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April 2026 meeting with a focus on the 2026-2027 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan

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Table of local times. These all refer to the same Café session.
Time zone Day of week Date Local start time UTC offset
Hawaii Standard Time, used year-round in Hawaii Saturday 11 April 04:00 -10
Pacific Time Saturday 11 April 07:00 -7
Eastern Time Saturday 11 April 10:00 -4
UTC Saturday 11 April 14:00 0
Indian Standard Time Saturday 11 April 19:30 +5.5
Indonesian Western Standard Time, Indochina Time Saturday 11 April 21:00 +7
Australian Eastern Standard Time, Chamorro Time, and Vladivostok Time Sunday 12 April 00:00 midnight +10
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Agenda. This will be an approximately 2 hour Café session. The agenda is subject to change, such as after the first draft of the Annual Plan is published which may happen before April 11.

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  1. Global trends (7 minute plenary discussion)
  2. Experimentation (7 minute plenary discussion)
  3. Users with Extended Rights (20 minute plenary discussion including demos from Sam)

Estimated break point for a 5 minute intermission

  1. Newcomers (7 minute plenary discussion)
  2. Collaboration 7 minute plenary discussion)
  3. Reading (7 minute plenary discussion)
  • Zoom out to bigger picture questions & answers, facilitated by the host Pine (5 minutes)
  • Next steps & closure ← Pine (5 minutes)

How to attend the session

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If you would like to attend then please sign below at least 2 hours before the start of the session. A Zoom link will be emailed to you before the start of the session, using Special:EmailUser.

  • If you sign up near or after the start time of the session then the hosts might not have time to send a meeting link to you for the session.
  • Before the scheduled start time of the Café, please verify that you can successfully use Zoom.
  • Attending the Café requires that the participating Wikimedia account has 500 or more edits on a single wiki with an account that is 30 or more days old (consistent with English Wikipedia's policy for extendedconfirmed group membership), and no active blocks visible in Special:CentralAuth. If your account does not currently meet these requirements then please fulfill these first. After your account meets these requirements, you may sign up for a Café session. Thanks.

Signups for the April 2026 session

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  1. User:KStineRowe (WMF) - featured guest
  2. User:Samwalton9 (WMF) - featured guest
  3. ↠Pine (✉) 23:24, 28 March 2026 (UTC) - facilitator[reply]
  4. Saroj (talk) 06:06, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Eugene233 (talk) 09:07, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  6. -- Archies 2804 ✈️ (📬 Let’s connect) 13:49, 29 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Dev Jadiya (talk) 08:10, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Misaochan (talk) 13:26, 30 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Affandy Murad (talk) 03:49, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  10. –SJ talk  07:13, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  11. --Geert Van Pamel (WMBE) 08:31, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  12. CMD (talk) 10:46, 31 March 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  13. Toadspike [Talk] 09:51, 2 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  14. Sohom (talk) 13:28, 2 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  15. E mln e (talk) 17:15, 2 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  16. Kaartic [talk] 15:27, 3 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  17. Bo-3903 (talk) 00:06, 4 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  18. --Paula (WDU) (talk) 15:52, 6 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  19. Martin Rulsch (WMDE) (talk) 11:50, 8 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  20. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 10:23, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  21. Peaceray (talk) 13:57, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
  22. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 14:46, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
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Hi @KStineRowe (WMF), Samwalton9 (WMF), Saroj, Eugene233, Archies2804, Dev Jadiya, Misaochan, Affandy Murad, Sj, Geertivp, Chipmunkdavis, Toadspike, Sohom Datta, E mln e, Kaartic, Bo-3903, Paula (WDU), and Martin Rulsch (WMDE): emails have been sent to you with the Zoom connection information. I look forward to our discussion. ↠Pine (✉) 04:27, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

