Talk:Wikimedia Futures Lab

Discussions on each main topic below, please expand into subsets when a new key point is raised so we can all follow discussions.

Goal 1: Foster movement belonging

Expected outcome: Participants gain insight into different perspectives and local contexts, they collaborate to develop a shared understanding of challenges and opportunities and imagine futures for Wikimedia.

Conferences

• Conferences big and small bring people together. Encouraging and support a wide range of conferences especially region and thermatic specific helps. Gnangarra (talk) 08:50, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

Internships

• consider the potential to enable key people from small Affiliates the ability to intern at larger Affiliates. Be involved in specific activities. example: WM United Kingdoms trainer workshops. Gnangarra (talk) 08:50, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

  +1 @Gnangarra, as a co-founder of Wikimedia Ghana User Group, I often reflect how impactful it will be if the user group could learn from other affiliates during problem-solving, but quickly realise that there isn't a consistent platform to formally engage, embed and learn from another affiliate. A system for discovering or engaging mentor/role-model-affiliates is key for some of us. This idea strongly resonates with me. –– Sandiooses (talk) 13:30, 3 August 2025 (UTC)

Meetups

• sometimes keeping people active and belonging to a community simple local meetups, chat over a coffee and cakes help people to foster communities. They act as a support and feed back mechanism where there generally isnt a written record these sessions enable more open sharing in place where everyone understand the same cultural sensitivities. Gnangarra (talk) 08:56, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

Goal 2: Discuss key global trends and their impact on Wikimedia

Expected outcome: Participants engage with experts and research to deepen the Movement’s understanding of key trends affecting Wikimedia and discuss how global developments impact regional contexts.

Government child safety laws

• A key issue in Australia is the Government limiting the ability of under 16's to participate in forums and access sites to what is consider adult information. This is putting requirements on companies to collect more information about the people using their platforms and have means to verify the authenticity of individuals. The shift has forced even Googles search engine to know a person age and restrict material accordingly. see and this. Gnangarra (talk) 09:32, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

AI media creation

Visual

• The ability to create photographic like images using AI with not actually being connected to the location. For Commons specifically and the whole movement in general to retain veracity and accuracy we will need policies, tools, and capacity to identify such files along with where they are being used.

Audio & Video

• There is still an unanswered issue of copyright infringement by the AI systems in making these files. Now its also possible to use voices created by AI in videos and sound bites these too will have long term copyright issues. Gnangarra (talk) 09:32, 2 August 2025 (UTC)

Registration decline

• The research tab of this Wikimedia Futures Lab sub-site has links to some interesting pages. The "Global Trends" tab on the linked page "Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan", in turn, has a link to a very interesting report, Investigating the 2021–present registration decline, by Neil Shah-Quinn.

That report found that Wikimedia account registrations have declined substantially since 2019, causing a similar decline in new active editors. It then concluded, "It seems likely that the cause is some broad, global trend external to the Wikimedia movement, like a decline in authentic readership (masked in our metrics by unidentified bots and data issues) or interest in contributing."

I'm not sure that that really is the likely cause.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the report is Figure 9 - a graph of the reasons given by French Wikipedia welcome survey respondents as to why they registered. The graph shows that by mid-2024, the most frequent reason by far respondents gave for registering was "new-page" (ie a desire to create a new page) at more than 30%, up from 20-25% in 2021. As of today, fr.wikipedia has more than 2.7 million articles that have already been created. So perhaps the main cause of the decline in French Wikipedia registrations is simply that there are currently more than 2.7 million fewer fr.wikipedia articles to create than there were when fr.wikipedia went online.

Such a possible main cause is even more likely in relation to English Wikipedia. As of today, en.wikipedia has more than 7 million articles that have already been created. It would therefore not be surprising if a Figure 9-style graph of the presently declining English Wikipedia welcome respondents showed that, as for their francophone counterparts, the most frequent reason for registering is "new-page".

