The Signpost is a community newspaper written by Wikipedia editors for Wikipedia editors, chronicling updates from within and outside the Wikimedia movement. Our cadence, depth, and breadth are pretty much dependent on your submissions and suggestions, among other internal processes. The Signpost's content structure covers everything from updates within the movement to outside of the movement, from compilation of research on Wikimedia movement to jokes and crossword puzzles, as well as allowances for commentaries and opinions. Want to contribute to The Signpost? Here are some ideas.

10–30 minutes

• Contribute to "in the media". Every issue of The Signpost summarizes recent journalism about Wikipedia. Search for news through your favorite search process. There are 10-20 articles a month. Make a decision of whether an article merits a 1-sentence or 1-paragraph summary. Write your summary, and post it to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-06-21/In the media.
• Summarize any interesting and broad-interest Wikimedia community activity, particularly governance issues, in News and notes.
• Go to WT:NEWSROOM and join in any discussion. Start with unanswered or smaller posts. Your opinion and review is invited.
• Sign up as a copyeditor here, or if you want to start right away, go to WP:NEWSROOM#Article status. Find a scheduled submission which says, " Ready for copyedit". If it also says, "No talk page section · click here to open one", then note that. Copyedit the submission using our coordination guide. After you check it, change the header template to |Copyedit-done = yes. Now either go post to the newsroom talk section, or click to open one as you noted. Say something about the piece you reviewed so that other editors can review whatever is most sensitive or could use more opinions.
• Address any item in the Suggestions queue.

90+ minutes

• Make a submission, again at Submissions.
• With any frequency and no commitment issue to issue, take on any of the requested regular features. The general pattern with all of these is that you personally find interesting activity in Wikipedia, you ask the people involved for comment, you try to recruit them to write anything, then you fill in the blanks for a story. Popular and unstaffed currently includes Discussion report (summarize any interesting discussion anywhere in wiki), WikiProject report (summarize any group activity of any WikiProject), or the Arbitration report (summarize any arb proceedings, whether a case or anything else).
• If you figure out any of those reports, then you will have the skills to work out other kinds of reporting. Other kinds of possible reporting include WikiConference reports (at least two per month, most not reported), giving a community view on how to respond to the WMF's many requests for community input, and getting out the vote for elections including picture competitions or mass reviews for user rights, or rallying for petitions including in Meta-Wiki or cross languages.
• Revive any other story format in Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Content guidance.
• Help with Signpost administration. Current needs include rallying consensus for an AI policy, picking one of the 20+ Signpost software tools and documenting how it works and what it accomplishes, and going through the newsroom talk archives for the past year and resolving any unresolved problem.

Long-term

The Signpost is looking for people to take on long-term roles:

• Publication managers: Publishing The Signpost is a complex and multi-step semi-automated procedure, and maintaining the ready state of the publication go button is the primary responsibility of the publication manager. The publication manager is also able to pull the trigger themselves whenever they feel that The Signpost is ready for its monthly publication.
• Outreach managers: Editors delegated to assist the editor(s)-in-chief with managing The Signpost's tip lines, handling the occasional Signpost reader surveys, and maintaining The Signpost's social media accounts.
• Designers: These editors are tasked with maintaining The Signpost's distinctive visual appearance and template code, and helping to make sure that editors that wish to write articles don't get bogged down with procedural matters.

Quick notes

• You might be involved in the matter of the story you want to write. If you are able to objectively write the story, go ahead. However, we encourage you to file the story ahead of the release deadline as your fellow editors and The Signpost's editor-in-chief may not be able to vet through in time before the release. Otherwise, make a submission and ping onwiki/approach offwiki any editors who have recently contributed to The Signpost for immediate assistance.

On May 20, Wikimedia Foundation announced the disbandment of the Community Tech team at meta:Community Wishlist#May 20, 2026: Community Tech becomes a program:

After noticing that having a centralized team was leading to frequent bottlenecks and delays ... we've decided to shift Community Tech into a program that multiple teams are officially responsible for supporting ... disbanding the Community Tech team and the roles of five engineers and one manager. (emphasis added by The Signpost)

The community reacted strongly to the announcement (see this issue's Technology report and other sections).

Upon reaching its 763rd signature, the Wiki Workers United solidarity petition became the 2nd-most supported proposal or petition ever on the English-language Wikipedia, behind only the 2024 open letter about Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation, which has 1374 signatures.^[1]

meta:Talk:Community Wishlist#Proposed direction for Wishlist; Chief Product and Technology Officer S. Deckelmann has stated they are "in listening mode" to the feedback.

Footnotes

Two upcoming Wikimedia Café sessions will focus on the editor reflections project, featuring Clovermoss. If you would like to attend the session, please see these instructions.

The dates of the sessions are:

• Saturday 27 June 2026 15:00 UTC
  • equivalent to 8:00 A.M. in Los Angeles (UTC-7)
• Sunday 28 June 2026 03:00 UTC
  • equivalent to 13:00 in Sydney (UTC+10)

– M

• WikiProject Feminism revival: Several editors have been revitalizing WikiProject Feminism, and are welcoming editors interested in the topic.
• WikiProject Computer security revival: Other editors are reviving WikiProject Computer security, and invite editors to help tackle the todo list.
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects have reached milestones:
  • English Wikipedia reaches 1,000 editors who have made more than 100,000 edits, according to this list.^[a] Edit counts can be affected by the type of edits a user makes, such as copyediting, script assisted editing, and the size of each edit, and very high edit counts can also be calculated innaccurately as a result of a software bug.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Khoekhoe, followed by Injury (beginning 22 June). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
• Chinese Wikipedia There is an ongoing RfC on formalisation of Arbitration Committee and possible return of local CheckUsers.
• New account creation flow: Wikimedia Foundation announced a new account-creation user experience to address what they described as a "broken" process.

Twelve years ago, on June 16, 2014, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) announced that as part of the site's terms of use (ToU), all paid editors must declare that they are paid editors, and disclose their employers, clients, and other affiliations (unless a Wikimedia project has implemented alternative disclosure policies).

Surprisingly, six days earlier a group of PR practitioners had made a similar "Statement on Wikipedia from participating communications firms" (which we'll refer to below as the "2014 statement"). It was posted on Wikipedia by the founder and president of PR firm Beutler Ink, Bill Beutler (User:WWB Too).

While they did not make any hard and fast promises, they did express their intentions to follow the Wikipedia community’s conflict of interest (COI) rules, the WMF terms of use, and to try to correct any infractions made within their own firms and to inform other firms when those firms violated the rules.

Beutler explained much of the PR group's statement and much else that has happened with paid editing since then in a presentation at WikiConference North America 2024 (complete with video).

This article investigates how well some of the largest firms who signed the 2014 statement executed their plan.

There has been an explosion in the growth of disinformation in general across the internet. Not surprisingly, there has also been a tremendous rise in paid editing activity on Wikipedia, most of it only declared as COI editing, rather than the required declaration of paid editing. The category Wikipedia conflict of interest edit requests, listed 253 unanswered edit requests from June as of June 16, 2026, or about 17 unanswered requests for each day. Enforcement activity among Wikipedia editors and admins has also surged since 2014.

Beutler's 2024 presentation mentions four particular cases after 2014:

• Operation Orangemoody in 2015,
• a stunt by Burger King in 2017 which was later awarded a prize for creative advertising at Cannes,
• the North Face scandal in 2019, and
• the editing which was paid by the city of Portland, Oregon for Rene Gonzalez (politician) in 2024.

Other paid editing scandals that Beutler didn't mention include Jeffrey Epstein's reputation management efforts (see The Signpost's 2020 report) plus two other well-known sex offenders.

For many other such scandals, see the list in the right hand column at the top of this page, which includes a U.S. presidential candidate, an award-winning novelist, a Canadian charity, an imploded submersible operator, Russian oligarchs, an Indian billionaire, and on and on.

