On 9 April 2025, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) announced a halt to its "Access to Knowledge" (A2K) program. In some ways, CIS is unlike a Wikimedia regional chapter, for reasons including that it is a tech-oriented nonprofit which does programs independently of the Wikimedia movement. In other ways, it performed some of the functions of a Wikimedia chapter, in that its staff coordinated Wikimedia training programs and fulfilled community requests for Wikimedia support throughout India. (Wikimedia India, a separate organization, was approved as an official chapter in 2010, but derecognitioned in 2019.) The A2K program was the Wikimedia program of CIS. With this stopped, the Wikimedia Movement no longer has any ongoing major Wikimedia programs in India, and no plans to develop any.

The reason for the halt in the program is that NGOs in India who receive foreign money must regularly renew their certificate of compliance with the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010. CIS recently lost its FCRA certificate, so it cannot receive money from the Wikimedia Foundation.

There is no public information about why CIS lost its FCRA certification. The Wikipedia article for FCRA lists numerous cases where organizations in India lost their certificate, and were shut off from receiving foreign funds. As the Wikipedia article notes, Western organizations affected by this tend to complain, while India's Ministry of Home Affairs argues that compliance is a reasonable expectation.

The international Wikipedia community speculates that the loss of certificate is related to other Wikimedia conflicts in India, including the November 2024 Asian News Internal vs. Wikimedia Foundation court case, the February 2025 accusation of disparaging Sambhaji, or the above-described April 2025 call by the Greater Mumbai Police for the Indian government to shut down all access to Wikipedia.

While The Signpost only last covered the CIS A2K program 10 years ago, the organizers themselves have numerous published reports of typical Wikimedia editing programs documented on the Meta-Wiki page.

This month's announcement marks the end of an era that began around 2010, when the Wikimedia Foundation was pursuing serious plans to itself open an office in India, as its first presence outside the US (Signpost coverage: "India: Media speculation on country's future 'Wiki-capital'). By early 2011, these plans had been downgraded to the hiring of an India-based consultant. Later that year, the very well-attended first WikiConference India evidenced the country's high levels of enthusiasm for Wikipedia (India remains the country with the third most active editors on English Wikipedia), but also foreshadowed its current hostile legal environment: As reported in The Signpost at the time, [a] group of about a dozen protestors from the youth wing of the nationalist BJP political party demonstrated against one map on Wikipedia, whose depiction of the contested border regions surrounding Jammu and Kashmir they objected to [...] and planned to file a criminal case against "Jimmy Whales and Wikipedia's India chairman [sic]". (The BJP subsequently took power in 2014 and remains India's ruling party as of today.) – Bluerasberry, H

Until 31 May, the Wikimedia Foundation is seeking community comment on and approval of the 2025-25 annual plan]].

Everyone is invited to form their own thoughts on the planned "objectives and key results" (OKRs), but at a glance, they seem to continue the to prioritize Wikipedia over other Wikimedia projects, and seek short-term increases in established programs for editor engagement and retention rather than development of more ambitious multi-year projects and features.

As reported last November, the Wikimedia Foundation's revenue for 2023-24 was US$185 million. The Wikimedia project values user governance and user input as fundamental to the success of the project, so how the next year's nearly $200 million will be spent is to be decided by Wikipedia editors and Signpost readers. Please give the Wikimedia Foundation board your feedback by commenting. For anyone who wants support from the Signpost in rallying attention and funding commitments to your favorite cause, please consider submitting your manifesto, petition, or other call to action in the next issue, so that you can recruit more people to support it. – Bluerasberry

Wikimedia LGBT+, the Wikimedia user group which supports LGBT+ Wikimedia editors and the development of LGBT+ Wikimedia content, welcomes its first staff members Bisi Alimi as first Executive director and Vic Sfriso as Director of programmes and community engagement.

The development of Wikimedia LGBT+ is of general interest to the Wikimedia community for several reasons. One is that WikiProject LGBT+ studies is among the most popular WikiProjects in English Wikipedia, and it tends to be popular in all Wikimedia language versions where it exists. The rising importance of those issues in national election campaigns for many countries is reflected in high frequency and intensity of editorial LGBT-related wiki conflicts – another reason why everyone should be aware of the health of the wiki LGBT+ community. Examples include discussions of transgender pronouns in biographies and how to report notions of transgender identity. LGBT+ Wikimedians and those editing LGBT+ topics are increasingly the targets of harassment, so this pool of editors is at the forefront of testing and using the Wikimedia platform's social and technical systems for promoting civility and addressing misconduct, such as the Wikimedia Foundation's developing Incident Reporting System. Finally, despite the global nature of Wikipedia, there are few examples truly global collaboration in the Wikimedia Movement. The LGBT+ community is a random subset of the world population, so Wikimedia LGBT+ is a group which attracts individuals from all parts of the world to seek protection and community.

Please welcome Wikimedia LGBT+'s staff, and do what you can to support them in contributing to the Wikimedia Movement's global multicultural infrastructure. It is in everyone's interest that the international Wikimedia community have multiple channels and networks in place to convene global conversations on making Wikipedia a high quality universal reference source. – Bluerasberry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(miscellaneous)#Vote_now_on_the_revised_UCoC_Enforcement_Guidelines_and_U4C_Charter - U4C Charter vote, and revised UCOC Enforcement guidelines

Affcom - Have the 2025 members been announced? meta:Affcom seems to be updated

WMF Bulletins - meta:Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin/2025/6 (also see if Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin/2025/4 listed things we didn't summarise before)

Wikipedia:Arbitration_Committee/Noticeboard#Conclusion_of_CheckUser_consultation_and_change_to_the_Oversight_team,_April_2025

Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/2024_review/Phase_III/Administrator_elections - Admin elections are now a thing! New elections expected mid this year WT:AELECT is coordinating the logistics

Comment these items out if something happens.

• New administrators: check for likely 'crat chat after Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/EggRoll97 2 voting ends 19 April
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects have reached milestones: TKTK
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Honshu (beginning 14 April 2025), followed by Stuffed toy (beginning 21 April 2025), followed by Internet research (beginning 28 April). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
• Tariffs take off: To no one's surprise, daily readership of the Tariff article shot up from less than 5000 a day to over 60,000 on 3 April. (template:Annual readership is currently suspended but the data is available externally.)
• Katy Perry takes off, too: Daily pageviews on Katy Perry increased from the mid four figures in early April to 120,000 on April 14, the flight date of Blue Origin NS-31. Oddly, the page about the space mission only reached shy of 26,000 pageviews.

• Herbal collaborations: Ongoing or upcoming editing collaborations include WikiProject Cannabis's 420 Collaboration through the end of April, and WikiProject Plants's Philodendron Garden Party, through the end of May.
• Challenges: WikiProject Europe's European Destubathon is active through the end of April. Other ongoing challenges can be viewed here.