• From the team: Tools, tech, and Wikimania
• Argentina report: New digitization partner
• Bangladesh report: International Museum Day Edit-a-thon and Workshop held in Dinajpur, Bangladesh
• Belgium report: Postal Mission on Wikimedia
• Brazil report: Empowering Institutions through Wikisource Education and GLAM Capacity Building
• Czech Republic report: Bridging the gap between labs and Wikipedia: continuing cooperation with FZU
• Egypt report: From Museum Celebrations to Archival Documentation
• Finland report: Northern Wikimedist meetup in Oulu
• France report: #1lib1ref Recap and International Archives Week
• Italy report: Heritage and Community Action
• Mexico report: Open GLAM in Puebla
• Netherlands report: Interview with Olaf Janssen, Wikimedia coordinator of the KB, National library of the Netherlands
• New Zealand report: BAU at Auckland Museum, Otago Uni Library Life and the NZBSI WiR is complete
• North Macedonia report: Collaboration with the Botanical garden at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in Skopje
• Poland report: Poland Report: New Partnerships, Conferences, and Wikimedians in Residence
• Serbia report: Opening the Doors of Serbian Heritage: Wikimedia Serbia’s Recent GLAM and Wikidata Successes
• Spain report: GLAM Labs Futures 2026
• Sweden report: Finnish-Swedish cooperation
• Switzerland report: Exhibition, International Archives Week Panel
• UK report: Ninth Good Article from Khalili partnership
• USA report: Philadelphia WikiSalon
• Biodiversity Heritage Library report: Updates on work by BHLWiki Working Group members
• AvoinGLAM report: Is the sauna still hot?
• Memory of the World report: New articles
• Calendar: July’s GLAM events

Article Guidance, the project that kept me busy the last few months, is available as an experiment on a few pilot Wikipedias. The goal is to help the less experienced Wikipedia editors in the creation of Wikipedia articles. You can use the feature in a real environment by starting a new article on Simple English Wikipedia.

Creating a new Wikipedia article is a rewarding activity, and while this is a common motivation for newcomers to join Wikipedia, most of those articles are finally deleted by the community (62% on desktop and 75% on mobile, based on last year’s deletion data). This generates frustration for newcomers, and additional work for reviewers.

For the design of Article Guidance, we wanted to follow the principle of “learning by doing”. Helping junior editors to learn with a hands-on experience that is specific to the article they want to create. The following video shows how the feature works:

These are the key ideas in this approach:

• Understand the user intent. By knowing which type of article the user is trying to create, more specific guidance can be provided. Guidance that is specific (for an actor, city, or dinosaur) is easier to apply than generic documentation. Communities can provide guidance for specific types of articles reaching the level of granularity they find useful. For example, a community can provide guidance for both “Museums” and “Art museums”, and depending on the specific type of museum the user is creating an article about, the more specific guidelines will be used. All this is supported by the concept onthology of Wikidata.
• Reflect community practices. All the information, restrictions, and contents used on each type of article are captured in community-editable outlines. The outlines are regular wiki pages with additional mark-up to make the guidelines to be integrated with the content creation tools (not just documentation). For example, Simple English Wikipedia has over 30 outlines defined with guidance for different types of articles.
• Notability restrictions. Not all subjects are relevant enough to have a Wikipedia article. As we try to facilitate the process of creating an article, we also want to identify those articles that do not belong to Wikipedia as early as possible (helping users to learn why, and prevent additional work and frustration). Article Guidance provides mechanisms for communities to add restrictions affecting only the cases where there is a higher risk of notability issues. These act as an initial check based on whether the subject exists in other projects (on Wikidata or other Wikipedia languages), the editor experience (restrictions can apply to all or only junior editors), and whether providing references upfront is mandatory for the type of article. For example, a community where biographies of politicians are often problematic can decide to limit the creation to the less experienced editors when they try to create an article of a politician that is not already documented on other Wikipedias.
• Encourage providing references upfront. Collecting references before starting to write the article is a good practice that the Article Guidance Workflow encourages. Using it as an opportunity to explain the concept of verifiability. In addition, communities can indicate common recommended and discouraged sources for a given type of article. This can help to educate users about common sources of information that the community finds problematic for a given type of article.
• Key instructions. Before reaching the editor users are presented with a community-defined message. This allows to provide the key considerations for editors to keep in mind when creating an article of a specific type. Unlike the usual documentation, these are intended to be concise tips along the lines of the recommendations an experienced editor would provide to a less experienced one sitting next to them in an editathon event about a specific topic.
• Show how (and which aspects) to write about the subject. Outlines also capture the initial contents that can help a newcomer to write about a given type of article. This is intended to illustrate by example both the key aspects that are relevant to cover about the subject and the writing style. This provides another opportunity to set the expectation for references being needed to back-up the different claims.

These ideas emerged as response to the needs identified as part of research studies and conversations with Wikipedia editors.

Next steps

The previous workflow is mainly focused on the steps that lead the user to start editing the article. However, it does not provide additional guidance while the user is actually editing the article. This is an aspect that has been explored in parallel, and after a research study identified the ideas as promising, these will inform the next steps in the project.

This vides shows a prototype illustrating some of these ideas:

The support for guidance while editing explores a more iterative approach for adding usual contents (common paragraphs and sections). Supporting users to quickly fill the gaps while still supporting editing freedom (being able to edit any piece of content as usual).

Facilitating the discovery and reuse of existing contents that can be relevant for the subject such as data (with references) from Wikidata, and references from other projects can be helpful to find those resources and encourage their use.

In addition, we wanted to makes sure that the ideas proposed to support the addition of new contents were aligned with the existing infrastructure for checking existing contents.

More details

The ideas of this project have some parallelisms with the design of Content Translation, one of the first projects I worked on with the Language team over a decade ago. Both try to simplify a big rewardign task such as article creation by reusing previous community efforts, and automating the boring steps. Content Translation has been used to create over two million articles, and Article Guidance will show if it is possible to make article creation more accessible when translation is not possible.

While the experiment is still running, the initial results are encouraging, and the team will continue to learn from both data and community input.

The video below shows an early presentation of the project with more details:

The Dagbani Wikipedians User Group, together with the Mabia language communities, participated in the 2026 AfroCuration article writing contest organized by the Global Open Initiative Foundation (GOIF). This marked the second consecutive year that the user group has taken part in the initiative, reaffirming its commitment to expanding free knowledge in Ghanaian indigenous languages through Wikimedia projects. AfroCuration 2026 was held under the theme “Advancing African Culture Through Traditional Ghanaian Music, Symbols, and Digital Language Innovations.” The program combined weeks of online collaboration with a two-day conference that brought together Wikimedia volunteers, language advocates, academics, students, and researchers to explore the role of indigenous languages in preserving African cultural heritage in the digital age.

Preparatory activities

Preparations for the contest began several weeks before the official launch. GOIF organized an orientation meeting with representatives of the participating language communities to provide an overview of the program, outline expectations, and coordinate activities across the different language groups. As the Dagbani Co-Lead, I represented the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group at the meeting alongside the leads of the Dagaare, Kusaal, Gurene, and Moore language communities. The meeting provided an opportunity for community leaders to discuss implementation strategies and strengthen collaboration ahead of the contest. Following the orientation, GOIF organized a series of online training sessions for participating communities. These sessions introduced both experienced editors and newcomers to Wikipedia editing practices, article translation, referencing, and quality improvement. Within the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, I facilitated the community training, guiding participants through the editing process and helping new contributors understand Wikipedia’s content policies and editing standards. These sessions also created an opportunity for experienced editors to mentor newcomers before the editing campaign commenced.

Article translation campaign

Interested participants registered for the contest and were each assigned two articles to translate into their respective language Wikipedias. This year’s campaign focused on documenting indigenous Ghanaian music, traditional musical instruments, cultural symbols, and notable musicians, contributing to the broader effort of preserving Ghana’s cultural heritage in local languages. Between 25 April and 25 May 2026, members of the participating language communities created and substantially improved articles across several Ghanaian languages.

The contributions included:

Dagbani: 43 articles, Gurene: 22 articles, Moore: 12 articles, Kusaal: 9 articles Dagaare: 6 articles. Collectively, the communities created and improved 92 articles. Beyond translation, contributors enhanced article quality by adding references, internal links, infoboxes, additional sections, and structured content to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards. The campaign demonstrated how collaborative editing can significantly increase the availability of culturally relevant knowledge in underrepresented African languages.

AfroCuration 2026 conference

The final phase of AfroCuration 2026 took place from 26–27 July 2026, bringing together participants from Wikimedia language communities, including Dagbani, Dagaare, Gurene, Kusaal, Moore, Ewe, and Twi. The conference served as a platform for discussions on language preservation, digital innovation, artificial intelligence, and collaborative knowledge creation.