The question of whether Wikipedians can trust PR firms is especially important now. Paid editors are in a rush to incorporate AI into their operations. The New York Times recently reported that a reputation management company, Terakeet, charges their clients $5–10 million per year for their services, which in some cases included Wikipedia editing. How are we going to be able to properly review this firm's editing? It will be difficult, but is not impossible. The Times's sources identified User:VentureKit and User:Quorum816 as Terakeet's paid editors on Wikipedia. Both accounts were blocked as sock puppets (see previous Signpost coverage).

Representatives of some of the largest PR companies in the world signed the 2014 statement on Wikipedia:

• Edelman is one of the largest independent PR agencies in the world. It was represented in 2014 by Phil Gomes who founded the Facebook Group CREWE which tried to exert influence on Wikipedia in favor of PR companies.
• Omnicom, which did not sign, is one of the largest networks of PR, advertising, and marketing firms in the world. It owns FleishmanHillard, Ketchum Inc. and Porter Novelli which all signed.
• Ogilvy & Mather, a large subsidiary of the non-signing WPP plc, signed. Several of its subsidiaries also signed, including Burson (then known as Burson-Marsteller)
• Many companies owned by (or "partnering with") MDC Partners, a large PR firm, did not sign the 2014 statement. Only MDC itself and its partner Allison+Partners signed the statement.

Other PR firms signed after the original posting. WWB Too suggested in the video that these firms hadn't had much experience editing Wikipedia, or were just "jumping on the bandwagon".

To see how well the companies who signed the 2014 PR editing statement followed the principles laid down in their statement, I examine articles where they were obviously paid and had a very serious COI, the Wikipedia articles about the PR company itself.

Phil Gomes of Edelman provided much of the impetus behind the 2014 statement by sending an open letter to Jimmy Wales letting him know what Wikipedia could do for PR firms and then organizing a Facebook page to exchange information and opinions from others. The Facebook page, known as CREWE for Corporate Representatives for Ethical Wikipedia Engagement became controversial in its own right (see previous Signpost coverage).

The open letter said that "communications professionals and the Wikipedia community can/must work together" because Wikipedia was near the top of every Google search page for every company and many Wikipedia articles were "derelict" or out of date. Among Gomes's suggestions on how Wikipedia could accommodate PR professionals' needs was:

"We could revive discussion about some guidance you gave in 2006, whereby a company could author a suggested entry, license it under the (GNU Free Documentation License), post it on its own site, and 'notify Wikipedians who are totally independent.' "

Of course, they could have done that without permission from Wikipedia.

On Wikipedia Gomes, as User:Philgomes, made only 71 edits, mostly before the 2014 statement. After the statement there was little PR company editing to the Edelman article for about six years. From 2020 to 2024 Edelman's representative acting on the Edelman article was User:MichaelBush48 who had a passing acquaintance with the 2014 statement, and seemed to act in good faith, but appeared to be somewhat confused about how to implement the statement's principles. He made 47 edits, including 8 to the article, 34 to the talk page, 4 to Wikiprojects asking for help adding his talk page requests to the article and in 2023 one to his user page making a clear disclosure of his COI. The requests were long and rambling and generally ignored.

Signatories from this group included FleishmanHillard, Ketchum Inc. and Porter Novelli

The article on Omnicom Group itself was not edited by any declared paid editors. The article on FleishmanHillard was only edited twice by an informally declared "conflict of interest" editor. Those edits were minor.

Two fairly detailed requested edits were made by User:Heatherer on the article talk page for Ketchum Inc. Two independent editors replied that they had inserted some of the material but disagreed with other material and left it out. Heatherer pointedly asked them to put the disputed material into the article, but eventually let the independent editors alone.

Porter Novelli is a subsidiary of Omicon and in turn has Voce Communications as a subsidiary. Voce signed the 2014 statement, but there is no Wikipedia article about it. Porter Novelli specializes in work for non-profits, government agencies, and other public service public relations. It may be the company most compliant with the 2014 statement.

There are a couple of editors in the history of the article about the company that are a bit surprising. One is from the owner of a small PR firm that signed the 2014 statement after the first posting, though there is not much in the actual edits that is surprising. Another editor Timtempleton was an active and widely respected Wikipedia editor who was suddenly indefinitely blocked by a checkuser.

For the most part, the three editors who declared their COI status on the article talk page were model citizens. They suggested long edits on their user talk pages and clearly were respectful toward ordinary editors. Nevertheless, they may have overwhelmed those volunteer editors with the seven long detailed requests submitted from 2017 through 2023.

WPP plc is a holding company that owns Ogilvy & Mather and WPP Media (formerly known as Group M) is the holding group's media operation. Both WPP plc and WPP Media have been clients of Beutler Ink with the talk page requests and Articles for creation submissions handled by User:Inkian Jason. This paid editor properly declared their paid status on their user page, as they have with about 150 other Beutler Ink projects. Their work on the two WPP articles went smoothly and was quickly accepted by other editors.

After the 2014 statement two declared paid editors started a formal set of long detailed edit requests on the Ogilvy article. Heatherer and Danilo Two were also working through Beutler Ink, which is run by User:WWB Too, William Beutler, who originally posted the 2014 statement.

Both of these paid editors used similar methods to make changes to the article. Both submitted about six long, multi-step requests, which were inserted into the article with minor changes or corrections by just two editors for each paid editor.

A third apparent paid editor, RedZone22 made only three total edits in 2022 and 2024, seemingly trying to follow the same playbook. They did not, however declare their employer or client, only saying "I am connected to Ogilvy".

Burson-Marsteller, now just called Burson, had only one declared paid editor, User:BCW Editor starting in 2019 with the difficult task of merging the articles for Burson-Marsteller and Cohn & Wolfe after the companies themselves merged. The half-dozen or more detailed requests in this case may have been justified in taking up so much volunteer time. But it likely would have been easier to keep the Cohn & Wolfe article and just summarize the material into one section with a link to the older material.

Burson did have a couple of skeletons in the closet. In the 1980s they did PR work that was criticized, involving the Bhopal disaster and the Chicago Tylenol murders which had long been included in the article. The requested edits apparently did not have any effect on these sections of the article.

While there is no rule against submitting long requests and fine-tuning an article, there is an essay (which is not an official policy or guideline, but in this case is quite influential) known as WP:BOGOF or "Buy one get one free". The essay strongly suggests to paid editing companies that they not overload our volunteers with long and detailed requests as it creates a systemic bias. The more time volunteers spend editing articles about commercial companies, the less time they have for creating and editing articles about other more interesting and worthwhile topics.

Heatherer also was a paid editor on this page while employed by Beutler Ink. They posted their edit request as a draft on an apparently long user page that was later deleted because it was "Unambiguous advertising or promotion". Two independent editors apparently inserted the bulk of the draft into the article. Both of these editors showed their independence, saying that they couldn't insert all of the information provided in the draft.

Another apparent paid editor, Ademdcpartners, made only one edit and it was directly to the article page, announcing a new CEO.

Near the end of Bill Beutler's presentation at WikiConference 2024 he seems disappointed that his big effort to bring in more PR firms to ethical paid editing didn't work. His work just seemed to fade away.

Most noticeably, perhaps, was the lack of interest by the signatories in editing articles. There just weren't that many attempts at self-interested edits.

The major Wiki-sins of commission were pushing the independent reviewers too hard and not appreciating the benefit the reviewers provide them by providing a second point of view.

One thing that Beutler shouldn't be disappointed about though, is that he got a lot of business from some very big PR firms who didn't want to go to all the effort to do the editing themselves. It may simply take too much effort for a PR firm to ethically edit Wikipedia themselves. It may be too far from their usual business practices for PR folks to participate here.

