Wikimedia Foundation Affiliates Strategy/Implementation/Affiliate health criteria/Reports/2025/Wikimedia Stewards User Group
| Affiliate basic information | ||
|---|---|---|
| What is the affiliate name? | Wikimedia Stewards User Group | |
| Please list the languages supported by this affiliate | any | |
| Please list countries where this affiliate operates | any | |
| Reporting timeline (e.g. January-December) | January–December | |
| Reporting year (e.g. 2024 or 2024-2025) | 2025 | |
| Primary contact (user name) | DerHexer | |
| Secondary contact (user name) | Base | |
| Goal delivery | ||
| What is the affiliate mission? | The Wikimedia Stewards User Group serves to coordinate and enable growth of the steward team and better involvement of stewards in Wikimedia governance. | |
| What are the affiliate goals? Link to the strategic plan, if there is one. |
| |
| Organizational development | ||
| How does the affiliate make decisions? How are decisions communicated? | Membership in the group is open to anyone interested in steward recruitment, tool development, or any of the other topics included in the user group mandate. Voting membership will be restricted to current and former stewards in good standing. When consensus is not reached, a formal, internal voting process was established in 2022: Steward decisions. | |
| What is the current state of the affiliate finances? Link to the latest financial report, if there is one. | no budget, no grants | |
Affiliate health and resilience
| ||
| How many people participate in the decision-making process in the affiliate? |
| |
| Has there been any significant changes in the level of the affiliate membership body (e.g. increase/decrease of number of dues-paying members)? | plus two members in 2025 (6 new, 4 leaving), everyone is a volunteer | |
| Are there any affiliate activities in the past year that were led by affiliate members? Please share the highlights. | see the more detailed report | |
| Leadership and inclusion | ||
Diverse, skilled, and accountable leadership
| ||
| What kind of skills does the affiliate leadership possess? | governance, communications, technology | |
| Is there any kind of succession plan for the affiliate leadership? | yes | |
| Are there any trainings that affiliate leadership undergo before they assume their leadership position? | only limited at the 2025 Stewards Conference, but there are a couple of public and non-public handbooks as well as mentor-like support | |
| Are there any requirements for affiliate leadership to disclose their conflict(s) of interests? | yes | |
Diversity balance (especially gender)
| ||
| What is the diversity level of the affiliate leadership and membership body? | members can join without revealing their identities and there has been no survey about this diversity yet; however, among the ~30 members, only a handful are known to be non-male | |
| How is the affiliate leadership encouraging gender diversity in the decision-making process(es) of the affiliate? | decisions are made by consensus without any kind of knowledge of the diversity of participants | |
Universal Code of Conduct compliance
| ||
| How does the affiliate leadership ensure, enforce, and evaluate compliance with the Universal Code of Conduct obligations? | our members have advocated for the establishment of a UCoC long before it existed and are experts in UCoC-related activities furthermore, we have a close relationship to the U4C members through a joint Discord channel and had joint sessions at the parallel Stewards and U4C conference in 2025 | |
| Engagement and Collaboration | ||
| Please share the publicly available records of regular meetings, activities, events, or conference in the past year where the affiliate has participated. | due to the sensitivity of our work, we're using a non-public wiki where meetings are documented with the support of WMF staff however, our annual group reports summarize our activities in detail | |
| Community connection | ||
| How many affiliate members are active contributors to the Wikimedia projects? | close to 100 %, see statistics for stewards, e.g. here | |
| How many affiliate members are not active contributors to the Wikimedia projects? | close to 0 % | |
| How many affiliate members are active organizers (of projects, events, conferences, initiatives, etc) within the Wikimedia movement? | 15–30 % | |
| How many people have participated in affiliate projects, events, conferences, and/or initiatives in the past year? | about 10, at Steward Conference 2025 and Wikimania 2025 (in particular at the Users with Extended Rights Convening) | |
| Partnerships and collaboration | ||
| Please list all activities/initiatives that the affiliate has organized or co-organized in past 12 months. | see the detailed report | |
| What would affiliate leadership list as the top 3 (three) capacities of the affiliate? (e.g. evaluation, community governance, programs and events, organizational governance and resource policies, conflict management, partnerships, fundraising, communication and media relations, contributor development, on-wiki technical skills, policy advocacy, etc) | technology, in particular product security and integrity | |
| global governance | ||
| communications | ||
| What are the 3 (three) capacities that the affiliate would like to strengthen in the next 12 months? | language diversity | |
