comments, escalations are made before they churn out? how many churn out in 30 days and why? Are new users interfacing with good contributors or paper pushing metapedians? How many active users are spending time on metapedian activity rather than contributing?
Cultural & community issues are not given adequate attention. You will never know why editors are fleeing until you get to the cultural root of the issue. Tonymetz (talk) 19:24, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for raising this, @Tonymetz. You are pointing to a set of issues that many research findings and community conversations have consistently surfaced. While newcomer retention is influenced by multiple factors, cultural and social dynamics are clearly a significant part of the picture. The Growth team names cultural issues as one of the three key challenges newcomers face.
There is an important role for Wikimedia Foundation teams to play in supporting improvement here, even if culture itself cannot be “fixed” through tooling alone. For example, the Contributors Strategy emphasizes making contribution feel meaningful by strengthening human connection, positive reinforcement, and a sense of impact. In parallel, improving tools and workflows for patrollers, mentors, and users with extended rights could help reduce burnout and free up time for more proactive and supportive engagement with newcomers.
The idea of a dashboard that surfaces signals about newcomer experiences, such as reverts, feedback patterns, escalation, and early churn, is also compelling. Metrics like these could help make social and cultural dynamics more visible, inform better decision making, and prompt earlier intervention. While numbers alone cannot capture the full complexity of community interactions, they may help ensure these issues receive more attention. Although it is not exactly what you are describing, the Mentor Dashboard is currently the closest tool we have that surfaces related signals. Access requires enrolling in Mentorship on your home wiki via Special:EnrollAsMentor. From your perspective, do you think the Mentor Dashboard helps address some of the underlying problem you named? What would make it even more impactful?
Unless we continue to examine and address the cultural roots of discouragement alongside technical improvements, we will struggle to meaningfully change newcomer retention trends. Are there existing community practices or initiatives that should be expanded or focused on more to help address cultural issues that can't be solved through improved tooling alone? Thanks for sharing your insights! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:34, 4 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
thank you for raising awareness I applied to that mentorship program -- I believe I was part of it, or a similar one.
. While numbers alone cannot capture the full complexity of community interactions,
I agree qualitative feedback is important as you mentioned, like surveys and community focus studies.
From your perspective, do you think the Mentor Dashboard helps address some of the underlying problem you named? What would make it even more impactful?
I'll take a deeper look at the dashboard once the records flush out from the program content and let you know how it compares to the ideas I had about new user onboarding and retention.
are there existing community practices or initiatives that should be expanded or focused on more
Community Portal / Village Pump / Teahouse -- these areas are helpful support forums for newcomers.
WikiProjects -- These are helpful in giving direction to new users for pages needing contribution
Welcome messages -- receiving welcome messages on the new user pages are encouraging. I recommend adding notifications to the sender for 1mo/6mo/12mo follow ups. And otherwise helping mentors encourage (and defend) new users by keeping the mentor engaged with new user activity and calling them in when help is needed (e.g. admin escalations or talk page activity).
Improving connections on all of the above would help. So if newcomers engage on a village pump with someone, making it easier for the mentor or mentee to reconnect later would help develop community.
Thank you for sharing the community practices @Tonymetz! I am taking notes of that. FYI (as a further reading): We recently did a research about understanding organizers' impact on newcomer growth (the final report is still progress). You can find it here. We interviewed organizers from various regions in the movement and captured (qualitative) nuances on existing onboarding practices from organizers' point of view. (P.S.: I am a newcomer to the Wikimedia movement myself and I think, this is my first time replying something on a talk page!) AJayadi-WMF (talk) 07:48, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
From your perspective, do you think the Mentor Dashboard helps address some of the underlying problem you named?
I took a look at the mock data & training material, and the content is great, definitely in the right direction. measuring reverts, and encouraging re-engagement are both major pillars of newcomer support.
The areas needing more attention would be defending newcomers against well-intentioned bad actors -- precursors to reverts or churning out. that is, tools to identify negative community forces that bite the newcomers .
The real risk of churn is that behaviors leading up to the churn occur months beforehand. Or they may be degrees away from the immediate indicator. Tonymetz (talk) 23:28, 4 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
My recollection is that the “Save page” button was changed to “Publish changes” due to some sort of legal consideration. I don’t recall what the specific reasoning was. — pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 14:35, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Pginer-WMF, @KStoller-WMF, @STei (WMF), @Samwalton9 (WMF), @AJayadi-WMF, @Tonymetz, @TheDJ, @Mwintirew, As part of the Article Guidance experiment we are exploring ideas to provide better guidance to editors trying to create new articles. One of the aspects we are considering is to enable community-defined guidance that is specific to the type of articles the user is trying to create. We want to try those ideas in an experimental set-up so that we can measure their impact (in terms of improving the survival rate, editor retention, etc.). So we are open to incorporate ideas that can help in that space. (The bolding is mine). This is very good to hear because among the volunteer editing community there are professional experts in UX, communication, and UI design.
For about 17 years either prominently or in the background I have been deeply concerned about the quality and appropriateness of new articles, especially those submitted by new users who are determined to create an article as their first foray into Wikipedia. My leading the efforts for over 10 years to address these issues began in 2012 in direct collaboration with the WMF, for New Page Patrol (NPP) when I initiated the development of Page Curation and its new New Pages Feed, which I followed by creating the NPP school in 2012, the NPP user right in 2016, and in 2018 concluded the 7-year long WMF's resistance to authorise the local consensus for ACTRIAL, the final research of which by Meta proved conclusively that the WMF's resistance to this policy change was completely erroneous. It is now generally accepted that such policy changes are local Wiki decisions on consensus and further excellent collaboration was provided by @Marshall Miller in this Signpost/2018-06-29/Special report Special Report.
NPP with its resident developer is constantly being improved but it is is the only firewall and gatekeeper for new content. It is now in its greatest crisis ever and is unable to to cope with an ever increasing massive backlog. Despite the 800+ rights holders (of whom only ~10% are active), backlog drives which have become the pattern have proven ineffective in maintaining the backlog at a sustainable straight line graph. Why this is, is another discussion but this research I conducted last year among patrollers will explain most of the problem.
...numbers alone cannot capture the full complexity of community interactions: Looking for solutions it becomes clear that a holistic approach is needed; one that will not only immediately but softly guide new users into creating their first article in a way that without the vast complexities of a mentoring infrastructure and its suggestions what to do, but will ensure that only appropriate (but not necessarily 100% perfect) articles will find their way into the New Pages Feed and Articles for Creation (@User:Pythoncoder). The effect will be immediately appreciated by new users who have a genuine article to submit, and will feel encouraged to stay around, and by NPP and AfC who will see their workloads significantly reduced and able to improve the quality of their reviews and help to creators.
Are there existing community practices or initiatives that should be expanded or focused on more? There are: Mobile editing, @User:Toadspike, and the increasing challenges presented by LLMs.
From your perspective, do you think the Mentor Dashboard helps address some of the underlying problem you named? What would make it even more impactful? Forced by personal circumstances to take a long Wikibreak since previously mentioning it, I have a 95% complete staggeringly simple project almost ready to roll out, that needs no further research and testing. It's a project that would easily be Wiki agnostic and needs no interventions into MediaWiki or extensions creating. The templates just need coding (@Sohom Datta). I would simply like to be given an opportunity to present it as a proof of concept to the Growth Team and other concerned users through a video meeting before I waste any volunteers' or employees' time on it, and without side-stepping with 'no time' or 'no money', or 'Ask the Wishlist'. Many years ago I was so impressed by the results of the WMF's development of my ideas for Page Curation whose quality exceeded my wildest dreams, and later direct collaboration, I think we can do it again, and I'm always open to better - and economical - ideas. Kudpung (talk) 01:56, 8 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for the feedback, Kudpung. We are very open to meeting and would welcome the opportunity to hear more about your proposal. I will follow up by email to arrange a time for a video discussion with you and a few colleagues who are currently thinking through Article Guidance. @Pginer-WMF and @GGalofre-WMF are leading this effort, and @Sdkb-WMF, who participated in our NPP discussions several years ago, is also advising on this effort.
I continue to revisit the feedback you shared when we met previously, and I regularly raise the importance of approaching this problem in a way that reduces the burden on experienced editors who review new pages. Your long standing experience with New Page Patrol and article creation workflows is highly relevant as we think through how to design guidance that supports new contributors while making the review process more sustainable for experienced editors. I look forward to speaking with you! You can expect an email from me shortly. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 00:13, 18 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@KStoller-WMF, @Sdkb-WMF, @Pginer-WMF, @GGalofre-WMFI wasn't aware that Sdkb had recently joined the WMF - that is great news. Indeed their Vision for a better Article Wizard was an extraordinary coincidence that at the time I was working on something remarkably similar (see my comments) which takes that a stage further with a redrafted much more succinct and readable 'My First Article' help page that is only 6 minutes reading instead of a typical Wikipedia 40 minute wall of text, and a simple system to encourage new users to use the new totally interactive wizard. The system is based on the process flow chart I designed which outlines this project. I am sure that Sdkb and I could bring this quickly to fruition and it would solve a lot of pressing issues, simply and very economically. By using a few bits simple javascript in some templates, it's almost AI without being AI. In fact the project precisely avoids the lengthy, elaborate, and costly solutions such as the one proposed by the WMF at Article Guidance although some elements could be combined - I'll reiterate that my original vision for Page Curation was taken by the WMF in direct collaboration with Erik Möller and Jorm to new heights resulting in a software package that exceeded all my expectations! And they produced it in record time. Kudpung (talk) 02:18, 21 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Kudpung I'm not sure if the previous email was lost in a spam filter, sorry about that! I've just responded to the email you sent, so hopefully you have received it now? KStoller-WMF (talk) 18:49, 3 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Comment: One major challenge I have identified with new editors is that they often do not know what to edit or where to start. It is much easier to continue editing when there is a clear and curated list of tasks. When newcomers are left to search on their own, they can feel lost or unsure if their contribution is meaningful. Even as an experienced editor, I sometimes find that the Special Pages are not very inviting. The tasks listed can be repetitive, too general, or not interesting, which can reduce motivation. For newcomers, this can be even more discouraging. I suggest making task lists more welcoming and personalized based on users’ interests. For example, showing suggestions like “This page has an issue, would you like to help fix it?” on a new user’s homepage can guide them directly to useful and simple edits. I have also found that short, simple videos work better than long explanations. Quick tutorials that focus on one task at a time make editing feel easier and help newcomers build confidence faster. These small changes can help newcomers feel guided, motivated, and more confident in becoming effective contributors.Mwintirew (talk) 10:20, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Mwintirew: your concern is spot on, this has been implemented as mw:Growth/Feature_summary#NT. New editors get it by default, but you can switch it on in your preferences (search for Newcomer) on English Wikipedia to check it out. I am not sure about other languages. Like anything, it could be improved though. Commander Keane (talk) 01:18, 21 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Commander Keane Thank you for passing along your knowledge of Growth features! These features, including the Newcomer Homepage, are available on nearly all Wikipedias, with the exception of a small number of very new wikis. The specific Suggested Edit types vary by wiki based on Community Configuration and deployment status. For example, English Wikipedia does not yet have the Add an Image task, though we hope to make it available on English Wikipedia in the future if there is community support. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 10:29, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@TheDJ That is a great point about discoverability. For newer account holders, the username currently links to the Newcomer Homepage. On desktop, this is one click away, while on mobile navigation to the Homepage takes two taps. For older accounts that do not have the now standard new account holder preferences, the Homepage is even more difficult to find.
There is also a broader discoverability issue related to autocreated accounts. Growth features, including the Newcomer Homepage and Mentorship, are disabled by default for autocreated accounts. As a result, someone who creates an account on English Wikipedia and later starts editing on another wiki, will not see the Homepage or have a mentor there. This creates an inconsistent experience across wikis and can be confusing, particularly when username navigation behaves differently.
Addressing these gaps is one reason the Contributors Strategy emphasizes the idea of a personal dashboard that is modular, customizable, and able to grow with the contributor over time. My hope is that this direction can help reduce discoverability issues and provide a more consistent experience across devices and projects.
What do you think would make a personal dashboard or homepage like this easier to discover and genuinely useful, especially for mobile editors? - KStoller-WMF (talk) 04:36, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@KStoller-WMF But why would I click my username ? Do I expect this information when I click 'MyName" or would something like 'User profile' be more efficient for this purpose by creating more curiosity ? Or maybe a small banner during your first 20 edits point you at it ? Or adding it as a link in the "post edit" notification. I worry that we are not looking holistically enough at some of these areas. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:50, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@TheDJ Thanks for the feedback! The username navigation path was chosen for several reasons, including the fact that a large proportion of newcomers visit their own, not yet created, user page within 24 hours of account creation. [1]
New accounts receive a guided tour after account creation to help them find the Homepage and understand its purpose. In addition, 48 hours after account creation, new account holders receive a notification with a targeted message based on their prior editing activity, or lack of activity, that directs them to their Homepage and Suggested Edits feed. There is significantly more we could do in this area, but these are two initial ways we are attempting to address the issue in a more coordinated manner.
I agree that we need to address these issues more holistically, and that some aspects of the current navigation are far from ideal. @Samwalton9 (WMF) and I are actively thinking through longer-term plans for Homepage / Personal Dashboard navigation, including whether the username menu is truly the clearest and most effective entry point for new account holders. KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:40, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Mwintirew Thank you for this thoughtful feedback! I am the Product Manager on the Growth team at the Wikimedia Foundation, which builds tools to support newcomers. Your observations closely reflect what we hear from many new editors, particularly around uncertainty about where to start and whether their early contributions are meaningful.
The Growth team continues to improve the Newcomer Homepage, which is designed to address this challenge by offering a curated list of Suggested Edits that can be filtered by topic. If you are interested, you can enable the Newcomer Homepage in your preferences by selecting “Display newcomer homepage” and then visit Special:Homepage. I would be interested to hear whether you think this feature helps address the challenge you described.
Your point about short, focused videos also resonates. Many newer audiences prefer concise visual explanations, which has implications for how we support newcomer onboarding. At the same time, producing, localizing, and maintaining video content is complex, so we are still exploring what is most effective. I have been considering whether short videos such as "How does Wikipedia work" or "Can you trust what’s on Wikipedia" could support early engagement and onboarding for new account holders. Do you think this type of content would help newcomers understand core principles such as neutrality and verifiability? Or do you think video tutorials need to focus more on specific technical guidance, such as using wikitext or the VisualEditor? - KStoller-WMF (talk) 10:30, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi Kirsten,
I think the videos should be far more specific, like how to add a picture to commons, or how to find articles that need edits.
Thanks for the feedback, @KStoller-WMF. I would say both. Short videos can help address common misconceptions that new account holders may have, while more specific technical guidance would also be very useful for those ready to start editing.
One important consideration is the medium. For example, I’ve encountered videos like the ones you mentioned on platforms such as Instagram, and I imagine the same applies to other social media, which seems like a good outreach approach. It may also be worth exploring whether this type of content could be embedded directly on Wikipedia (for example, from Commons) to support newcomers at the point of need. Is this something that already exists or has been considered? Mwintirew (talk) 14:07, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Embedding more instructional videos on help pages could be a good starting point. My concern is that many newcomers never reach those help pages at the moment they need guidance most. As an early idea, it could be worth exploring whether a small number of short, high quality instructional videos could be surfaced more directly through newcomer-facing experiences, such as the Newcomer Homepage or specific workflows.
For example, a brief video explaining NPOV could be available when a new editor triggers Tone Check, or a task-specific video could be shown alongside a Suggested Edit. This would allow guidance to appear at the point of need rather than requiring newcomers to seek it out. @Mwintirew is this closer to what you were thinking when you mention embedding this type of content "at the point of need"?
There are, of course, real challenges related to video creation, localization, maintenance, etc. That said, the idea aligns with our broader Contributors Strategy and with broader trends in how younger generations prefer to learn, so perhaps it's worth exploring further. I appreciate everyone taking the time to think through these ideas with me at this early stage of planning! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 05:58, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
once you have the videos for specific things, you can put them on social media, at the point of their use (e.g., at the upload button) and also just have one random one pope up on the homepage of newcomers.NabuKudurru (talk) 20:50, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
As someone who has introduced undergraduates to Wikipedia through WikiEd, the thing that continually surprised me was: they had no idea that they could edit Wikipedia, or that the site was operated by volunteers. That aspect of Wikipedia's "brand" seems to be oddly diminished in visibility. (In fact, every class has a collective epiphany: "Is that why my high school teacher said not to use Wikipedia, because anybody can just edit it to say anything??" -- they assumed their teachers just didn't like online sources.) In their reflection assignments, several said Wikipedia should run paid ads (especially on TikTok) informing people that new editors are both allowed and welcome. I'd be interested in, e.g., on-wiki banner campaigns encouraging people to register & try editing. I do also think that many people won't ever be bitten by the editing bug, but increasing awareness that it's an option could help the "right people" find the hobby. Incidentally, my students also consistently said that they found it easy and rewarding to learn how to edit, and described it as a welcoming space -- so I think there's a lot to be proud of with the work accomplished so far to assist with onboarding. LEvalyn (talk) 04:45, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi @LEvalyn, thanks for the feedback! It’s fantastic to hear that your students consistently find editing easy and rewarding!
I agree that there is more we can do to increase brand awareness. For a site with the slogan “The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” it’s always surprising to me how many people still don’t realize they can contribute. The good news is that the Future Audiences team is working in this space, and we are beginning to reach millions of people on platforms like TikTok.