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

This paper^[1], presented last month at a workshop about "Diffusion of Harmful Content on Online Web" as part of the annnual ACM WebSci conference, proposes a comprehensive system of disclosing AI involvement in contributions to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, building on the edit tags system of the MediaWiki software. From the abstract:

"Building on prior work analyzing inconsistencies in Wikipedia’s Special Tags system, this paper argues that current tagging practices do not match the realities of modern editing workflows. Tool usage is frequently underreported, tag adoption varies widely across languages and topic areas, and editors often have incentives to hide tool involvement to avoid being held responsible for errors introduced by automated systems. Recent work, such as the development of LLM-based image captioning tools for Wikimedia Commons, illustrates that AI participation is already widespread and expanding. Instead of attempting to restrict AI use entirely, this work proposes a more practical strategy. This paper outlines a set of new tags organized into four major categories: Content Creation Tags for textual editing, Assistance and Verification Tags for evaluation and support functions, Metadata Suggestion Tags for organizational elements, and Media-Specific Tags for images, audio, and video. These tags document how, where, and to what extent AI systems contributed to Wikipedia content [...]"

In the paper's introduction, the authors refer to extensive community discussions over the past years as a motivation for their system:

The community is also divided on what to do, with some advocating for a prohibition of AI tools and others embracing use of tools for light editing or even more.

In practice, a prohibition on AI-generated text would be impossible to enforce. Many people suggest banning AI-generated content, but this is hard because AI use is already common and difficult to detect. This work aims to enable contributors to Wikipedia to label their contributions accurately. Rather than discouraging or shaming contributors for using AI tools, labeling AI involvement is a more practical path that encourages honest disclosure.

The paper also mentions the numerous quality problems with AI-generated content on Wikipedia identified by the WikiProject AI Cleanup.

A "Demonstration" section walks through several concrete examples of applying the proposed tags. One involved prompting an LLM to "Polish this paragraph" for some text about Bangladesh, showing how AI tools can assist with stylistic refinement while leaving the substantive content and overall meaning under human control. Another one, demonstrating the propsed "AI-Bias-Detection" and "AI-Bias-Removal" tags, used the article 3ality Technica (as an example of an article already tagged for NPOV problems by human editors).

Like much other peer-reviewed academic research about the impacts of the AI boom, this paper is already outdated in some respects at the time of its publication, both in terms of the capabilities of the models used in the "Demonstration" section (e.g. GPT-4) and in its summary of community discussions. The latter summary seems to predate English Wikipedia's WP:NOLLM policy, instituted in March 2026, which now outright prohibits some kinds of edits in the red-colored part of the figure (although not all kinds of use of AI). However, the paper at least mentions that the community strongly opposes unreviewed AI text in articles. Also, for the above quoted statement that AI use is [...] difficult to detect, the authors cited a paper from 2020, i.e. from before the advent of current LLMs and AI detectors.

A section on the practical implementation of the proposed system emphasizes that it

[...] must be vetted through Wikipedia’s established governance processes: discussion on Village Pump, feedback from relevant WikiProjects, and potentially pilot programs in specific topic areas or language editions. Different communities may adapt the framework to local norms while maintaining core transparency principles. Technically, MediaWiki must provide easy tagging mechanisms, dropdown menus, checkboxes, or semiautomated suggestions based on edit patterns. Specifically, the proposed tags would be implemented using the ChangeTagsListActive hook, which allows new tags to be registered in the system. Editors would apply them through a collapsible checklist in the EditPage form, and once applied, tags would appear in revision history and be accessible via the API [...]

From the abstract of this paper (accepted at the upcoming CSCW conference):^[2]

"This study investigates Wikimedia Commons contributors’ lived experiences with the Computer-Aided Tagging (CAT) tool, an AI-assisted image tagging system designed to improve Commons’ discoverability, searchability, accessibility, and multilingual support. Using a qualitative analysis of 595 CAT-related community comments from 11 wiki pages and 16 in-depth interviews, we identify seven key issues that contributed to CAT’s mixed reception and eventual deactivation. We also offer community-informed suggestions for improving the tool.

In the "Discussion" section, the researchers identify

[...] seven key issues that contributed to CAT’s mixed reception and eventual deactivation: (1) misalignment in the perspectives of Structured Data on Commons, (2) unclear definitions of the Depicts statement, (3) difficulties applying Depicts through CAT, (4) lack of integration between categories and CAT, (5) an ill-specified AI/ML task, (6) limited support for collaborative evaluation, and (7) a disconnect between CAT and Commons’ search functionality.

("Structured Data on Commons" is an effort launched by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2017 to integrate structured data from Wikidata on Commons. An an earlier research publication had found it to have "made little progress on Commons because many contributors simply did not know about it or did not care", or "preferred their 'own' [category-based] system over a new structure designed by the foundation".)

(See also our past coverage of previous research by the two authors.)

• See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.

From the abstract:^[3]

"This randomized controlled study assessed how model assistance influences the quality of Wikipedia edits created by undergraduate audiology students [in Brazil]. Thirty-six participants were assigned to two groups: Group 1 (G1) edited without model support, and Group 2 (G2) edited with ChatGPT support [ChatGPT 5 Instant]. Twenty blinded expert reviewers evaluated a sample of 30 texts (15 per group) using a six-item Likert-scale instrument covering Content, References, and Language. Inter-rater reliability was high (Gwet's AC2 = 0.80). The analysis suggests that LLM assistance may lead to a significant improvement in Language (β = 0.400; p = 0.023; Cliff's δ = 0.400). G2 improved by 0.68 ± 0.47, while G1 improved by 0.28 ± 0.57. The analysis found no significant differences for Content (β = 0.167; p = 0.214) or References (β = −0.267; p = 0.859), although G2 scores in the latter category trended lower. [...] LLM assistance appears to risk substituting constructive contribution with linguistic polish.

From the "Content selection" section:

"The 15 texts closest to the median in each group were selected, excluding the 3 with the greatest deviation (6 total). Extreme word counts were excluded to reduce heterogeneity, as very short edits may indicate disengagement or misunderstanding, and long edits could show pre-existing expertise"

From the "Instrument" section:

"A questionnaire [...] was created to evaluate the quality of Wikipedia articles, consisting of six questions rated on a four-point Likert scale (Poor, Fair, Good, Excellent). Its construction was based on an open-licensed assessment rubric used in educational activities involving (Wiki Education Foundation, 2025; see also https://w.wiki/8Xzv). This rubric was selected for its use in Wikipedia educational contexts and its development by the Wikipedia educational community. The instrument is structured across three dimensions with six items. Content: Evaluates thematic scope (Q1), ensuring all relevant aspects are covered, and quality/accuracy (Q2), assessing if the information is current and clearly explained. References: Checks verifiability through citation coverage (Q3) and the reliability of the sources utilized (Q4). Language: Assesses textual mechanics and correctness (Q5) alongside the logical organization and coherence of topics (Q6)."

From the abstract:^[4]

"Short descriptions are a key part of the Wikipedia user experience, but their coverage remains uneven across languages and topics. In previous work, we introduced Descartes, a multilingual model for generating short descriptions [see this newsletter's 2023 coverage]. In this report, we present the results of a pilot deployment of Descartes in the Wikipedia Android app, where editors were offered suggestions based on outputs from Descartes while editing short descriptions. The experiment spanned 12 languages, with over 3,900 articles and 375 editors participating. Overall, 90% of accepted Descartes descriptions were rated at least 3 out of 5 in quality, and their average ratings were comparable to human-written ones. [...] The pilot also revealed practical considerations for deployment, including latency, language-specific gaps, and the need for safeguards around sensitive topics. These results indicate that Descartes's short descriptions can support editors in reducing content gaps, provided that technical, design, and community guardrails are in place."

The preprint (by several Wikimedia Foundation employees and researchers from EPFL) mentions that the underlying models The model is currently deployed on LiftWing, Wikipedia’s production machine learning serving platform (linking to [1]).