@Pine: sorry for the late sign up: could you send me an invite too? —Femke 🐦 (talk) 13:45, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
@Pine: Also for me, please. Peaceray (talk) 13:58, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
"The host requires authentication on the commercial Zoom platform to join this meeting. Please sign in with a commercial Zoom account to join." It would be helpful if the need for such an account was signposted in advance. CMD (talk) 13:57, 11 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]
True. I even tried to sign up but couldn't join as I didn't receive an email from zoom. I would love it if we could use Jitsi instead. Kaartic [talk] 04:30, 19 April 2026 (UTC)[reply]

Slide deck & notes

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  • To be added: slide deck from Kelsi
  • Wikipedia/Wikimedia is "More vital, less visible" in the AI era.
  • Slides from Kelsi show ~8% decline in human usage
  • Downward views on all wikis, particularly on Wikipedias
  • Reader stats blog post on Diff should be up shortly
  • Other diff posts with relevant info:
  • Comment from Kelsi: the 2030 vision of being essential has been achieved. We can look further ahead now.

Medical page views: https://mdwiki.toolforge.org/views/?sub_dir=users-agents

Presentation from Sam. Newcomer homepage flow: from "You can edit" to "You can review other people's edits". Patroller-type work which could "grow" into rollbackers, admins, etc. Currently using ORES model. But in 2026-2027, focusing more on users' demonstrated edits, and integrate with newcomer home page for smooth path

Suggestions

  • Show people readership stats of the past few months of pages they edited it
  • Active discussions should be higher up vs. recent changes. Proposing a discussion may seem less intimidating hat outright reverting vandalism
  • Showing pages that people haven't edited is also important. Ideas:
  1. grab pages from watchlist
  2. grab pages that link to pages which people edited
  3. machine learning model based on topics that people have edited
  4. Categories of pages which people edited
  5. Wikiprojects
  1. Wikiprojects which relate to pages which a newcomer edited are wiki-specific which could make hooking the new onboarding experience into projects could be complicated.
  2. Low activity in some wikiprojects being potentially discouraging to new editors. A
  3. Wikiproject talk page might be interesting such as for requested moves, even if projects are inactive.
  4. Look at tags of wikiprojects on talk pages

On Experimentation:


Comments regarding Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2026-2027/Product & Technology OKRs
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  • Multimedia/"Rich content" seems to be missing from the OKRS (graph extensions, media formats, maps, interactive calculators, three-dimensional models, interactive models of biological cells, cross-sections of biological anatomy or constructed objects like ships or buildings, etc.)

Collaboration: en:Special:Allevents on ENWP needs to be better advertised. Maybe highlight backlog drives, campaigns, etc on the Newcomer Dashboard. Also, possibly highlight on homepage. Also, consider automating points=counting for an event. Possibly WMF could support indirectly such as with a GSOC intern or encouraging a community developer to get involved.

Idea: "community ombuds"
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  1. Until recently the WMF Board had its Community Affairs Committee but that committee wound down at the end of 2025. The Product and Technology Advisory Council somewhat has this role on the Product and Technology dept now. User:Sohom Datta is a point of contact for that council.
  2. The "community ombuds" would be a role (not a position) responsible for keeping track of where things are, e.g. with the Etherpad discussion. We shouldn't have personnel churn blocking progress, such a project being blocked because a decision hasn't been made and the decision will be made by the person who eventually fills a vacant project manager position.
Reading
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Drop in pageviews might not imply people not reading. Data could be consumed & reused off-wiki such as through search engines, AI, etc., but we need an attribution framework & for us to know counts of our off-wiki reads/reuses.

Question from Toadspike: how far back was data corrected for filtering out bot traffic? This could affect how we read recent supposed downaward pageview human reads. Pine will ask WMF about this.

How many of the off-wiki readers might be interested in becoming editors? Do we let them know that they could contribute?

"Semantic search" would fix a lot of issues, such as with LLMs.

Other
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  • Future Café topic: what's happening with health of wikiprojects? How do they tie into new user experience? Maybe contact James Hare. CMD: problem with consolidating wikiprojects is that merging tools that are specific to projects is technically complicated. There's a en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Inactive project
  • Invite Sam back in a few months to discuss the ongoing work regarding moderator tools & the new contributor experience.
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