| gender diversity | ||
| grant-making | ||
| What are the organizations, community projects, or groups that the affiliate had been working or seeking to work with to develop and support the 3 capacities? | Wikimedia Foundation staff and board, local functionaries, U4C | |
Report of the Wikimedia Stewards User Group (WMSUG) for activities from January until December 2025. (edit)
Governance
[edit]Membership to the User Group is open to anyone interested in steward recruitment, tool development, or any of the other topics included in the user group mandate. Voting membership is restricted to current and former stewards in good standing. In the first quarter of 2025, the annual steward elections within the global Wikimedia community took place, resulting in six new stewards (everyone new to this role). That’s the second-highest number of successful applications since 2020, with only one new steward less than last year. Around the annual confirmations, four stewards lost their access. Three of them resigned before the confirmations, one of them lost it with good standing after consensus among the stewards and global community. With one more resignation since the last report, only 33 stewards remain active as of 29 December 2025, one more than in the previous report. Recruitment for new stewards in 2026 has begun, but the numbers remain low. The user group remains consensus-driven among members with co-contacts Base and DerHexer, as well as co-founder Ajraddatz who returned to the co-contact role. The internal “stewards decision” process was not used in 2025; consensus was reached among the group without the need for voting.
Communications
[edit]Due to the nature of our members who work in security-related fields, an internal wiki was used with some WMF staff members having access where experiences about global abuse were shared (documentation of cases, processes, etc.). We also continued using a private mailing list (steward-l), where Wikimedia Stewards discussed various cases in more than 370 emails in the reported period, less than the 500 messages reported last year. However, communication heavily increased in some of the other channels (IRC, Discord); more than 11,500 messages can be reported in the internal communications channel with an additional 1,300 in collaboration channels (see below). While the number of general messages decreased from ~15,000, the number of messages with WMF staff increased by more than 60% (~800 messages last year). Additionally, some members joined collaboration channels with close groups, like the Discord channel for users with extended rights, which was created after the convening of this group at Wikimania 2025 (see below) and was joined by 13 stewards.
More than 8,600 tickets were handled in the VRT stewards queues in the reported period (that's 65% more than last year!), mostly queries about previous actions of Wikimedia Stewards. While writing this report, a little more than 250 tickets are open, which is five times higher than at the last report and mainly caused by a reduced support of Steward clerks, with only individual stewards (particularly one) working on these tickets. This led to a recent reform of the steward clerks system, with three removed and one added as of now. Besides VRT tickets, hundreds of requests have been handled on UTRS. As of now, the internal mailing list for WMSUG members is barely used. Most conversations take place in the other channels as per above.
Within the reported period, Wikimedia Stewards advised WMF on several topics on a monthly basis and joined additional calls, especially on the topics of the newly founded Product Security and Integrity team (PSI), which evolved from one permanent steward liaison for the global introduction of temporary accounts since 2024 to regular feedback on all of their products (Incident Reporting System, Anti-abuse signals including hCaptcha, Account security, etc.) through the liaison, regular calls for feedback, and hundreds of chat messages (see above). In this regard, stewards played a key role in the March 2025 discovery of account compromises and are invited to the PSI retreat early next year because of their onwiki expertise. The collaboration between stewards and WMF teams like PSI has been extremely fruitful for both sides; everyone is eager to continue these good cooperations, including the role of a liaison, which seems to be useful in general. The number of stewards joining these calls is still low compared to the number of stewards, though, but a few more seem to be interested in tech- and governance-related conversations now.
Online activities
[edit]Most standard onwiki activities of Wikimedia stewards are visible on a statistics page: Stewards/statistics. For editcounts of the user group, please also take a look at these statistics with about 120,000 edits and log actions in the reported period, which is 30% lower than last year. However, there is still an increase in pageviews for the Steward requests pages (2025: 2.1 million versus 2024: 1.8 million) that can record that the overall workload at the front line is also growing. Furthermore, many actions are not publicly logged because of the nature of these actions or take place in one of the 1000+ local wikis where they cannot be counted up.