In "How Anonymous Wikipedia Editors Influence Global Narratives — and AI Systems", Toby Dershowitz and Ashley Rindsberg at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a pro-Israel lobbying group, claim "Citogenesis on an institutional scale" and describe this as "one of the most consequential acts of historical revision in the digital age". Their criticism is focused on Wikipedia's coverage of Al-Jazeera, a media network that is banned in Israel.

Dershowitz and Rindsberg point out that Al-Jazeera is sponsored by the government of Qatar, which is an absolute monarchy, and add:

Reporters Without Borders ranks the country among the world's least free for journalism.

However, a quick look at the World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders (original here) shows that Qatar currently ranks at no. 75 – in other words, in the top half, and 41 places higher than Israel at no. 116. Dershowitz and Rindsberg go on to critique various edits to Al-Jazeera-related articles. These may well be worth studying, but caveat lector. As the above example shows, Dershowitz and Rindsberg have their own agendas and blind spots. Not all of their critiques ought to be taken at face value. – AK, B

YouTuber Cambrian Chronicles uploaded "How a Hoax on Wikipedia Changed a Country's History", an investigation into the Wikipedia article on the Battle of Orewin Bridge, a page that has existed since 2005, revealing the only source for the article to be a 14th century chronicle by Walter of Guisborough, and that the other surviving sources from the time provided no support for.

The events of this day [...] in important historical works from the 20th century, are all based on the description given by this man, Walter of Guisborough. A man who described a battle that no sources ever corroborated, in a location never before mentioned, with a conclusion that disagrees with his contemporaries both in and outside of Wales. [...] In fact, the only source that Walter's battle of Orewin Bridge ever had anything in common with was his own description of the Battle of Sterling Bridge.
— Cambrian Chronicles (YouTube channel)

They assert that this work was meant to provide a narrative to reflect how the English should have conducted the Battle of Sterling Bridge, which they lost, to allow them to achieve victory. They also call the work a "hoax", reflecting the impact it has had on public perception of the battle. – M

See related coverage in this issue's Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-06-21/Technology report

Various national and international media, including The Verge (paywalled), PC Magazine, The Times of India, heise, Il Foglio (in Italian) and The Register – with the latter claiming a planned "banner sabotage" – have reported that "hundreds of prolific Wikipedia editors are threatening to go on strike" over the dissolution of the Community Tech team at the Wikimedia Foundation. Reactions at User talk:Jimbo Wales#WMF technical team have also been discussed, including withdrawal of contributions both financial and volunteer time. – B

• A matter of trust: Jimmy Wales tells the WSJ Leadership Institute CEO Summit that trust is declining in journalism, politics and business because of AI (just trust me).
• You-know-who versus Grokipedia: "Grokipedia articles show selective political divergence from Wikipedia, research finds: Researchers identified ideological sourcing shifts between Wikipedia and Grokipedia articles." (Digital Watch by Geneva Internet Platform)
• AI detection: Wikipedia may have built the best AI writing detection guide says makeuseof.com.
• Topic ban catches media eye: "Wikipedia bans anti-Israel editor from editing articles on Israeli-Palestinian conflict" (Jewish News Syndicate) concerning a Contentious topic ban.
• National Indigenous Heritage Month: National Indigenous Heritage Month event at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, via CBC Television video.
• Future-proof: Raju Narisetti, Anusha Alikhan write "Wikipedia under siege: how to future-proof the internet's last best place" for Journalism Film Festival program.
• Lines drawn and erased: The MediaPost Media Insider commentary "Wikipedia Vs. Google Search: Game On!" says that Wikipedia "drew the line" on AI generated content "partly an act of self-defense for the entire information supply chain" but Google AI Overviews "erased" another line, replacing search results with "synthesis, delivered with the smooth confidence of a thing that cannot tell you why it chose this framing over another".
• Virginia is for lovers ... of Wikipedia: Prof. Peter Uetz edits, and encourages students in Virginia to do so, too. Via Virginia Commonwealth Uni News.
• Android came first: The Wikipedia game "Which came first?" is now available on iPhone. The game was originally released to Android platforms in June 2025.
• "Wikipedia made me do it": "Chicago cross-burning feared to be hateful racist threat turns out to be idiotic anti-Trump protest: 'Saw the Wikipedia page'" (New York Post). Some twists and turns and invitations for credulity from the reader...but maybe true that the burner of crosses didn't fully understand what that means.
• Will the real winner please stand up?: "Wikipedia Lists Result of Iran War as 'Iranian Victory'" (Newsweek) A Request for comments (RfC) to change the outcome to "inconclusive" was opened and, as of our deadline, remains under discussion.

A proposed standard neutral point of view policy was developed to support young, developing and small Wikipedias.

The neutral point of view is a core philosophy of Wikipedia. It was the very first policy written for English Wikipedia, way back in February 2001. Comparable policies were soon developed on other Wikipedias, and it was often the first policy for new Wikipedias as they were created.

But somewhere along the way, as the Wikipedia family of projects grew, policy development on younger projects lagged behind. While NPOV was a core philosophy on these projects, documentation of it was often entirely absent, or represented by a link to the policy of another project. That link was often to English Wikipedia’s policy, which had continued to expand and become more complex over time. It was a policy suited for a mature, well-developed Wikipedia, rather than a young, small Wikipedia in its early stages of growth.

This was one of the challenges that a small NPOV working group took on starting about a year ago. After communicating with younger, smaller Wikipedias, and doing some research on how other Wikipedias documented this core philosophy, we realized that it would be helpful for Wikipedias to have a common NPOV standard that they could link to, one that would use as much simple language as possible, and that would be easily translatable.

The result is below, ready for community discussion. The underlying philosophy is familiar to most Wikipedians, and even some of the language is reminiscent of the English Wikipedia policy, but it is short and simple.

What does it mean for English Wikipedia? Well, our policy contains everything in the proposed global standard, and considerably expands upon it; we have lots of related policies, guidelines and processes. The same is true for most mature Wikipedias. We don’t have to do a thing to meet the global standard; this project’s policies helped to set it.

It means a lot more for smaller, younger, and developing Wikipedias. These projects usually have considerably smaller communities, and their primary focus is content development in their language, rather than the infrastructure that includes policy development. Feedback from leaders on many of these projects was that they and their communities simply did not have the time or experience to develop project-specific core policies, but that they would find a simple and straightforward “standard” to be much more applicable than trying to translate or copy the large and complex policies present on mature Wikipedias.

On June 17, a discussion of the proposed global NPOV standard was started on meta. Editors from all projects, large and small, are encouraged to participate. The discussion will close on July 15. Some questions to think about:

• What are the “best practices” that you think are most helpful in ensuring our project demonstrates NPOV?
• Is there a really key aspect of NPOV that this standard doesn’t include?
• What can large or mature projects do to help younger or smaller projects develop this and other policies?

This op-ed challenges the way we recruit and retain long-term Wikipedia editors. As direct traffic declines, the strategy of converting readers into editors is threatened. The op-ed questions whether that was ever truly an issue. Future long term retention and recruiting of new editors could include drawing from sister wikis, such as Wikidata, Wikisource, and Commons, as well as investing more in GLAM partnerships and Wiki Education.

Lately, I have wanted to write a love letter to humans creating knowledge. I wanted to (belatedly) celebrate 25 years of the Wikimedia movement! I wanted to celebrate the evolution of the weird and wonderful activity of editing an encyclopedia, into a global phenomenon.

Wikimedia is part of my life: I spent the last 20 years editing English Wikipedia, becoming an admin both here and on Commons, organizing editathons, leading GLAM partnerships, designing campaigns and learning how to batch edit Wikidata. I discovered my best friends and greatest collaborators because of the Wikimedia movement. Wikimedia took a weird teenager, with a tendency to dive deep into rabbit holes, and gave him a space to grow into a confident, citizen of the world.