Regarding on-wiki banner campaigns encouraging registration and editing, the Growth team collaborated with Marketing and Communications a few years ago to run experiments targeting different audiences through the Newcomer Experience Projects. For example, we tested a Thank You Banner that generated over 50 million impressions, but it resulted in only 492 new editor accounts. Based on these results, we concluded that banners alone may not be the most effective way to convert readers into editors (banner blindness is real!).
That said, there are other potential "calls to action” we could surface to readers that may be more targeted and impactful. One idea the Growth team recently explored involved displaying simple edit suggestions directly in an article’s read view. While we only piloted this for new account holders (not logged out readers), I’d be interested in your thoughts: Do you think a concept like this could effectively introduce editing to readers who may not realize they can contribute? Do you have any other ideas for increasing awareness of editing? - KStoller-WMF (talk) 11:12, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Interesting, I didn’t know about that banner trial! I’m glad that was tried and I know folks are working hard in this area. The low conversions resonates with one of my other observations, that not everyone is really an “editor in waiting”; I’ve come to think that editing as a hobby will only appeal to specific personalities, and it’s futile to try to change someone’s personality. So I’m often chewing on the question, “where are ‘editor types’ already gathering and how can we specifically invite them?” For example, video game modding communities might have a lot of overlap. But that’s more of an idle thought. LEvalyn (talk) 06:15, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@LEvalyn - I agree that more targeted approaches are likely to be more effective for reaching certain personalities and potential contributors who are already inclined toward editing. This idea came up in related discussion below. For example, WhatamIdoing notes that the targeted 1Lib1Ref program has been successful in engaging reference librarians. In addition to Product and Technology work, the Community Growth team supports efforts like these through Community Development and Content Enablement, with a focus on reaching audiences where there is a natural alignment with contributing to Wikimedia projects.
I like the idea of outreach to video game modding communities! Wikipedia’s open APIs already support some game developers, and there may be opportunities to build on this and explore more intentional engagement in this space. Thanks for sharing this idea! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 17:37, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@KStoller-WMF thank you for sharing about our team, Content Enablement, Kirsten! @LEvalyn Hi! I am part of the Content Enablement team that Kirsten mentioned. I am curious about what are best practices that you could share based on your experience introducing undergraduates to Wikipedia through WikiEd? How do you spark their interest in contributing to Wikipedia? (Context: We have this research about understanding organizers' impact on newcomer growth which captures existing best practices in onboarding newcomers) AJayadi-WMF (talk) 08:09, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
To be very honest, I don't think I have ever "retained" a student as a long-term editor, so I see the impact on growth as happening at the more abstract level of maintaining ""brand awareness"" in a new generation, plus short-term gains from their edits. I therefore approach WikiEd with two priorities: 1, "small edits in mainspace over big edits in draftspace" (i.e., prose edits to one paragraph and fact-checking two sources rather than trying to do a whole article), so the encyclopedia can benefit from the time they do spend editing; and 2, "culture over content" (i.e., reading and interpreting AfDs together rather than doing research to add to articles) so they can come away with a real understanding of Wikipedia itself. For the latter point, it helped that I was teaching classes on digital literature, so Wikipedia was our course content; it would probably be weirder to read AfDs in a biology class. LEvalyn (talk) 08:53, 6 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
This impacts so many different sections that I don't know where to put it: We need a functioning mobile editing interface. Currently, anyone who wants to do anything beyond basic text editing is forced to use the Desktop mode in a mobile web browser. Everything is tiny, fat-finger mistakes are unavoidable, and lots of stuff just doesn't work. We need a good web version of Wikipedia that allows even moderately-advanced editing. Ideally, this would be possible in the app, too! Toadspike[Talk]21:07, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Commander Keane Can I ask, when you say editing, do you mean editing ? or engaging with others ? Or gnoming, or doing full on moderating and curation ? These are all very different user groups in my experience, with wildly different needs. One problem with mobile has been that our experienced editors want everything in one page, whereas most beginners want as few distractions as possible. This has been a long term problematic area when it comes to development, as that is a combinatory explosion of different pathways that has been difficult to develop and support, so getting more insight in this is a good idea. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:08, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@TheDJ All of the above, but especially basic content editing. I can't give a complete summary of all the issues with mobile, but the basic problem is that a lot of essential tasks like editing citations and templates can be very difficult. Scripts are basically nonexistent on the default mobile skin and in the app. There are of course OS-specific issues that the WMF can't fix, like the fact that I can't tap to put my cursor in the middle of a word, which is essential for editing code and templates, but there is still a lot that can be improved. It is silly that in 2026 the first piece of advice we give to anyone editing on mobile is still "scroll to the bottom and switch to desktop mode". Toadspike[Talk]22:43, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for raising this issue, @Toadspike. I agree that there is much more we can and should do to improve the mobile editing experience. I appreciate how TheDJ framed this distinction: new editors benefit from simple and clear ways to get started, while experienced editors already understand editing workflows and tools and primarily want efficient access to the full set of tools and functionality they rely on.
I have been working with a group focused on identifying some of the most significant barriers to mobile web editing: Mobile_Web_Editing_Research. As you can see, there is active effort underway to move several improvements forward. That said, this work has primarily focused on newer mobile editors, and there was less emphasis on the needs of very experienced editors. As a result, we may be missing some areas that are most important to you.
From your perspective, would introducing additional tools within VisualEditor on mobile be helpful? Or are you primarily interested in improvements to the mobile source editor experience? - KStoller-WMF (talk) 05:22, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
One of my issues with the current mobile editor has been logged out editing. I'd bet that most account holders made their first edit logged out. However, people on mobile are often some form of mobile data connection. In my experience in the United States these are basically always blocked. I suspect this creates a pattern of someone tries to edit > sees that they can't right now > never tries again. We should try to make mobile editing frictionless like Amazon makes shopping. I am not sure what would be required on the technical side to make this happen because I would have thought that the temp accounts change fixed this. However, I just tried and it did not. Czarking0 (talk) 04:02, 4 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Czarking0, thank you for your comment. Is you suggestion to really encourage mobile users to create an account, or am I missing a more obvious point? (my English got rusty ^^') Trizek_(WMF) (talk) 15:32, 4 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think there are a lot of ways this could be improved with a basic reflection on how websites like Amazon encourage first time sales. If the user on Amazon was hit with a big block message when trying to add items to their cart because their IP address was associated with fraud it would be detrimental to sales. Anything WP does that would be detrimental for sales on an e-commerce website needs a strong reason to stay.
One example of a better way to handle this is to not block these edits but immediately pending changes protect the page, add their edit and then follow with a UI to create an account. If they then create the account the edit is auto-reverted and then attributed to the new account with the pending changes protection removed and applied to the page. If it is not created then it stays on the pending changes. Obviously this process should be A/B tested to determine if it brings more vandalism than the new editors are worth. If so, automatically rollback the changes after some time which allows the editor to continue their session. Czarking0 (talk) 15:45, 4 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Czarking0, in conversations with enwiki editors, about half of our existing highly experienced editors made their first edit as an IP (or perhaps I should say – half of them both remember and publicly admit to it; the actual numbers could be higher). If half the users of any large network can't get started, then we could lose half of our future editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:50, 4 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I have been active in two periods, 2004-2007 and from 2021 (with some odd edits in-between). One thing that I have noticed is that the level of what constitutes a "constructive edit" is much higher now than when I started the first time (sources, formatting, "standardisation" etc.). I think this is very unfortunate. Whilst there obviously is a case for increasing the quality of what we do that comes at a cost (that might reduce quality in the long run). The learning curve has become much steeper even though the site has become technically easier to edit. Learning-by-doing is becoming harder and harder. It is unfortunately not trivial to suggest some helpful way to handle this. One thing to consider with guidelines and policies is, do they substantially increase the quality of the encyclopedia and/or reduce the amount of possible conflicts? If not, can they be removed? For every new policy there is one more thing for a new user to learn. Gunnar Larsson (talk) 16:22, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
People don't need to know of and learn all the policies. They can get pointed to them if they add content / edit that is not in accordance with any of them and then know about the policy part from that point on. Sources have always been expected so I don't think what you said applies throughout and editing is still quite easy where the difficult part is more the motivation, finding something to do, and being bold enough to contribute etc imo. Guidelines and policies have their reason and abandoning any or any parts of them can't be done or decided at the global and/or WMF level but is done by the communities, e.g. after deliberation on the policy's talk page or RfC etc. Various things can be done to display relevant policy&guideline info at the point where is needed and to make it easier to find; e.g. displaying some hint when the wikitext editor detected sth like a lot of content being added without source or making it easier for newcomers to learn/ask/find relevant meta content like the policy on a certain subject buried in some section deep down in a large policy page that's not so easy to find and things like that. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:27, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
В VRT помогает приватное общение, демонстрация образца под задачу. Образцы, конечно, есть и на страницах проекта, но они масштаба "статья о человеке", а без помощи задача найти, скажем, статью о певце, но при этом не избранную или хорошую, а достаточно качественный стаб -- почти нерешаема, так как статьи найти можно, но нельзя оценить, стоит ли равняться на их качество. Lvova (talk) 21:54, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 4 days ago18 comments10 people in discussion
The rise in dis- and misinformation, vandalism, and security threats means that the work of users with extended rights has never been more important, yet their numbers are shrinking on the largest Wikipedias. At Wikimania this year, we brought users with extended rights together to share best practices and come up with ideas for the future. How else can we strengthen and grow our community of editors and users with extended rights?
How do you prioritise what needs your attention on your wiki? What pages, categories, processes, or tools has your community developed to surface requests or manage backlogs? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects are not generally censored. However, a trend in some jurisdictions, is to require more responsibility and risk mitigation planning, from platform operators, moderators (and contributors). It is my view that a discussion should be opened as to the effectiveness of the technology supporting content selection, and moderation approaches in use within Wikimedia based projects.
It has long been stated that content on Wikimedia projects is NOT (and never will be) censored by default. However it has also been stated that content should ideally 'support a reasonable academic or cultural purpose', Given the vast range of diverse cultures that contribute on Wikimedia projects, this purpose is not always a uniform one.
A review should be undertaken to ensure that Wikimedia project communities have robust tools, in order to enable project communities to implement and enforce consistent scoping, editorial policy, and community standards, appropriate to those project communities, or groups within those communities.
What volunteer-built tool or gadget is most important to your workflow, and why?
Twinkle by far. Nominating for speedy+regular deletion, tagging with maintenance tags, requesting page protection, etc. I would not be able to tell you how many hours would be saved if it wasn't for it. EatingCarBatteries (talk) 07:41, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Twinkle again, NPP, AWB, and AfC deserve mention. AWB is the type of tool that is really due for a reboot. Wiki can talk big game about competing with or complementing LLMs but AWB is the sort of thing that shows WMF is not stepping up to the plate to make the tools for modern technology. This could be so much better UI/UX functionality and performance. Related to the next question, backlog drives are great for introducing the concept of patrolling but if you look at the top performers for a lot of them, they are clearly gaming the system. A lot of the gaming is actually low hanging fruit that can be more automated with better tooling. NPP and GOCE are probably the lowest hanging fruit. Czarking0 (talk) 00:33, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
What types of improvements would help more editors get involved with patrolling?
I think that Special:Homepage could be used to introduce editors to patrolling. For example, consider the subjects the person is interested in. Surface a (selected) recent edit in one of those articles for review. Ask whether it needs reverting, if they want to thank the editor, if it needs additional work (e.g., adding a [citation needed] tag), or if they're not sure/let someone else decide. Giving them a mix of edits that are easy to classify (e.g., using ORES labels for probably good and probably bad edits, but not necessarily showing them those labels) would help them figure out how it works. Eventually, they can be encouraged to use Special:RecentChanges instead. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:44, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I concur that encouraging new users to patrol recent changes for vandalism and other inappropriate edits would be positive, but I would be very hesitant to introduce them them to tasks such as for example NPP (just saying, because it has been mentioned) which is absolutely not for beginners. For NPP we need to examine the reasons why otherwise qualified users give up with it so soon after requesting the right (800+ patrollers, less than 10% active). Kudpung (talk) 00:46, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
То, как Фонд выбрал, что такое extended rights, объявил это на Викимании, провёл несколько встреч с некоторыми группами из объявленного списка, а потом сократил список, заслуживает звания "демотиватор года". Вы могли бы усилить сообщество, не демотивируя волонтёров. Lvova (talk) 22:01, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
At the beginning they did meetings, but not for all from the list, then they shortened the list. Yes, I think it shows bad attitude. Lvova (talk) 21:29, 4 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
There are still many wikis that hope to install revision-approval tools such as Extension:FlaggedRevs or Extension:Approved Revs (see Community_Wishlist/W363 and task T31744). These tools can strike a balance between page protection and allowing edits, better preventing important pages from being vandalized. However, FlaggedRevs is unmaintained and will not deploy to any Wikimedia wiki since 2014. In a recent discussion on the Chinese Wikipedia, there was once again a proposal to install such tools. More technical investment is needed to enable FlaggedRevs or Approved Revs for more wikis. --Steven Sun (talk) 06:46, 9 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Active editors at the German-language Wikipedia 2001–2025
@Steven Sun, this graph shows what happens to a community when Flagged Revisions is installed. This decline didn't happen at similar large Wikipedias without Flagged Revisions (e.g., French, Italian, Spanish). It did happen at other Wikipedias that used Flagged Revisions, such as Polish.
@WhatamIdoing, It depends on the criterion for 'active user' applied by each Wikipedia. Flagged Revisions might be a contributing factor but active users and contributors on the English Wikipedia, for example, have generally declined or shown significant instability since 2018, with a accelerated, long-term drop in new, active contributors (a 36% decline from 2016 to 2025). While a brief spike occurred during the pandemic (2020), it did not lead to sustained growth, and by 2022, the trend returned to a decline. Kudpung (talk) 00:36, 10 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
The number of active editors has been stable at the English Wikipedia since about 2013.
The English Wikipedia is not a good comparator, because it has unique pressures (e.g., global article spam, as few know better than you) and unusually high levels of tool-based editing. That said, the difference in the slope of these two graphs is obvious: The 'active editor' count at German-language Wikipedia is in a steady decline since soon after the introduction of FlaggedRevs. The same metric at the English Wikipedia was approximately stable(-ish) for about a decade starting in ~2013 (though I believe last year's total numbers were down, and I think this is probably not a one-off fluke). WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:27, 10 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for providing this information! German Wikipedia enables Flagged Revisions for all pages. However, the proposal on Chinese Wikipedia is to protect only a few of important pages, similar to what English Wikipedia does. A recent study focuses on the differences in how Flagged Revisions are used. Steven Sun (talk) 01:19, 10 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
The English Wikipedia's approach is called w:en:Wikipedia:Pending changes. I do not think it has significant harmful effects on editor retention, if it is only used on a small number of pages (especially if it is used instead of harsher protection levels). WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:30, 10 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 13 hours ago33 comments10 people in discussion
We want to make it easier for contributors to find one another and work on projects together, strengthening overall collaboration and connection on the Wikis.
Do you ever set editing goals or challenges for yourself or for a group that you’re a part of? How do you set and share these goals? Would you be interested in having ways to do this and share your work with others? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
Мне очень нравится в качестве цели Hall of Fame на CEE Spring, так как это достижимая цель, углубляющая в саму идею мероприятия, налаживание отношений в регионе через интерес и получение информации друг о друге.