Beyond these activities, Wikimedia Stewards helped out as scrutineers for several elections, including the 2025 Wikimedia Foundation elections, the 2025 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee, and others, as well as observers for various WMF committees. Besides that, we completed annual activities like the admin activity review/2024 for administrators on small wikis and helped out with other global activities, like CentralNotice. For the latter, new trainings for requesters (slides, video) and administrators (slides) after the usage guidelines had been updated in November 2024.
Wikimedia Stewards worked on several tools, scripts, gadgets, and MediaWiki code that support their activities (see Phabricator board). However, stewards also had to get familiar with new technical developments like project-wide two-factor authentication and temporary accounts, which changed our workflows and shared their experiences with wikis, where they were introduced later. Thanks to the closer collaboration with WMF, such transitions seem to have run pretty smoothly.
Offline activities
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For the first time in ten years, stewards met at a conference only dedicated to their topics, in Amsterdam in February 2025. Thanks to the coordination of the Wikimedia Foundation, which also sent a handful of contacts, eight stewards could attend in person, and one steward joined virtually for most of the conference. Due to the sensitivity of the stewards’ work, the agenda couldn't be made public. Discussions touched on topics like governance, processes, and the future of the group, as well as technical wishes and feedback for tools like the incident reporting system together with the U4C, which resulted in needed changes to the tool. It has been fruitful to have the U4C members at the same place because our established group could give some guidance to the newly founded group at their first-ever meeting, which took place in parallel. Furthermore, both groups could define the boundaries of their respective work.
As usual, stewards once again met at Wikimania for internal meetings and exchanges with other groups, in particular functionaries (hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation). A couple of stewards attended the first-ever Users with Extended Rights Convening, where they shared their global experiences, for example, at the roundtable discussions and a workshop for small wikis, which are historically supported by stewards. That convening has also been the place of the first of at least three meetings with the PSI team of the Wikimedia Foundation, where strong relationships were built that furthered the onwiki conversations in the chat. Furthermore, the group happily received that for the second year in a row, one of the members of the WMSUG was awarded with a Wikimedian of the Year award, this year a new steward and WMSUG member as Functionary of the Year.
Addditionally, one member of the group was selected to represent the WMSUG at the upcoming Wikimedia Futures Lab conference in January/February 2026, and a couple of members will attend the retreat of the PSI team in mid-January. Stewards attended regional and local conferences like German WikiCon and WikiCon North America and shared their experiences there as well. It remains valid that an attendance of stewards at international events can enrich technical and global conversations.
Publications
[edit]There haven't been any specific publications on stewards activities only in the past year. The new training materials for CentralNotice have been mentioned above; that tool was also introduced in two presentations at Wikimania 2025. Beyond that, stewards have given feedback on multiple presentations, especially about temporary accounts.
Evaluation of the group status
[edit]While the amount of steward-related activities remains high and the number of stewards and activities of stewards clerks pretty low, the increased conversations with the Wikimedia Foundation and other functionary groups at the Stewards Conference, the Users with Extended Rights Convening, and beyond have still moved the group forward. In particular, the close collaboration with the Product Security and Integrity team at the Wikimedia Foundation has helped to design better products for the global community without going through huge pushbacks from the communities. We hope that this new teamwork will continue in the same good way with new challenges like anti-abuse signals, account security, the incident reporting system, and others, ahead and look forward to the retreat with the PSI team.
This collaboration is more important than ever, with new technical challenges (and solutions) on the horizon and with the number of tasks and conversations for our group rapidly growing. There is still a huge need for new stewards, especially from underrepresented regions, for the daily work and more perspectives on technical aspects. For that reason, access to limited functionary work like adminship that are the first steps for becoming a steward should be simplified further. Stewards are happy to help with guidance and their experiences in global governance from their global perspective and are closely watching new models like the temporary admins on Ukrainian Wikipedia or the extended role of patrollers on Portuguese Wikipedia. However, with the establishment of the U4C, the stewards’ role continues to be more technical than ever before, so it is expectable that the steward role will attract mainly people interested in these activities.
Altogether, 2025 has been a good step forward for the stewards and global community governance. For 2026, we hope that the role of stewards can emerge even further and that we can continue serving the global community in the best possible way.