...but in thinking about this grand and ambitious project to create the sum of all human knowledge -- I am extremely sad about the way we are having conversations about the future right now. We are underestimating our strengths by arguing about features that created our past (i.e. on Wikimedia-l, or the community response to the Foundation's Annual Plan). These conversations assume our decline because of Google  and other AI companies seizing our "reading" public.

Wikipedia's readers have always been a happy accident based on the good content created by our uniquely organized contributors: we are the weirdest, most wonderful, (and weirdly argumentative) collection of humans interested in curating public knowledge. Our relationship with Google was beneficial to our growth, but doesn't need to be a dependency. We need to be building a story that plays to the strength of humans who want to create knowledge, not the weaknesses of our distribution channels.

Let me try to offer one better vision than the old cliches we keep falling back on: for example, the annual plan from WMF depends on funneling readership into editorship. We don't need theories that have persisted unevidenced for at least the last 15 years. The "Reader-to-Editor funnel will disappear" framing of the future does not reflect the movement of human knowledge creators we hope to build for the next 25 years, but instead is rehearsing a failing business model that we benefited from during the last 25.

Wikipedia is not alone in experiencing a fundamental shift in the internet. Almost all publishers and non-profit communicators are experiencing an upending of the knowledge economy, shifting traffic away from knowledge producers and their source of income towards unprofitable AI based interfaces. For example, almost all news websites are seeing a decline in traffic.

Commercial, mass market AI models that are taking over the search space and substituting for user needs served by other websites like Wikipedia, while tending to be people pleasing, and epistemologically convergent.

Very few of the AI systems attempt neutrality or accuracy or editorial objectiveness very well or have a balanced process for creating knowledge – but the vast majority of the public will be consuming these non-critically, and consuming it like they did ten years ago for more trustworthy platforms like Wikipedia. When I was finishing this essay, Google announced that search is going to be a "customizable app" system designed to trap readers, instead of facilitating search for a path to users interacting with websites. The internet is moving away from an internet of readers of websites towards an internet of corporate controlled AI interfaces with little regard for what that means for content quality.

We have entered an era of tools that mimic reliability, while amplifying the editorial decisions of the commercially and bad actor motivated web (and likely are persuading most people to change their opinions and understanding of critical real world topics and giving bad advice that puts vulnerable people like children at risk.

But the substitution for "reliability" is extremely uneven, affecting different topic areas extremely differently, and publishers are building strategies around that. As Luis Villa, a former staff and long time supporter of the Wikimedia Foundation, recently analyzed: our readership decline is also highly topic specific, more severe in certain languages and somewhat slowed by updated content.

The topics that are declining quickest are not surprising:  math, sciences and computer sciences are all topic areas where our content tends to be too expert, too technical or meant for users already partially familiar with the topic. These also tend to be the topics that AI tools have strong benchmarks and are being optimized to logically navigate.  

Whereas we are seeing readers decline significantly less rapidly on topics that (historically) have been the focus of encyclopedias: humanities, biographies, social sciences and culture more generally.

AI models concentrate citations in a cluster of "top" sources for a domain. For every grouping of prompts that I am tracking for public interest questions about climate and energy, 10 sources are responsible for 1 in 4 of citations, and the top 100 sources for a topic area are responsible for 3 in 5 citations. Wikipedia is always in the top 50 of the sources, usually the top 10.

A recent study by Muck Rack, a PR advisory and services firm, found sector specific evaluations of public interest topics important to journalism regularly include Wikipedia as a top 5 citation alongside other knowledge repositories like the medical Pubmed and the International Energy Agency.

What does all of this suggest to me? We are experiencing a market correction in our readership stock, where Google was overvaluing us as a click-through destination for readers on a wide range of topics that we probably weren’t ever well positioned to serve (such as general interest explanations of complex math terms; I love you pi, but a video about a pizza probably explains you better).

At the same time, we have more influence than ever: users are relying on our knowledge content in more interfaces than ever. We just aren’t tracking it, and we aren’t going to get paid for that value in the same way.

Market corrections tend to be very good at revealing where companies and economies have strengths, and where their overoptimistic investments weren’t playing out correctly. Clearly we were overindexing the role of reader metrics in our mental model of our value to the world.

It's very important for us to double down on the thing that isn’t declining nearly as quickly: updating and increasing the relevance of Wikimedia content and finding the gaps in public knowledge that we are uniquely able to serve to these new kinds of interface.

We need to get really serious about how we imagine building content that will be used by AI in the future, and spend less time chasing the kinds of "it's the easiest answer" readers that we got in floods from Google 15 years ago.  In the past we could rely on different kinds of readers, because of our chance relationship to a monopoly. But the long-term decline of readership to other language wikis like Spanish Wikipedia, where auto-translation by Google has substituted for local language content, this was always a bit of a devil's bargain to begin with.

And in the medium-to-long term, Wikipedia and its sister projects are likely not the destination for readers, but a tool for "architecting" the responses of AI tools (both agentic, and directly accessed by humans in interfaces like chatbots): Wikipedia continues to play an outsized role in grounding the models as a source of citations overall, and by topic/domain. And, more likely than not in influencing the underlying training data for the models (for good or ill), and thus Wikipedia provides a tangible, human centered way of influencing their knowledge. We are more relevant than ever!

However, as a movement, we aren’t adapting quick enough to "see" the impact we are having on the AI tools; instead WMF strategy, and the community conversation are falling back on a motivated reasoning about finding more "readers who will become editors like us" – doubling down on a past, instead of imagining a different, regenerative future.  

About a month and a half ago, I was in a Wikimedia Foundation community call for the Annual Planning process, and board member User:Victoria said something to the effect of "I promise you that there are more editors like us out there."

To start with: if you talk to anyone who has worked with me for the last decade, I am extremely optimistic about there being 100s of thousands of new contributors in the world. I have spent over half my life advocating for recruiting newcomers (first as a volunteer organizer, and then 11 years working for the Foundation) – I believe the new editors are there, but as I have argued for most of that time, showing them the edit button has never worked.

However, I also firmly disagree: I don’t think it helps that we all assume there will be more "organic" editors who are "just like us". The funnel (or at one point the Foundation expanded this to a flywheel which suggested that more editors would lead to more readers) theory of change may feel familiar, and "make sense", but it tends to lead everyone who needs to make decisions about our strategy down paths of motivated reasoning.

The tendency of the oldest Wikipedians (like me) is to obsess over recreating detail obsessed editors like themselves who can spend hours of their lives crafting exquisite text, fixing formatting and content errors – this is unsustainable and not really what is needed from the public in the face of new AI powered tools. Fixing technical problems, and writing smooth text with structure is the main use of large language models. Creating a pipeline of new editors who are basically glorified mechanical Turk contributors, while there is a better piece of software to do that work is not a way to create loyal human volunteers.

Volunteering is a privilege of free time; volunteering on information dense content in a world of information overload is a rare personal choice;  and if the assumed pathway to contribution is the same labor being outsourced to AI models in most other parts of our lives – we are narrowing the funnel not growing it.

By the way, at least in high income, English-speaking countries, we probably found all those folks who want to do these kinds of edits in the last 25 years of Wikipedia. Which would explain why the most recent study on successful new editors shows that they are mainly young adults freshly graduated from university.

The tendency of people who try to influence the direction of the Wikimedia Movement who were not originally editors, is to approach it as readers: "If only random phone users read Wikipedia more and could be invited to click the edit button they would stay".

This is a nice user feature to have, but again this is not sustainable – the vast majority of humans approached us as passive consumers of Wikipedia for the past 25 years. A shift in phone experiences is not going to suddenly help them become active knowledge creators or critical consumers – that is exactly why AI tools and short form video have found an audience: convenience and passive consumption. (and if this was the case all the WMF staff and donors aware of Wikipedia editing would be committed editors). We have repeatedly tried this tactic (for example this donor banner experiment we ran a few years ago) but it doesn't work. I have even advocated for it myself before: I have been proven wrong.