Для себя во время участия в марафонах по написанию статей, которые у нас длятся до месяца, или просто при работе с источником я часто ставлю задачу типа "одна статья по теме марафона/книге в день". Хотя я, наверное, видела бы риск в том, чтобы демонстрировать подход явно другим участникам; это слишком легко может стать невротичной идеей, не получилось -- хорошо, а разрыв страйка -- плохо. Lvova (talk) 22:22, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Lvova, Спасибо за то, что поделились этой информацией! Команда Connection в настоящее время работает над функцией, позволяющей устанавливать цели редактирования для мероприятий, которую мы планируем выпустить в ближайшие несколько недель. Эта функция создаст индикатор прогресса на странице мероприятия, чтобы участники могли видеть свой общий прогресс в достижении цели. Мы согласны с тем, что важно сосредоточиться на сотрудничестве и результатах, а не на создании тревожной обстановки для участников мероприятий. Мы также заинтересованы в расширении этой функции в будущем, чтобы все редакторы могли, при желании, устанавливать цели редактирования и работать над их достижением вместе. Мы с нетерпением ждем реакции пользователей на нашу функцию установки целей и ценим ваши отзывы! IFried (WMF) (talk) 22:38, 13 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Lvova (english version, for others to read) - Thank you for sharing this insight! The Connection team is currently working on a feature to allow events to set editing goals, which we plan to release in the next few weeks. This feature will create a progress bar on the event page, so people can see their collective progress against the goal. We agree that it is important to focus on collaboration and impact rather than creating an anxiety-inducing experience for event participants. We also are interested in expanding this feature in the future, so all editors can perhaps set editing goals and work toward goals together, if they want. We look forward to seeing how people respond to our goal-setting feature, and we appreciate the feedback you shared! IFried (WMF) (talk) 22:39, 13 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
My editing goals are to get as many of my todos done as possible and there's too many of them so I'd like to offload them. Sometimes I try to finish todos for Wikidata because there's the fewest compared to Commons, metawiki, and Wikipedia. There is not really places to share them (so e.g. editors who don't know what to do can pick them up) but I've set up c:Commons:Categorization requests where I added a tiny slice of Commons-specific todos. I think there one can see how they're usually not very unimportant and usually have practical applications such as enabling updating of outdated data graphics in Wikipedia (the low pageviews of Commons is a separate problem that could eventually be improved via better integration with Wikipedia and work relating to search engine indexing). Btw, when clicking reply, the comment is added somewhere below the bullet point beneath, not beneath this bullet point as yet another issue with the Reply tool. An earlier editing goal was to routinely update an article like 2023 in science monthly with major scientific findings after spending days to go through hundreds and hundreds of papers to find these and subsequently to also add the info to the respective Wikipedia articles. I've stopped for now because it's a lot of effort and time with very little recognition and I hoped somebody else would pick this up (see also), e.g. because I still have lots of papers with findings to integrate that include some nonfeatured ones containing still info important for some WP article. Ways to share such things would be great. I like challenges and participating in these e.g. on Commons where there were sometimes drives to cut down on uncategorized categories or files missing categories where it was really nice to see the collective effort to shrink the backlog down to zero. However, while they're a lot of fun, I don't have time for these due to all the todos. I was nice to see the numbers go down and visual charts would make it even more fun and motivating. Often experience gained from such tasks is then used to build meta help pages but one shouldn't lose sight of more at-scale approaches to improve the sizes of such backlogs such as ways to address things at the source such as improving the UploadWizard on Commons to better facilitate and guide categorization. In any case, again experience gained from such activities can be made available on pages that could e.g. also form the base of project pages or campaign landing pages or backlog drives etc. I think work on this could make fairly inactive users more active and get new users as well as potential new (not yet registered) users started. --Prototyperspective (talk) 18:18, 9 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Prototyperspective, thanks for sharing this perspectiveǃ To clarify, when you write: "I think work on this could make fairly inactive users more active and get new users as well as potential new (not yet registered) users started," are you referring to being a part of collective editing activities with measurable goals, or something else? As to your larger response related to the challenges of collaborative editing initiatives: Your comment about the difficulties of sharing to-dos and the limited recognition from some of your past work makes a lot of sense. It also parallels some project ideas that we're exploring on the Connection team for the future, such as making it easier for editors set and share goals, collaborate with each other around these goals, and give/receive recognition for goals met/good work done/other work that may not even be tied to goals. We're in the early stages of thinking about this, but this is helpful context as we explore these options. Thank you again for sharing all of thisǃ IFried (WMF) (talk) 22:52, 13 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
If you organize events (like edit-a-thons, workshops, or meetups), what is your biggest challenge? What technology could the Foundation provide that would have the most impact on your success? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
The foundation should develop a series of tools that allow for a quick assessment of current articles and/or of the impact of an editathon. Think of the many visualisations and tools developed for WikiProjects (eg. https://wp1.openzim.org/). Allow an editathon facilitator to deploy this on a smaller scale, eg. they plug in a list of articles edited during the event and get summaries of before and after. Allow small groups of editors to clearly see their long-term plans without having to create a whole WikiProject infrastructure and tag everything themselves. CMD (talk) 02:43, 21 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Chipmunkdavis, thanks for the reply. I think this sentence you shared is especially illuminating: "Allow small groups of editors to clearly see their long-term plans without having to create a whole WikiProject infrastructure and tag everything themselves." It makes a lot of sense that people want to collaborate, see their impact, and share what was accomplished with simple, intuitive tooling. This is encouraging to hear, and it's aligned with some of the work that my team (the Connection team at WMF) is doing. We recently released a feature called Collaborative Contributions, which is enabled on all Wikimedia wikis. This feature allows editors to come together and see what was worked on in the course of an event (or any collaborative activity, really). It's a very new feature, so it's quite basic for now, but we're interested in expanding it in different ways in the future. To start, we're developing a way for groups to set editing goals, such as creating 20 new articles within a 1-month period (T387389). A progress bar would be displayed, so everyone can see their collective progress against the goal. This goal-setting feature will be an optional part of Collaborative Contributions. Once this work is done, we're considering other projects, including the ability for groups to create a worklist of articles to focus on (T412860), which can be compiled either before or during the event/activity. Then, we can display relevant statistics (like edits made, bytes changed, number of editors, etc) along with perhaps a "before" and "after" summary, like you explained. Do you think these feature ideas could be useful for groups of editors who want to collaborate together? Any thoughts or suggestions on what I just shared? We're curious to hear any more thoughts you have, and thank you again for your replyǃ IFried (WMF) (talk) 20:44, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@IFried (WMF) Thank you for this reply. I think I actually used that tool, at least partially, during a Wikipedia 25 event. I didn't see any progress bars but perhaps I missed some functionality. If there is an easy way to test it I would be interested in experimenting. CMD (talk) 06:02, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Chipmunkdavis, great to hear that you used Event Registration for Wikipedia 25ǃ To clarify, Event Registration and Collaborative Contributions is available on the wikis today, but the goal-setting & progress bar feature is currently in development. We just started the project, but we're hoping it will be available to test in the next few months. You can see design examples for what it may look like in T412860, as well as seeing updates on our project progress. We'll also be providing status updates about the work on the Collaborative Contributions project page. Once it is released, we're really looking forward to people experimenting with it and sharing their feedback. IFried (WMF) (talk) 18:21, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Let me imagine a truly ambitious event platform! This platform would have a few key features:
It could integrate existing metrics tools. For example, if an organizer chooses the Program & Event Dashboard as the tracking tool, the system would automatically create a project. Participants who register through event tools would then have their accounts automatically added to the tracking page.
It would also function as a schedule tool for participants. Registrants could add events to their calendars and receive reminders at scheduled times. If organizers need to communicate with participants, the platform could help by sending notifications, emails, or even leaving messages on User Talk pages.
It could integrate with the Foundation’s grant tools as well. For instance, Fluxx could directly pull data from this platform to populate metrics. For project-based grants, this could significantly reduce administrative workload, allowing more activities to be completed within the time and energy volunteers can realistically afford.
It could even include some social features—such as allowing participants to leave feedback on events, or enabling newcomers to ask questions and learn from people who have participated in similar activities before.
I know this all sounds a bit crazy, but if something like this actually existed, I think it would make the Wikimedia community feel much more like a real community. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by Reke (talk)
@Reke, thank you for this comment! I grew very excited when reading it because some of the features you mentioned already exist in the CampaignEvents extension, which was developed by my team (the Connection team). Let me explain below, going through each of your ideas:
Integration with the Programs & Events Dashboard: We have something like what you're describing! We allow organizers to create event pages on the wikis with the Event Registration feature (so there's a "Register" button on the event page), and organizers can tie on-wiki registration to their event on the P&E Dashboard. So, if someone registers for an event on the event page, their username is automatically added to the dashboard event. Additionally, we have our own new event statistics feature for event contributions called Collaborative Contributions, which shows event contribution statistics directly on the wikis.
Event scheduling and notifications: Right now, we a) have automatic registration confirmation emails after participants join events, and b) organizers can choose to send mass emails to participants to remind them of the event. We don't yet have automated reminder messages, but we know that this could be useful, so we may add this feature in the future.
Integration with Fluxx: We have basic integration! When organizers configure Event Registration, they can input their grant ID, which grant officers use to analyze event impact. We don't show insights from Fluxx on the wikis, but we're focused on showing more event impact data through Collaborative Contributions. Up next, we're focused on allowing organizers to set an optional event goal (such as "20 new articles created") with a progress bar (see T387389 for design examples.
Social features, like feedback on events or reaching out to other editors with questions: We haven't deeply worked on any of this stuff yet, but we may do some related work in the future. We're especially interested in a) finding more ways to connect editors with similar interests so that they can work together/share ideas & resources, b) finding more ways that editors can understand the impact of their work, and b) finding more ways that editors can give and receive feedback & recognition for good work done on the wikis. All of this work is related to helping editors feel more connected, supported, and valued.
If you would like to learn more about our work, I invite you (and anyone who is interested!) to attend our next learning session and to join our Telegram group for people interested in event organizing, on-wiki collaboration, and related topics. Thanks for these great comments and ideas! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 21:11, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Есть мероприятия, которые идут на регулярной основе, и в них наибольший вызов -- постараться уделить внимание всем участникам и сделать итоги оперативно. Этот вызов сам по себе рутинен, но всё же требует сил. В основном, когда я отвечаю, я думаю про Тематическую неделю, куратором которой выступаю уже год; каждый месяц сообщество выбирает страну и на протяжении 10 дней пишет статьи о ней. Я стараюсь читать все статьи, каждый раз около сотни, поправлять опечатки, чтобы авторы видели, что кому-то не всё равно, быстро выдавать обещанные награды, номинировать статьи в Знаете ли вы, что -- опять же, чтобы авторы чувствовали внимание к своей работе. На мой взгляд, это даёт результат; напрямую я не считаю нужным это автоматизировать, но технология, которая помогала бы авторам ощущать эффект от проделанной работы, была бы кстати не только тут. Есть, конечно, счётчики посещений, но они плохо работают как мотивация на коротких дистанциях, сразу после марафона. При организации мероприятий разовых самая большая проблема -- совершенно непонятно, будет ли отклик сообщества, и непонятно, как его получить; да, можно сделать объявление на форуме, повесить оповещение в списке наблюдения и на "домашнюю страницу", проследить, чтобы мероприятие не накладывалось на подобные себе -- и этого недостаточно. Согласование баннера слишком сложно. В качестве мозгового штурма далёкая от идеала идея -- рекламные кампании в поисковиках, которые можно было бы не сложнее, чем баннеры, делать через Фонд? Lvova (talk) 22:22, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Lvova, Спасибо за ваши комментарии! Они очень полезны. У меня возникло два дополнительных вопроса: вы упомянули, что количество просмотров страниц статей, редактировавшихся в ходе мероприятия, может быть не самым значимым или мотивирующим показателем. Существуют ли, на ваш взгляд, какие-либо другие метрики или критерии оценки, которые могли бы быть более мотивирующими? Вы также поделились весьма ценными наблюдениями касательно сложностей, возникающих при продвижении мероприятий и распространении информации о них — как внутри вики-ресурсов, так и за их пределами. Команда Connection как раз начинает изучать возможности того, как мы могли бы помочь организаторам в продвижении мероприятий среди более широкой аудитории; правда, пока мы сосредоточены преимущественно на продвижении непосредственно внутри вики-среды. В качестве одного из возможных вариантов вы упомянули рекламу в поисковых системах. Если это возможно, нам было бы очень интересно узнать, какие именно идеи в этом направлении приходят вам на ум. Заранее спасибо!
EN: Thank you for these comments! They are very helpful. I have two follow-up questions: You mention that pageview counts for articles editing during an event may not be the most impactful or motivating. Is there another metric or measurement that you think may be more motivating? You also wrote some great insights around the challenges of promoting and sharing events, both on and off the wikis. The Connection team is actually beginning some explorations to see how we can help organizers promote events to larger audiences, but we're mostly focused on on-wiki promotion so far. You mention the idea of search engine advertisement as another option. If possible, we would love to hear about what ideas you have in mind, in particular. Thank you in advance! IFried (WMF) (talk) 23:09, 13 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
How do you show recognition for the work of others on the wikis today? What could help make it easier for editors to express appreciation for each other? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
Anyone who wants to "make it easier for contributors to find one another and work on projects together" needs to look at DannyH's prior work on "neighborhoods". This is only relevant for larger wikis. At the mid-to-small size, the on-wiki answer is always the village pump, or maybe they add on a second page specifically to support newcomers (like the w:en:Wikipedia:Teahouse or voy:en:Wikivoyage:Arrivals lounge), and the off-wiki answer is frequently the most effective one. My rule of thumb is that if it's feasible to read 24 hours' worth of comments (on the whole wiki) in less than about 30 minutes, then everything should be centralized to a very few pages. For example: English Wiktionary and English Wikivoyage should centralize to a few pages. English Wikibooks and English Wikisource should have just one or two pages. Commons should have a variety of pages.
Enwiki's main model for finding people to work with is w:en:WP:WikiProjects (a group of people who want to work together, usually around a subject area or around a particular type of edit). The main problem is the proliferation of tiny splinter groups (e.g., a "group" for a single television show that is actually just one or two editors). We have about 2,000 such groups. It would be better if we had 200. Most large-to-mid wikis need even fewer. We have looked at mw:ORES/Articletopic as an organizing principle. It seems sound, but the problem is that actually merging things takes, say, 30–60 minutes per WikiProject, spread across two months. We could get a lot of this done if someone wanted to spend 10 hours a week for a year on it, but it's not really fun or interesting work. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:30, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
In re "How do you show recognition for the work of others on the wikis today?":
I have been thinking recently that barnstars are under-used. Maybe Echo/Notifications could tell people with medium levels of experience about WikiLove. The message for this would require some thought. The "internet outrage machine" might make people think that it's good to award barnstars to people who stir up drama, rather than calming things down and finding solutions. We would want to find a way to encourage desirable behavior. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:29, 15 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@WhatamIdoing & @Sohom Datta re: recognition - I just wanted to chime in to say these are excellent ideas and would help build connections across the movement. Are there any other ways of celebrating and recognising good work on the wikis that you have come across during your wiki travels? Mayur मयूर-WMF (talk) 14:01, 18 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Some things I've seen:
Special:Thanks is a good place to start, and it breaks my heart a little bit to see editors say that they've made hundreds of edits and never been thanked. Part of what's valuable about that is that the thanks is very specific: you know exactly what the person appreciated. It usually only takes a few seconds, especially now that Editing's put a Thanks link in the ••• menu after the Reply button on each comment. It's not a "big" commitment, and nobody else can see what you're thanking someone for, so for the (few) people who understand how Special:Log/thanks works, it's a little less intimidating than a heartfelt note that's on the internet forever.
At the moment, I'm clicking the thanks button (usually for a comment in a discussion) a few times a day; I receive about one a day (which is plenty, thanks). This ratio is not enough for every constructive editor to get a 'thanks' from an experienced editor.
Of course, in a managerial role or other closely connected group, the Thanks button takes on a different meaning, closer to "I've seen this" or "I see you're handling this, so I'm moving on to other things" than to appreciation, but it's very efficient for letting people know what you've seen.
An ordinary note expressing gratitude is very nice. The trick here is that you want to get evidence of respect from people whom you respect, so this is most valuable when a senior community member thanks a mid-range community member (i.e., not when someone is sucking up). A few enwiki editors do this around their national w:en:Thanksgiving holiday. A campaign to recommend promising editors for various mid-level user rights or to take up positions of responsibility in certain processes might be another way of encouraging recognition from senior editors.
There are some contest prizes with virtual trophies. w:en:WP:WikiCup is a big one, but there are smaller ones that can be awarded informally (example, example). The biggest challenge with the informal awards is remembering that they exist. I probably could have handed out these two examples a dozen times last year, if only I remembered that they existed and made time to look for qualified winners. @Doc James used to make a list of the highest volume editors for medicine-related articles and deliver hundreds of copies of "The Cure Award" each year.
Sue Gardner handed out her own custom barnstars on wiki for a little while (links). I suspect that there was a lot of staff work behind this, but adapting it to groups (e.g., all the editors working on an important current event article; all the editors who participate in a survey) might be a good variation.
Speaking of surveys: the US has a little thing for elections: w:en:I Voted sticker. It would probably appeal more to Americans, but a bot posting something like that for completed SecurePoll votes might have some advertising value.
The Editing team handed out physical barnstars at an in-person offsite meeting with some of the local volunteers. This was an incredibly positive thing. I believe that Jorm started this idea back in the day.
Some affiliates do something similar. "'You did such a good job (or "You had such a bad day"), so here's your logo item" is good for community-building. Timeliness matters here: people need to feel seen when they do the good thing/have the bad day, and not months later. The Merchandise giveaways has struggled with that, and also with import tax problems.
