Since its foundation, Wikipedia has attracted a globally networked community of hundreds of thousands of editors who share the vision of producing freely available truth that is verifiable through reliable sources. While there are many other trustworthy information sources, Wikipedia also has an extraordinarily large audience that helped it become a major influence on global media. Wikipedia editors use several fact-checking processes and other editorial practices to maintain Wikipedia's quality. Readers come to Wikipedia because it has information that they like and trust, and editors post to Wikipedia because they want to serve those readers.

Wikipedia invites anyone with complaints about the site's limits to join in as editors themselves, and to participate in the platform's online, public and transparent editorial process. Complaints are welcome as part of the civil discourse and editorial process of building the encyclopedia. On the other hand, unfortunately, there are some entities who attack Wikipedia without civility and in bad faith. These may be individuals, organizations, corporations, or even governments, who all criticize Wikipedia because it shares information or media that they dislike. Sometimes, they may demand that editors bypass the usual editorial process to make an exception for presenting special content. At other times, there is no pretense of negotiation, and those targeting Wikipedia simply make demands that Wikipedia publish only statements or content that reflect a particular point of view, to the exclusion of other stakeholders. Sometimes, the attacks just take the form of harassment without a clear motivation.

While criticism can be valid, negativity never is, and Wikipedia remains one of the world's few attempts, if not the only one, at producing a community-governed, community-fact-checked, free of cost, multilingual and multicultural reference source for general interest.

Pointing to evidence of increased acts of hostility against Wikipedia editors is difficult to explain with digital media metrics alone. Still, the Wikimedia community is a network of actual humans who talk to each other, and enough of them have been observing a trend of increased attempts to spread misinformation in the media and bring that same misinformation into Wikipedia, as well as increased push-back against editors for applying our fact-checking process to those instances.

From 14 to 16 February, the Internet Archive hosted Wikipedia editors at WikiCredCon 2025 in person in San Francisco, where they gathered to discuss threats to trust in the media and threats to our editors. The Internet Archive and Wikipedia have common goals and common concerns, as both are non-profit organizations that provide free public access to their content, and both rely on crowdsourced contributions. The two organizations already collaborate in various ways: Wikipedia editors frequently access publications at Internet Archive to verify information, whereas since 2016 the Internet Archive has actively backed up digital links, which editors can cite in Wikipedia by using the InternetArchiveBot. While wiki editors convened at Internet Archive's headquarters to discuss common goals and obstacles, here are videos of people^[a] talking about the things that they thought were most important to share.

• Jamie Flood – government censorship
• Craig Newmark – Wikipedia is where facts go to live
• Lane Rasberry – Editing Wikipedia is not a crime
• Mary Mark Ockerbloom – disinformation threatens trust
• Vic Sfriso – Wikimedia Argentina against misinformation
• Quincy – disinformation in climate change

• Robin Isadora Brown – birds flock for safety
• Colby Webster – social connections
• Fabian Garcia – if you don't see yourself represented, then represent yourself
• B – defend Wikipedia and journalism

• Rosie Stephenson-Goodnight – Wayback Machine for multilingual fact-checking
• Mark Graham – Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for fact-checking in Wikipedia
• Sawood Alam – Wayback Machine Turn all References Blue
• Maximilian Doerr – InternetArchiveBot archives sources for Wikipedia
• Peter Meyer – Wikipedia and Internet Archive are allies

• Mahmoud Hashemi – Wiki Loves Monuments
• Vipin SJ – Wikipedia Library
• Kevin Payravi – WikiPortraits
• Netha Hussain – misinformation and knowledge gaps in health information
• Deena Larsen – electronic literature

• Lane Rasberry – Universal Life Church
• Sally Lehrman – Trust Project
• Harsha Madhyastha – FABLE for Finding Aliases for Broken Links Efficiently
• Swapneel Mehta – SimPPL for trust in media
• Nevin Thompson – Hacks Hackers WikiCredCon Credibility Coalition for countering misinformation
• Gaute Kokkvoll – Factiverse
• Michael Nelson – Robust Links