Further (and as to the declines in registrations in languages other than French and English), many people who speak both English and (an)other language(s) and who might otherwise have registered to create a new article in another language might have chosen, instead, simply to press one button and machine translate an existing en.wikipedia article for personal reading (as an alternative to going to the considerable effort of creating a corresponding Wikipedia article in the other language, either from scratch, or by uploading a fully fledged translation of the en.wikipedia article).

So maybe the decline in new active editors is not as much of a problem, if at all, as may at first appear.

I can even also say this from my own experience. I registered in 2009, because I wanted to create a new en.wikipedia article by translating an existing de.wikipedia article. Since then, I have created more than 1,000 articles, many of them from scratch. One thing I've noticed is that very few of those articles have been radically altered since I created them. What that tells me is that relatively few registrants are really motivated to make major changes to an existing article - they much prefer creating a new one, or making minor alterations/updates to an existing one. My own preferences are similar - I can think of relatively few articles created by another registrant that I have ever substantially altered.

My conclusion, therefore, is that some more data analysis, and perhaps data creation based on some future further surveying, would be very helpful in pointing to whether the decline in new registrations is really much of a problem after all. Bahnfrend (talk) 13:46, 3 September 2025 (UTC)

Goal 3: Propose and adapt strategies to stay relevant

Expected outcome: Participants discuss possible strategies to respond to these trends and generate first ideas that can be taken forward after the event.

Editor/contributor recruitment and retention hub

• I am a member of a WM Australia sub-committee devoted to membership recruitment/retention. I think the Wikimedia movement/affiliates could set up a hub to co-ordinate editor/contributor/affiliate member recruitment and retention activities worldwide. Various affiliates have already developed successful systems for such recruitment and retention. For example, Wikimedia Deutschland has managed to recruit vast numbers of chapter members, Wiki in Africa runs a multilingual course training school children to contribute to Vikidia, Wikimedia Uganda User Group has created a very effective course for recruiting university student editors/contributors by training them to edit Wikisource, and Wikimedia Ukraine has a training course for over 55s. It's desirable to avoid 'reinventing the wheel' by developing possibly ineffective recruitment/retention programs if such programs have already been developed and shown to be successful elsewhere. A hub could be used to maintain, develop and share these and other successful systems for use by all affiliates worldwide. The hub could also, eg, research and address ongoing opportunities and threats, etc, for editors/contributors/affiliate members - essentially keep an eye on, and respond in real time to, the Track 2 issues identified in this Futures Lab event. Bahnfrend (talk) 04:47, 22 August 2025 (UTC)

Costs of the Wikimedia Futures Lab

I read the voting result of the board of Wikimedia Deutschland and found a section about the costs for the Wikimedia Futures Lab. The planned costs are 553.126,75 Euro and the Wikimedia Foundation pays 276.563,40 Euro of the total amount. You can find the amounts in this document in the section Wikimedia Futures Lab (11.11.2025). From my point of view after reading about the total amount I think it is too expensive. The outcome of this event will not bring so much benefit as what you can get when you employ people instead for this amount of money who are working on improving software in the Wikimedia projects. If there there are 100 particpants at the event the costs per person participating onsite are 5531,2675 Euro. It is too late to cancel and so I hope you will learn from it for the future. If I am interested in it I will ask in the costs of an event I try to ask earlier next time and I hope there will be a good discussion about the costs then. How much of the amount are external costs and can you please create a page called financial transaprency or something like that to make sure everyone who is interested in the budget of the event can find the information about the planned costs. Hogü-456 (talk) 13:52, 6 December 2025 (UTC)

Hello @Hogü-456, the budget you mentioned is correct. As with all previous international events organised by WMDE, the event's final budget will be included in the event reporting that will be shared a few months after the event. Eva Martin (WMDE) (talk) 12:15, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

All recorded interviews are published

The interviews I recorded during the conference are published now. I linked them on Wikimedia Futures Lab/Podcast series to make it easy to find them. ♥Ainali ^talk_{contributions} 07:58, 11 February 2026 (UTC)