As someone who regularly dips his toe into New Page Patrol: I am fairly confident we don’t want most of those organic "under 150 edit individuals motivated to create new articles" users to be our next generation of editors anyway. Many of them are clearly here to promote commercial topics such as business and promotional biographies, the same commercialized spam that dominates the rest of the internet. These users frequently behave like the Audience builder type persona identified by the New Editors research which tends to have bad faith intentions, and not "stay" on the wikis in constructive ways.

If you talk to retained new contributors, and listen carefully to their stories: it's not that "readers will become editors" but more "the people that make good Wikipedians, also enjoy consuming long-form written content like good Wikipedia articles". Research like the Journey Transitions study by the Foundation, reinforce this: editors see a world of opportunity in our content. As a former Wikimedia Board chair, Christophe Henner said: we created something truly unique in our human-facilitated process for finding consensus across competing intellectual traditions. Becoming a Wikipedia editor is not a very "normal" way to spend your down time.

What we need is a powerful diversity of tactics leveraging social context to gather people still invested in the human centered exploration of knowledge and give them a chance to join our community. We need a diverse, optimistic investment in reaching people already spending most of their lives engaged in intellectual curiosity.

The tendency is to say "but what about the overlap of readers and donors?": sure the ratio of potential donors to actual donations changes, and does make the work more complicated. But the Fundraising team has been more successful than ever at raising money: in part because they understand how to get the most from our banners, but also because they have been working to decouple fundraising from readership over the last 5 years, and it seems to be working!

Let’s decouple the "editor" and editing strategy from readership as well!

The funnel theory of change is best understood through metaphors: we are trying to persuade individuals that see Wikipedia as a utility to be consumed like a service, that they too possess some internal desire to contribute knowledge; advocating for this theory of change, is like advocating for bottom trawling to catch a rare 1 in 10,000 underwater snail, sure it works because you caught everything at the bottom of the ocean, but you end up killing other species, destroying the ecosystem, and throwing out some of the snails with the other bycatch.

In order to catch the editors we need for the future: what we need is the equivalent of lobster traps: species targeted, persuasive systems that get filtered by organizers and experienced editors for the healthiest lobsters we want to keep (though please don’t eat the new editors for dinner or serve them to the Cabal). We need each kind of potential group of editors to feel invited, with specialized support for their motivation to act.

Here are just a few of the signals that we could be letting guide bold, evidence based ways to invest in decoupling newcomers from readership:

• Editing doesn’t need to start with Wikipedia, and is sometimes more interesting elsewhere:
  • Wikidata and Commons continue to increase registrations despite never having been good sources of traffic.
  • Efforts like WikiCite or Coordinate Me consistently bring in high quality contributions to Wikidata and Commons from both external partner networks and existing Wikimedians.
  • Some of our most successful global south programs are on Commons (ever heard of Wiki Loves Monuments or Africa or Earth or Folklore?), Wikidata, Wiktionary and Wikisource, especially in new audiences learning how to contribute to the internet for the first time (e.g. Lexemes in Ghana or Wikisource in India)

• Catching new audiences in classrooms and other places of curiosity works better but requires professional investment
  • Wiki Education's program has been the most successful at scale intervention for creating high quality content used by readers: by training students in classrooms to fill knowledge gaps.
  • Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom has been the most successful at scale intervention have seen for increasing readership and editors in smaller language Wikipedias
  • Basque Wikipedia’s education program has consistently demonstrated a successful audience-specific increase in traffic, because its used in schools.
  • Most of us who joined the movement during the early 00s and 10s were aware that "anyone could edit" Wikipedia because the news, faculty and teachers argued with us about how reliable Wikipedia was. You see this origin story a lot everywhere retained editors share their story, like the Clovermoss editor reflections survey.
  • Encyclopedia Britannica has even pivoted their entire business model towards educational environments to create a financially viable future. We stopped comparing ourselves to Britannica a long time ago, but I think there is something to learn from their business strategy.
• Catching knowledge stewards and communicators through their professions  addresses movement strategy goals of knowledge equity and topics for impact
  • GLAM partnerships have consistently filled gaps in our visual and Wikidata content pipelines.
  • The continued expansion of Wikidata has been in large part due to well-targeted academic training, civil society outreach and support of GLAMs, such as library friendly outreach programs and library funded data projects.
  • Wikimedia UK and other European affiliates have consistently supported Wikipedians in Residence, often funded by external partners and ally organizations, that produce regular volumes of wikipedia pages, editors and filled key critical knowledge gaps.
• Persuading people in their own context matters, and only affiliates have capacity for that (even if some affiliates are ineffective)
  • Wikimedia Nigeria’s advertising campaigns as part of an early pilot on reader awareness – did significantly move the needle on reader awareness
• Editor decline is more closely coupled with on-wiki cultural problems than readers
  • That Spanish Wikipedia has had an editor and reader decline long before this current boom, and it appears to have been attached to lower quality content leading Google to auto translate content from English Wikipedia. Why is there lower quality content? One good theory is that editors on the wiki report really high feelings of harassment.

If we were to take all of this evidence together, quite the opposite of a funnel seems to drive the success of individual wikis and content editors: context specific recruitment, higher quality newcomers and culturally dynamic on-wiki communities receiving new editors seem to be some of the strongest signals we have of creation of content and subsequent traffic.

See also coverage in this issue's Opinion piece: "Wikimedia Foundation staff develop union and Wikimedia user community reacts"

Having spent more than a decade at the Foundation, most staff want to build this kind of future as well and are more than capable of doing it. However, there is a growing concensus of individual staff not feeling represented and forming a union in order to be more involved in organizational decision making processes (please express solidarity).

Moreover, I have been hearing disappointing reports from attendees to the closest thing we have had to a movement-wide conversation about the future, The Futures Lab, which only had about 100 community members. If the world is rapidly changing, how are we supposed to spawn innovation at the scale we need to facilitate our diversity with a conversation that only included 100 people?

The problem is that the overall theory of change is premised on this idea that "investing in readers and the platform" is an "investment in editors and donors".  This "funnel from reader to engaged reader to editors" may seem like a "common sense" thing but I have yet to see an intervention or documented example of a change in reader or registration experience rippling through to "editorship" – and WMF’s own analysis of the registration decline couldn’t connect it with interface changes for example.

Even if we end up in a world where humans are not the main consumers and curators of encyclopedic style content:  we need the Wikimedia Foundation to support more diverse and potential futures where we are embracing the strength of human curiosity, and imagine a future that includes us as editors. We could be asking questions like:  What does vibe curating of knowledge look like? How do we empower the most inspired humans to fill the quirkiest gaps of the "sum of all human knowledge", while not trying to compete with AI?

And if we are so concerned about AI for readers: the data highlighted by the foundation so far about AI has only been one of fear of overwhelming the servers -- again why are we so focused on the "reader/consumer metric" as a leading indicator of a threat?

If we sit back and look at our 25 year history: the reader decline is probably a natural correction in Google sending us searchers. Most of these searchers weren’t intending to find a long-form essay on a deep topic (and as User:HaeB recently pointed out in Wikimedia and AI Telegram, Google is responding to a different kind of user that our form of content is not good for serving). That the world wants to consume us in new formats, should be a celebration of opportunities – after all, how do we expect to reach all humans in their own language?

If we are serious about the "sum of all human knowledge" center of our mission, there are ample signals that could enable editors and readers to benefit more from Wikimedia in the context of AI:

• AI Search is creating a lot of signal, that the Wikimedia Foundation could be giving that to the editors: for example, AI Query fanout, for instance is driving a huge chunk of citations and traffic, and AI generated synthetic queries are some of the easiest data to filter out of any Google Search Console data (4-8 entity strings, that are clearly not written by humans and structured to elicit subtopics matched against user intent)
• Google and Bing are both including signals about AI citations in their analytics data (I am an advisor at Appropedia.org and this has significantly changed our perspective on where they are providing impact for internet users)
• We could be building better partnerships with companies which provide more researcher focused AI research tools to make the research part of writing a Wikipedia article easier (as has been piloted by Wikimedia Switzerland and Poland)
• When we negotiate contracts with AI companies for Enterprise, there has to be something they could be giving us to super charge editors filling knowledge gaps with low quality results, like we tried to do with Google search data multiple times.