Day One

The opening day featured welcome remarks by Miss Harriet Bayel, Executive Director of the Global Open Initiative Foundation, followed by a keynote address delivered by Professor Charles Ofosu Marfo, Provost of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). A panel discussion explored the conference theme, bringing together distinguished scholars including Dr. Faleka Victoria Ogunnike (Department of Languages and Communication Sciences), Professor Kofi Agyekum (Department of Linguistics, University of Ghana), and Professor Akwasi Adomako, vice dean of the Faculty of Ghanaian Languages Education at the University of Education, Winneba. The discussions examined how traditional Ghanaian music, indigenous symbols, and digital technologies can work together to strengthen African languages and cultural preservation. Participants also attended a presentation on Artificial Intelligence and Ghanaian Languages: Building Digital Futures in Our Mother Tongues, highlighting emerging opportunities for AI to support language documentation and digital inclusion. Additional activities included a program overview, interactive trivia sessions reflecting on the panel discussions, and a presentation on the history of Highlife music in Ghana by Mr. Eugene.

Day Two

The second day opened with a cultural performance and educational session by Nana Osei Korankyi, who demonstrated the cultural significance of the traditional Seperewa musical instrument. One of the highlights of the day was a panel discussion featuring representatives of the participating language communities. I had the opportunity to represent the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, sharing our community’s experiences in organizing Wikimedia activities, training new editors, and expanding Dagbani-language content on Wikimedia projects. The discussion was moderated by Fuseini Mohammed Kamaldeen. Participants also attended a practical session on contributing to Wikipedia facilitated by Dnshitobu, which introduced new participants to the Wikimedia editing ecosystem. By the conclusion of the event, 37 new Wikipedia user accounts had been created, reflecting continued interest in contributing to free knowledge in Ghanaian languages. The conference concluded with networking sessions, community interactions, and group photographs, providing participants with opportunities to strengthen existing partnerships and build new collaborations across language communities.

Strengthening indigenous language communities

AfroCuration 2026 demonstrated the growing capacity of Ghanaian Wikimedia communities to collaborate across languages while documenting and preserving cultural knowledge. For the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group and the wider Mabia language communities, the program extended beyond article creation. It strengthened editor capacity, encouraged cross-community collaboration, introduced new volunteers to Wikimedia projects, and expanded freely accessible knowledge on indigenous Ghanaian music and culture. As indigenous languages continue to face challenges in the digital space, initiatives such as AfroCuration provide practical opportunities for volunteers, researchers, and language advocates to work together toward a shared goal: ensuring that African languages are not only preserved but also continue to thrive online. The Dagbani Wikimedians User Group remains committed to supporting contributors, expanding high-quality Dagbani-language content, and collaborating with other Ghanaian language communities to improve the representation of local knowledge across Wikimedia projects.

At the ESEAP Conference 2026, the EduWiki Hub hosted the session “Strengthening EduWiki Participation in ESEAP: Pathways for Collaboration, Support, and Growth”, attended by more than 20 educators, Wikimedians, and community organizers to explore how we can better connect, support, and amplify Wikimedia in education efforts.

A Region Full of Potential

One of the key reflections from the session was clear: ESEAP communities are already doing meaningful and impactful work in education. From university-based initiatives such as the CBSUA Wiki Club in the Philippines and the University Wiki Club at St. Aloysius in India, to student engagement programs, language preservation efforts, and broader community initiatives, the region holds a wealth of experience and innovation.

However, much of this work remains locally visible, shared within countries or communities, but not always documented or showcased globally. This creates a gap, not in impact, but in visibility and connection.

Creating Pathways for Visibility and Exchange

At the conference, the EduWiki Hub was introduced as a space designed to bridge this gap, not by replacing existing efforts, but by connecting them. We highlighted opportunities such as the EduWiki Newsletter, Knowledge Showcases, workshops, and mentorship programs as pathways for communities to share their work internationally and learn from others.

Participants showed strong interest in contributing to global platforms, especially when it builds on work they are already doing locally. The idea of bringing regional knowledge into a shared, global space resonated strongly, opening the door for future collaboration and cross-regional learning.

Tools That Support Learning and Teaching

A key part of the discussion focused on the EduWiki Dashboard and its training modules. While some participants were already using the modules and found them valuable, others discovered them during the session and expressed interest in integrating them into their programs.

These modules were presented as a practical solution to support students and new contributors, especially in contexts where educators have limited time for direct training. By allowing learners to explore materials independently, the dashboard can strengthen both learning outcomes and program sustainability.

Addressing Language and Accessibility

Language accessibility emerged as an important theme. Many participants highlighted that English is not widely accessible across the region, which can limit participation in global initiatives.

In response, we shared that EduWiki Hub workshops and Knowledge Showcases are supported through interpretation in several ESEAP languages, including Chinese and Indonesian. This was met with strong appreciation and reinforced the importance of continuing to prioritize multilingual access as a core part of engagement in the region.

From Conversation to Collaboration

Beyond the presentation, the session created space for open discussion allowing participants to share their challenges, needs, and ideas. Conversations touched on topics such as student motivation, time constraints in educational settings, and the importance of adapting approaches to local contexts.

Most importantly, the session led to new connections with communities that are either starting or strengthening their education programs. These exchanges opened opportunities for future collaboration, from showcasing local initiatives globally to providing targeted support for emerging affiliates.

Looking Ahead

The ESEAP Conference reaffirmed that the region is not lacking in innovation or commitment; it is full of strong, growing education communities. What is needed is a stronger connection, visibility, and shared learning.

Through our presence and session, the EduWiki Hub took an important step toward building these bridges. We are continuing these conversations, supporting communities in sharing their work internationally, and learning from the experiences already shaping Wikimedia education across ESEAP.

Together, we move closer to a more connected, inclusive, and collaborative future for open knowledge in education.

The hype around LLMs does not escape the Wikimedia movement. Not only because we are obviously feeling the effects of its presence in multiple ways (server loads, changed behavior, and lost readership). Many Wikimedians also either feel an urge or a pressure to use such tools themselves. There are plenty of conversations about how to use them going on in our movement. From policy discussions onwiki, sessions at our hackathon, and chat groups running with it. I have a lot of feelings about this, but I also haven’t really formed my thoughts fully yet. Apologies in advance for some threads being left hanging unanswered. However, I feel that I need to publish something before Wikimania as there are so many sessions around it and side events happening, and here is why.

Recently, I went to the AI-Bridges symposium, and in a Wikimedia-focused side event, I was relieved to hear that there were more people than me feeling that the issue is sided with many different problems. There was one quote during the day that resonated strongly with me (I cannot share who said it due to the meeting being under Chatham House rules). The essence of it: “What would principles for LLMs have looked like if the Wikimedia movement had come up with them before the current hype?” And that is where I want to focus this blog post. If nothing else, I hope it will serve as one perspective to bring into some of the 22 Wikimania sessions in the AI track so that we are not getting swept away by the current hype flood.

Free Libre and Open Source

The values of the free and open source software movement are deeply ingrained in the Wikimedia movement. And to me, it has been clearer and clearer about why it should be. Perhaps the best writing I read about this, and that is also related to AI, is the essay Software Freedom as Civic Care by Audrey Tang. I highly recommend reading it. Free Libre and Open Source may seem like an obvious requirement for LLMs as everything we want to deploy on our servers must be open source, LLMs or not, but there are some nuances to consider. First, the open source community already recognized that just slapping a license on a model isn’t the same as publishing source code with it. Partly, because it isn’t really the source. So the Open Source AI definition was developed, but this still only requires a description of what kind of training data has been used, not explicitly providing it. If, on the other hand, the training data was explicitly referenced and made accessible, it would be possible to tweak it for improvements and analyze for biases. Having all training data under a free license or in the public domain would not only enable providing this open access, it would also align with our values and how we publish our content for reuse.

Now I am not an LLM developer myself and only have limited knowledge of how they are built. So if there are other things that are essential (how evals are done?, the weights themselves?, the framework they run on?) to the LLM, these should also be published so that they can be used, studied, improved, and distributed at will.

Having all this would be a good start, but I don’t think it is enough.

Ethics

Even though it, at least for now, seems to be legal in the USA to train on fully copyrighted material, I think it is passing some clear lines and that we should stick to more explicit allowances. Training on only free content is at least more ethical than also harvesting everything published under full copyright, but it is likely that many people using free licenses didn’t foresee their content being used in this way. Predicting the future is challenging, but at least this content was published for general reuse. For more recent content, we should make sure that for whatever opt-out technologies and signals there are, these should have been respected when collecting the training data.

In a recent session by the Open Knowledge Foundation, Prof. Adriana Baravalle (Universidad Austral, Buenos Aires) described five principles for responsible design. I liked them quite a lot. The first one was around traceability of the training data; the four others were about ethics and perhaps honesty. Not all can be easily “solved”, but I think they are all worth thinking about for our movement as well. Perhaps one we already are familiar with is the variance of resources in different languages. It’s not easy to level this playing field, but we are aware of it, and several in our movement are also working on this. Similarly, the issue about access to the tools in places with poor infrastructure is known, and we should keep bearing that in mind. The part she calls ecological honesty could perhaps have been under transparency below, but I think it fits as an ethical issue as it is a process issue and not about the content or results. My view is that we should only use LLMs whose developers make a proper effort to report on what ecological impact the creation of the LLM had. And we should also be role models in reporting on what resources we use to run them or require that data to be public too. The principle of hers that I find novel and might require some innovation is that a tool should have a “pedagogy of uncertainty”. By that she means that they should communicate what they don’t know and not offer false confidence. Perhaps this is impossible given current technology, but as a Wikimedian, I would certainly like tools to offer that.

