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Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 3
[edit]
Highlights
- Wikipedia Library: Wikipedia Library gained new content partnerships, restored access to the British Newspaper Archive, and added an Arabic language academic resource with more than 7 million records.
- Gender gap: The Celebrate Women 2026 campaign will run from March 1–31 to advance the achievements of the women’s rights and gender equity movement globally.
- Annual Planning: The Annual Plan is the Wikimedia Foundation’s description of what we hope to achieve in the coming year. We invite you to shape this plan together with us. Between now and the end of June 2026, we will have continuous conversations about how global trends may shape our future, how we can experiment, adapt and respond together.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Patrolling improvements: A new feature available on Special:Contributions shows temporary accounts that are likely operated by the same person, and so makes patrolling less time-consuming.
- Wikifunctions: How Abstract Wikipedia articles can be integrated into Wikipedia language editions to enable Wikipedians to write an abstract article once and have it available in many languages.
- Suggestion Mode: A new Beta Feature for the VisualEditor, Suggestion Mode, is now available on English Wikipedia for experienced editors. This features proactively suggests actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, such as "add citation", "improve tone", or "fix an ambiguous link".
- WDQS Blazegraph Migration: As part of the migration away from Blazegraph (the current backend of the Wikidata Query Service), an initial evaluation of open-source triple store candidates has been completed. Using the published evaluation methodology, performance, stability, and compatibility was assessed.
- Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 06 and 07 include the new Watchlist labels feature that allows logged-in contributors to organise and filter watched pages in ways that improve their workflows. They also link to the 44 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events
- Funding Principles: The interim Global Resource Distribution Committee (GRDC) has published a first version of the Funding Principles which guides the broader grantmaking ecosystem across the Wikimedia Movement. Share your feedback in the Discussion page.
- Wikipedia 25: Celebrating 25 years of Wikipedia in Warsaw.
- Responsible AI: Why the Global Index on Responsible AI matters for Wikimedians.
- Open Knowledge: Why the Open Knowledge Movement and Public Interest Journalism must unite forces. Shared principles and interdependence, points of convergence and the path forward.
- Journalism Awards: Applications for the Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards are now open until March 1. Presented by the International Center for Journalists in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, the awards seek to recognize African journalists whose reporting helps close knowledge gaps about Africa on Wikipedia.
- UN General Assembly: Wikimedia Foundation was invited to speak at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) hall about Wikipedia’s role in global digital governance.
- Advocacy: Wikimedia Foundation has adopted new and updated policies regarding the use of banners, logo changes, and blackouts on the projects, particularly for advocacy purposes. Specifically, the new "Use of Wikimedia sites for advocacy purposes" policy, and updates to the guidelines for CentralNotice usage and requesting wiki configuration changes. The policies establish clearer processes for advocacy activities, and require notification of Foundation staff for some proposed uses of the Wikimedia sites.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Wikimedia Futures Lab: Reflections from a Wikimedian who attended the Wikimedia Futures Lab.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletin
wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 23:26, 17 February 2026 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 4
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Highlights
Let's Talk continues
- Birthday mode: This limited-time campaign feature celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia with a birthday mascot, Baby Globe. When turned on, Baby Globe is shown on ~2,500 articles, waiting to be discovered by readers. The feature is available for all Wikipedias to customise through Community Configuration until 6 April 2026. So far 17 Wikipedias have joined in the fun.
- Wikipedia's 25th birthday party celebrated on Commons: Content from the January 15th global birthday party selected as Media of the day.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Etherpad cleanup: For security and performance reasons, all current pads on Wikimedia’s Etherpad instance, the web-based "ephemeral" editor for real-time collaborative document editing, will be permanently deleted after 30 April. We will continue running this Etherpad instance to support events and other short-term collaboration, but will be periodically deleting data going forward. If you have content in Etherpad you want to keep, please create local backups, as data will be permanently deleted and will not be able to be recovered.
- Activity tab: Wikipedia iOS app has rolled out the improved Activity tab to all users in version 7.9.0. A/B test results showed increased account creation among users with access to the feature. Updates include enhanced editing impact insights, module customization, and relocation of History into the Search tab.
- Reference Check: The feature Reference Check has been deployed to all Wikipedias. In A/B testing, the impact was substantial: newcomers shown Reference Check were approximately 2.2 times more likely to include a reference on desktop (or acknowledge/explain why they did not) and about 17.5 times more likely on mobile web.
- Semantic search: The Foundation has launched a limited Android mobile app experiment that tests hybrid search capabilities which can handle both semantic and keyword queries. The Phase 1 beta is now live on Greek Wikipedia. The goal is to understand whether combining meaning-based retrieval with keyword search helps readers find information more effectively. Testing will expand to English, French, and Portuguese Wikipedias in March.
- Navigation experience: The Foundation will run an experiment for mobile web users, that adds a table of contents and automatically expands all article sections, to learn more about navigation issues they face. The test will be available on Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Indonesian, and Vietnamese Wikipedias.
- Site notices: Site notices (MediaWiki:Sitenotice and MediaWiki:Anonnotice) now will render on all platforms, not just on the desktop site. Users on mobile web will now see these notices and be informed.
- Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 08 and 09 include the new “Edit full page” button for people who are editing a page-section using the mobile visual editor. They also link to the 40 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
- Wikifunctions: Abstract Wikipedia is going to have its public preview within the next few weeks, here is the preview.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events
- Gender gap: The Celebrate Women 2026 is coming! The Wikimedia Foundation will host a kick-off celebration that will work as a welcome session for both organizers and participants on March 5 at 13:00 UTC.
- Language: New edition of the Language and internationalization newsletter highlights new feature developments and improvements in various language-related technical projects.
- Let’s Connect Learning Clinic: Watch the recordings of past learning clinics about Wikipedia’s 25th Birthday Tool and Strengthening Local-Language Admin Communities.
- Wikimedia Research Showcase: You can watch the recording of this month research showcase whose theme is about "AI and Communities".
- Hubs: Lessons from hub pilots.
- Banners & logo policies: Wikimedia Foundation has adopted new and updated policies regarding the use of banners, logo changes, and blackouts on the projects, particularly for advocacy purposes.
- Digital Safety: The next edition of Digital Safety Office Hours will be on Mar 27 at 9:00 UTC and 19:00 UTC. The session will explore practical threat modelling: a structured way to think about risks, assess your exposure, and make informed choices.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Wikimedia Enterprise: Ecosia Enriches Search Results and AI Answers with Wikimedia Enterprise.
- Human centered AI: Members of the Wikimedia Enterprise team presented on "Wikipedia in the Age of AI and Bots" at the seminar of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.
- Inclusive AI: Advancing Open, Inclusive AI with Free and Open Knowledge at the India AI Impact Summit 2026.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 12:36, 3 March 2026 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 5
[edit]
Highlights
- Supporting readers: For most of its history, Wikipedia did not have to worry about attracting readers. But with the way people search for information changing, there is a drop in the number of readers which is impacting the number of accounts created and contributions to our sites. Have a look at some of the ongoing and planned work to support reader experience.
- Server switch: All wikis will be read-only for a few minutes on March 25 at 15:00 UTC. This is for the datacenter server switchover backup tests, which happen twice a year.
- Tools improvement: The PTAC Unsupported Tools Working Group continued improvements to Video2Commons in February, with fixes addressing authentication errors, large-file handling, task queue visibility, and clearer upload behavior. Work is still ongoing in some areas, including changes related to deprecated server-side uploads.
- Wikipedia 25 Grants: The celebration continues! The Wikimedia Foundation offers Wikipedia 25 Birthday Funds to communities planning Wikipedia’s 25th birthday events with funding between USD 1,000–2,000. Apply before March 31.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Experiments: The Foundation is frequently conducting experiments to help learn what features will be most effective and valuable to the projects. The list of experiments in Product and Technology, tracks upcoming, live, in-analysis, and completed experiments as well as their rationale. For example, the tracker shares that one upcoming experiment, Reader to Contributor Baseline, will measure how many readers create contributor accounts and whether the rate differs depending on how people arrived to the site.
- Article guidance: Help less experienced editors by filling out a questionnaire on this page (available in 7 languages). The Foundation are looking particularly for experienced Wikipedia editors from these pilot wikis. Your answers will help customize guidance for less experienced editors while creating an article.
- Wikifunctions: You can now create Functions that will show a citation in their output.
- Editing feature: Suggestion Mode is available as a beta feature within the visual editor at all Wikipedias. This feature proactively suggests various types of actions that people can consider taking to improve Wikipedia articles, and learn about related guidelines.
- Paste Check: Paste Check is now available at all Wikipedias. The feature prompts newcomers who are pasting text they are not likely to have written into VisualEditor to consider whether doing so risks a copyright violation.
- Mobile experience: The user menu in the top corner for all mobile users is standardized so that it is closer to the desktop experience to improve the user interface for readers.
- Two-factor authentication: For security reasons, members of certain user groups are required to have two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled. Currently, 2FA is required to use the group, but not to be a member of it. Given that this model still has some vulnerabilities, the situation will gradually change in March.
- Tech News: Latest updates from Tech News week 10 and 11 include the new GraphQL API has been released as a flexible alternative to select features of the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS). They also link to the 50 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events
- WikiCelebrate: Celebrating Mervat, one of the most experienced and dedicated contributors to Arabic Wikipedia.
- Wikimedia ecosystem: The pilot on the ecosystem of Wikimedia organizations has published a draft proposal for a Future Affiliate Landscape. It welcomes your review and feedback.
- Fundraising: The Fundraising Report 2024–2025 has now been published on meta.
- International Women's Day 2026: Women, visibility, and the future of trusted knowledge on Wikimedia.
- Don't Blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
- Wiki Loves Earth 2025: See the winners from the 13th annual edition of the globe-trotting photo contest.
- Wikimania 2026: While most Wikimania program submissions are closed, the research track is open until March 31. It accepts proposals from both professional researchers and Wikimedians.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 22:17, 17 March 2026 (UTC)
Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 6
[edit]
Highlights
- Supporting the mobile experience: The Foundation is starting conversations with communities to explore how editing should work on the Wikipedia mobile apps. The goal is to understand how to better support both new and experienced editors, and how the app can guide users to the right editing tools. Your input is welcome. Join the discussion!