We need deep editors interested in reorganizing public knowledge, with ambitious public knowledge goals, and they need the infrastructure to help them do that.

We probably don’t need to recruit new editors focused only on shallow editing, primarily fixing typos or our backlog -- if we provide good creative spaces for our existing editing community to build their own workflows with AI assisted programming and classification tools. I am sure LLM assisted writing tools and workflows should address these detail oriented problems. In the last few months, AI has been helping me rethink my editing priorities, and my way of "seeing" how to contribute to the movement.

A healthy Wikimedia requires an ecosystem approach focused on human thriving, not a solitary tree depleting groundwater as climate change and human extraction create water bankruptcy.

As someone working now in climate and environmental communication, it makes me really sad that the Foundation’s metaphor for its annual plan pivots on a single deep rooted tree that "goes it alone through a drought": the shepherd's tree (Boscia albitrunca). The solitary species is a one of the worst cliche’s in well meaning, but ineffective environmental communications: the single charismatic anchor species "going it alone" which is good for fundraising, but terrible for ecological conservation. Species depend on ecosystems. Sending roots deeper into the soil  doesn’t work in dryland restoration: the groundwater table is retreating and climate change means that it doesn’t have a chance of regenerating in at least the next 1000 years, unless humans intervene to harvest water on the whole landscape.

From an environmental perspective, a single tree is doomed to fail: we are in a world where all of our environmental systems are on the edge of collapse without more holistic thinking – and the digital ecosystem is no different. The most concrete thing we can do is invest in diverse, multispecies ecosystems, with different tactics for survival, so that we can weather climate change and human-created water bankruptcy which are drying up aquifers – i.e. the AI extraction that we need to endure. One tree tends to live for a lifetime, doesn’t recharge the water in the soil and can easily die under stress, whereas an ecosystem can be helped to regenerate new and innovative approaches to survival.

Like libraries, schools, museums and other institutions that have lasted more than 100 years because they have adapted their strategies as intergenerational stewards of the knowledge the world needs, we need to reimagine our ecosystem and do it intentionally. We need a regenerative Wikimedia strategy: investing in building tree plantations, and propagating other kinds of life, and re-architecting the water flows so when it does rain we catch it all. What we need is to imagine a knowledge commons 25 years from now, and double down on our strengths: empowering the humans who want to curate human knowledge.

I look forward to contributing to an encyclopedia and all of the seedlings around it for the next 25 years of my life. Let's keep doing it, but let's be more intentional about how we cultivate the knowledge stewardship we need for that future, rather than live in fear of our lost past!

See also coverage in this issue's Technology report: "Community Tech team is disbanded, controversy erupts"

On 20 May 2026, Wikimedia disbanded the Community Tech team, which was responsible for the Community Wishlist. This abrupt announcement affected six employees, including several members of the Wiki Workers United which went public in February 2026.

On February 6 (two weeks after Bernadette Meehan had taken the reins as new Wikimedia Foundation CEO), longtime WMF employee Bryan Davis announced on Mastodon that he and several other staff had begun an effort to unionize:

Five years ago I made a Twitter post calling for employees of @wikimediafoundation to organize a union. Yesterday a group of us came out publicly to all other staff as being actively engaged in that effort. I’m proud of everyone who has helped get us to this new milestone and I look forward to being part of a recognized bargaining unit in the future.
— [2]

This labor union, labeled "Wiki Workers United", also has its own web presence at https://wikiworkersunited.org and Mastadon instance.

Over 1,000 comments were exchanged between community editors and Foundation leadership. The layoffs were covered by news outlets The Verge, Heise Online, and PC Magazine. This opinion essay focuses on the future of the nascent Wiki Workers United initiative and explains why editors should care about trade unions and get involved. I am writing this from the perspective of a disgruntled tech worker and union member.

George Bernard Shaw once said that "democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve". Replacing nation-states with workplaces, the quote's meaning still holds true. A simplified version of the power resource approach used in the global labor movement argues that the strength of any labor movement, and its capacity to respond, depend on four different factors.

The power resource approach as defined by the organized labor movement is an analytical theory of change that analyzes the technical, social and economic relations in which workers operate.

• Associational power refers to the willingness of its members (Foundation staff in this case) to respond in a coordinated manner (forming a union, publishing shared statements, maybe even going on strike). Furthermore, the reliance on a [larger] pool of volunteer editors for content creation suggests that volunteer editors mainly hold symbolic societal power, but this picture shifts when you focus on the advanced permissions of trusted functionaries. Volunteer editors with advanced permissions would create a significant disruption cost, if they were to strike in solidarity with Wiki Workers United. Unlike staff, volunteers are not financially dependent on the WMF, so they can credibly strike for as long as necessary.
• Societal power draws on a larger audience beyond the immediate workplace bargaining unit. Examples of broader audience include NGOs, GLAM partners, Wiki readers/editors. Perceived legitimacy and boosted morale are important aspects of any popular labor dispute.
• Structural power is the strategic economic positions that both Wikimedia Foundation itself holds within the digital space and the unique labor-market skill sets that WMF staff have. Using engineering as an example, if the WMF could rely on a smaller core of engineers (both cheaper and easier to manage) or rely on volunteer open-source contributions alone to keep the lights on, the WMF would have done so a long time ago. The perceived and actual structural power of both the WMF and the staff themselves is up for debate. Clearly the WMF and the community do not value the Community Tech the same way.
• Institutional power is shaped by the legal setting, from national laws to the workplace policies and work contract language. As we saw from the Community Tech debacle, aside for potential union busting, what the WMF did was legal, even if highly unfair. Generally speaking, union busting is illegal in the United States, but the tough reality is that enforcement is negligible. Within the United States, every state has different regulations regarding right-to-work and at-will employment laws. Employees, contractors and freelancers might have differing regulations regarding their eligibility to bargain with the employer. Globally, there is no true labor law framework, so if Wiki Workers United were to operate as a global union, it would legally speaking be a patchwork of local initiatives volunteering to coordinate together. At the end of the day, behaving like a union is a political commitment, but it is important to also keep in mind the legal landscape and risks involved.

Ultimately, the qualitative character of the wider Wikimedia movement hinges on the net balance of power between volunteer editors, paid staff and the Foundation's leadership, among other stakeholders (contributors, readers, affiliates etc.).

The WMF has operated without workplace representation for over 20 years. What, then does the early stage union drive at Wikimedia mean for the already complex ecosystem of the Wikimedia movement?

Workplace democracy, including unionization at the WMF now is inevitable. Depending on the degree of community support (see more below), possible future retaliatory measures from management and the internal organization of Wikimedia staff, the nascent Wiki Workers United will either be an adversarial or harmonious addition to the Wiki ecosystem. The degree of influence that both staff and the community wield will determine how bold their respective demands will be.

As of writing, the solidarity-strike pledge is the second most popular petition on English Wikipedia which simply asks management to do the right thing and go beyond the bare legal minimum.

Management so far indicated a willingness to listen and even indicated a positive reception to unionization, but it does not mean much if management is unable to back words with action and correct its mistakes. Over the course of a long month, the WMF has hired back 3 of the 6 fired employees, but it has not made any commitments to avoid union-interference nor proposed any plans for the future of the Community Wishlist.

In a nutshell, the Wiki Workers United campaign focuses on two major themes:

1. Working conditions – internally focused on Wikimedia staff, e.g regarding hiring, firing, and salary equity.
2. Empowering the broader Wikimedia movement by giving a voice regarding transparency, and product development.