Transparency

Most of the transparency would be taken care of by being more open about the training data and the code. However, I think it may be worth repeating that this would not only be from an ideological viewpoint; it would also give a clue of what levels of trust can be had with a given model. At the same time, this verifiable provenance chain would also be very Wikipedian.

On Meta, we already have a good practice of describing machine learning models with model cards. The template for this could be expanded with everything mentioned above, and every model we use should then, of course, be described using a model card.

Joy

While there are almost countless discussions on projects on how we can use LLMs they are often centered on the usefulness of the output, and sometimes the legal issues are discussed. But I also want to highlight a point Christophe Henner made in an email thread on Wikimedia-l earlier this year:

“Human running the loop is our number one value. Wikimedia projects are great, but we have also successfully created something bigger: communities that across topics, languages, and geographies share a vision on what quality is. Even with the differences across projects, this is our biggest achievement. No AI system can replicate community-validated knowledge with editorial accountability. That’s our moat. Not the content itself, but the human process behind it.”

Combining that with what Alex Stinson wrote in the Signpost in June:

“Volunteering is a privilege of free time; volunteering on information dense content in a world of information overload is a rare personal choice; and if the assumed pathway to contribution is the same labor being outsourced to AI models in most other parts of our lives – we are narrowing the funnel not growing it.”

Both of these rhyme really well with this quote from 2024:

“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.” — Joanna Maciejewska

So the point I want to make is that when we use LLMs we shouldn’t turn into reverse centaurs as Cory Doctorow would put it. We should instead make sure that anything we innovate brings us humans that constitute the Wikimedia movement more joy and a stronger sense of community rather than more chores and not forget the process that we have created.

Where do we go from here?

This was mostly a post to describe how our tools could look if we designed them from (our) first principles. I am sure I have missed some important aspects. Yet, obviously we aren’t there. I don’t know of any existing LLM that would meet all these criteria. I am acutely aware that existing “frontier models” are lightyears away from meeting these and that there additionally are plenty of other issues with them and perhaps in particular the companies behind them, but others have written about those topics better than I ever could (for example, Amnesty and Greenpeace). There is also a difference between the tools we deploy on our servers and the tools that people run locally (although I have views on that too). I still hope I have given some food for thought for our upcoming discussions. This is not the last of it, certainly not even my own last thoughts or words on the matter.

The grammar and spelling were checked with the open source Language tool. No other tools have been used for generating text or “bouncing ideas”.

In the final quarter of this financial year, we added 5 new collections to the Library and launched a course developed by leading experts in academic publishing and open knowledge. 

New collections from India and the United Kingdom

Last month, we added our first British newspaper to The Wikipedia Library! Annual subscriptions to The Telegraph are now available to up to 400 eligible editors (apply here). The Telegraph is a conservative broadsheet that is considered to be a newspaper of record in the UK and a reliable source for English Wikipedia.

We have also partnered with The Tribune, a daily newspaper in India. Eligible editors can apply for access to The Tribune English, Punjabi Tribune, and Dainik Tribune. Thanks to Tamanpreet Kaur from the Punjabi Wikimedia community for helping us secure this partnership!

The Wikipedia Library was also supported by Medhavi Gandhi, who introduced us to Marg, one of India’s oldest and most respected art book publishers. Eligible editors can now apply for access to the archive and current editions of the quarterly Marg Magazine.

Library Bundle access was renewed for both NewspaperArchive (a database of digitized newspapers) and Edward Elgar (an academic publisher focused on law and business). L’Informé, a French economic investigation website, will continue to be available to eligible editors who apply for access.

If, like Medhavi and Tamanpreet, you can connect us with a publisher of a reliable source that is not yet available to Wikipedia editors, please contact wikipedialibrary@wikimedia.org

Extending the reach of scholarly work through Wikipedia citations

A course developed with leading experts in academic publishing and open knowledge is now open for enrollment on WikiLearn, the Wikimedia Foundation’s free online learning platform: Wikipedia for Researchers: Building Reliable Knowledge Through Citations. This course equips early-career researchers with the knowledge needed to contribute peer-reviewed citations to Wikipedia responsibly and critically. 

If you work with early-career researchers, teach at an academic institution, or support open knowledge communities, please share this introduction to the course with your network!

In our last update, we mentioned that we had surveyed all eligible editors who had previously logged into The Wikipedia Library. The full results of the survey are now on Meta.

Wikimedia Spain took part in GLAM Labs Futures 2026, an international event held on 25 and 26 June at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, which brought together professionals and researchers from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) to discuss the future of innovation labs in the field of digital heritage.

Representing Wikimedia Spain were Gustavo Candela, who was part of the organising team for the event (University of Alicante and a member of the Wikimedia Spain Board of Directors), and Rubén Ojeda (project manager at Wikimedia Spain), both of whom spoke at various sessions.

The event began with a key question that shaped the course of the sessions: how can GLAM Labs remain relevant and sustainable in a context characterised by artificial intelligence, data infrastructure and resource constraints?

The event took place at a pivotal moment for initiatives of this kind, characterised by advances in artificial intelligence, the consolidation of new data infrastructures and the need to rethink the sustainability of digital cultural projects.

A programme featuring leading international voices

The programme brought together some of the leading international voices in the fields of GLAM Labs, digital research and open knowledge infrastructures, cementing the event’s status as a key forum in this field.

The keynote sessions were led by Melissa Terras (University of Edinburgh) and Tim Sherratt (historian and hacker), two key figures in the field of digital humanities, cultural data and experimentation with digital collections.

Alongside them, the event was attended by leading international figures such as Abigail Potter (Library of Congress, USA), Alba Irollo (Europeana), Katrine Hofmann (Royal Library of Denmark), Mahendra Mahey (University of Tallinn), Olga Holownia (Internet Preservation Consortium) and Sally Chambers (DARIAH-EU and the British Library), amongst others, who offered different perspectives on the development of cultural laboratories in Europe and the Americas.

Digital Heritage Laboratories in Transition

Over the course of the two days, the debate highlighted that GLAM Labs are currently undergoing a process of redefinition. These spaces, which in many cases began as experimental initiatives, have established themselves as hubs linking research, technology and cultural heritage, but now face the challenge of ensuring their long-term sustainability.

Sustainability was one of the central themes of the programme. The discussions addressed the need to explore new organisational models, funding strategies and ways of integrating the laboratories into the permanent structures of cultural institutions, there by avoiding their dependence on temporary projects.

Data, artificial intelligence and cultural infrastructure

Another key focus of the event was the impact of data infrastructures and artificial intelligence on the cultural heritage sector.

The sessions examined how open science initiatives, European cultural heritage data hubs and technological platforms are transforming the way in which digital collections are described, linked and reused. In this context, GLAM Labs are emerging as key spaces for experimenting with these technologies and translating them into practices that are accessible to cultural institutions.

Open science, participation and the commons of knowledge

The programme also addressed the relationship between digital heritage, citizen science and the knowledge commons. Discussions centred on the importance of encouraging public participation in cultural projects, promoting open access to knowledge and strengthening communities around cultural data.

These reflections reinforce the role of GLAM Labs as infrastructures that can contribute to more open, collaborative and sustainable models of knowledge production and reuse.

Learning from mistakes in innovation processes

Among the sessions was “Learning from failure: When Labs go wrong”, which focused on projects that failed to achieve the expected results despite their technical or conceptual soundness.

The session highlighted the value of learning from mistakes as a fundamental part of institutional innovation processes, particularly in contexts where experimentation forms part of the projects’ very design.

Wikimedia Spain’s involvement

Wikimedia Spain took part in a session dedicated to rethinking the concept of the GLAM Lab, its limitations and its opportunities in the current context.

The debate centred on a key question: when a cultural institution shares its data on Wikidata, is it returning knowledge to the public or helping to fuel new technological infrastructures based on artificial intelligence?

This reflection helped to open up a conversation about the role of free knowledge platforms within the GLAM ecosystem and the importance of ensuring that open data translates into access, re-use and the social return of knowledge.

An ecosystem undergoing redefinition

GLAM Labs Futures 2026 showcased a well-established international community currently undergoing a period of strategic review. Digital heritage labs are no longer seen merely as spaces for technical experimentation, but as cultural infrastructures with organisational, social and political implications.

The challenge arising in this context is not only technological, but also institutional: how to sustain these spaces, how to integrate hem securely into cultural structures, and how to ensure their long-term impact.

At Wikimedia Spain, we particularly value participation in this type of international gathering, which enables us to continue strengthening dialogue between communities, institutions and open projects centred on free knowledge and digital heritage.

Last month, we had the opportunity to speak with Vic Sfriso (1989, Buenos Aires, they/them). Vic, who lives in Buenos Aires, is the Director of Programmes and Community Engagement for the user group Wikimedia LGBT+, a Co-coordinator of the Wikimedia Volunteer Supporters Network, and leads the Community and Advocacy Program at Wikimedia Argentina. They are also an author and researcher who focuses on LGBT+ experiences and sexual and reproductive rights.