Better than nothing and nice initiative but I think edit counts are really bad and overused metrics (cmnt). Some write a whole good-quality article on an important subject read by hundreds a day in 1 edit, others correct a little typo in 1 edit. There are different contribution types. Using authorship changes or sth like that is not ideal either since it also does not differentiate between contribution types but when it comes to medical Wikipedia article text content changing (improving, copyediting, adding, removing), using these metrics if possible would be much better I think. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:07, 19 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I agree with Doc James, and I think that having multiple approaches (though it's more work for the organizers) is better than having any single metric. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:41, 14 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Будучи лишены грантов как внутри страны, так и извне её, мы активно используем вики-ордена, при этом лишь недавно включили себе WikiLove и сразу же обнаружили, что Фонд его больше не поддерживает, а устарело оно заметно. Кнопка "поблагодарить", которая поддерживается вместо него, тоже используется, но, грубо говоря, за неё статьи не пишут. Интересно, что при добавлении материального приза в марафон, типа книги, авторы зачастую отказываются. Lvova (talk) 22:22, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
How do you show recognition for the work of others on the wikis today? Using the Thank you button nearly every time I see a really constructive contribution, especially when it was impactful/difficult (on a related note, I noticed I get thanked mostly for the nearly least-effort nearly least-impactful changes, not the other way around). I don't like barnstars because they are given arbitrarily and likewise not necessarily for high-effort/special/impactful contributions so I don't give them – I think these are a flawed meaningless unsystematic subjective method of recognition. What could help make it easier for editors to express appreciation for each other? Maybe I disagree with some of the underlying assumptions and would prefer more objective measures and methods of recognition which would also make contributing much more fun and the measures more meaningful as one gets engaging feedback throughout. Currently one gets a notification for edit count milestones and when articles one has created (not those created from redirect pages) are being linked. Especially the latter are quite interesting and motivating. One could for example also show notifications when files one has uploaded to Commons are being used in mainspace (phab:T77154). I think meaningful recognition would have to differentiate by contribution types; c:Commons:Commons contributions achievements is a page illustrating the concept of what I mean and c:Category:Wikimedia contributions has as subcategories various contribution types (see also the links there). One could for example create a (verified) badge 'Draft helper level 1' when the user helped other users create articles from 5 drafts or badges described at W457: UI and badges for categorization requests or badges for 'created 5 articles with 1000+ views per month'. If you see these badges on a user page, you know they actually did contribute sth impactful with much effort. I also think things like the en:Wikipedia:WikiCup linked above and en:Wikipedia:New pages patrol/Backlog drives/January 2025#Leaderboard are great and these could also be applied to get more volunteer open source developers involved (W463: Volunteer software development recognition badges). Subjective proactive personal recognition by contributors could additionally be done, but the more effective more meaningful fundamentals are such imo. They could also make use of these stats or be part of these badges which could in some cases eg require people to nominate users and/or verify the contributions. Some validation/verification/checking may be needed for some badges and some badges could be more subjective where initial identification is more difficult and/or it needs more extensive review of the associated contributions. Moreover, potential of WikiProjects is probably not leveraged much. For example, these could be suggested based on people's edit history (see W316: Suggested tasks based on contributions history (user interests) also for experienced editors with which this could be combined or made part of). Users could also get a talk page post after some editing that shows them the WikiProjects they could sign up at and links to their todos/opentasks. Related disc. --Prototyperspective (talk) 19:55, 19 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Do you like the "Your impact" section on the Special:Homepage? I think it encourages editing on high-traffic articles. This might be a good thing at a mid-sized wiki, but at enwiki, one of our strengths is being the rare free site that actually has any significant amount of information about some niche topics. People with a common cold don't need a long article at the English Wikipedia as much as people whose baby was just diagnosed with a rare disease that no one in the family has ever heard of. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:29, 19 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think it's a good start. The statistics could be interesting and motivating but it's only 5 items with no way to see more – phab:T337311 (disc) – and it doesn't separate eg articles just copyedited slightly, articles extensively edited, articles create anew, etc. I think I already suggested the latter somewhere relating to w:Special:Impact but I barely found the other issue and can't find it – it only makes sense once more than 5 items are possible anyway. I don't think it's incentivizing users to edit large articles more, it's more giving feedback and interesting stats on what one has done. It's certainly better than nothing being added to the range of feedback available and the described badges would be about also recognizing and providing motivation for other types of tasks. I find it's just mildly interesting to see the pageviews of articles one has edited, not really nudging/affecting user editing in any significant way. Moreover, more often than not I still find large articles where say one of the 5 key aspects is entirely missing – imo it wouldn't be problematic to get more editors on articles that are more important; not every small article is about a rare disease or important protein instead of some anime TV series episode for instance. High-traffic articles are intrinsically more important due to the reads but on the other hand they could be on otherwise relatively unimportant subjects. So if it does encourage editing on high-traffic articles, then the best thing to do I think is not giving the user less but more stats & feedback. Keep in mind that edit counts being more or less the only other measure would also encourage more edits as well as activities with lots of small edits instead of overall value/constructivity. So to mitigate that too, it also needs more better measures/validations. Manually checking pageviews of articles one has written certainly is interesting, sometimes motivating, and probably quite common. Lastly, people naturally write articles on niche topics because it's their interest – when it comes to that & incentives, it would make more sense to incentivize particularly needed/important articles (high-traffic stubs, redlinks, requested articles) that's within a field of interest of the user (via W316). Prototyperspective (talk) 00:48, 20 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Prototyperspective, @WhatamIdoing, @Lvova, @Doc James, and @Sohom Datta (apologies if I missed anyone): I am writing a general summary of some things that have stuck out to me in these comments, all of which were very helpful & appreciated.
Neighborhoods - i.e., new ways to organize people together in topical areas - this is a concept we may want to seek inspiration from, since some editors and/or wikis struggle with dynamic and engaging ways to bring editors together around topics and tasks that they care about
There is interest in creating more visibility around thanks and wikilove. These forms of recognition mean a lot to some people, but they are often not received often enough by editors. Similarly, there could be ways to improve the experience of using these tools, particularly for wikilove.
Recognition means different things to different people, and some people prefer impact metrics.
Regarding impact metrics, we could do more to supply meaningful data around editor impact, including the nature of the edits (such as large edits), where the work was reused, etc. Also, it can be helpful for editors to learn about high-impact articles that are needed in their interest areas.
Badges and awards can be very motivating to editors.
Latest comment: 23 days ago22 comments12 people in discussion
New user trends show that people are accessing Wikimedia content all over the internet, even if they don’t visit wikipedia.org. But with fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work. We are currently running experiments that focus on both enhancing familiar ways of learning for active readers, and building new ways of learning for new readers. What do you think would be most impactful in bringing and retaining readers on Wikipedia?
What might keep new generations from finding Wikipedia content interesting and engaging? How might we overcome that using our existing content? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC
Don't be text-centered. If we want more visits and more donors, we need to show what we have and what we can have. Text can be read outside, but we can be the place to learn. And learning happens in a variety of shapes. Make Commons the place to serve free learning videos, audios and texturized 3D. Make easier to have interactive graphs, learning applets, interactive content. Promote the idea that wikimedia is where learning happens, not only where you can go to read wikipedia. Because that's where we lose battles. -Theklan (talk) 17:51, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Wikipedia, or Wikimedia ? Considering that the community has been pretty resistive of brooding the scope of the various individual projects... I think it is good to put some though into if there is opportunities for new projects, new approaches to current projects or the merging of projects, especially with the different way that people will be engaging with us in the future as AI becomes even more prevalent. And what is the budget that we should allocate to such projects ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:17, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Some communities have been pretty resistive. There are other that are very open, and some that need attention and are struggling. The WMF tends to center on the resistive ones.-Theklan (talk) 16:44, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
However, it probably also needs to be said that these are far smaller. I think we're talking about e.g. Basque Wikipedia (open to innovation & more media) compared to English Wikipedia (resistive-bias). Implementing things at larger projects has bigger impact. If implemented at smaller projects first that may need clear positive quantifiable outcomes for other project members to listen, what's heavily used & established elsewhere is not recognized as useful if the users did not have the experience themselves in my experience. (+here it seems the other way around) I may have misunderstood you however (eg "scope" doesn't seem to fit entirely). It makes sense to focus on the big-audience projects. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:15, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
A clean, simplistic, non-obtrusive reader interface would go a long way to not turn away readers. We as wikipedians can keep content enganging. The UX part is something the WMF can and should improve on. --Prüm (talk) 18:19, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I find the UI quite simplistic and non-obtrusive but the app and desktop site very unengaging and boring. Maybe you could explain what you'd like to see changed or submit a wish about that. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:37, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
We both know this is not the place for individuals to explain their UX preferences, and individual wishes won't change anything. The WMF can and should do frequent surveys among non-logged-in readers to find out their grievances with the current UI. We all use MediaWiki mostly logged-in, most pure readers do not. The WMF also has the resources to hire or commission a UX task force, made up of experts in the field, to address these grievances. A site that is among the top 10 by visitors should look polished, clean, efficient and up to latest standards in the field. --Prüm (talk) 05:55, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
The UI was recently revamped. Possibly with help of some UX task force. As said it seems the UI already is very simplistic and non-obtrusive (maybe too much so when the TOC is hidden). I just think feedback that is entirely unclear isn't valuable in terms of constructive. A survey of reader wishes, grievances and unfulfilled demands sounds like a good idea. The site does look polished when it comes to Wikipedia, there are some issues with e.g. display of Commons category pages but you didn't specify what you mean exactly. Anyway, I won't try any further to make your feedback more useful; it's only in your own interest to make it clear and understandable. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:28, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi Prüm, thanks for sharing this. I’m a product manager on the Reader Growth team at the Foundation, and I agree that we need to keep evolving the UX for reader experience.
We’re currently running experiments focused on logged-out readers to better understand what feels engaging, clear, and useful across mobile and desktop, and how the interface can continue to improve as reading habits change.
When you say the experience feels unengaging or could be more polished, are there specific elements you’d want to see explored? Even high-level ideas are helpful as we think about what to test next. SherryYang-WMF (talk) 19:33, 6 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
One idea would be to limit full-width campaign banners to the wiki's main page and/or an engagement portal. Donation campaigns are a special case, of course. I fully understand that this probably conflicts with other targets. Prüm (talk) 12:28, 7 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Chatbots and AI-driven search are increasingly popular as ways to seek information. With this trend unfolding, what might we do to encourage more people to use Wikipedia as their go-to place for knowledge? –– STei (WMF) (talk) 10:24, 10 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
Have we considered making our own? Stanford basically already did something like this, albeit using closed models. As much hate as commercial LLMs rightfully get (for numerous reasons), a leaner, non-profit one, whose exclusive intent is to provide accurate, factual information, with good disclaimers, basically-guaranteed-zero IP/copyright theft, and an eager ability to say, "I'm not sure" could be exactly what a lot of people want. en:WP:REFDESK is a good example of people coming for exactly that kind of baseline interaction, and much like a call tree, if someone genuinely needs help with a query, they could have an option to forward the session context over to REFDESK (or something similar). Granted, we're likely talking a significant shift in computational resources and budget to implement it, but it might be worth exploring if it hasn't already. When (not if) commercial AIs collapse under the weight of their own excessive breadth, people will still want that interface, and they'll want a relatively "safe" (in many senses of the word) place from which to get it. And with that, we link back to ourselves and directly provide a welcome mat to improve results. Article content, alone, isn't enough to train one, but with a little imagination, there are several ways around this. --slakr\ talk /11:59, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
en:WP:REFDESK is a good example […] if someone genuinely needs help with a query, they could have an option to forward […] over to REFDESK good idea! Maybe it's worth adding to the page linked above or its talk page. albeit using closed models Maybe it would be a good idea to change the wish title/scope because of that; Wanda is already named there (the foss Ollama is supported by it albeit the only foss llm). When (not if) commercial AIs collapse that's a hypothesis here without any substantiation and I doubt this will not be mitigated. people will still want that interface you started with describing sth for Wikimedia-internal purposes but now you describe it as sth for general tasks; I doubt a Wikimedia-only-based llm is the right tool for that since Wikimedia projects can only provide data or info for a small fraction of questions, unlike the overall Web. isn't enough to train one I very much doubt it would be a good idea to spend lots and lots of resources on developing an entirely new llm instead of using open source LLMs and it's probably not very feasible either or at least it won't be as good as existing/other LLMs. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:57, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
What have been effective ways you have seen others learn and explore knowledge outside of Wikipedia? Can any of these ways be used as inspiration for Wikipedia?
There are swaths of high quality long-form educational content on YouTube. While Wikipedia is more text-orientated, I do feel as if videos could play a supplementary role in articles (such as an animation/breakdown of black holes on its respective page). The main issue with that is staying consistent - videos stay static while the page is everchanging, and you don't want the video to contradict the article. EatingCarBatteries (talk) 05:42, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Я готова писать Википедию, но за последний год стала готова меньше читать её. ИИ может дать мне выжимку, указав ту же Википедию как источник; в самой Википедии я могу наткнуться на избранную статью, в которой буду продираться через текст для небольшого фрагмента знания, который мне был нужен. Иногда про такой подход жалуются, что это -- про сокращение объёма внимания; нет, это скорее про конкуренцию Википедии с художественной литературой. Можно сесть и разбираться, ходить по ссылкам, а можно получить быстрый ответ. Необходимость получения конкретного быстрого ответа сообществом скорее игнорируется во имя качества: короткая статья должна стать не короткой, в идеале избранной. Может быть, и позиционировать Википедию стоит ближе к художественной литературе? Lvova (talk) 22:31, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Wikimedia offers premier subscriptions to tech companies e.g. for real-time feeds. I recommend making these licenses contingent on proper grounding & attribution to wikipedia whenever wikipedia content is presented. With AI and search indexing, Wikipedia syndication has 1000 times the reach compared to Wikipedia hosting. So grounding / referencing original Wikipedia Articles and resources is critical. Critical for continuing contributions (volunteer time, donations), also critical for informing the reader where facts originated from (AI is a seemingly authoritative black box). Tonymetz (talk) 19:29, 12 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hello @Tonymetz - the commercial companies that have contracts for using the high-speed/volume API service (know as Wikimedia Enterprise) are already required to attribute Wikimedia content (in accordance with the relevant copyright licenses used), and having users of the spirit and letter of the content licenses is part of its project principles. [I should also add, there's some legal nuance about how and when Fair Use applies to generative-AI content, this is a new area of law that courts have not yet caught-up with yet]
In terms of improving the status quo, I would point you to a blogpost case-study published just this week where German environmentally-focused AI/Search company "Ecosia" talks about how changing from a scraping model to using our Enterprise API service has increased their ability to consistently and accurately use Wikipedia content in their own products - including attribution. While this is just one case-study, it shows the effort to try to assist reusers to be able to do a better job at a technical level (by making it easier for them to do a good job of attributing, and refreshing to the most recent content), rather than merely at a legal/contractual level. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 14:03, 18 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Why does this contradict the experience? ChatGPT/AI in general doesn’t link back to the article. The most frequent consumer experiences don’t link back. Perhaps our definitions of attribution vary? Or enforcement isn’t being done. It certainly isn’t visible on 95% of the ways users experience Wikipedia content. Tonymetz (talk) 16:27, 18 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Well, I'm probably not one of the "95%", then, but (a) attribution is only required if it's the same copyrightable words/content, and (b) attribution doesn't require a link back. If you take the words of a Wikipedia article and run them through a chatbot, and the chatbot spits out the same facts/ideas using different words, then no attribution is required. If, instead, you're thinking of something like asking Siri or Alexa a question, and it reads you a bit of a Wikipedia article, then attribution is required, but the attribution could be as small and unnoticeable as a short, wordless sound. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:19, 18 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for raising this question, @Kowal2701. There is no single, simple answer, but I will share my perspective from my role as Product Manager on the Contributor Growth team.
Several years ago, the Contributor Growth team worked with Marketing and Communications to run a set of experiments that explicitly promoted editing to different audiences through the Newcomer Experience Projects. These included outreach to off-wiki audiences, on-wiki banners shown to readers, and messaging that encouraged donors to consider editing as another way to contribute. Overall, these efforts produced modest results. In particular, the Newcomer Experience Marketing experiment that ran off-wiki ads to promote account creation showed that while off-wiki ads were effective at driving traffic, they did not meaningfully increase registrations or lead to sustained participation.
Based on these learnings, WMF strategy has shifted away from broad advertising and toward strengthening the full pathway from reading to contributing. This includes investing in how people discover, trust, and engage with Wikipedia as readers, alongside improving activation, support, and retention for those who already show intent to edit.
The Future Audiences team is investing in new ways for emerging audiences to engage in sharing, collecting, and improving knowledge, with the goal of identifying actionable insights for future products and programs.
The Readers Teams are helping provide incentives for casual readers to create accounts and become more engaged readers, deepening their interaction with and connection to Wikipedia.
The Contributor Growth team is focused on reducing barriers for new account holders and supporting successful first editing experiences.
Together, these efforts prioritize long-term readership health and contributor sustainability rather than short-term gains from advertising.
That all being said, I would love to hear more from you if you want to outline more about what you mean by "actively advertising for new editors?" Are there certain ideas or audiences you think we should be targeting? - KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:26, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you very much for the detailed response. Your approach sounds good, I don't have any clever ideas but something like Community Wishlist/W496 would be so good, I've heard that data suggests most people (somehow) don't know they can edit Kowal2701 (talk) 21:42, 18 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Kowal2701 Thank you for sharing that wish! I agree that there are opportunities to more clearly communicate to readers that they can edit Wikipedia. While there are no immediate plans to work on that specific wish, but a closely related idea was recently raised by the Mobile Web Editing Working Group, and I would love to explore a related experiment in the future.
There are several other parts of the reader to editor journey that are currently suboptimal. For example:
On mobile, logged out users who tap Edit are currently shown a warning message. While this is a helpful reminder for experienced editors, it can feel abrupt and unwelcoming for someone attempting to edit for the first time. We are exploring ways to improve this experience so that potential newcomers are not immediately discouraged [1].
For readers who proceed past that initial step, English Wikipedia still defaults temp accounts and new account holders to wikitext rather than Visual Editor. This can be particularly intimidating for newcomers, especially on mobile devices [2].
The Growth and Editing teams are working to reduce common points of friction for new editors on mobile [3], while also ensuring that newcomers are presented with simple, structured edit suggestions to help them get started more confidently [4].
