At Wikimania 2021 seven editors were presented with Wikimedian of the year awards by Jimmy Wales. While there have been multiple winners before, this is the first year more than three awards were presented. As originally presented on a 24 minute video, Wales surprises the award-winners on ZOOM calls to tell them the news. We include the edited individual videos below. They may be less fun but are easier to follow.

Alaa Najjar is active on the Arabic Wikipedia and in many other wiki projects, having made over 473,000 edits total. He works as a general practitioner and contributes to WikiProject Medicine, especially to the COVID-19 project on the Arabic encyclopedia, providing access to life-saving information. He works to combat medical misinformation. On Arabic Wikipedia he is a steward, bureaucrat, sysop, checkuser and interface-admin. On Wikidata he's a sysop and checkuser. He is also a sysop on 5 other projects and a VRT volunteer. Shortly after receiving the award, an article about him was created. Don't worry, though, the AfD was quickly closed as "KEEP".^[1]

One of the founders of Wiki Loves Monuments, Lodewijk Gelauff helped lead the WLM International Organizing Committee over the next 10 years. Over that time 1.7 million photos of 1.5 million cultural monuments and landmarks have been uploaded from over 70 countries as part of the world's largest photo contest. Many new editors have joined Wikipedia as a result, and many chapters have organized to join WLM. A truly remarkable achievement. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Management Science and Engineering in the U.S.^[1]

Netha Hussain is a physician and researcher who earned a PhD in clinical neuroscience from the University of Gothenburg. She has worked extensively on COVID-19 related articles on Wikipedia and worked against pandemic-related misinformation. In eleven years on Wikipedia she's made 183,500 edits total on over ten projects.^[1][2]

Carmen Alcázar has been a member of the Board of Wikimedia Mexico since 2012 and president of that organization 2018-2020. She helped organize Wikimania in Mexico City in 2015. She's a political scientist and Feminism activist. One of her priorities has been to close the gender gap in articles. She's helped close this gender gap on Spanish Wikipedia by over seven percent in five years.^[1]

Jay Prakash, the founder of Indic-TechCom, was named Wikimedian of the Year Tech Innovator. He "is known for providing technical support to Indic communities, fixing bugs, building new tools, and spearheading technical outreach."^[2][1]

Anaya Mondal founded the Wiki Loves Butterfly project in 2016 and has run the campaign four times resulting in 2,600 images being uploaded to Commons. She started the project after seeing there was no article on butterfly on her native Bengali Wikipedia.^[1][2]

Carma Citrawati is a university lecturer, author and literary activist in Bali who began editing in 2019. She digitizes and translates ancient texts contained on palm-leaf manuscripts.^[1]