Our conversation with Vic was part of a series of interviews with gender organizers for the project Wiki and GLAM: Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality. These interviews shed light on the collaborative efforts to promote gender equity within Wikimedia through partnerships with GLAM institutions. While each context has its own particularities – we discussed projects in Portugal, Spain, the United States, and India –, all our previous conversations focused on the history and memory of cisgender women. Speaking with Vic provided an opportunity to broaden this perspective by learning from the experiences of queer and trans communities. In this post, we will focus on the specificities of trans history, as it has much to teach us as we seek to understand the dynamics of collective memory and historical preservation within Wikimedia.

We use the words “trans” or “transgender” here to refer to a broad range of gender identities and roles that differ from those typically associated with their assigned sex at birth. Vic reminded us that these experiences are in turn shaped by factors such as race, ethnicity, class, social background, and geographical location of individuals and groups (for example, living in the Global North or the Global South). All of these factors interact with each other as they affect people’s access to institutions and technologies of memory.

Our conversation introduced aspects of collective remembrance mediated by the digital world that are not exclusive, but are particularly salient to trans memory efforts. It brought to the fore one central aspect of Wikimedia and GLAM collaborations dedicated to the memory of gender minorities: the formation of archives. This topic had already emerged in our previous interviews, but from a different perspective. By listening to Vic explain the efforts of trans people and lesbians to gather, research, and communicate their history, we gained valuable insight into how communities navigate the tensions between visibility and erasure that characterize the preservation of collective memory. Previously, we learned that much of the work carried out by gender organizers dedicated to the history of cis women consisted of “digging” through museum storage rooms, archives, and libraries in search of overlooked figures and histories. When we speak about the memory of trans people, however, we must go one step further back, as regular institutional archives are less likely to have records related to these communities. In fact, trans identities were not officially recognized in most places until very recently. In Argentina, for example, the pioneering Gender Identity Law that granted trans people the right to be recognized and treated according to their gender identity, without the need for gender-affirming surgery, was enacted only in 2012.

Challenges and opportunities

Without the consistent support of heritage institutions, trans communities have long recognized the potential of digital archiving, using blogs and social media platforms such as Facebook to call for contributions of documents, images, and testimonies of their own personal experiences and the memories of friends. According to Vic, Wikimedia can be a powerful tool in this process, serving as an ally in the preservation of trans people’s historical memories. There are, however, some challenges. Efforts toward transgender memory preservation tend to rely heavily on oral transmission and user-generated content, usually not considered reliable sources of information for Wikimedia. Although this issue emerged in all of our conversations with gender organizers, it has a particularly significant impact on trans memory work due to the still incipient institutionalization of their archives.

Moreover, online user-generated content tends to be ephemeral. Vic highlighted the fragility of privately maintained online archives, as domain registration costs money, web hosting costs money. Keeping digital resources also requires a significant investment of time and labor, resources that are often scarce among minorities. Therefore, communities that could benefit most from online archiving, those whose collective memories are especially vulnerable, are often the ones least able to sustain a long-term online presence on their own.

The obstacles are not limited to a lack of financial resources or time. Vic raised an important point that often goes unnoticed in discussions of heritage preservation: the emotional labor involved in remembering, revisiting keepsakes, photographs, and memories of friends. This made us think about what Medhavi Gandhi pointed out in our last post, “Medhavi Gandhi: Championing Open Knowledge in India”: we must consider the responsibilities we have, as Wikimedia contributors, when engaging with personal histories.

Yet despite these obstacles, trans communities have created significant examples of digital spaces dedicated to their memory and history. Argentina offers an emblematic example in the Archivo de la Memoria Trans (Trans Memory Archive), envisioned by trans activists María Belén Correa and Claudia Pía Baudracco. What started as a Facebook group dedicated to sharing personal images and stories of trans women in Argentina evolved into a collective dedicated to the preservation and digitization of materials in accordance with archival standards. The Archive has produced a podcast, a radionovela, and founded its own publishing house, dedicated to trans authors and themes. It also has an impressive Wikipedia page, created in 2018. Since there were no GLAM institutions dedicated to trans memory, the Archive became one itself—eventually entering institutions such as Museo Reina Sofia, Tate Modern, and the São Paulo Biennial.

While discussing strategies for documenting queer memory on Wikimedia platforms, Vic introduced us to the Wikipedia article on the Calchaquíes Valley, in northeastern Argentina. Editors added a section about LGBT+ culture in the valley that highlights the Marcha Plurinacional del Orgullo (Plurinational Pride March), a movement that acknowledges queer communities as well as the numerous indigenous peoples and multiple nationalities that inhabit the region. Adding short, but significant information to existing documentation on Wikimedia projects is a strategy that can be adopted by communities that don’t have all the resources, or the desire, to create and maintain large archives (online or offline). Similarly, queer communities might join forces with groups who have already established partnerships with GLAM institutions as a point of entry to future collaborations.   

Lessons learned

• If queer documents are absent from GLAM institutions, begin by documenting recent events.
• Start gathering documents somewhere. Social media can be a valuable tool for building networks and collecting memories, while closed groups may help protect contributors when needed.
• Approach personal histories with care and sensitivity. Remember that sharing memories can involve emotional labor and that exposing queer people’s data can compromise their privacy, safety, and autonomy, especially in contexts where these identities are stigmatized or criminalized.
• Think about a series of small, specific interventions on larger Wikimedia projects. This can relieve the pressure of building and maintaining resources. Adding brief but important information on existing Wikimedia articles is a good strategy, as seen with the LGBT+ section added to the Calchaquíes Valley Wikipedia article.
  

Learn more

This is the fifth blog post in our series for the Wiki and GLAM: Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality project.

• Read about the WELx and the Belém Library partnership in Portugal.
• Read about Wikiesfera and their GLAM projects in Spain.
• Read about the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, and their Wikimedian-in-Residence program. 
• Read about the many initiatives led by Medhavi Gandhi in India.
• Find out about the project Wiki and GLAM : Harnessing Knowledge to Foster Gender Equality.

Join us!

Want to learn more about GLAM partnerships for gender equality? Join our Telegram channel or send an email to wikiglamgender@gmail.com to learn about our next events. 

Wikipedia hosts its images on Wikimedia Commons, a shared media library that serves all language versions of the encyclopedia. But Commons was built around a text-first content system, and the tools for managing images have never been quite as smooth as they could be.

One such tool is CropTool, a Wikimedia Commons gadget that allows contributors to crop and make basic adjustments to images directly in the browser, without needing external editing software. It supports JPEG, PNG, TIFF, SVG, WebP, animated GIF, PDF, and DJVU files, and is used every day by volunteers to improve media within the Wikimedia ecosystem.

The tool itself worked well, but its interface was showing its age. Much of it had remained largely unchanged since its inception in 2013. Last month, longtime tech contributor and WikiPortraits photographer Vera de Kok (User:1Veertje) took it upon herself to carry out a major overhaul and implement several long-requested features.

What has changed

The most visible improvements are in the editing workflow itself:

Mobile-friendly at last

The interface now works on phones and tablets, not just desktop browsers.

Multilingual support

CropTool is being connected to Translatewiki, a platform that pairs open-source projects with volunteer translators. English, Dutch, French, and Spanish are already available, with more languages on the way. Support for right-to-left languages has already been added.

Smarter metadata handling

Before uploading a crop, you can review inherited categories and depicts statements, deselecting anything that no longer applies. For example, if a person has been cropped out of the frame, their depicts statement can be removed before upload.

Fine-grained image controls

Angle, contrast, saturation, and brightness now have dedicated sliders, each with an “auto” button for quick corrections. Numeric input fields for users who prefer precise adjustments remain available alongside this new feature.

Rotation made simple

Rotating a photo by 90 degrees was already possible, but the option was buried within the interface.

Automatic border detection

Border detection has long been part of CropTool, but it is now available through a dedicated button rather than remaining hidden in a simple hyperlink.

Precise straightening

Slightly tilted horizons and other alignment issues can be corrected with exact adjustments.

Better feedback

System messages have been redesigned for better visibility. After a successful upload, CropTool now offers convenient buttons to copy the new filename or file URL to the clipboard, similar to the experience provided by UploadWizard.

A comparison button allows users to temporarily view an image without any contrast, saturation, or brightness adjustments applied, making it easier to compare edits against the original.

Wikimedia touches 

The interface now uses Wikimedia’s Codex icon set, replacing the previous Font Awesome icons. A new CropTool logo has been introduced to match. The color palette and spacing have also been brought in line with the Codex design system.

Who uses CropTool

CropTool allows contributors to crop and improve media entirely within their browser, with no need to download, edit, and re-upload files to Wikimedia Commons, the largest free image repository in the world. Its lossless crop mode preserves image quality, OAuth authorization keeps Wikimedia accounts secure, and the metadata review tools help ensure that structured data on Commons remains accurate after a crop.

Try it

You can use CropTool right now by enabling the gadget and selecting the crop option from the menu next to any image on Wikimedia Commons.

CropTool runs on Wikimedia Toolforge, and its source code is available on GitHub under the MIT license.