Overall, improving reader awareness that editing is possible is important, and I think it will work best when paired with a smoother and more welcoming first editing experience. But I think both are necessary! Thanks for taking the time to ask questions and offer feedback! - KStoller-WMF (talk) 21:09, 21 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@KStoller-WMF, not sure if this something the "Newcomer experience marketing experiment" did, but I remember a few of my undergrad friends (in the continental USA) were really into the fact that at some point Wikipedia started posting ads on Tiktok! Sohom (talk) 10:58, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Sohom Datta Glad to hear your undergrad friends were seeing these videos and responding positively to them! Those videos were part of the Future Audiences work. While the videos could be perceived as a form of promotion for Wikipedia, I don't believe they were paid ads. Rather, they were part of an effort to reach and engage a large, global Gen Z audience on short-form video platforms by sharing Wikipedia knowledge through concise, educational, and entertaining videos. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 22:56, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi @Sohom Datta! I'm Damian, and I'm the Product Manager for the Future Audiences team. My team and I run experiments on how to reach Gen Z audiences. I'm so glad to hear you and your friends enjoyed the TikTok ads!! Right now, we're trying to learn how we can create a new content browsing and creation experience based on Wikipedia. Would you and your friends be interested in being a part of our early testing? I can send you an email with more details from damian@wikimedia.org. DLin-WMF (talk) 18:51, 9 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Part of the problem with general advertising is that the people who are motivated to post content on the internet (e.g., business touters and political activists) aren't the people we really want (e.g., teachers and master tradespeople). The targeted 1Lib1Ref program has been successful in bringing in reference librarians, but most people wouldn't think of it as "advertising". WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:34, 22 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think that IF you go into a direction of advertising, you really have to advertise on what makes a good editor. "Do you get a fuzzy feeling from emerging yourself in books and research ? Join" "Always wanted to review sources and figure out what is true ? Join" etc.. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:21, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for prompting this discussion @Kowal2701, @WhatamIdoing, and @TheDJ. I very much agree with needing to look at these challenges more holistically, as you point out in an earlier comment @TheDJ. @KStoller-WMF and @IFried (WMF) already described some of the interventions we're thinking about, but I wanted to chime in as well to emphasize that the efforts across the various Contributor teams are all geared towards creating more clarity for volunteers, and we believe an important part of that is to make it more clear why contributing is worthwhile, especially considering all the other options for online participation available today. Contributing becomes especially worthwhile when you clearly understand what you can do to have an impact, when you have fun doing the work, and when you can see the value you're adding to the movement. So in part we want to focus on making the experience less open-ended and more intuitive through a more structured editing experience (especially for mobile devices), we want to provide very clear opportunities for volunteers so that they know what to do next (for example via the personal dashboard), and we want to make the impact their work has more visible to them and celebrate their milestones. Of course all of these experiences need to interact with each other seamlessly, which is something we plan to focus on in the next couple of years as well. We believe that this approach, coupled with the work the Future Audiences and Reader teams are doing, will help us not only make contributing more enticing for new editors, but that it will also add value to help retain volunteers who are already participating. One piece of research that I found especially compelling around the topic of accessing new types of editors was the archetype research -- do these volunteer archetypes match what you're seeing on the internet? Which of them would you think are most relevant and promising for contributing to Wikipedia?SPerry-WMF (talk) 20:53, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
The WMF has done a lot of research over the years on mw:Personas, Audiences, Archetypes, Roles, and Stakeholders. Compared to some prior versions, I think that this "V2" round ignores the role of paid editing, self-promotion, and similar forms of POV pushing. Specifically, we get editors, particularly in hot-button political issues, whose goal is to make Wikipedia say the Right™ Thing. As long as the Wikipedia articles exist or say the thing that they want (e.g., so their client pays them; so they can say "Just read the Wikipedia article on ____ if you don't believe me" in an online argument), then they don't have much interest in doing anything else.
For a small wiki, this can be acceptable. At the Haitian Creole Wikipedia, we usually turn a blind eye to people creating autobiographies. At the English Wikipedia, this can cause destructive fights. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:12, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks @WhatamIdoing, that's a good point. I believe in this case that portion was left out on purpose because the focus of the research was to understand where on the internet people who could become good-faith, constructive contributors are currently spending their time. I think the example you mentioned is especially valuable in the context of how we can help with providing the right tools to help communities enforce WP:NPOV and to set them up for those cases where the lines a bit blurred. Do you have anything specific in mind that you think could help with the problem you describe? SPerry-WMF (talk) 00:31, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
A biased editor might be acting in good faith (=not trying to hurt Wikipedia) and might be constructive. Imagine a sales person who wants writes about the products they sell, because they find that their customers are confused by the different types of widgets. They might write that blue-green widgets are 90 mm wide and can be used instead of all blue, green, or yellow widgets, but high-temperature applications need pink widgets, unless the blue-green widget is insulated by a white widget cover.
This sales person is not very likely to become a "generalist" editor. They have figured out how to do something that helps their company and doesn't obviously hurt Wikipedia. But some editors might think "What a bad editor. I have changed the formatting in a thousand articles, but they only care about putting trivial details in two articles".
These facts don't hurt Wikipedia. The sales person is not writing "Call me to buy blue-green widgets today!" or "Our company's blue-green widgets are better than the others". But perhaps another Wikipedia editor reads this and thinks that this is too much detail, or they are angry because the sales person cited their company's website instead of a newspaper article (or a newspaper article about their company, instead of a technical reference book). If that editor removes the details, the sales person might be unhappy, and we might have a discussion (or worse, an edit war).
I have described an biased editor who does something useful, but some of these editors want to write about themselves and their company, or they want to write about a hot political topic. Instead of a sales person adding technical facts, we could have a political activist re-writing an article about a geopolitical dispute. This person might even believe that their contributions are factual and fair. It might be difficult to recruit people to provide information and avoid getting people providing what they believe are neutral facts.
One possible way around that would be to run focused campaigns. For example, "Correct outdated articles about computer hardware" might attract fact-oriented contributors, whereas "Create new articles" might appeal to self-promoters and political activists. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:58, 6 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I also think focused campaigns for updating outdated articles would be great. This is more because there's so many articles with outdated and barely anybody does something about it in effective or regular/systematic/routine ways. However, there doesn't seem to be much campaigning around "Create new articles" and finding outdated parts in articles and updating them accurately isn't exactly the easiest of contribution types. Here is a signpost article about the subject of updating outdated articles (note: it didn't seem to appeal to many users newish or not, albeit that could have been in part because it was about health/medical articles only) including some of my thoughts, proposals, resources/links and ideas regarding it in the comments.
Moreover, I think often editors may perceive things as POV-pushing when often it would be more accurately described as bias/POV-corrections and the categorization of users into POV-pushers for example or perception of them as such is often quite detrimental as it harms calm AGF-compliant rational deliberation based on respectful thoughtful reasoning and Wikipedia policies. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:41, 6 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for this added context @WhatamIdoing and @Prototyperspective. I agree that this is a pretty big opportunity space, in fact there are a few things we're thinking about that could help with that. For example @IFried (WMF) is thinking more about the concept of worklists and how they could help with motivating people to join in on an effort and track their impact (T412860), and we're working on expanding the concept of the newcomer homepage to more people so that volunteers can see these opportunities surfaced in a personal dashboard, very much in line with what you're suggesting in your post under Outreach, @Prototyperspective. With regards to your comment about good faith biased editor, @WhatamIdoing, we just recently built Tone Check, which alerts editors before publication if their text is not neutral, and we're planning to invest more in this kind of structured editing to meet people in the moment with prompts and suggestions. Please keep this feedback coming, it's really helpful for prioritizing our work! SPerry-WMF (talk) 00:27, 7 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think that a lot of the concerns, suggestions, discussion, etc. at the recent Signpost article is very valuable. We need to capitalize on AI's usage of our content, while also making our content more accessible to people who are on the margin of either going directly to us; this includes reducing the mobile-web disparity. Further, we need to make editing for established contributors easier by any way possible to increase their productivity; this can be accomplished by increasing investment in the Technology group. We could also consider ways to involve people further in the projects, by offering ways to, for example, sign up to watch one or two otherwise-unwatched pages and evaluate an AFC perhaps once a month. — The preceding unsigned comment was added by JuxtaposedJacob (talk) 12:00, 21 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 month ago5 comments4 people in discussion
IMHO it is alarming that - based on this (public) Phab comment, and assuming that some of the 1,069 tasks mentioned there are no longer valid, and/or are in non-WMF-deployed software, and/or are security-adjacent rather than active security issues, etc. - there are potentially tens or hundreds of (reported) valid, unresolved security bugs in Wikimedia-deployed code. As someone who does the occasional bit of volunteer devving on the MediaWiki side of things, I would very strongly encourage WMF leadership to put a lot more resources into fixing security issues with WMF-deployed code than it seems like is currently happening. (I'm commenting about this here as, if I understand correctly, the Annual Plan is a major way in which the WMF decides where to allocate resources.) Best, —a smart kitten[meow]12:43, 21 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the note, @A smart kitten - I see you around quite a bit on Phabricator and always appreciate your contributions, technical and otherwise.
As you mentioned, there's a smaller set of things that are genuinely concerning than that top line number, but yes, we are working on getting these numbers down. And as importantly, we've been investing a lot more time and energy to the security of our platform this past FY than in previous years -- something we will be continuing into the next FY. Some of this work is described in our Account security initiative, where we focus on making whole categories of attacks (like account takeover, or user script compromise) much harder and more expensive to conduct. That work involves a mix of feature, usability, and technical-debt-paying improvements that all work together to be able to make us be less worried about common issues. Our work on bot detection is in a similar vein -- a foundational platform improvement that, once it's in place, lets us and our community take a category of malicious activity and change it from easy to hard.
I'll also just shout out that we have been hiring software engineers into the Product Safety and Integrity team, specifically to focus more on security and privacy issues and features like these. One of these is open right now.
I hope you'll stay involved as we keep planning our security and safety work for the next FY, as we're in the process of discussing and prioritizing where we might go next. EMill-WMF (talk) 20:29, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
In early 2024, I helped reproduce & test a bug fix (T358771:Unable to login on iPhone with Passkey Enabled ) for Wikimedia passkeys (2FA authentication) which was preventing further adoption (iphone users would be locked out if they enrolled). Despite the low risk (a one line change, only affecting previously enrolled users ~ 0.001% or less, the patch had been tested in upstram libraries), the deployment of this fix was stalled indefinitely despite my pleas for attention. During this period, a major security breach involving admin creds occurred, which later accelerated the deployment of passkey-related security fixes.
I was shocked at how few resources were committed to security fixes (and general wikimedia site fixes) despite the tremendous amounts of resources available (large endowment, large annual contributions). Where are those funds being committed to?
Thankfully more attention has been given since the breach, Passkeys just now rolled out (though adoption will take time), and monthly bugfix reports are published in the Tech news. So there is some progress, though less than needed.
@Tonymetz A credential stuffing attack is a not a "major security breach involving admin creds" by any measure of that term. Credential stuffing occurs when folks go out on to forums, find reused credentials and then use them to compromise other accounts of the same individual. There was/is no security bug in this context nor a traditional "breach" (since that would imply the credentials leaks from the WMF which is untrue). Sohom (talk) 21:03, 8 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Regardless, it was significant enough for WMF to improve the security policy , take action to fix passkeys , and produce regular reports on the security fixes . So it was significant , clearly. The point stands Tonymetz (talk) 21:13, 8 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 18 days ago15 comments4 people in discussion
I remember we did a survey after the 2009 strategy process, the need has only increased since then. We think we have a changing community, I suspect as retirees are one of the groups we recruit among we may be greying - ageing faster than a year per year. It is also speculated that we are a mainly PC based community dealing with a mainly smartphone accessed internet. Surveys of current and former editors are a good way to clarify that, and find out what proportion of our editors use various devices off and on Wikipedia. For example, are our PC based editors familiar with how the site appears on Mobile? What are the age, gender, and other skews within our communities? It is difficult to tackle a problem such as community shrinkage and skew without first examining it. WereSpielChequers (talk) 15:33, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@WereSpielChequers How do you propose folks reach out to former volunteers? Also, there has been attempts to survey various portions of the current userbase, most recently Research:Successful_Newcomers_Survey_2025#Results. If you have thoughts on what else should be looked at/or thoughts about the current survey feel free to share them (also cc @LZia (WMF) who might have a better handle on current directions of research/surveys in the WMF) Sohom (talk) 14:13, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi Sohom, I didn't know of that interesting survey, as I remember it the last time we surveyed former volunteers we did so by email. Obviously not everyone sets an email or still monitors the account they used to use for Wikipedia. But lots did. As for that survey of new editors, I was surprised at the youthful profile, and I suspect that the "prefer not to say" may have included even younger editors. It would have been interesting to also ask where in the world they are, and how long they have been using the internet for. I'd also be interested in some cross tabs especially if the dataset is large enough to do that meaningfully. a crosstab of age v editing device would particularly interest me. Also turning this into some sort of longitudinal study would help, my assumption is that older and PC based editors stay longer, and that we disproportionately lose female and younger editors. As for those who chose not to give their age, or don't have high school, I'd expect to see academic qualifications rise significantly of a few years of resurveying the same people every year. WereSpielChequers (talk) 14:38, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Sohom Datta, @WereSpielChequers, @LZia (WMF):I came to this page quite late and while it is not my intention to go through it and throw in my 2¢ on every section, I found this survey fascinating, and extremely useful and revealing, especially as I spent a significant part of my post-grad research on the conception and design of, well, surveys.
WSC's comments are extremely relevant and I'm sure that comes from his background in RL where surveys are frequent and important. FWIW, I designed and ran a Wikipedia survey many years ago in the run up to the development of Page Curation and also reused some of the data when I created the NPR user right - something that I should consider doing again combined with my recent attempts to discover what ails the 800+ reviewers of whom only 10% are active, and my comment above in Newcomers.
What I found missing in the Research:Successful_Newcomers_Survey_2025#Results page was the sample size and the %age of respondents (perhaps I missed it). Apart from that, it's one of the best compiled WMF-run surveys I have seen recently, where others seem to have been put together by people not specialised in survey-making.
I would welcome more collaboration with the Community when considering future surveys of any kind, there are communication specialists among the volunteers and who also have ideas of what surveys can be run and would be helpful. Kudpung (talk) 03:52, 22 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I don't understand that even when on an open knowledge platform, the open source solution (Linux) is not also considered. However, isn't the used tech & UX basically the same on Windows & MacOS (Web is crossplatform)…so this doesn't seem like an important question if I'm not missing sth. who also have ideas of what surveys can be run and would be helpful by the way, for things like this crowdsourcing pages may be good where people can leave their ideas, requests, and proposals and other users can then either help flesh them out, make relevant people find them, or find some to implement (or to add to something already planned). Prototyperspective (talk) 19:49, 22 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
What I don't understand is why some people automatically assume that most Wikipedia users are IT cognitive. For want of an analogy, most people can drive a car (a fairly complex process) but plenty of them don't have a clue how the engine works, and generally don't need to know. Windows currently dominates the desktop market with roughly 65–70% share, while MacOS holds approximately 13–16%, and Linux has grown to over 4%. While almost all new computers bought from major retailers come with the operating system (Windows or macOS) pre-installed and are ready to use out of the box, most new computers do not come with Linux pre-installed — it is not the standard, mainstream option. I began my first use of a desktop computer on a MacPlus in 1987 (it was what was in the office where I was working, it was far more user friendly than PC so I bought one - and we Mac users considered ourselves some kind of elite!).
So why is it interesting to know what platforms our contributors use? Because for users like @WereSpielChequers who make extensive use of AWB, that nifty piece of near-essential software is denied to me and other Mac users. So the next time you come across a user who boasts an edit count in the 100s of thousands, AWB is possibly what they have been using, while in contrast, the use of Macs could be a possible indication of the affluence of our users.
And for those Wikipedians among us who remain convinced that real conferences and meetups are the most conducive channels for collaboration, it's interesting to note the very high proportion of Macs in the the room... Kudpung (talk) 20:50, 22 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Most of my editing has been on various PCs. I've used Chromebooks, Lynux and Windows, and handfuls of edits on a Mac and I sometimes upload photos to Wikimedia Commons from my android phone. My highest edit count era on Wikipedia was probably when I was using AWB under Windows, but I dropped windows for years because of virus concerns. However, AWB notwithstanding, I think the big divide in editing and I suspect reading experiences is between PC and mobile. So happy to survey all likely options, but the big difference I expect to see is going to be PC v mobile. WereSpielChequers (talk) 21:58, 22 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Nowhere did I make this assumption. You evidently made the unquestioned assumption that one should exclude an option of 4% and only offer the two largest options.
Moreover, that one should exclude that option even when only this option is really matching what is both a key philosophy and the methodology behind the project(s). Furthermore, the percentage is probably higher than the global average among Wikipedia editors so why kind of dismiss this option as if all these people didn't count? I've noticed that issue with AWB too. However, I'm not sure whether these stats would be useful or even needed for anything in that regard – people already know very well that lots of contributors use OS other than Windows. More precise estimates of it probably don't help much. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:11, 22 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think research, the results, the analyses, and extrapolations are best done and discussed by people who understand them and seen them for themselves rather than making assumptions. Some years ago a WMF 'assumption' led to a very heated argument including personal attacks (all documented) levelled at volunteers by the salaried staff. The WMF 'assumption' was disproven in no uncertain terms by the volunteers but only after a costly research and trial by professionals commissioned by the WMF under pressure from the Community, but to get there had taken 7 years.
