Wikimedia Futures Lab/Dashboard/Notes/Day 2 crowdsourced notes

These are crowdsourced notes from Day 2 of the futures lab. These have been copied across from the Etherpad as is - no checks for accuracy have been made and some notes may be inaccurate.

2026 Wikimedia Futures Lab Day 2- Jan 31, 2026 Day 1 - https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Futures_Lab_day_1

Opening

Introduction

Talk to each others by pair. "What inspired you to get involved" and "How do you see that changing?"

Stand up by age (50+, 40-49, etc.). Is there different answer by demographics? Example from a few of the youngest persons. There is definitely a change, not the same issue, not the same ressources.

Dariusz Jemelniak: https://spectrum.ieee.org/wikipedia-at-25

How might we respond to the changes? Today is about thinking, some lightning talks and then workshops.

The data bar is now taking reservation to do some deep dive into the data.

Wikimedia Lightning Talk: Knowledge Contribution

Kadheem Khan, staff data scientist WMF talk about contributors metrics, interresting to visualise as a funnel, people more and more involved : from readers (visibility) to sysop (administration). Taking 2019 (pre-covid) as the baseline. Break down by type, almost all are declining. Account registration sees the most attrition. 40% decrease. Same for newcomer and new editors, down 10%. But a bit of upward between 2024 and 2025, could the trend be reversing? Experienced editors are staying around, stable. Active administrators is going down a bit, and consistenly each years...

Key messages

• readers are the starting point
• funnel is uneven
• mixed signals

Things to think about:

   * who is the population that you are interrested in? keep in mind, they might respond differently
   * how does your community compare the general trend? better/worse? more/less resilient?
   * what factors that you think affect participation? is it interface, moderation, mentorship? something else?

Raja Amelung, director product, WMDE

Wikidata reuse

120 million item, increasingly used! A lot of API, request and query. +25% growth in general.

some examples of reuse: KDE itinerary, Scribe (texting assistant), etc.

Goals:

   * improve access
   * support the mission-aligned reuse 
   * advocate for attribution and contribution
   * advocate for more diversity
   * wikidata being the go-to spot for data
   

Think about:

   - target groupes for data resue?
   - what are the use case?
   - how can we motivate to attribute
   - how can we resure foster contributions?
   - how to improve diversity?
   

Knowledge Contributors: Panel Discussion + Audience Q&A Benjamin Mako Hill, social scientist and technologist at the University of Washington and long-time Wikimedian Talking about dynamics. Like higher rejection of new draft, impacting user retention. There is unique challenge regarding to managing editor. Unlike social media, where you can't collaborate (just commenting), Wikimedia project do collaborate. And they do it lasting in time, maintaining articles for the future. Related to vandalism/highjack that need to be checked. Vandalism is a side effect of success; no one vandalized Wikipedia in the beggning, no one cared back then. Now huge part of time and money are sometimes used for highjack Wikipedia. Take away: unlike other part of the internet, we need to maintain what we already build. Some of the goals are actually intention.

Nathan Matias, assistant professor at the Cornell University Departments of Communication and Information Science

Daniel Sigge, Programs Manager at TikTok and German Wikipedia community member

Sofia Ongele, developer, content creator and Director of Strategy at Gen-Z for Change

• • Breakout Sessions 1 **

Small group discussions on contribution insights and implications for Wikimedia. How are these contributor shifts showing up in your region, project, or local context? What might the implications of these shifts be for the Wikimedia projects and Wikimedia movement?

Lunch

Shifts in Information Sharing: The Future of the Open: Keynote presentation Sarah Pearson, General Counsel at Creative Commons

"A writer who lawyers" I have a healthy skepticism because of laws and general conditions. Eventually, I left the open movement and went to privacy. It was the missing piece for me. Tensions around boundaries between sharing and protecting. There is a disequilibirum / broken relation between share and privacy. We loose the instinct to share. IA is not changing that, it's not new, it's the continuation of older trend. See old presentation 'open is dangerous' (2018 ?). It's not wrong to say that open is vulnerable, open to abuse. We need to find a new way. Changing our mental models, rethinking some of our assumptions about what "open" is and means. - the old taxonomies no longer apply (distinction between open content and open data is not relevant anymore, everything is data now ; same for copyright and public domain) - copyright is not the main event (open is not just opposite of copyright any more, copyright is still an issue but copyright weakness is the main problem now) - we have to stop confusing property with morality (important principles - like you can't own facts and ideas - are not an ethical line, being free doesn't mean that no rules apply) - boundaries benefit us all (they have social values on their own) - open should not be a purity test (it's important but we shouldn't focus on that, that's the wrong lens right now, we should focus on values) Open has always been conditional and a spectrum (not just one way to share). We are stepping in gray areas... Less certainty.

Back to where we began: instinct to share for a collective benefits.

Dimension of prosocial boundaries.

It's imperfect but we can leverage copyright. We can also control access, danger as our role is to share. But if AI tech are not listening, we may need to make them listen.

"We need to give the voice of the cynical skeptical grouch that patrols the borders of our imagination a reste" Ruha Benjamin

Questions :

   - Mathias: I'm used to spicy thoughts ;) After year I switched to CC0. At the end of the presentation, I felt a contradiction ("let's leverage copyright again"). Wouldn't it be more honest to abandon this copyright debate?
   IT's a question of strategy. What are the tool we can leverage? from moral perspective, I see where you coming from. At the same time, I oversimplified a bit, copyright still has a role to play, just not the same relevance and practicality.

- Riske: you mentioned the possibilities of harmful use. We could use some example? I can tink or images of minors. yes, also for military uses. protection against big tech. - ferdi: xxxxx should we redefine content? yes. it's broader that just copyright. it should be rethought. - valentin: most wikimedians are concerns about the state of the world. but what about a more ground approach? for instance national laws changing I'm not really aware of specific laws. - ahmad: legislation in some countries (like developing countries ?) is weaker, for example in Malaysia the laws is not really developed moving forward. How to attract attention to it? it makes me thinks to the origin of Creative Commons (and Lessing idea), this is how I'm approaching things right now. We don't have the luxury to wait...

• • Breakout Sessions 2 **

Hypothesis Workshop: Small group sessions to generate potential responses to contribution trends How could the Wikimedia movement respond to the contribution shifts we’ve been exploring today?

Hypothesis Exchange + Heatmap Full group exercise to review hypotheses and identify where to focus energy + attention on Day 3 Which of our hypotheses do you feel most energized to focus on during Day 3? Where should we focus our experimentation?