Thanks

This project was financed by WikiPortraits, a global photography initiative delivering high-quality, freely licensed portraits for use by Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and the wider world.

It’s powered by a network of volunteer photographers and supported by partners including the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Switzerland, AfroCROWD, Wikimedia Norway and Wikimedia UK. You can support our work by making an individual donation.

The post Wikimedia Foundation Challenges UK Online Safety Act Regulations appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

Note: This article is not paid or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation or the Ageless Galaxy and is solely written for the sake of reflection

Last Saturday, I found myself navigating the vibrant streets of Jakarta, heading toward an event I never quite envisioned when I first started editing Wikipedia a decade ago. The Wikimedia Foundation had teamed up with Ageless Galaxy, a local Jakarta-based lifestyle fashion brand, to launch a limited-edition capsule collection.

To celebrate Wikipedia’s upcoming 25th birthday, they threw a block party. It was a collision of worlds: the often-hidden, academic universe of free knowledge meeting the hyper-visual, contemporary world of Indonesian streetwear.

The collection itself was a masterclass in subtle, intentional design. Using a color palette and elements inspired by a combination of Wikipedia’s 25th birthday celebration and Jakarta motifs, the collaboration featured t-shirts, running hats, a set of stickers, and a beautifully crafted cardigan.

The heart of the launch was an intimate talkshow featuring the two key architects of the collaboration: WMF’s Brand Collaborations Lead Tas Elias and the co-founder of Ageless Galaxy Tamish Aswani. Tas emphasized that the collaboration was built on the spirit of free knowledge, aiming to create a physical product that embodies the collaborative soul of Wikipedia. For Tamish, the mission was deeply personal and rooted in local pride. His goal was to put Jakarta firmly on the global streetwear map. He explained how the design team seamlessly merged Wikipedia’s iconic puzzle pieces with traditional Indonesian Batik-inspired flower motifs, blending global digital culture with local heritage. Tamish introduced Lulu Shafira, the Ageless Galaxy’s principal designer, crediting her as the one who brough the concept to life. (Lulu uploaded a video showcasing the behind-the-scenes process from design to production in her Instagram)

After the talkshow, I had a talk Elias to get the story behind the partnership. He revealed that the Wikimedia Foundation is incredibly protective of its brand identity. WMF maintains a strict, highly curated list of criteria for potential brand collaborations. They look for partners that are locally based (as massive global conglomerates often make meticulous demands that drain foundation resources), ethically sourced in their manufacturing, and deeply committed to empowering local communities. Fascinatingly, Elias discovered the brand completely from scratch through digital research based entirely on those strict ethical and community-driven criteria.

When I asked him, “Why Indonesia?” the answer was clear. Statistics show that Indonesia contributes a massive, highly active share of Wikipedia’s global readership. Through this collaboration, WMF aims to amplify Wikipedia’s presence outside the traditional halls of academia and insert it directly into pop culture. It’s a deliberate move to shed the old stereotype that Wikipedia is solely the domain of “nerdiness” and reframe it as a living, breathing part of modern lifestyle.

The energy of the block party was electric. Free flow food and drinks were available throughout the event, ensuring a steady supply of fuel for laughs and talks. The launching attracted a diverse crowd of fashion enthusiasts and local Wiki community members, among which was Pandji Pragiwaksono, the prominent Indonesian comedian, actor, and artist. A close associate of Tamish, Pandji was there from New York to show his support. I even managed to record a quick video of him warmly congratulating Wikipedia on its upcoming 25th anniversary.

I ended up walking away from the store having purchased the collection’s standout cardigan, which I initially mistook as a sleek sweater. Purchasing it was more of a killing-two-birds-with-one-stone, as I needed a substitute for my sweater that I’ve lost some years ago and a piece of clothing beyond the usual t-shirts obtained in conference (and could only be worn on limited occasions) that I could wear with pride to showcase my identity as a Wikipedia editor.

At IDR 900,000 rupiah (roughly 6 to 10 times the price of a standard sweater in Indonesia), it was certainly an investment. But knowing that a portion of the proceeds goes back to support the Foundation made it an easy decision. Given the immense benefits in the form of knowledge and connections I’ve gained through Wiki projects over the last ten years, buying it was a small token of my gratitude.

As a hilarious bonus? It turned out Pandji Pragiwaksono was rocking the exact same cardigan at the party. If it’s cool enough for one of Indonesia’s top cultural icons, it’s certainly good enough for a decade-long Wiki editor.

Here’s to a quarter of century of free knowledge, and looking good while sharing it.

Practically anyone can edit Wikidata, but openness at this scale will sooner or later bring challenges: ontological inconsistencies, duplicate entities, non-notable items, unsourced statements and other data quality issues.

This is where WikiProjects truly shine. The well-structured areas of the world’s largest knowledge graph often have their own WikiProject community, hard at work behind the scenes making sense of the data. They help shape data models, build maintenance workflows, organise focus areas and establish guidelines and documentation.

What are Wikidata:WikiProjects?

Whether a few passionate individuals or large groups of motivated contributors, WikiProject communities often work in parallel, each tending their own garden of the Wikidata project. Sometimes they work with different tools, pursue new approaches and learn valuable lessons from solving niche data-modelling problems, but they rarely have a chance to share these findings with the wider Wikidata world.

The first iteration of the WikiProjects Days event was designed for exactly that. Held online over three days from June 19-21, 2026, WikiProject contributors were invited to come together to share their experiences, voice their challenges, discuss best practices, and hopefully learn something new that they can take with them.

WikiProjects Days 2026, a Wikidata ‘X Days’ event

Although it was the first event of its kind, the event welcomed over 80 participants and featured more than 20 speakers covering a remarkable range of topics — looted heritage, government directories, marine taxonomists, italian monument and art provenance, Philippine historical plaques — a snapshot of the broad variety of communities that shape Wikidata. Let’s delve into some of the moments that stood out.

Highlights

• Session: How do you find what needs fixing in your WikiProject? — by Raisha (WSC)

Maintenance tasks constitute a large proportion of the activities WikiProject communities work on. Although they can be unglamorous, they’re essential to keeping the project efficient. But before contributors can actually fix things, they must first identify what’s broken or wrong. Raisha led a candid conversation on how WikiProjects currently identify and prioritise cleanup tasks, on their experience with building Broomstick (a tool designed to automate some of these processes), and she also raised a bigger question: can this approach scale across different WikiProject domains, where many differing definitions of “broken” exist?

• Session: Modelling, crosswalking and creating documentation for natural history holotype specimen items – by Ambrosia10

User:Ambrosia10, Wikimedian in Residence at the New Zealand Bioeconomy Science Institute, took attendees through the project’s natural history specimen data model, a collaboration with the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Developing a complete ontology, using different tools, creating and publishing documentation and working alongside GLAM institutions — all these are great examples of the impressive range of topics and tasks an active and healthy WikiProject has to tackle.

• Session: State of the art of tools for WikiProjects: What do we have; what is missing? — by Peter F. Patel-Schneider and Lydia Pintscher

What happens when a newly onboarded participant incorrectly models a new item? How can such a mistake even be found, to say nothing of getting it flagged for revision? What tools are already available to WikiProjects, and what’s missing?

Peter brought attendees to look at WikiProject Ships — a comprehensive, well-maintained community that has existed for well over a decade. In that time, ontologies have been developed, processes iterated, tools developed, and knowledge passed through generations of participants. But as Peter showed, even mature WikiProjects encounter mistakes. The trick is catching errors before they have a chance to spread.

Using WikiProject Ships as a case study, Peter surveyed the tool landscape currently being used to monitor progress and check for issues. He weighed up their relative strengths and weaknesses and identified the gaps where tools are needed. In the second half of the session, Lydia opened the discussion to allow participants to share what tools they personally use, and exchange ideas on how tools that would fill the gaps might work, what would be needed to implement them, and who could develop them.

Takeaways / learnings

• There is interest in forming a user group on data organisation and quality
  
• Efforts are underway to clean up the Tool Directory, and make tools helpful to WikiProjects more visible.
  
• As seen in Raisha’s session “How do you find what needs fixing in your WikiProject?”, the WikiCollab’s team is prototyping a tool to surface things to improve in WikiProjects. Try it now!
  
• Many attendees asked for the ability to ping WikiProjects. This idea had been proposed (and declined) in the past due to its potential for abuse. The development team will revisit the topic to see what options are available to address the need. See the talk page for a brief history of the topic and to add your comments or support.

Event Media

If you’d like to watch these or other session recordings, you can find them in these places:

• Event program
• Commons Category:Presentations & Category:Videos

Would you like to receive updates when session recordings become available from this or any future Wikidata X days events? Please subscribe to the Wikidata mailing list or sign up your User Talk page to receive a weekly summary of Wikidata-related news.

Next Steps for Wikidata Events

The Wikidata X Days will return. The next event is in planning for sometime in Q4, 2026.

Looking further ahead, preliminary planning for WikidataCon 2027 has already begun. Next year will signal our return to a hybrid event, with both on-site and online activities.
WikidataCon 2027 is currently looking for a regional partner to host the physical, on-the-ground conference. WMDE will host the online conference and offer technical support.