In very recent years collaboration between the volunteers and the WMF has improved dramatically but there is still some way to go. Statistics are very important, not only can they avoid money being wasted as it has in previous years on developments no one wanted, but if sufficiently precise and based on facts rather than and wild guesses of their probable impact, they can channel the available funds towards the development of the right solutions for the right reasons. We don't dismiss options, or rule out any useful information that builds the bigger picture; most of my generation of Wiki veterans are Internet but not necessarily IT cognate, we've nevertheless been around Wikipedia over a lot of of its 25 years and retained a lot of institutional memory that helps us understand what works, what doesn't, and what after all these years, still needs to be done. For example, by around 2016 smartphones were considered standard rather than a luxury, every farmer here in Isan had one while workinh knee-deep in his paddy field while MediaWiki is still trying to catch up on mobile technology. Kudpung (talk) 23:33, 22 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Exactly; all reasoning for why not to make the assumption that a smaller option shouldn't be included and that's nearly all I briefly said (with the other part not discussed further). Prototyperspective (talk) 23:39, 22 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
One reason why we need this sort of research is the instructions we need to give to our developers. There is a difference between writing software to take advantage of the features available at the leading edge of technology, writing software that assumes everyone running it has a PC that is less than two years old, and writing software that has to work on every device that humans use to access the internet. Programmers coming to the WMF from a commercial software background are very likely to have worked in an environment where the assumption is that new software needs to take advantage of leading edge technology, because people with old computers aren't buying new software until they buy a new computer. While our users will include the guy with a seven year old Lynux box. My own IT days ended a long time ago, and were more mainframe than PC. But sometimes I find some of that experience useful. I helped test the visual editor and some other software, and a few years ago I had that discussion with a WMF staffer, where we tracked down some of my problems testing their software to the fact that at the time I was using a 7 year old Lynux box. Of course we don't need surveys to gather all of that information, I'm pretty sure a site such as the WMF ones could get much of this data directly from the electronic handshakes with our users, and as long as the data was anonymised it is OK to collect such data. In the past this sort of consideration, and the lack of data behind it, has fed into discussions I have been involved in re how big a page should be before it becomes too large to load or display for those among us with the oldest devices and slowest connections. These days I barely notice the time it takes to load pages that were a real pain for me a decade or so ago, but that may mean I now have average 2020s consumer tech and internet connections. My preference is still that the WMF consciously aim to serve the whole global community, and that requires knowing what the slowest and oldest tech is out there. WereSpielChequers (talk) 10:18, 23 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
As said, the software is mostly running cross-platform as it's Web software. Regarding the rest, it's already well known that many contributors aren't on Windows. Additionally, asking about the OS does not provide the info you describe here which is about hardware. Linux (not Lynux btw) including 7+ year old ones run the VE perfectly fine. I think a question you may find useful is asking users how much RAM they have but that also doesn't seem so important as devs already know things should also work with little RAM. Anyway, probably we shouldn't discuss one proposed survey question in such length and I don't think it's my fault since I just briefly addressed the assumption that we should not include the third-largest and only open source solution. A better survey question regarding what you wrote about would be ' Which if any Wikimedia software does have (performance) issues on your device? ' but again, I'd propose to put survey question requests and related discussions onto a separate page. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:21, 23 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
"' Which if any Wikimedia software does have (performance) issues on your device? ' " That would be a useful question, maybe also ask which pages if any cause your device problems. WereSpielChequers (talk) 14:38, 23 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 19 days ago13 comments5 people in discussion
From a marketing perspective, our outreach program has long fixated on the wrong stage in an editor's lifecycle. We have never been short of new editors clicking the edit button and doing a few edits, adding a tiny proportion via outreach doesn't address our main problems. Our problem for years has been that selling a new hobby is hard, and very few of the people who do a handful of edits go on and become regular members of the community volunteering an hour or more of their time most months. Refocusing our outreach programs back from recruiting completely new editors to more of a skillshare event, targeting newish editors who have started using their watchlists as per the original British Museum editathon of 2010 should in theory be a more effective way to grow the community. WereSpielChequers (talk) 15:49, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Agree if I understood you correctly. This would be retaining editors and making editing fun and engaging and sth to enjoy sticking with (think of feedback, achievements/badges/gamification, user interactions, campaigns, statistics, etc) so that editors become and stay highly-active constructive contributors. I think a key way for that would be a tasks-sharing system where people can quickly find interesting things to do (interesting/relevant to them), see W316: Suggested tasks based on contributions history (user interests) also for experienced editors. I think I heard some stats showing just how low the fraction of editors still editing after a time like 1 year is. It's understandable; there is no feedback (if there is any, then people meaninglessly click the Thanks button for your least-constructive/least-effort contributions) and you are likely to sooner rather than later get treated like a criminal having to defend themselves before an hostile court on Talk and meta pages for doing some well-intended good effort. One way to get some feedback on and motivation for one's contributions proactively is to look at the pageviews stats of articles one has edited and I think there is some dashboard-kind page now showing some of that but these are not so meaningful in practice as it eg also includes pages where one corrected a typo and things like that and probably not properly separating articles created anew. See also c:Category:Wikimedia contributions. Furthermore, one could do outreach for various tasks such as showing people the need for science-related articles to get updated – few people are aware of this problem-field and few are working on this; doing outreach there could make more people see that their help is needed and show them how (see also this Signpost piece). I'm interested in what you mean with skillsharing (or skillshare event) more concretely. A note there is that I don't think the problem is with the lack of skills per se but largely with the lack of finding things to do; and giving users better ability to find the Wikipedia help/meta page paragraphs/sections/pages where they can learn the skills they're looking for or need could be done via what's proposed here. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:40, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi, a skillshare event is one where you invite existing editors to attend an editathon and not just as trainers. When you get several editors around a couple of tables you will find people sharing experience, learning better ways to fix edit conflicts or use buttons they haven't yet used. It doesn't need to be taught, it will emerge naturally when you bring groups of editors together. Of the ten of us who took part in the British Museum event in 2010 several are still active 15 years later. Online something similar works when people reach out to editors they see on their watchlists and invite them to relevant Wikiprojects. The important factor is relevance. Either you are using a geonotice to invite people in a geographic area or you are using your watchlist to say thanks for editing article x, would you like to join us at WikiProject Y. Of course you will sometimes get people saying they updated article x because they were fixing a particular typo across Wikipedia and have no interest in the subject. But no one is going to be offended if the Water Polo wikiproject invites them to join after they edit an article on a retired water Polo player. Task sharing is another way to encourage people to get more involved - I was involved in writing EN:Template:Welcome training so I know some of this takes place, but from my experience the skillshare event is a better model to expand. WereSpielChequers (talk) 18:55, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for explaining. When it comes to offline events, I don't think these are impactful/efficient (eg hard to scale, expensive and of interest to just a small fraction of users), especially when it comes to already-registered/active editors. Online events (campaigns too maybe?) sound more promising but when it comes to inviting people to WikiProjects that's no sure way they keep on editing or have more fun in doing so etc and I think automatic invitations of that kind would be better as more scalable and more relevant – these could be suggested to users based on the interests they selected here and (/or) the type of articles they comprehensively (not just typos) edited. Wikiprojects themselves could be made more engaging; e.g. many just turn inactive and generally don't seem to raise skills & editing much. Novel features and initiatives could be added to and/or leverage/involve Wikiprojects. Regarding skillsharing one also has to consider that people have very different interests and types of editing & tasks they do so it may be more impactful to make it easier for people to discover as well as to learn the skills that are relevant to them personally, such as gadgets they haven't heard about that are detected to likely be of interest or a way they can ask for things and quickly get the relevant help page paragraph etc. Online skillsharing would certainly be interesting...maybe this can be done as part of campaigns or more often within wikiprojects. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:02, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
How are you measuring that? My experience has been the opposite - outreach to recruit new editors is expensive per new editor who sticks around for any length of time but outreach to existing editors is efficient and cost effective. WereSpielChequers (talk) 13:42, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi Sohum, I'm a regular at the London meetup - I've been most months since 2008. This is an event that is promoted by Geonotice but doesn't involve the chapter or get or need any funding. This doesn't change what happens there and while I haven't been to a recent Wikimania I doubt it would change that much. It would change the focus of outreach. The last time I was involved in that the priority was almost always on getting new people to try Wikipedia, and the WMF metrics that the chapters worked to were focused on getting people to do their first few edits. WereSpielChequers (talk) 14:58, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Unclear what you're referring to. Nearly all offline events funded by WMF as far as I can see are fairly low-impact and many of them expensive. Active editors going there already are active editors and noneditors who go there are 1) few and 2) usually don't end up becoming active editors where the more important piece is 1). It could be measured for example via fraction of participants who after 1 year still do >20 edits per month. If I understood you right, I'd like to note that your reply only addressed 7 words / 1 claim of my comment and additionally if you read it apparently misunderstood it as criticizing the approach of outreach to existing editors. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:08, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I'm suggesting that we refocus outreach from new editors to newish editors. Many of the funded outreach events in recent years have been focused on recruiting new editors, I think we both agree that this is rarely cost effective. I'm not active in any Wikiprojects at the moment and so didn't respond to your comment on that. I have been involved in online events, I think they have their place and they don't tend to cost much, but I'm not convinced they are as effective as offline ones. Or rather, if we are in the same room I feel more confident in helping someone with a problem. But I do remember enjoying those Not the Wikipedia Weekly skype chats and in hindsight they were an important part of my learning to be a Wikipedian. WereSpielChequers (talk) 10:38, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Prototyperspective, those of us who have been around a long time, worked in the trenches, and attended offline events are fully aware that editing Wikipedia is not always 'fun and engaging'. Someone has to clean the toilets in the clubhouse and inappropriate behaviour has to be addressed and the more delinquent members being thrown out. If you're an admin or a New Page Patroler, you're what the British English idiom calls 'a bugger for punishment' - someone who persistently continues with a difficult, painful, or unpleasant task despite suffering or exhaustion. Having run several outreach programmes I fully concur that we should refocus outreach from new editors to newish editors. For some of us, international academic conferences are routine and come with the territory, but anyone who has attended a Wikimania in an active capacity will have taken a deep dive into how essential such conferences are in a volunteer-driven context, and whether the event was well or poorly organised (and some were) will benefit from a much enriched Wiki experience and vastly increased enthusiasm. It's where some of the best and most consequential work gets done, often shortcutting tedious arguments on talk pages. Contributors to the English Wikipedia, the driving force of the movement, are located all over the globe, and rather than cutting costs, budgets for such events should be greatly increased - there's no shortage of funds. Kudpung (talk) 22:46, 22 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I did not say Wikipedia is always fun and engaging. I'm not sure if I offended you somehow but please read more carefully. And I didn't say Wikipedia should be always fun and engaging either. Moreover, I have to notice you seem kind of thinking that people who attended offline events are some first class Wikipedians and the rest who for example don't wish to disclose their attendance or not attend at all are second-class. I neither didn't say inappropriate behaviour shouldn't be addressed or that delinquent members shouldn't be thrown out. I'm not sure if this "refocus outreach from new editors to newish editors" is also addressed to me because I haven't stated/argued anything to the contrary. Regarding offline events, which I don't object to, instead of raising various things and addressing your claims I'll just note that you did not substantiate your bold claims with anything other than your opinion. Additionally, one of my main points has been about cognitive dissonance and inconsistency with sustainability goals. I also named several further things such as possibility of regional events, integration/combination of regional with international events, and virtual participation which aren't just about lowering costs but also about raising participation and efficacy. In any case, this seems misplaced under section Outreach – Wikimania isn't about outreach. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:13, 22 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I'm not the one who has launched into philosophical arguments, I have simply explained that without real-life venues some major achievements would not have been realised. Such venues are not simply 'preaching to to the choir', nor strictly outreach but curious, non-conbtributors do wander in, visit the booths, ask intelligent questions and go away armed with brochures and freebies. I was never able to measure the impact of all the pure outreach that I have done because it was not funded and a local affiliated did not exist (at that time) to support it. If you do not wish to share your experience of venue attendance, that is of course your prerogative and no one has suggested you should. That said, I think 'I have to notice you seem kind of thinking that people who attended offline events are some first class Wikipedians and the rest who for example don't wish to disclose their attendance or not attend at all are second-class' is getting into AGF territory, so let's leave it at that. Kudpung (talk) 23:53, 22 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Also agreed that incorporating newbies into the community to be 'full time' nerds like us would be the most productive. You have get a silly number of new accounts to find someone who would replace a regular editor Kowal2701 (talk) 11:56, 23 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 month ago10 comments6 people in discussion
I am a relative newcomer here but it seems there is something broken with this Annual Plan feedback process. No one is commenting here. I'm the only User who has contributed any ideas. I am happy to share ideas but it somewhat feels that I am doing the job of other, unpaid. Perhaps the WMF could offer a stipend for experienced users/admins to respond to this annual plan? An annual plan with no feedback from the community is a bit alarming. I imagine there are many admins who would have great ideas here. To make a gardening analogy: It seems the WMF is spending a lot of time designing and building nice raised beds but not enough time watering the seeds and plants living in the beds. -Wil540 art (talk) 16:09, 5 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi @Wil540 art - we have been waiting until the new year to do a more proactive announcement about this page, and the planning process is still quite early inside WMF. Starting next week, you'll see us sharing this page in Tech News and then on various local wikis. Please do help spread the word if there are specific groups you think would like to contribute their thoughts! KStineRowe (WMF) (talk) 15:47, 6 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Wil540 art This is how the WMF and the community operate. They post an "annual plan" or "mission statement" or "growth project" somewhere and wait for people to find it and be interested in it. After two months of us Wikipedians ignoring it, they go ahead with whatever they were going to do anyway. It's a good system because it gives both sides the comfortable illusion of collaboration and discussion, without either side actually having to give input or accept it. Cremastra (talk) 17:35, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Cremastra, I will say, WMF plans to do more comms about this in the coming weeks. The process has just started (I posted the CTA on enwiki a day after PTAC was told about this) and will eventually culminate in a staff discussion around the second week of Feb. I'll try and post to other wikis in waves to see if more people want to be involved. Sohom (talk) 17:52, 20 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
You need to consider that commenting here is low impact. If WMF employees read it at all, it doesn't look like it has much of an impact at least one can't see whether, how or how much. Motivations to provide feedback are therefore unreasonable to expect to be very high and it's not been long since this has been written with few links to the page prior to your comment.
Additionally, lots of users contributed in the Community Wishlist where they already outlined what they'd like to see getting done. Feedback here feels a bit like just restating what's already written in these wishes (e.g. when it comes to considering and working on things for users on mobile). Prototyperspective (talk) 20:13, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think it would be helpful for WMF staff to show in this year's plan where specific comments from this discussion impacted specific parts of the plan as implemented. Czarking0 (talk) 20:58, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
"We also used community feedback and the Product and Technology Advisory Council’s guidelines to reshape how we collaboratively develop and communicate our work on readers" Where might one find this community feedback? The way I read this paragraph it is not the discussion from last year in which I only found one volunteer mentioning Edit Check and none mentioning Council.
None of the other comments give a skeptical reader a strong impression that last years version of this discussion made a significant impact. Though I think the doc does a good job of highlighting other events where community discussion made an impact. Czarking0 (talk) 03:48, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks @Prototyperspective for sharing the link to PTAC’s work, this is definitely a good resource.
To @Czarking0's point, last year’s discussion did impact several areas of the Foundation’s product and technology work. For context, when we ask these questions, the intention is to help shape our early thinking when plans are still pretty open ended. Sometimes feedback validates a product strategy that we’d been thinking about, sometimes it helps us understand new problems or directions to consider, and sometimes it helps us become aware of issues that weren’t on our radar. So I can offer a few (non-exhaustive) examples that fit within this vein:
In last year's APP discussions, we heard multiple editors talk (example, example, example) about how it's hard to get the word out about events to people who may be interested in them and that perhaps WikiProjects could be revitalized by creating events that people can do in real time. Since then, the Connection team has developed the Collaborative Contributions feature, which shows collaborative edit data in real time, and the team is currently exploring ideas on making it easier for people to learn about WikiProjects and events, some of which were discussed in the talk page.
Similarly, some editors wrote about how they find meaning as editors in getting more data and insights on the impact of their edits. This is a focus area that the Connection team is interested in working on in the upcoming fiscal year - you can see we’ve asked more questions about it on the annual plan page.
The Editing Team’s decision this year to prioritize work on Suggestion Mode is in part due to a culmination of many volunteers sharing ideas like what we heard in the annual plan discussion about offering people actional feedback or suggestions as they are editing.
We added the issue of volunteers from the Turkish community being frustrated that Google search in Turkish was prioritizing machine translated versions of English Wikipedia articles over articles from Turkish Wikipedia in our ongoing Partnerships discussions with Google.
We also continue to hear a lot about the need for improvements to the mobile editing experience, both through a recommendation from the Product and Tech Advisory Council and through last year’s questions. Because of this, we dedicated time this year to get a better understanding of the challenges more broadly, and prioritized improvements to the mobile web editing experience based on our findings.