- Wikimania 2026: Registration for Wikimania 2026 is opening soon from the end of March to May 1. Like other Wikimedia events this year, we are introducing a "request for invitation" process, with trust and safety checks conducted prior to confirming in-person attendance. Our priority is to create a safe environment for connection, collaboration, and shared learning.
- Around the Puzzle Globe in the CEE region: On March 23 almost 60 Wikimedians took part in the CEE-Catch up- a meeting for Wikimedians from Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. As a part of continuous conversations we have with the communities around the Foundation's annual plan, participants discussed the global trends related to Readers and Contributors in their regional context. The meeting was also an opportunity to connect with the new Foundation CEO, Bernadette Meehan, who is meeting communities around the puzzle globe to listen, learn and engage with the communities.
Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure
See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
- Crawlers: The Foundation is now detecting and blocking billions of bot requests that don’t follow our robot policy, such as aggressive scrapers, to make sure our resources go towards serving human readers. In the coming months we’ll be working on better detection of rapidly changing bot behavior and better API infrastructure.
- Moderator tools for newer editors: Wikipedia editors in Indonesian, Thai, Turkish, and Simple English now have access to an early version of Special:PersonalDashboard. It introduces newer editors to patrolling workflows, making it easier for them to move from making edits to participating in more advanced moderation work on their project.
- Account creation on mobile: Mobile editors at several wikis are now presented with a simplified logged-out warning message, which encourages them to create an account or log in. This test is part of our ongoing effort to enhance the account creation experience on mobile and increase participation.
- Verification email redesign: The verification email sent to new accounts that add an email address during signup has been redesigned. When tested on English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata, the same-week email verification rate increased from 41.6% to 45.9%.
- Retaining notification history: Wikimedia site users can export their notifications older than 5 years using a new Toolforge tool. This will ensure that users retain important notifications and avoid losing them based on the planned change to delete notifications older than 5 years, as previously announced.
- Tech News: Latest highlights from Tech News weeks 12 and 13 include the update that Wikimedia site users can now log in without a password using passkeys as a secure method supported by fingerprint, facial recognition, or PIN. See also the 64 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.
- Experiments: Check out the list of experiments in Product and Technology to see all upcoming, live, in-analysis, and completed experiments. One new experiment that just went live is the "Improve the logged-out warning message on mobile web," which aims to reduce the sense of friction or alarm when users encounter the logged-out warning upon editing.
Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support
See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events
- Digital rights and free knowledge: Wikimedia Foundation staff and Wikimedians from across the movement will contribute to important conversations on AI governance, information integrity, and equitable access to knowledge at RightsCon 2026 from May 5–8. Join the conversation virtually.
- Microtask Generator: Learn more about the Microtask Generator, a tool which identifies content quality gaps in Wikipedia articles and suggests tasks for editors to address within a dashboard. Users can input lists of articles for analysis, or get recommendations based on article categories. Ideal for edit-a-thons and other article improvement drives.
- WikiLearn: Discover the latest edition of WikiLearn News where you can find the latest online learning opportunities to take your editing skills to new heights.
- Diff Event calendar: The event calendar on Diff is now redirected to the list of events on Meta-wiki. This list pulls in all events that are open to all wikis.
- Grantmaking Strategy: The GRDC has identified the key challenges that will inform the design of the new Grantmaking Strategy.
Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness
See also: Progress on the annual plan
- Audit report: Highlights from the Wikimedia Endowment’s fiscal year 2024-2025 audit report.
- Enterprise partnerships: Wikimedia Enterprise announced new partnerships. Together with Firecrawl to reform how AI agents access the world’s largest online repository of human knowledge and with Aligned AI to develop Ethical AI products for families by providing Wikimedia Enterprise Snapshot API.
Board and Board committee updates
See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter
- Endowment Board: Welcoming Nataliia Tymkiv to the Wikimedia Endowment Board of Directors.
- Affiliate recognition: Affiliations Committee extended the pause on new affiliate recognition to September 1, 2026.
Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. Let foundationbulletinwikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!
MediaWiki message delivery 22:04, 31 March 2026 (UTC)
CEE Newsletter is out now!
[edit]Dear all,
The first CEE Newsletter issue of 2026 is now live, and we are happy to share it with you.
The past few months have been anything but quiet across our region. From Wikimedia CEE Spring and the CEE Women Campaign, to cross-border collaborations, youth initiatives, and new ideas taking shape, there is a lot happening -- and this issue brings together many of those stories in one place.
You will find highlights from community activities, updates from the CEE Hub, international news, and a wide range of contributions from across the region. It is a good snapshot of what we have been working on together at the start of the year.
As always, thank you to everyone who contributed -- by writing, sharing updates, or supporting behind the scenes.
Take a moment to explore the issue and see what is going on across the region: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CEE/Newsletter/March_2026
As always, we have prepared a Russian version of the same issue: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CEE/Newsletter/March_2026/ru
Happy reading!
On behalf of the CEE Newsletter team, Karo