Interested? Follow the Call for expressions of interest to host for application details.

Organising Team

This event only came to fruition thanks to the time and efforts donated by the sessions’ speakers, and the interest and attention of the audience attendees. WikiProjects Days 2026 was organised by Wikimedia Deutschland, with essential help provided by Léa Lacroix (User:Auregann)

• Alan Ang – Partnerships Manager
• Arian Bezorg – Product Manager
• Danny Benjafield – Community Communications Manager
• Deepesha Burse – Developer Advocate
• Lydia Pintscher – Portfolio Lead Product Manager
• Mohammed Sadat Abdulai – Community Communications Manager
  

As the fall semester approaches I have two questions. How good is Pangram.com at avoiding false positives for AI prose, and has student AI use grown since ChatGPT’s arrival? Fortunately, I have a dataset with which to answer these questions: seven years of reading responses from my Communication in the Digital Age course.

Unfortunately, I don’t have all the students’ responses over that time, but many of their responses do survive on the students’ HackMD wiki pages. I crawled those pages and sampled about fifty responses per semester. I’d test them all, except this sample itself cost me around $30 in Pangram API costs.

Pangram rates each of the 278 responses from before ChatGPT’s November 2022 launch as human-written. That’s reassuring with respect to avoiding false positives.

After ChatGPT’s introduction in November 2022, there’s an upward trend in detected AI prose, climbing to 42% in Fall 2025. Curiously, the Spring 2026 drops back to 6%. That was the semester I ran Pangram on all readings responses, told students I was doing so, gave zeros to the responses that were written by AI, and referred students who lied about it to the Office of Student Conduct and Conflict Resolution. (I heard some real whoppers this past year.) As I wrote about my process earlier, I also required a link to writings’ version histories and reviewed drafts’ histories with the Process Feedback tool.

So did enforcement work, or did it make students better at hiding it? I don’t know. Stupid misuse of AI is detectable, but others might be getting more sneaky. My policy and its enforcement does have two costs I can detect elsewhere. This past year, my courses saw an unprecedented number of students dropping in the first week—once I explained the AI misuse policy and its enforcement. The spring semester also yielded the lowest student teaching evaluations I’ve ever received in the 2019–2026 period. I think the two are related: it’s too tempting for students to misuse AI on out-of-class writing, want to avoid courses that are rigorously policed, and resent the detection and enforcement that follows.

This isn’t tenable. Though it pains me, I will move further from writing towards testing. In Fall 2027, I’ll abandon the requirement for well-written reading responses and ask students instead to share small-stakes QICs (Question, Insight, or Connection) from the readings. I will adopt higher-stakes but easy in-class quizzes, perhaps counting the best seven out of ten for that grade. In the quizzes, however, I will sometimes ask students to document the QIC they shared before class. If they did the work—or even pay attention to what AI told them—they should be able to answer this and participate in class.

New York City (9 July 2026) — The Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia NYC, the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies (UN-ODET), and the United Nations Office of Information and Communication Technology (UN-OICT) came together to host the second-ever UN “edit-a-thon” as part of UN Open Source Week 2026 inside the UN headquarters in New York City on 22 June 2026. 

A Wikipedia edit-a-thon brings together volunteers to create and improve articles on specific topics on Wikipedia. At this event, dozens of volunteers from around the world gathered inside the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) chamber to edit Wikipedia pages about the UN and open source topics, including digital public goods, AI regulation, the Global Digital Compact, UN history, and more. The event happened alongside the UN Tech Over hack-a-thon and maintain-a-thon, annual collaborative events designed to tackle global challenges using open source technology.

With in-person support from Wikimedia NYC — an independent, Wikimedia affiliated organization — event attendees, many of whom were editing for the very first time, improved several Wikipedia articles using on-site UN archives, official reports, datasets, and credible news sources. Volunteers worked to expand access to free and open knowledge online by:

• Creating more than 60 new Wikipedia articles
• Making nearly 700 edits across 129 existing articles
• Adding 16,600 words to Wikipedia
• Adding 120 citations to reliable reference material

Tajh Taylor, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Special Advisor to the Chief Product and Technology Officer, closed out the edit-a-thon by sharing: 

 “Wikipedia became the largest reference work on the internet because millions of people contributed small, meaningful changes, each of which added a bit of knowledge or corrected a small issue.  The work of the volunteer editors and stewards today adds to that body of knowledge, paying dividends to the billions of curious people around the world in search of human knowledge.”

The edit-a-thon also kicked off a full week of panels and discussion that fostered collaboration, awareness, and engagement on the benefits of open source technology and the global digital governance challenges that are ahead in the age of AI. As Omar Mohsine, Open Source Coordinator at the UN Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies, put it: 

“Global gatherings like UN Open Source Week are critical spaces for Member States and stakeholders across the UN system to come together to learn, share ideas, and build a digital future that works for all of humanity. The open internet and open source technology are at a crossroads in the age of AI, and the conversations happening at UN Open Source Week are exactly the conversations we need to be having not in 2 years, 5 years, or 10 years, but now.”

The Wikimedia Foundation looks forward to continuing collaborations with Wikimedia NYC and the United Nations to continue championing the importance of digital public goods and open source technology on the global stage.

Stay informed on digital policy, Wikipedia, and the future of the internet: Subscribe to our quarterly newsletter 📩

About the Wikimedia Foundation 

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. We support the people, technology, and policies that enable reliable information to be shared with the world. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA. Visit our website to learn more about the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia. 

About Wikimedia New York City 

Wikimedia NYC is a 501c3 nonprofit and local Wikimedia chapter formally established in 2009 that is dedicated to building a brighter, broader, and better Wikimedia movement. We help promote free access to the world’s knowledge. We are committed to building a Wikipedia as democratic and diverse as the New York City subway and to partnering with libraries, museums, organizations, and educational institutions that share our vision in providing access to free knowledge. Visit our website to learn more about Wikimedia New York City.

About the United Nations Office for Digital and Emerging Technologies

UN ODET advances global technology cooperation to build a more inclusive, innovative, and sustainable future. As the UN’s Connector, Catalyst, and Convener, we bring together governments, the UN system, the private sector, academia, and civil society to strengthen collaboration, align expertise with Member States’ priorities, and maximize the impact of emerging technologies. Our mission is to help close the digital and AI divide by supporting countries in building the capacity to shape and benefit from technological innovation. Through inclusive partnerships and coordinated action, we work to ensure that digital transformation creates opportunities for everyone. Visit our website to learn more about ODET.

About the United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology 

UN OICT enables a better, safer, more sustainable future through innovative technology. OICT is responsible for defining strategic direction for ICT in the Secretariat. It provides oversight of ICT programmes, systems, applications, and decision-making. The office is committed to ensuring colleagues all over the world have the necessary ICT tools to succeed in their respective mandates. Visit our website to learn more about OICT.

The post Wikimedia Foundation co-hosts second UN Open Source Week edit-a-thon appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

In June, we continued investing in the people and communities that make free knowledge possible. Through workshops, editathons, community support and partnerships, editors across Ghana gained new skills, improved content about Ghana, and contributed to the growth of the free knowledge movement in Ghana.

Here’s a look at what we’ve been up to!

The WMGH Shared Community Resources Program Supported the Ghanaian Pidgin Wikimedians Community

The Wikimedia Ghana User Group’s Shared Community Resources Program continues to support community-led initiatives that grow the free knowledge movement in Ghana. 

On 6th and 20th June, WMGH supported the Ghanaian Pidgin Wikimedians Community to host editathons under the Africa Wiki Challenge 2026 to improve content on the Ghanaian Pidgin Wikipedia.

WMGH provided event space, refreshments and lunch, allowing organisers to focus on what mattered most: building knowledge and engaging contributors.

We look forward to supporting more mission-led communities with resources they lack funding for. 

WMGH hosted an English Wikipedia 101 Workshop & Editathon for Beginner Editors in Accra

To ensure editors who are beginners are continuously engaged, we hosted a session at the Work From Home Workspace in Accra, on 13 June 2026 that brought together participants from previous workshops as well as newcomers.

Participants discussed their motivations for contributing to free knowledge, explored Wikipedia editing guidelines, and had opportunities to network.

New editors made their first contributions, while returning participants received guidance that helped them build confidence and improve their editing skills. 

Ga Wikipedia Incubator Workshop

As part of our continuous work with Ghanaian Language Wikipedias, WMGH organised a Ga Incubator workshop on 20 June, 2026. 

The session welcomed a small group of native Ga speakers who were introduced to the basics of Wikipedia editing and aided to create new articles for the Ga Wikipedia in Incubator. 

We look forward to supporting the growth of the Ga Wikipedia in Incubator into a fully fledged Wikipedia.

English Wikipedia 101 Workshop and Editathon with MFWA

As part of our ongoing partnership with the Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), we hosted a follow-up Wikipedia 101 workshop and editathon for staff members under our Knowledge Equity Fund Connected Grant.

Building on an earlier introductory session, the workshop focused on strengthening participants’ editing skills. 

We will continue to support MFWA as they build the skills to bring their work and expertise to Wikimedia projects.