Latest comment: 8 days ago29 comments8 people in discussion
One anomaly of the movement has been our over centralisation, especially re fundraising. Given recent global events, this year would be a good time to become a more conventional global NGO. Split the WMF into an WMUSA organisation and a WMF international one and encourage all national chapters that can get not for profit tax privileges in their country and have a board with a majority of Wikimedia volunteers to take over WMF fundraising in their country. WereSpielChequers (talk) 15:12, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think this is a valid concern. The WMF's current legal structure has served us well, but it may be time for a serious look at the alternatives. Similarly, the WMF should look into expanding the list of countries where fundraising is possible. It surprised me to learn recently that there is no fundraising in South Korea due to local regulatory hurdles. I don't have the full picture on this, but I'm sure the fundraising folks know where the gaps are. Toadspike[Talk]21:04, 23 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
With "all the volunteer accounts here" are you referring to users on this talk page or to users on meta and/or sth else? English is not my native language but I still choose to mainly spend my time on ENWP because I think most articles in other languages would best be created via translations of them if they're of sufficient quality (and made two wishlist proposals about making that easier and/or scaling that up). You could put the annual plan into DeepL or Google Translate or use your browser to translate it. However, this way one could not correct typos and fix bad wording which is what 1 of the proposals is largely about. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:00, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I just meant this page (and said this immediately before some non-en.wiki people arrived lol). Yeah translation needs to be a massive priority for growing other wikis Kowal2701 (talk) 20:38, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
This has been concerning for me as well. The downsides are of course: a split is expensive as heck. (just think of all the legal work). 2 it will add extra cost (more organizational overhead and communication) 3. how do you 'unbuilt' that cost if the organization has to shrink. Regardless, I think it would be wise to at least put some thought into it. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:26, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yes, DE is the model I was thinking of. But it isn't the only one, and much of the expense; financial, legal and in volunteer time of creating a network of national chapters has been done. Its just that most of them are little more than decorative in our current San Francisco centric model WereSpielChequers (talk) 10:45, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
One of the issues is it is very hard to raise money in many regions of the world. We incorporated Wiki Project Med in the USA due to the lower barrier for fundraising there. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 08:23, 19 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
To elaborate on this:
in the long term: make the WMF a proper international org, and structure chapters such that they are controlled by the local communities, probably through board elections which get similar prominence on local projects that arbcom elections get on en.wiki. Following this, gradually devolve some powers to those chapters. Obv there are caveats and concerns about this, lots idk about, but one would be rogue chapters or capture, though that could be dealt with in a similar way to how Kubura was chucked off hr.wiki (global ban), with input from the rest of the chapters determining it. As other wikis and projects grow (and I guess contribute more to revenue), the impetus for 'dethroning' en.wiki is only going to get stronger, and there also needs to be a fundamental solution to community-WMF tensions. I guess I see this as an equilibrium
in the short term: one issue I see is communication channels, like where are they. Idk what it's like on other projects, but atm if someone on en.wiki wants to contact a WMFer they either contact someone else who has contacts inside the WMF, or they start a thread at en:WP:VPW and sometimes a WMFer will drop by in a few days to make a comment addressing things. It'd be nice to have a list of contacts (each on a different topic) given to each project so that the relevant contact can be pinged to relevant discussions. Not saying that'd be an easy job, but a rewarding one probably
a sticking plaster: encourage WMF staff to edit as volunteers (ie. non-WMF account) on any project they wish, even if just a little bit. It'd greatly improve staff's general understanding of the projects and communities (as well as reduce tensions and scepticism related to the corporate world in those communities), and narrow any disconnect there may be.
Given the unpredictability of the current USA regime, given that press (oa BBC) is taken to court for outrageous amounts, it is no longer realistic to suppose that our organisation and our infrastructure is safe in the USA. To what extend can we maintain a service when our infrastructure in the USA is no longer available to us. GerardM (talk) 09:23, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I would hope that Wikimedia Deutschland would be in a position to fork their language versions if they had to. But for the rest it is currently a risk, and not just one of infrastructure. We rely on US law to an extent that I'd want lawyers involved in any uncoupling. My understanding is that both our main datacentres are in the US, much of our non US income is processed in the US and some wikis use US specific law. If we on the English language Wikipedia stopped using "fair use" images, then I think that would be one barrier removed against relocating the servers. I've suggested that we decentralise funding so any chapter with charitable status and a Wikimedian majority on its board can handle fundraising in their country. My guess is that if we approached some of the smaller nonaligned countries we'd find that Iceland, Ireland, Costa Rica or similar would be interested in being the host of Wikimedia. In current politics this might be less confrontational than moving to Canada or South Africa. WereSpielChequers (talk) 11:20, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Restricting this issue to only German Wikipedia is a disservice to our public. There are several servers outside of the USA, obviously it is not 50% of our capacity but when the USA regime is foolish enough to make such a move, I am certain that there is a lot of opportunity that will manifest itself. The issue is then more technical and organisational than money. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 11:33, 26 January 2026 (UTC) PS concentrating funding to the USA is in and of itself the easy option and makes for the strained situation we face in the over reliance on US and English.Reply
I'm not restricting the issue to Deutschland, merely observing that our chapter there is already handling fundraising in that country and has a proven track record in handling IT projects and budgets. I'm hoping they could fork our German language sites if they had to, and if they said they could do it I would believe them. One of my suggestions is that we move more of our chapters to the German model. WereSpielChequers (talk) 12:06, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Again, money is not the issue. It is being prepared technical and organisational for what should be unimaginable but is now a real prospect .. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 15:14, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hence my point "has a proven track record in handling IT projects" absolutely this is about technology and organisational capacity as well as money, and of course community support. WereSpielChequers (talk) 15:13, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I also sincerely hope that there is SOME sort of idea of how to deal with the USA, that some teams at least put some thought exercise into it. We need to take care of employees, our editor identities, trademarks, and our investments (hardware and monetary) and have a flexible approach that ensures that Wikipedia endures and cannot be the subject of a hostile takeover. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:30, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
We forked Wikipedia at MDWiki:Main_Page about 5 years ago. Basically we have about 10K articles locally and the rest of EN WP is simply mirroring the most recent version. It was relatively easy to do and running the site costs about 3,000 USD per year. Definitely does not have either the dependability of the WMF run sites or the ability to handle the large bandwidths of traffic. Enough to say that spinning up a new version is not excessively difficult. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 02:41, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks Doc. How did you handle the migration of volunteers to a system outside of universal single login? My understanding of previous discussions about forking the projects is that the difficulty of migrating the userbase without badfaith actors usurping accounts of current and former members was a bit of a challenge. WereSpielChequers (talk) 10:50, 28 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for that Doc, good to hear there is a workaround, though presumably you lose the pseudonymity if you have to authenticate by another site. Unless people could authenticate via WMF sites? WereSpielChequers (talk) 15:10, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Doc James I think you are underestimating what would be required to completely move all the sites. Running one mirror that can still rely on some wikimedia stuff being up is one thing, but MOVING all traffic, is a different beast. Wikimedia runs multiple supporting services (like OTRS, thousands of caching services, media conversion and hosts dedicated to creating backups) and 800 of these sites. The database servers themselves are beasts that require a lot of knowledge on how to deal with that much data (it's at the limits of what such databases can support even with continuous ongoing optimization). Without prep, you might have to start without the user credentials, a pita to resolve, let's not even talk about the humongous amount of traffic that might immediately bring down your servers once you open them up. It's the difference between 'save some' and 'move'. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:07, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
By the way all of this is also related to m:Community Wishlist/W78 in case the community proper stays asleep on this and some external organization builds this. On the talk page a user recently brought up the issue of Not sure if such a project should be hosted by WMF in the USA and it may be best if a/multiple non-US chapter(s) hosted it or alternatively some non-WMF organization. Obviously not in China either despite that this is where we could get over a billion additional regular/frequent readers via what's proposed there. More broadly, there's also the idea of decentralized hosting since the contents are mostly just text, e.g. via (improved) IPFS. Prototyperspective (talk) 14:25, 29 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
The technical and organisational question STARTS with a USA making our existence from within the USA impossible. So we start with some server parks outside of the USA. To what extend can they collaborate without US based infrastructure. When predictable public response happens, money is probably not the problem. Our chapters have legal presence in many countries, they take centre stage. Technically and organisationally there will be a need for global presence, global collaboration.
Given that mobile telephony is no longer binary, given that China is one of our biggest publics, to what extend do we support Huawei hardware, mobile and computers? Thanks, GerardM (talk) 08:10, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi @GerardM, thanks for this question. My name is Jaz, I am a Product Manager on the mobile apps team. The official Wikipedia app is available on the Huawei app store. We previously had a campaign to increase visibility of the Wikipedia app on the Huawei app store. At the moment, there are ~150K monthly downloads of the Wikipedia app from Huawei devices. JTanner (WMF) (talk) 22:53, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 days ago6 comments4 people in discussion
More and more people spend time on their smartphones rather than computers. It seems little progress had been done on mobile. On Commons, there are trove of potential free images captured and saved on mobile phones, yet the Commons app has no iPhone version exist. On Wikidata, it is hard to find the option to create an item, a lexeme by simply going to the mobile main menu. Wikipedia app still use source editing while Visual Editor entices new generation of editors. Our outreach training modules for our affiliate & passionate contributor trainers do not have basic modules for mobile users, forcing learners to use computers. We are in 2026 and our interface was stuck a decade behind. -- Exec8 (talk) 17:57, 25 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Truly wild how even this page is super messed on mobile: only 4 topics appear directly, with the rest (including ALL the prompts) being nestled under the generic “learn more about this page” dropdown. Gee I wonder why newcomers aren’t contributing to the conversation? It’s because they can’t find it! ExtantRotations (talk) 20:39, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@TheDJ FYI as a mobile user I am unable to even reply to any of the topics placed on the “learn more about this page” page, which makes even being part of this discussion difficult. ExtantRotations (talk) 23:29, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Exec8 Thanks for raising this topic. Across Wikimedia projects, contribution workflows still reflect a desktop first model, even though most people now access the internet primarily or exclusively via mobile devices.
Research across the movement consistently confirms this gap. Mobile accounts for the majority of Wikipedia readership, yet only a small fraction of edits come from mobile users, and those edits are reverted at much higher rates. I participated in a working group that examined these challenges in depth and produced a set of recommendations aimed at addressing some of the underlying issues, documented at: MW:Mobile_Web_Editing_Research.
That research focused primarily on the new editor experiences on mobile, which meant there was less emphasis on advanced contributor workflows. Even so, it has already led to tangible improvements, including fixes for several mobile specific bugs, with additional feature improvements currently in progress. While there may not be a standalone Annual Plan objective dedicated solely to mobile, the work WMF Contributor teams have planned is guided by a clear commitment to a mobile-first approach, as outlined in the Contributor Strategy.
The Mobile Web Editing Research is already informing concrete product changes, including reducing friction in account creation, first edits, and expanding Structured Tasks and VisualEditor capabilities on mobile.There are inevitably hard choices and tradeoffs. The scope of needed improvements is broad, and capacity is limited, so not everything can be addressed at once. That said, I strongly agree with your underlying point that a mobile first lens is essential. Mobile is where the people are, but it is not yet where contributors reliably succeed. Closing this gap is critical for equity, sustainability, and the long term health of the movement. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 18:49, 6 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Despite the rising interest, especially developing and low economic countries, in contributing to Wikimedia Commons, the only officially supported mode by the Foundation is only through mobile web. It is quite sad that there is no whole of the Foundation support to develop or fund dedicated mobile apps. — Exec8 (talk) 15:31, 7 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 1 month ago14 comments4 people in discussion
We can provide structural information on many subjects in any language based. Information about awards, competitions, government ministers of nations .. As much of such information is available in Wikidata, we can provide this information thanks to processes like "Listeria". It will be obvious when a local article is available, if not we can provide information in the form of something like Reasonator .. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 11:28, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think it could be clearer what you're asking or suggesting. Regarding data in Wikidata (and this also often if not usually applies to data on awards etc), see also How can Wikidata be useful IRL if it has less data than Wikipedia?. The listeria tool is very underrated and has lots of potential so it's nice that you're raising this but it's for example unclear where you see English language focus in the plan and what change exactly you'd like to see.
This is NOT about Listeria, it is a prototype. This is about the WMF annual plan. If it is to reduce the focus that is now largely for the English language projects that are less than 50% of our traffic. The aim is for the WMF to adopt strategies that have potential as shown by Listeria. Therefore voting for an update is not what we aim to achieve with comments on the annual plan. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 18:12, 26 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Functionality like Listeria is external to WMF. Many of the most useful tools are not supported by the WMF, Scholia is another example. Given the lack of support reliability is below par. So what I want from the WMF is support for the tools that we/our public are actually using. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 08:20, 27 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Scholia is this tool (documentation page), Listeria refers to ListeriaBot and it's associated services documented here. Given that this is the wikidata/tools side of things I'd personally look at affiliate support or alternatively WMDE support (which typically has been the org that does a ton to support Wikidata related work). Sohom (talk) 15:48, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think the user was asking which tools GerardM was referring to when saying Many of the most useful tools are not supported by the WMF. If not at least I'd like to know. GerardM previously said they don't want development of Listeria (improvements to the tool and/or a new variant/fork of it) which I found contradictory and still don't understand so far and it's still unclear as far as I can see what the user is asking for specifically. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:18, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
It's not used for article creation, certainly not in the way you image. Basically, it's not used in the way you imagine it is or would be and I don't feel ready to explain it to you all from the fundamentals ground up to real-world practice how to make good use of this but recommend getting some experience with it. GerardM's original comment may sound like it would be used as you described but it needs experience and knowledge about it to see how Wikidata/it could be used for sth of that sort. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:41, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Listeria relies on Wikidata. It is quite good at references. What it is good at is what Wikipedias are bad at. Maintaining lists, lists like award winners, list of politicians. The problem is with people who assume it is about "their" Wikipedia and that there is only one scenario that makes it useful. For instance, where Wikipedia has a "red link", Listeria shows a cursive string linking to a Wikidata item. When a local article is linked to that item, it becomes a local link to the article on the next Listeria update. When Wikidata knows about a new award recipient, dependent on some software update, it could only update a list with "update requested" for a list.
When you consider poor quality, it is poor quality when red or black links show where a local article is available. Poor quality also shows in categories with missing entries. How about when information is just not there?
When Commons started, there was FIRST a Wiki with pictures that were properly licensed and used on Wikipedias. The software showing the pictures came later. THAT is what wiki wiki means.
The notion that we do not have experience is false.
I don't know who you were replying to but FYI I find it unintelligible and I still don't know what you're asking for if it's not improvements to or improved versions of listeria, especially since you named it again. Prototyperspective (talk) 19:30, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I wish for WMF to support functionality. Listeria is an enabler. When WMF considers Listerias functionality its own, we no longer suffer from substandard support. Thanks, GerardM (talk) 11:53, 4 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 14 days ago15 comments9 people in discussion
I think it is better to have regional meetups rather than huge global Meetups like Wikimania. From my point of view this can save money and enable more people to meet other people in person if there is better financial support for local events. If Wikimania is happening at a place where I can travel to by train within one day I try to visit it. Regarding events I think it is important to reduce the costs per participant. Paying for flights should be avoided where possible and if a flight is necessary there are cases where booking it very early can lead to much lower costs. Regarding costs during a event I think breakfast in a Hotel is not necessary and one warm meal a day is enough. Instead of a Hotel I think another option can be Hostels or at least rooms where several people stay together. I like Hostels and visit them at the moment regularily. The way how people stay should be not enforced to much. As I know it can lead to less privacy or maybe conflicts if several people stay together in a room. At the end I think there should be a ambitious goal of how much a stay for one person per day should cost at maximum. I think about a price of 80 Euro per night including one meal is an ambitious price. Travel costs should be in average not more than 500 Euro per Person for an global event. If it is an regional event it should be not more than 200 Euro per person in average. Holding such an average requires to fund enough people who have lower travel costs. The travel costs should be one selection criteria for example for Wikimania. If people are able to participate with lower costs they should get a preferred access to funding. Optimizing the costs there can lead to higher number of fundings with the same budget. Helping people to participate at a event is something I support and like and so I hope it will be possible to give people the chance to be able to do it in person through reducing costs. Hogü-456 (talk) 20:51, 31 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
I don’t think this is necessarily true. the combination of time + location + amount of people is what makes the costs.
Having more events will almost always be more expensive esp over the size of say 100 or so people. Locations are very expensive, equipment, security (unfortunately) the preparation work etc etc etc. These all count up way faster than people assume. Also the exchange is of course somewhat the goal of wikimania, considering we already do many local things (thanks affiliates!!!).
I do like your idea for selecting for travel costs, but would point out that even for regional meetups that does disadvantage those further away from the meetup. (and often planes are cheaper than trains). Also, i dont think this is really an annual plan point, this is a 10 year point, that should probably be resolved before the foundation even makes the plan, as esp a wikimania starts being planned 2 to 3 years ahead of it happening. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:13, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Agree with what you said.
Additionally, I'd like to point out the inconsistency with the movement's declared goal of ecological sustainability. There is a lot of cognitive dissonance and self-contradiction involved when at the same time we're facilitating air travel, at times paying for air travel, and don't work enough on (or prioritize) the set up of alternative events that don't require that. See Air travel demand reduction.
I don't know how large the expenses for these international events are and they may not be so large for this to have a major impact but it still would save a lot of money that could be used differently.
