Wikimedia New York City hosted the conference and shared presentation streams for most public talks during the three-day event. For anyone who wants to know the contemporary important Wikipedia issues, checking the the conference program is a fast way to identify the topics which the community brings to general discussion. Compare and contrast program topics to the individual video statements that people made spontaneously when asked to get more understanding of what people talk about collectively, versus what they share personally. Everyone at the conference brings concerns and projects which are important to them, and everyone matches with others to get some progress on their issues. The conference had 400 in-person attendees and about 100 more in the virtual live stream, so the program, presentation stream, and this interview collection only capture some of the knowledge and collaboration exchange.

Wikimedia New York City's organizational interests colored conference programming directions. Historically, this Wikimedia community, and New York City as a location, and the chapter itself has been a supportive foundation for Wikimedia community organizations and programs. While Wikimedians had been organizing meetups since at least 2003, the early motivation for meeting was to convene established Wikimedians to discuss Wikimedia things. In 2009, Wikimedia New York City hosted the first recorded "Wikipedia editathon" or outreach event, Wikipedia:Wikipedia at the Library, which invited new editors to receive Wikipedia training then actually make their first Wikipedia edits in a collaborative group setting. The editathon model of outreach immediately became very popular globally, and when the Wikimedia Foundation established the Wikimedia Grants program in 2014, adopted the editathon model's strategic goal of recruiting new Wikimedia participants as the primary measurable outcome for all grant funding.

Programs which had starting support in New York City but which have grown beyond that region include AfroCROWD, Art+Feminism, and Wikitongues. The first "Wiki Loves X" project was Wikipedia Loves Art in 2009, and since then, many organizers have found success with the following that model. New York City is also unusual for its language diversity, with all of the long-time Wikimedia institutional partners in the region, including City University of New York / LaGuardia Community College, New York Public Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Prime Produce all being organizations which prize and invest in multilingual and multicultural community outreach.

As a consequence of all these things, the New York City WikiConference had goals including inviting non-Wikimedians to the event to introduce them to Wikipedia, to be accommodating to people of various language backgrounds, to encourage community leaders and institutional partners to think big about their options to leverage Wikipedia to share knowledge globally, online, at-scale, and to seek to collaborate with unexpected organizational partners by finding editorial overlap in technology, language, or community outreach.

WikiConference North America has been held annually since 2014. The September 2026 conference will be in Edmonton, Alberta. Presentation submissions for that conference will open soon.

Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and volunteers maintain it. Wikipedia is also a volunteer social movement, centered on the values that everyone should have the right to access Wikipedia, and everyone should have the right to participate as an editor to share information in Wikipedia. To achieve this, there is a volunteer governance system of Wikimedia movement affiliates. The organization which presents this conference is itself the "WikiConference North America User Group". Organizations which are active in presenting the conference include Wikimedia Canada, Wikimedia DC, Wikimedia NYC, and Wiki Cascadia. Individuals and other groups make major contributions to host the conference, including support throughout the year from groups listed at North American Wikimedians.

WikiConference North America is a volunteer project by Wikimedians, for Wikimedians. The Wikimedia Foundation has provided grant support to the conference in most years, except for 2015 when Wiki Education Foundation financially sponsored everything, and during the COVID pandemic when volunteers organized the conference virtually without funding. Major conference expenses include travel support for the scholarship program and the cost of the venue expenses. When there is hired staff, then they are with the venue operations so that attendees can use the space. Past WikiConference organizing teams have not included a paid conference organizer, but with the growing complexity and expectations of future events, for 2026 Wikimedia Canada is contributing part-time staff support to supplement volunteer organizing. There are always volunteer options for anyone who can commit to join meetings of the core organizing team. Scholarship recipients are asked to volunteer for some aspect of the live conference, such as by checking in attendees, or monitoring rooms while taking notes.

The conference is four days long, Thursday to Sunday. Thursday is the "culture crawl", which is a tour of the city with emphasis on knowledge institutions like archives. Wikipedians love visiting archives, and archivists both like giving tours to Wikipedians and frequently remark that they do not get many tour groups of people who are sincerely eager to see rooms of filing cabinets. Fridays attract the local working professionals who are only going to attend a conference during working hours, and Saturdays attract local Wikipedians and the wiki-curious who work weekdays, but are happy to attend on a weekend. The schedule design reflects the interest patterns of those groups. All the WikiConferences have included talks on being inclusive to demographics of editors who are underrepresented in Wikimedia projects; updates from the local elected representatives of major Wikimedia governance bodies like the Affiliations Committee or Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee; a presentation from someone at a library; a project to increase collaboration with another tech nonprofit community like Internet Archive or OpenStreetMap; a discussion about if and when and how to pay for language interpretation to make events accessible across French, English, and Spanish language communities; the perennial claim that very soon there is going to be a Wikimedia chapter which represents the United States; and some weird idea to do something amazing, but which has never been discussed before. The bonus topic since 2024 is AI, which now gets to be part of every presentation.

Sunday is time for visiting attendees to return home, but morning meetings till break in the afternoon are a time for strategic discussions on staying connected as groups of collaborators, and for reflecting on our place as individuals who get extraordinary and disproportionate media attention as compared to any other volunteer network of editors at any other time in history. Wikipedians who attend for the first time often remark that this in-person conference is the first time they have met any other Wikipedia editor in person.

As The Signpost reported in October 2025, the conference began with a gunman joining then-Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander on stage during the keynote presentation. While the gunman had the attention of hundreds of people in attendance at the keynote talk, two Wikimedia editors – Richard Knipel (user:Pharos) and Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) – heroically and physically subdued the person. There were no shots fired. Although some news reports stated that the gunman's objective was to shoot themselves, enough attendees reported that the gunman pointed the gun directly at their faces and made eye contact personally with them as he pondered what to do with his finger on the trigger, crazed, having chosen to come to this Wikimedia conference because of grievances about their past experience as a Wikimedia editor and wanting interaction with Wikipedia. This is the latest of the reported terrorism events at a Wikimedia convening, with the last one in this conference series being the bomb threat, reported November 2023 in The Signpost, which disrupted a day of WikiConference in Toronto.

While the gun threat left a strong impression on conference attendees, Wikipedia editors may not have convened on-wiki in discussion forums to discuss that incident in the usual way that editors discuss many things. If anyone has more thoughts about security at Wikimedia events generally, consider sharing your ideas in The Signpost starting with a visit to the newsroom's submissions forum. There is no committee or individual who is hosting public Wikimedia community discussions to develop Wikimedia security practices. This is a distasteful topic to discuss or think about. It is very difficult to determine what security practices are appropriate to discuss publicly and which are dangerous to disclose. Anyone interested to give a try at making a public on-wiki place to discuss Wikimedia volunteer community best practices for safety can give a try at establishing or developing forums or community organizations to do this. As always, WikiConference is a volunteer activity, and another way to increase the security is to increase the community participation. Anyone who wants to help organize, review submissions, or join any other planning committee may contact WikiConference North America.