English Wikipedia 101 Women’s Workshop – Kumasi 

As part of our Write the Internet project, we partnered with Women’s Haven Africa to bring our English Wikipedia 101 workshop to women in Kumasi, Ghana.

The workshop introduced 19 women to the basics of Wikipedia editing and equipped them with the skills to improve the representation of Ghanaian women on Wikipedia. 

We are excited to create more opportunities that strengthen women’s participation in the free knowledge movement. 

Wiki Loves Places 2026 in Ghana 

Wiki Loves Places 2026 in Ghana comes to a close and we applaud the incredible contributions made by participants across the country.

During the campaign, we hosted office hours for troubleshooting, as well as an OpenStreetMap session exploring how geotagged photos on Wikimedia Commons can improve data on OpenStreetMap and Wikidata.

Over 500 photos were uploaded and we say thank you to all who helped improve structured, open knowledge about places in Ghana! 

Opportunities to Check Out!

Get a virtual ticket for Wikimania Paris! 

Can’t make it to Wikimania in Paris? You can still join from wherever you are!

Virtual registration for Wikimania 2026 is open, giving you access to keynote sessions, workshops, panel discussions, and community conversations with Wikimedians from around the world.

Register for your free virtual ticket and participate: wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2026:Registration

Find Articles to Edit with SuggestBot!

Not sure what to edit on Wikipedia?

SuggestBot recommends articles that need improvement based on your editing history and interests, delivering  personalized article suggestions directly to your Wikipedia talk page!

Read our step-by-step guide on how to set up SuggestBot and start receiving article recommendations today: Guide 

Looking Ahead

Cheers to closing our grant year doing what we do best, contributing to free knowledge and investing in the people that make it possible! We look forward to creating more opportunities that strengthen participation in Wikimedia projects and advance free knowledge in Ghana.

As always, thank you for every edit and effort that helps expand the sum of all free knowledge. 

Warmly,
Wikimedia Ghana User Group

“Physics is open to everyone.”

This clear conviction is what led sophomore Jalane Mendo to create a new biography article as part of her Wikipedia assignment — and exactly what she hopes readers will take away from the online encyclopedia’s new article on physicist Enrique Jose Galvez.

“Professor Galvez has made significant contributions to physics education and the field of atomic and optical physics,” said Mendo. “Creating an article helps readers get a better overview of his work and understand more clearly the impact he has had on both scientific research and student learning.”

Beyond the research and writing process, the project carried personal meaning for Mendo, a physics major.

“It is important for students, especially those from underrepresented groups, to learn about physicists from diverse backgrounds,” explained Mendo. “Seeing people like themselves succeed in physics can help them recognize that physics is open to everyone, and inspire them to pursue it as well.”

Mendo’s favorite part of the experience came early on, as she tracked down and sifted through sources to construct a more complete narrative of Galvez’s career.

“I liked the whole process of turning raw information from multiple sources into a finished article,” said Mendo. “My favorite part was the initial stage of gathering the information to include in the article. It felt like putting puzzle pieces together to create a meaningful picture.”

Through the research process, the student editor developed skills she expects to carry well past graduation. Mendo plans to pursue a research career in astrophysics, and sees a direct line between the habits she developed as a Wikipedia editor and the ones she’ll need in the lab.

“I learned how to look for reliable resources, provide proper citations, and present the information I gather in a concise and clear manner,” said Mendo. “The skills I learned throughout this assignment will definitely be applicable in scientific research.”

But not every part of the process came easily. Mendo, new to editing Wikipedia, noted that the encyclopedia’s guidelines and policies took some getting used to, especially the policy against adding original research, which ensures that editors contribute information verified in published sources.

“It felt limiting, but considering Wikipedia’s focus on neutrality and reliability, it makes a lot of sense,” said Mendo.

The assignment stood apart from anything else she had encountered in her coursework so far, Mendo explained.

“The Wikipedia assignment felt very different from other assignments I’ve had in college,” said Mendo. “It felt a little intimidating at first, but going through the training modules gave me a better sense of direction and helped me understand what was expected. Overall, it was a great experience, and I enjoyed contributing valuable knowledge that could reach people beyond my local college community.”

For Mendo, that responsibility is part of what makes editing Wikipedia feel so significant.

“Many people use Wikipedia as their first step in learning about a topic, so it plays a big role in shaping their initial understanding,” said Mendo. “What is included in an article also influences what readers focus on and explore further.”

The project also led Mendo to an unexpected discovery about the vast reach and scope of Wikipedia.

“One thing that surprised me was that Wikipedia has articles in languages other than English,” said Mendo. “It even has articles in my first language!”

And that global reach means Mendo’s contribution won’t stay confined to her classroom or campus. Thanks to her work, readers everywhere can now learn about Galvez and his career in physics — a reminder that knowledge, like physics, should be open to everyone.

Jalane Mendo’s work on Wikipedia is part of a larger Wiki Education initiative sponsored by the Broadcom Foundation, which supports the improvement of existing biographies and the creation of new biographies of unsung figures in STEM on Wikipedia.

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

Write wiki pages in Markdown, the widely used markup format and the native language of AI agents, with our new open-source MediaWiki extension.

We are proud to announce Native Markdown, a MediaWiki extension that makes Markdown a native content model. The content model determines the format in which MediaWiki stores and renders a page. So a Markdown page is not wikitext with some Markdown embedded inside of it. The whole page is Markdown, stored exactly as you typed it, and rendered as a real wiki page with working links, categories, templates, parser functions, a table of contents, and full-text search. Install it, and your wiki is a Markdown wiki: new pages default to Markdown everywhere, while any existing wikitext pages keep working.

The timing is no accident. Markdown is the format that AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT read and write best.

A real wiki page

A Markdown page renders like any other wiki page, and the MediaWiki features you rely on continue to work.

Wikitext link syntax works inside Markdown, with the semantics you know. [[Page]] gives you a blue or red link depending on whether the page exists, and the link is tracked in Special:WhatLinksHere. [[Category:X]] assigns a category, and [[File:Diagram.png|300px|alt=Text|Caption]] embeds an image.

Your shared templates keep working. Infoboxes, navboxes, and citation templates transclude with the usual {{...}} syntax, and a page re-renders whenever you edit a template it uses. Parser functions and magic words work too. Wiki admins can disable them in Markdown pages.

The Markdown flavor is CommonMark plus GitHub Flavored Markdown: tables, strikethrough, task lists, and autolinks, with footnotes on top. Tables are automatically styled as wikitables. YAML front matter is parsed, hidden from the rendered page, and stored as page metadata. Raw HTML is always escaped, so page content cannot inject scripts or other active HTML into your wiki.

You edit via the standard edit form. With the CodeEditor extension installed, you get Markdown syntax highlighting, and Show preview renders through the full pipeline. Diffs, history, undo, and page moves all work as expected.

---
version: 2.4.0
owner: Platform team
---

# Platform 2.4 release notes

This release focuses on deployment safety and documentation quality. Upgrade using the
[[Deployment Guide.md|deployment guide]].

## Upgrade checklist

- [x] Announce the maintenance window in #platform
- [x] Back up the database
- [ ] Run the search reindex job

Clean search results

Full-text search indexes the rendered prose of a Markdown page rather than the raw markup, so keyword lookups match what a reader sees. Search snippets are clean text instead of # and ** noise, and front matter stays out of the index.

Getting started

The first version of Native Markdown requires MediaWiki 1.43 or later and PHP 8.1 or later.

Once installed, new pages default to the Markdown content model everywhere (with some namespace-based exceptions). If you have any existing wikitext pages, they will continue to work as wikitext, and you have the option to switch them to the Markdown content model. The same applies in the other direction: if at any point you wish to switch from Markdown to wikitext, you can do so gradually.

If you would rather keep wikitext as the default, or offer Markdown only in specific namespaces, you can achieve this with a one-line configuration change. You can also let users decide via the optional .md suffix mechanism, which is disabled by default. When enabled, new pages whose title ends in .md default to Markdown, so the two models can mix freely even where wikitext is the default.

Installation instructions, configuration options, and the full documentation are on the Native Markdown extension page.

Get started quickly with Native Markdown via our managed MediaWiki hosting.

On 8 July 2026, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that hosts Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, was — for the sixth time — denied permanent observer status at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The decision, driven by a single veto from China, once again excludes Wikipedia, the world’s largest online repository of free and open knowledge created by a global community of nearly 250,000 volunteers, from participating in the international forum that shapes the future of intellectual property (IP) policy. 

WIPO is the UN specialized agency that discusses, negotiates, and approves international rules and frameworks for IP worldwide, which UN Member States use to draft and implement national laws that directly affect access to and content on open knowledge infrastructure such as Wikipedia and other digital public goods. 

Blocking the Wikimedia Foundation’s WIPO permanent observer status denies billions of Wikipedia users across over 300 languages a chance to be represented in decisions about how they work and what they can read online. Further, WIPO and its Member States are deprived of learnings from the Wikipedia community, including their 25 years of experience navigating modern and flexible copyrights and, more recently, one of the most pressing policy challenges: balancing creators’ rights with scalable public access to open knowledge in a time of artificial intelligence (AI). Excluding the Wikimedia Foundation from WIPO is especially concerning because Wikipedia is consistently used as one of the highest-quality datasets to train large language models (LLMs). 