It's not just about saving money, spending money more effectively, and sustainability but also about how meaningful the events are – e.g. agree with enable more people to meet and also more users going to more local events also means that there can be more opportunity for local news coverage and that people build lasting connections where they meet again other times or become friends instead of likely just meeting once since domestic events mean the people participating aren't living so far apart. There could also be innovative use of new means such as for example a wiki talk being held in one place being livestreamed to people in another place where they can also forward questions. I'm not sure what such offline events are most useful for (nothing much tangible ever seems to come out of them and e.g. talk always have low views on Commons & YT where most large/important discussions & project-launches etc happen mainly online where it's also easier to structure and read up on the deliberation) so the things that can be done depends in part on what people think these are and/or could be most useful for. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:38, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Prototyperspective As somebody who has occasionally attended the larger meetups, I will say I don't see the value of local meetups beyond environmental considerations and meeting within local affiliate organizations. If only local meetups were the norm, I probably would avoid meetups altogether. Unless you are necessarily working with folks in your area (which most people are not, cc our efforts at maintaining a diverse movement) everyone you see at local meetups are people who you typically would not work with onwiki. Additionally as somebody who isn't the most socially fluid in real life, I feel like larger events like Wikimania (or WCNA or similar) have a much lower expectation of group behavior/group think than much of the local meetups I have attended. For what it's worth, scholarship selection committees are already typically filled with local editors who are implicitly bias towards choosing folks from the general continent/area due to pure familiarity so I would be surprised if a significant number of participants in Wikimania have travel costs above "500 Euro per person" (Case to the point, when I traveled from India to Singapore for Wikimania 2023 I don't think the flight I was on cost more than 100 to 200 USD, Similarly, if I wanted to show up to Wikimania this year, the round-trip flight can be booked for 400 Euro) Sohom (talk) 17:28, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
What's the need or big advantage in meeting people you work with online? Especially since you're unlikely to meet them again after the event and could just discuss things via online chat software and/or talk pages. Additionally, this is mainly for users contributing to global projects such as Commons and English Wikipedia (and also international ESWP), but not all the users who contribute to their language-version WP. To me nothing of value to the movement is lost when people avoid participating in such nonlocal offline events altogether and haven't heard of anything to the contrary. I'm sure it's a fun experience though, I'm referring to the net sum of positives&negatives as well as from strategic/community impact interests. Regarding the group think issue which I don't whether or how much of an issue it is, that could be addressed in part via still having international conversations & talks via the use of telepresence / livestreaming technology. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:53, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
What's the need or big advantage in meeting people you work with online? - The same reason basically every open-source project has hackathons and conferences, exchange of like-minded ideas, putting faces on people who you've met online and learn about other initiatives/talk with folks about specific problems that folks face. To give you a concrete example, Wikimania 2023 got me introduced to English Wikipedia editing for the first time and led to me subsequently running for adminship a year-ish later. To me nothing of value to the movement is lost when people avoid participating in such nonlocal offline events altogether - That's a extremely reductive take, I've managed to have interesting conversations about problems with staff and other volunteers (which subsequently led to productive tech work), learn (in some detail) about how arbcom or U4C (or insert other project) functions. I don't doubt that all of these could have happened through teleconferencing services, but being in person helps in being able to brainstorm/hack on things together in a way that remote work often does not. Sohom (talk) 19:30, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Most open source projects have neither hackathons nor conferences. Exchange of like-minded ideas happens best online and I don't see why not second-best at local events. Also I wasn't arguing there aren't any positives. Putting faces on people you met online is not in itself of any benefit to anybody but if there are some arguments/reasons why it would be, then it could also work with local events.
Learning about other initiatives and talking with folks about things can also be done online and a potential area for improvement could be to improve online participation and make it better so that people more easily find things of interest to them.
I don't see how one needs some international event to learn about English Wikipedia, most users are well aware of it and of it being a global project etc. I can't stress enough that I do see benefits of international offline events. However, I think so far they are fairly small in absolute and relative scale. All the things you described could also be learned online as well as in local events so I'd suggest people who had positive experiences with offline international events take their experience and turn it into improvements to both of these things so all of this has a greater more tangible impact and additionally is more consistent with sustainability goals. Maybe some of these things indeed aren't possible with online events and platforms even if innovative approaches and technologies are built and/or deployed – but I think we should be much closer to maximizing out the potential and additionally have the things you described at local events where there's no reason for why these things would be exclusive to international events.
And I think brainstorming works several times as good online compared to offline – it just doesn't work well with talk pages but there's other types of platforms/tech one can use and additionally e.g. enable participation of more users than possible with offline events as well as discussions between users that find each others ideas interesting about these ideas etc (there's dedicated software for such but it's not used). Hackathons can also happen locally and it's easier to redo things and e.g. continue where last left off or adopting sth talked about in the last event etc. Prototyperspective (talk) 20:00, 1 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Most of what the movement does happens in editing on the projects. No dispute from me that the bulk of our interactions are and should be online. But I do think that offline meetings also have their uses. Different people have different learning styles. I don't dispute that offline events aren't useful for everyone. But the question is whether they are a useful small part of our movement. We can measure different retention rates for people who take part in certain types of events. I suspect that Wikimania etc are much better venues than most for interaction across various project boundaries. And it is high time I updated en:User:WereSpielChequers/2010-2014 Editor retention testWereSpielChequers (talk) 22:21, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Sure they are – I think the disagreements lie in by how much regional/local events should be prioritized and in how much resources&attention should be spent on offline international events or in how big the impacts/benefits of the latter are. Another thing I became more aware of earlier during this conversation is that the focus on physical offline international events to some extent probably takes away the consideration/attention on online events in the sense of potential improvements to integration with the physical events and better methods and tools (things ranging from for example adoption of/better mass-brainstorming tools to short videos of summaries of linked talks in a discovery feed in the app etc). Prototyperspective (talk) 23:45, 2 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think physical meetups and Wikimania are the most effective method for advancing community ideas for improvement of the encyclopedias for all audiences and stakeholders, and encouraging retention. They certainly were for me as evidenced by what was achieved during my 20 years here when I was still able to travel. From the funds gathered as a direct result of the volunteers' work, WMF support for such events is still not enough. The very first real live Wikipedian I met - a very, very long time ago - was @WereSpielChequers. Kudpung (talk) 09:23, 16 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Hi Kudpung, and both of us paid our own way for that one nearly twenty years ago. I've had expenses paid to travel to events where I was one of the trainers or on an interval panel. When I worked for Wikimedia UK from 2013 to 2015 I was involved in a bunch of outreach events that probably wouldn't have taken place, or gone as smoothly, without me or someone else turning up with spare laptops and the chapter covering the cost of sandwiches for the attendees. That sort of outreach could of course be put on hold if we were facing a financial crisis and needed to focus on survival. I think that part of the problem is that some people listen to the fundraising messaging and think that we only have money to spend on short term survival as opposed to investing in the future. WereSpielChequers (talk) 14:17, 16 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Strong oppose reducing global conference funding/scholarships. I go to wiki meetups in my local city, in my continent, and globally, and these are great for developing a stronger connection to the movement (very motivating) and for networking (meeting people, building productive working relationships). Overall, I think that WMF has been increasing their budget for things like scholarships at Wikimania, where it has gone from around 200 in 2023, to around 300 in the present day, and I applaud these efforts to send more Wikimedians to global conferences. Honestly, any money directly spent on volunteers (scholarships) is money well spent, and I will always support this type of funding over some other less practical things that could be selected for funding. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:05, 18 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
You can't put a price on the connections made in-person, and being a global community we need global connections. The relationships we build and solidify at events like Wikimania directly contribute to improvements on-wiki—we collaborate on articles, write tools, or draft policy proposals, and develop a deeper understanding of our movement and our communities based on conversations in-person. All of that can be done online to some extent, but the impetus of having so many people in the same place leads to quicker results and deeper relationships than I think is possible online. Many of the sessions are interesting and useful, but it's the follow-up conversations in the corridors (or over a whisky in the hotel bar!) where things really get done.I'm actually strongly in favour of reducing the costs per head of event attendance, but more so that we can enable more people to attend. Harry Mitchell (talk) 22:20, 20 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
to improve our support for online events - hope some people here joined the recent online WP:25 celebration on 15th Jan - and make more events hybrid. This will enable even more people join events when they cannot be physically there.
to ensure our gatherings acknowledge and respond to a more volatile world, which brings different challenges and trade-offs than we are used to as a movement.
And finally to increase the number of scholarships so more people are able to join. As @Novem Linguae mentioned, just on Wikimania we’ve been able to grow every year the number of scholarships. Some of this is driven by bringing down per person costs because with a large event we are able to benefit from bulk pricing and procurement, partnerships, negotiated discounts etc. The same applies to the regional/thematic conferences we support as well.
Over the last few years we have also worked more closely with the Core Organising Team (COT) of Wikimedians for each event to help bring more first-timers to various regional/thematic conferences (often those who have been editing for years but never had a scholarship) and users with extended rights. and I am curious if people here think these are the right groups, and if there are any other groups scholarship committees should prioritise? RASharma (WMF) (talk) 17:28, 27 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@RASharma (WMF) I think they are the right groups. I have met scholarship awardees at earlier Wikimanias who didn't actually have a clue why they were there. They had casually made a request for a scholarship and they got one. There have been suggestions that the scholarship committee prioritises people from their home Wiki; when I was on the scholarship committee we split the work up to avoid that happening. We approached our work on the principle of what the applicants had been doing for the movement and how they and their Wikis would benefit from Wikimania. Awarding a scholarship simply on a merit basis or just for curious new users didn't happen. The conditions of accommodation and programmed events for scholarship attendees has much improved in recent years and this is one area where cost cutting is not conducive to having a happy bunch of participants who really dig in. However, Wikimania (and some other global occasions) is still very much an elitist event, drawing heavily on people who can personally afford the travel, and of course the large attendance of the WMF contingent which accounts for much of the travel budget. Kudpung (talk) 21:51, 27 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 26 days ago6 comments5 people in discussion
as stated in a 2024 community wish, TemplateData support is abysmal, especially regarding the integration with Wikidata. I think development in this area is more urgent than improvement on Commons (where the new Graph implementation seems partial and without updates since June). valepert (talk) 07:53, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Agree. Charts in Commons is still not user friendly, requiring some technical skill to use it. In addition, Charts still has no option to embed Wikidata query service. -- Exec8 (talk) 11:27, 3 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Exec8 some technical skill is almost always required though. Ask anyone to make a graph in Excel and you will see well over half of the people fail. I'm not saying it cannot be better, i just want to caution against the idea that by simply making it simpler, it will become something that most people can use. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:28, 14 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Latest comment: 6 days ago9 comments6 people in discussion
Most of the problems mentioned on this page as well as many of the strategic goals and the wishes in the Community Wishlist have an underlying meta problem that if addressed would greatly increase the capacity to solve or otherwise address them (much more of them much more effectively and sooner):
the lack of technical development, or more specifically the lack of increasing software development capacities
Effectively addressing most of the current challenges Wikimedia projects like Wikipedia face today as well as nearly all community wishes involve mainly or in large part software development.
However, there isn't much Wikimedia software development going on. It does not seem to be a priority for WMF in terms of its activities, concerns and budget allocations. There is not much thinking about how we could get more volunteer open source developers to join the development or actions to increase their participation. Issues on phabricator getting solved by WMF employees is rare and most issues stay open for 8+ years even when lots of users describe it as very important. The issues listed here are few and mostly small and not of big impact. Think about any area where you'd like to see some improvements: it most likely extensively involves software coding.
Chart of the Community Wishlists showing fraction that got done (wishes differ in impact/importance & difficulty & votes; the low fraction can also be seen at the results tables) Avg = 10.2%; a tenth of wishes (not the most-supported/most-impactful) Note: I'll update this soon since a small number of more wishes have been done
However, these capacities are currently the bottleneck; they aren't even enough to fix many of the most critical bug-type issues. Chances aren't good we can manage to innovate, get more contributors, increase readership, safeguard + increase quality, and get more done if capacities aren't even enough to fix issues like phab:T11790 (open since 2007 and allows vandals&Co to just call a wikibot – which is easy to do – to hide their edit from lots of users' Watchlists). There is frustration with important issues just collecting dust everywhere but rarely do contributors recognize or speak about the underlying problem.
I hope that during this year, WMF starts to change this neglection of technical development. Many things can be done, some maybe more effective some less; some more costly, some near-free; some may work out better than expected, some may require lots of support (such as also working on more mentors for new developers and code-reviewers). I hope that people do not think only about everything that needs to be considered or that could go wrong or what is easily misunderstood or what's not as simple here as many may believe or as simple as this post may make it seem … but actually do some real actions this year to increase the capacities.
Here are some things that could be done and which I hope the WMF will do:
A campaign banner e.g. above programming-related Wikipedia articles to get more volunteer devs to join – it would link to some landing page with e.g. a list of issues that volunteers could pick up and could see the value in/may find interesting, a leaderboard of issue solved times impact/difficulty, badges, other campaign things, statistics, link to chat, mentorship help programme, tutorials for the set up and the codebase, etc
Giving out wish bounties where people get paid a bit if they implement wishes or issues
Solve this and you start to solve nearly all other problems to a certain extent (making it possible for them to be addressed or greatly raising the chance they can/will be). What are your thoughts on this? Is there something contributors could do to aid a potential effort to increase development capacity? Prototyperspective (talk) 00:45, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I think that documentation (and documentation mantenaince) is important, but I don't know how a YouTube video (especially an hour long video) can be useful for developers (because it's difficult to search inside a video, some information can be outdated, ...) but any help it's encouraged. --valepert (talk) 16:22, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
That may well be the least effective method idk. Nevertheless, I think it could be quite impactful. It would just show the full set up from installing & configuring Visual Code for example up to what happens after one has made a git pull request. If some information in the video is outdated that can be pointed out in comments or the description but the best way to deal with this is to upload a revised version or to make a new video. And there are YouTube chapters that allow people to skip or jump to specific steps, e.g. in case they already have some things set up.
The set up procedures are rather complicated compared to other open source projects or compared to how it could be and for having just a text document. You can find the textual tutorial at here(incl subsequent sections). There's lots of video tutorials on coding and required setups for such on YouTube with lots of views, examples: 500k views, 4.5 h; 320k views, 0.5 h (this one is actually about coding some Wikipedia API and more successful than nearly all if not all official videos by Wikipedia YT accounts) 8k 1.25 h (how to get started with LibreOffice development) so clearly what you said is not generally the case even if it may be the case for you. The one with 8k views is closest to what I suggested and 8 k aren't that much but one could also make the videos more like other two, e.g. showing how to get started with developing some simpler gadgets & tools for example or the Commons app and 8k aren't few if a large fraction of them actually implement the things in the tutorial and get started developing.
One also has to consider resource/effort requirements vs impact and making a YouTube video isn't as costly as hiring some employees but still could have quite considerable impact so I included it in the list of ideas/suggestions. Part of the reasoning again is that the setup in the case of MediaWiki is rather tedious when just having the text so probably most people considering giving MediaWiki development a try don't put up with it and instead go to another project like random-barely-used-github-repo where they can dive right in and this would probably be different if they can find an easy-to-follow video with a 10 min chapter on the initial setup plus it can attract additional devs+aspiring devs who didn't know of or look at any textual Wikimedia/MediaWiki development docs page. Prototyperspective (talk) 18:03, 5 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Kudpung Thanks, it's very appreciated!
By the way, I'll update the chart soon and then also include a line that considers wishes that were partially implemented. It needs to be said that it does take into account the many issues on phabricator that do not have an associated wish. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:24, 16 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Ah I was wondering about this bot edit [1] were the User:JJMC89 bot very effectively hid the vandalism rather than reverted it.
@Prototyperspective, the Wishlist can sometimes be very effective. However, it is often misunderstood by both the 'wishful' and the WMF in that it tends to confuse requested nice, convenient and practical solutions with urgently required updates, essentially needed features, and attention to bugs. Sometimes the verdict is 'Too big / out of scope for Community Tech', but when the Dev Managers are then approached directly they say: 'Please make your request at the Wishlist". This is why an 8 hour tweak can take 8 years to be done. With Page Curation, regular maintenance was left for so long that by the time it became critical, its entire code base first had to be rewritten Kudpung (talk) 22:14, 21 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Making bug reports is discouraging once one realizes their Phabricator task is going to be triaged as of low priority and then left untouched for years. To give a personal example: on 31 January 2026 I've opened a bug report concerning a readability issue with popups on the desktop when the browser window is small (phab:T416075), only to find out that my report is actually a duplicate of a 30 November 2018 task that is triaged as being of low priority (phab:T210873).
When making software that is tailored for a certain user group, it would make sense to check whether that software works with tools often used by that group. However, that is not always the case. For example, the user info card feature, which, according to the page description, is largely intended to be used by moderators, is somewhat incompatible with Twinkle, despite Twinkle being one of the most used, if not the very most used, anti-vandalism tool. I would like to use this feature, but I am not willing to give up Twinkle in order to use it.
When new pieces of software are created, many times there is a feedback phase. Eventually, the software, if deemed acceptable, is deployed on most or all WMF wikis. However, sometimes features are deployed only in part, and then the project is abandoned for no clear reason. Example: Search Improvements. Some of its features got deployed widely, but the quick-view panel (it can be tested here at Portuguese language Wikipedia) did not – instead, it's still deployed only on a limited number of wikis. From here, I understand that nobody really knows if and when the quick-view panel will ever be deployed on other wikis as well. Another example would be Vector 2022: since it became the default on most Wikipedias, I feel its development stalled, despite the many improvements it could further undergo. The sticky header, which would very much benefit the readers (not having the search bar at the ready is very annoying for readers), is still enabled for logged-in users only, so sometimes it's about not fully using the already existent features. --Paloi Sciurala (talk｜contribs) 22:44, 28 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
I found no simple way to disable width limited mode globally. I am curious about the reason why they didn't made this a global preference. --Hycæfſiam—☎️— 04:11, 8 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
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