Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a campaign calling for release from prison for Osama Khalid (User:OsamaK), who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia since 2020 for editing Wikipedia (see previous Signpost coverage). Without intervention, he is due for release in 2034. EFF has further profiled Osama as "Offline", which is their broader effort to recognize people who are imprisoned for sharing media, and the context of how and why people face opposition to information sharing.

Osama was very active as a Wikipedia editor in English and Arabic, as a bot operator, in the Wikipedia IRC group chat, and he attended the international Wikimania conference multiple times. He is known to many Wikipedians both online and through in-person events, including his volunteering to teach Wikipedia editing to students at medical schools. Among the many topics he edited, Osama collaborated with Wikimedia LGBT+ to develop medical articles related to sexual health, sexually transmitted infection, and reproductive health into that group's discussion, and to coordinate translation of health topics between English and Arabic.

As previously reported by The Signpost, a coalition of organizations began to publicly call for his release in 2024. Osama was arrested along with fellow Wikipedia editor and physician colleague Ziyad al-Sufiani (User:Ziad), who was released in 2025. – BR

The Wikimedia Foundation has officially closed Wikinews, one of its longest-lasting projects, on May 4, 2026. Editing and new content creation will no longer be possible, with all of the pages on the site locked in read-only mode.

First launched in November 2004, following an online vote on Meta, Wikinews was an official Wikimedia project based on news reporting and citizen journalism, as well as one of the first portals to set that mission for itself, having been intended by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales as a way to write each story "as a news story, as opposed to an encyclopedia article". However, throughout its history, the purpose of Wikinews was repeatedly questioned, with some observers pointing out how Wikipedia already provided high-quality coverage of recent events, while others criticized the project's perceived lack of commitment to a neutral point of view. Plus, Wikinews always struggled to gain momentum in comparison to other Wikimedia portals throughout the years: at the time of its shutdown, the platform was active in 31 languages, with just over 700 active editors across the board.

This resulted in a group of users forking away, before multiple calls for the closure of the project were made. These efforts culminated in a 2024 public consultation, which concluded that:

Wikinews is not viable as a global, multi-lingual sister project in the Wikimedia ecosystem and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. The project does not fill a need in the world through useful articles, significant readership, or significant volunteer engagement. News articles are not a good fit for the wiki model, as shown in the low editor engagement and few revisions over time. There are many stronger alternatives for the broader mission of non-profit news.

In November 2025, the Sister Projects Task Force (SPTF) advised the BoT to cease the activity of Wikinews permanently, a decision that eventually came into full effect back in March of this year.

You can find more details in our prior coverage and in this month's Special report. – B, O

Nominations for the May 2026 administrator elections began 00:00, 29 April 2026 (UTC), followed by a call for candidates through May 5, then the Discussion phase May 8–12. The Voting phase was open May 13–19.

Results were posted at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/May 2026/Results on 20 May. The administrators elected were (in alphabetical order):

• Asukite
• Bobby Cohn
• Bonadea
• Ca
• Drm310
• Reconrabbit
• Sammi Brie

All were elected with between 80 and 90 percent approval. Two additional candidates were not elected. – B

Voting is open for the 2026 election of Universal Code of Conduct coordinators until June 2 (midnight UTC).

The committee is tasked with providing an "equitable and consistent implementation of the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC)."

Editors can vote once if they meet the following criteria:

• not be site-wide blocked in more than one public project;
• not be a bot;
• have made at least 300 edits before 24 April 2026 across Wikimedia wikis; and
• have made at least 20 edits between 24 October 2025 and 24 April 2026.

– M

On Diff, the Wikimedia Foundation announced publication of the most important financial form for nonprofits, the Form 990, for both the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment. The WMF's Form 990 is available to view here and the endowment's 990 is here. Both forms cover the 2024–2025 financial year, except for compensation data, which is for the 2024 calendar year.

Judging by the forms' financial info, the Foundation appears to be in good financial health. The forms show net assets of –

• $297 million for the Wikimedia Foundation, up $25 million on the year prior, and
• $169 million for the Wikimedia Endowment, also up $25 million over the prior year.

The highest-paid WMF executives listed on the WMF's Form 990 for the reporting period were then-CEO Maryana Iskander, CPTO Selena Deckelmann and CAO Lisa Seitz, with total reported compensation of $553,360, $517,425 and $463,076 respectively. 271 WMF staff received more than $100,000 of reportable compensation. The Wikimedia Endowment has no paid staff of its own. – AK

There will be two Wikimedia Café discussion opportunities during the last weekend of May. Both sessions will focus on the the 2026-2027 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan. Participants may attend either or both sessions.

1. Saturday, 30 May 2026 at 15:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to the Americas, Africa, and Europe.
2. Sunday, 31 May 2026 at 05:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to Asia and the Pacific.

Café participants are highly encouraged to read in advance at least this summary of the plan. Optionally, Café participants are encouraged to read portions of the plan that interest them and ask questions or provide feedback on the Annual Plan talk page.

Please see the Café page for more information, including tables of timestamp conversions for both sessions, the agenda, and how to register!

On 21 May, User:SCherukuwada (WMF) (Deputy Chief Product & Technology Officer at WMF) announced that 6 members of the Community Tech team were laid off, with the team at large disbanded. Among other things, CommTech supported the Community Wishlist, with a number of the laid off employees also being long standing volunteer contributors.

This decision has caused significant community outrage. According to a comment on meta from technical contributor, Sohom

I would trust [the 6 fired employees to figure out] what the community wants more than anything, and the fact that the Foundation does not see the immediate benefit in retaining these engineers in a job where they explicitly work on community-requested features feels extremely sad and is a significant problem.

Some editors have claimed a connection between the firings and attempts at unionising the WMF. So far, a hundred editors have signed a petition signifying solidarity with the union. WMF legal counsel Stephen LaPorte later clarified that the Foundation respects the right of the staff to unionise, and will proceed to negotiate in good faith.

With the situation still evolving, The Signpost will be covering this topic in depth in the next issue. – S

• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects have reached milestones: Fulfulde Wikipedia (Fula language, also called Fulfulde) reaches 18,000 articles (from Diff).
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Harbor, and next week's (beginning 25 May 2026) is Partnership for Peace. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
• More Wikis block archive.today: Consensus to block or deprecate the notorious web archiving service has been reached on the Arabic, English, French, Romanian and Swedish Wikipedias, Wikidata, French Wikivoyage, French Wikiquote, French Wikibooks, and Dutch Wikibooks. English Wikivoyage has removed links to the site in the mainspace.
• Choose your Picture of the Day WISEly...: The Visual Geometry Group (VGG) of the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford has developed a new demo for an audiovisual search engine, based on the WISE AI tool, aiming to help users look for images and videos under the Media of the Day category on Wikimedia Commons. You can give feedback on the demo on this page.
• Wikiversity adopts an AI policy: English Wikiversity has adopted an official artificial intelligence policy on April 17, with it being permitted where it follows "good scholarly practices". The project also has guidance for editors using it on the project.