In vetoing the Foundation’s membership, the representative for China misrepresented Wikipedia’s volunteer-driven policies and practices, all of which are rooted in accuracy and neutrality and help effectively counter misinformation and disinformation online. Concerningly, this sustained opposition seems to signal a broader trend in suppressing legitimate participation and debate of civil society organizations — as shown earlier this year by the cancellation of RightsCon, the world’s largest digital rights conference. 

“Despite many years of vetoes from China, we will continue to pursue accreditation at WIPO on behalf of Wikipedia’s global reader and volunteer contributor community, who deserve to have a voice in the policy discussions that directly impact the future of open source knowledge projects like Wikipedia,” said Stephen LaPorte, General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. “The systematic exclusion of the Wikimedia Foundation from WIPO reflects the deeply troubling trend of civil society being pushed out of the rooms where policy is being made. Digital public goods like Wikipedia and Wikidata must be given a seat at the table to ensure the future of intellectual property policy continues to benefit the global common good.” 

Germany, acting as the coordinator of the WIPO group of industrialized countries (which includes Australia, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Turkey, the Holy See, and many European Union Member States), supported the Foundation’s accreditation request.

Alongside Germany, individual Member States, including Canada, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, expressed strong public support for the Foundation’s application. The supporting countries highlighted that the Wikimedia Foundation would bring invaluable insights and practical experience to WIPO’s ongoing mission.  

We call on all WIPO Member States and leadership to help resolve this political impasse and ensure that WIPO’s work enables the technical and legal viability of a free, open, neutral, and collaborative internet, now and in our shared future. 

As a recognized observer at the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and member of the Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue to advocate for free and open knowledge on the global stage, including in important conversations about AI governance and the future of knowledge in a digital age.

Subscribe to our newsletter to stay informed on digital policy, Wikipedia, and the future of the internet.

For media inquiries, please contact press@wikimedia.org.

About the Wikimedia Foundation 

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. We support the people, technology, and policies that enable reliable information to be shared with the world. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA. Visit our website to learn more about the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia.

The post China again blocks the Wikimedia Foundation as a permanent observer to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) appeared first on Wikimedia Foundation.

On Friday 3 July 2026, Wikimedia UK hosted its Big Birthday Party in London, bringing together an inspiring mix of people to celebrate two major milestones: 25 years of Wikipedia and 15 years of Wikimedia UK as a registered charity.

The event brought together editors with two decades of contribution behind them alongside newer volunteers, partners, leaders from the open knowledge sector, policymakers, staff, trustees, members, funders and donors. It was a powerful reminder of the breadth, generosity and commitment of the community that has helped make Wikimedia’s mission real in the UK.

From its beginnings in 2001, Wikipedia has grown into a global public resource spanning more than 300 language editions and a vibrant network of sister projects. Every day, it helps billions of people explore ideas, answer questions and follow their curiosity.

At a time when reliable information, media literacy and public access to knowledge matter more than ever, the gathering was also an opportunity to reflect on the continuing importance of Wikimedia UK’s mission: enabling people in the UK to engage with open knowledge, access reliable information, develop their understanding of the world and make informed decisions about issues that affect them.

We were honoured to welcome Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales as our guest of honour. Jimmy presented Wikimedia UK’s Silver Jubilee Awards, recognising volunteers whose contributions have had a lasting impact on the UK Wikimedia community over the past 25 years.

Silver Jubilee Award nominees

There were more than 20 nominations for 18 potential recipients. The five award winners were proposed by a small subcommittee and approved by Wikimedia UK’s Board of Trustees.

Below is the full list of nominees:

Alice White, Andy Mabbett, Daria Cybulska, Ed Saperia, Ewan McAndrew, Femke Nijsse, Jason Evans, Jess Wade, Kelly Foster, Kirsty Ross, Lucy Hinnie, Lucy Moore, Martin Poulter, Mike Peel, User, Roger Bamkin, Sammy Fox and Zeyi He.

Silver Jubilee Award winners

Huge congratulations to the five Silver Jubilee Award winners.

Andy Mabbett

Andy’s volunteer work is a huge part of Wikimedia UK’s story, and of Wikimedia more broadly, since he began editing in 2003. He has given training, run events, built partnerships and been a mine of knowledge and insight for other volunteers.

Andy was an early adopter of the Wikimedian in Residence model and pioneered ways for institutions to share open knowledge, including through residencies at the Royal Society of Chemistry, ARKive, a charity documenting threatened species, and the Disruptive Media Learning Lab at Coventry University.

Andy also set up the Voice Intro Project, encouraging the subjects of Wikipedia articles to record their own voices. The project famously resulted in a recording made aboard the International Space Station.

Throughout his work, Andy has consistently championed inclusion, particularly the accessibility of Wikimedia projects for users with disabilities. He has remained committed to the vision that we are not simply building websites, but sharing knowledge freely with everyone.

Kelly Foster

Kelly has been a driving force in supporting the addition of content about Black people, who have historically been underrepresented on Wikimedia projects, as well as in training new editors. She has been part of the Wikimedia movement since 2012 and began volunteering with Wikimedia UK in 2016.

Kelly exemplifies leadership and vision. She has served as a trustee of Wikimedia UK and worked as a Wikimedian in Residence with the Making African Connections research project. She is an excellent trainer and advocate, inspiring new contributors and helping organisations understand the value of Wikimedia.

Kelly combines enthusiasm with informed and necessary criticism. She has consistently encouraged the Wikimedia movement to engage with the legacy of colonialism in shaping the world we work in. She reminds us that open knowledge is a transformative project that should challenge, rather than perpetuate, the dominance of Western culture and the best-resourced institutions.

Kirsty Ross

Dr Kirsty Ross’s involvement with Wikimedia UK since 2020 has created an important connection between the charity and higher education. Kirsty is a public engagement professional at the University of St Andrews. She founded the IDEA Network with Dr Abd Alsattar Ardati, which aims to “make knowledge production inclusive, diverse, equitable, and accessible to all people, regardless of their background, location, or culture”.

Kirsty’s insight into public engagement is invaluable, and she brings fantastic ideas about how to engage people with Wikimedia. Her work shows a deep determination to widen opportunities to contribute to open knowledge, helping ensure that the shared knowledge represented through Wikimedia projects is more reflective of society as a whole.

She also works generously to recognise and champion those around her and those working alongside her.

Lucy Moore

Since joining the Wikimedia movement in 2019, Dr Lucy Moore has become a hugely valued part of the community. She is active in initiatives including Women in Red and has written a Wikipedia article for a woman from every country in the world.

Lucy is innovative and creative as an editor, trainer and colleague. With her deep knowledge of Wikimedia and the GLAM sector, she is able to identify gaps and ways of working that bring real benefit to communities and institutions.

Her activism and attention to marginalised experiences and voices make many Wikimedia projects richer and more equitable. Whether she is investigating ontologies of smell, celebrating queer and trans lives, or getting stuck into talk pages to address systemic bias, Lucy brings care, rigour and imagination to her work.

She also contributes a considerable amount of volunteer time to movement-wide Wikimedia bodies, including the Global Resource Distribution Committee.

Martin Poulter

With a depth of knowledge built through involvement in the movement since 2005, Dr Martin Poulter has been connected with Wikimedia UK from its early days and was part of the push to have it recognised as a charity.

Alongside his role in governance, Martin has been a highly active trainer, supporting Wikimedia UK’s Train the Trainer programme and helping people learn about Wikimedia. He is an excellent communicator, able to help institutions see the value of sharing information openly.

His work as a Wikimedian in Residence across a range of settings, including the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries, has led the way on important Wikidata work and inspired other volunteers to share collections data. His ongoing work with the Khalili Foundation has supported the release of many unique items onto Wikimedia platforms and helped the movement reflect on its coverage of non-Western topics.

Martin is a generous advocate for open knowledge across many different communities. He is kind, thoughtful and has been a huge help to many people over the past two decades.

Gift Knowledge, Your Way

As we mark these landmark anniversaries, we are also inviting everyone to be part of Wikimedia UK’s Gift Knowledge Your Way birthday campaign. Not everyone wants to edit Wikipedia, and that’s completely okay. There are many ways to support open knowledge, and one of the most powerful is by making a donation. Your support helps Wikimedia UK continue its work with volunteers, educators, cultural institutions and communities across the UK to make reliable information more open, accessible and representative. Please consider making a gift today and helping us build the next chapter of open knowledge.

Thank you

Many thanks to everyone who joined us, contributed to the milestone celebrations and continues to make open knowledge possible. Particular thanks go to our Chief Executive, Lucy Crompton-Reid, our Chair, Lucy Yu, and our Vice Chair and Treasurer, Alex Ashby, for helping make the occasion so special.

Here’s to the next chapter: more knowledge, more participation and more people empowered to make informed decisions about the world around them.

The post Celebrating 25 years of Wikipedia and 15 years of Wikimedia UK appeared first on Wikimedia UK.