The abrupt dismantling of the Community Tech team without a plan, cut off one of the direct access points between the community and the Foundation engineering teams. Given the high churn rate of senior leadership, I am skeptical that the Foundation can make strategic decisions, without input of either the community or staff. The fact that CEO Bernadette Meehan and CPTO Selena Deckelmann were unprepared for the community backlash, reveals a disconnect from the community, something the Community Tech team ironically could have mitigated.

Assuming good faith, that the layoffs were not in fact motivated by union busting, it exposes second issue. The WMF's broken feedback culture with a culture of retaliation is an even stronger case for unionization. It is not organizationally sustainable if individual staff members need to make a risk assessment, and decide whether they can or should express themselves publicly and or internally within the workplace. This is likely a familiar situation for anyone who depends on their job for their livelihood. High profile union-drives are often blamed for fueling conflict, when in reality they reveal existing frictions and fault-lines between management and workers.

It is worth noting, the solidarity campaign for Wiki Workers United currently is happening without direct coordination of Wikimedia staff, in order to ensure their safety.

Formally, staff at the Wikimedia Foundation need enough signatures from coworkers to confirm their representative legitimacy. Then they can either request voluntary union recognition or go through a National Labor Relations Board supervised election.

Winning an election is a hurdle in its own right. Wiki Workers United will need to figure out its leadership structures, internal decision processes, demands and public communications. Winning their first collective bargaining agreements is an even bigger hurdle, especial as a first time union. As a union busting strategy, some employers disrupt union elections, while others allow the elections to pass through, and then stall the collective bargaining phase, dampening the momentum and budding enthusiasm of newly formed unions over a period of several years. This is the strategy Starbucks is using.

Any trade union worth their salt is democratic, but it is only as good as the level of engagement by its members. If anyone believes the Wikimedia Foundation staff are incompetent, then of course any related union structure will also be incompetent. Fortunately, it is safe to say that the overwhelming majority of Wikimedia staff have the interest of the Wikimedia projects at heart and broadly speaking, they want the same things as the Wiki community.

A trade union for Wikimedia staff would not solve all of the pressing issues such as rising authoritarianism, enshittification or income inequality, but it would enrich the debates and enable lower-level staff to participate in conversations without fear of retaliation. This will be necessary for the difficult conversations that don't have easy answers, for example budget priorizations and technical directions in Wikimedia Foundation planning.

With full time employee compensations representing a large expenditure in the annual budgets, it is tempting for disillusioned community members or management to view employees as line-items and perhaps even the root of Wikimedia's problems, without dismissing the qualitative institutional knowledge and community relations they provide.

A trade-union can save the Foundation money, by ensuring stable employee retention, reducing the cost of onboarding, context-switching or golden-parachutes that executive leadership receives when they depart. In the difficult situations where terminations may be necessitated for financial reasons or individual misconduct, collective agreements can ensure just-cause is adhered to, bringing confidence both to the wider workforce and wiki community that terminations happen in a dignified manner, where all other options are exhausted, instead of turning every layoff into a high-profile public relations disaster that risks harming the reputation of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Despite renewed interest and popularity in the United States, in the private sector, union density or the ratio of union/non-union members is on the decline. The rate of newly unionized workplaces is not making up for the growing labor market, or retiring union members. Outside union hotspots in (New York City, Honolulu, Las Vegas) most workers learn about trade-unions through external means, i.e media coverage, e.g Hollywood celebrities going on strike or as alienated passengers of annoyingly effective transport strikes.

Unionization in the tech sector is on the rise after decades of inertia. Jake Orlowitz, founder of The Wikipedia Library warns in his op-ed that Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia. In my personal editing capacity, I have noted some of the new global tech labor struggles at Samsung, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Amazon among others. Future Wikipedia articles ought to be be created about the growing number of non-profits that are unionizing, from Planned Parenthood, Amnesty International, ACLU, EFF, South Poverty Law Center and the many other affiliates of Nonprofit Professional Employees Union. A wave of unionization at digital and traditional newsrooms reflect the collective responses to automation and depreciating online views.

It is not the first time volunteer editors have taken collective action either. Wikipedia editors might fondly remember in 2012 when multiple Wiki projects blacked out their respective home pages, or FRAMGATE which was one of the lowest points in the deteriorating trust between the community and the WMF. Repair work and restoration of trust has slowly happened, but this Community Tech incident is reigniting that mistrust.

In other volunteer-driven platforms, Reddit mods went on strike in 2023 as did AOL chatroom monitors in 1999. Some of these collective actions were more successful than others. There are instances where commercial content creators at Spotify and YouTube organized themselves, in parallel with Spotify and YouTube employees organising, but I cannot recall an instance where volunteer and paid contributors have combined forces, which might happen for the first time with volunteer editors threatening solidarity strikes in coordination with Wiki Workers United.

Wikimedia Foundation neither fits the classic "big tech", media nor non-profit profile, but either way, unionization is a logical response to the symptoms of growing uncertainty around algorithmic enshittification, disconnects between public values and internal actions and general uncertainty. Sounds familiar?

Fortunately, we are not starting from scratch. Do not underestimate the long-term obstacles ahead of us, but also embrace the fact that we have a lot of collective power. It is important to both celebrate the symbolic power and the withdrawal of activity by editors with advanced permissions (see the statistics)

1. Sign the English Wikipedia solidarity strike petition at Wikipedia:Wiki Workers United solidarity
2. Sign the official statement of solidarity with meta:Wiki Workers United
3. Update your signature and link to the Wikipedia:Wiki Workers Uniteds
4. Wear your union bug/userbox with pride

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{{User Wiki Workers United}}	This user supports the Wiki Workers United union of WMF staff. Sign the petition!

1. Wikimedia Deutschland has a works council and nonprofit-membership structure (see below)
2. Art+Feminism Workers United! – an ongoing union effort after mass dismissal. Unfortunately they are in a much weaker position (refer to the power resource approach above).

Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) is an autonomous non-profit that heavily contributes to MediaWiki, including the creation of Wikidata and its own version of Technical Wishes. Every few years, WMDE employees vote in 7-of their coworkers to represent them in the Wikimedia Deutschland works council, a German legally binding structure that approves the hiring/firing and transfer of employees. The works council's default regulatory powers are so powerful, it can even block the rollout of internal software not explicitly approved in a works agreement. If anything, because of employee input, WMDE and many other tech companies in Germany are in a better decision to make long-term technical decisions, because they are not afraid of being retaliated against, for merely questioning senior leadership.

User:Shushugah is a veteran Central Works Council chair and union organizer in an automotive tech company in Berlin, Germany. He spends his volunteer time editing Wikipedia and supporting unionization in transnational workplaces. He contributed to Signpost article on WikiProject Organized Labor and digital unionism on Wikipedia.

• Womack, John Jr. (2023). Olney, Peter; Perušek, Glenn (eds.). Labor Power and Strategy. PM Press. ISBN 9781629639741.
• "How to Start a Union at Your Workplace". Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. 2026.
• Ripley, Amanda Tobin (2024). "The Passion Subsidy". The Power-Shifting Potential of Collectivism in US Art Museums. – challenges of unionizing in a workplace you are passionate about
• Cohen, Nicole S.; de Peuter, Greig (2020). New Media Unions: Organizing Digital Journalists. London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429449451. ISBN 978-0-429-44945-1.

On May 20, the Wikimedia Foundation provided an update on the Community Wishlist, revealing the decision to disband the team of six staff and replace it with a decentralized program. Community discussions have arisen as a result of the decision, with many commenters bringing up recent attempts to unionize, claiming it to be a key motive behind the decision. An ongoing petition to stand up and take action has gathered over 1000 signatories, including many prominent and respected Wikipedians.

See also this issue's "Community view": "Putting the Wish into the Wishlist"

The Community Wishlist (then named the Community Wishlist Survey) was originally started in 2015 by Danny Horn (aka Toughpigs), the then-new manager of the Community Tech team. The idea was relatively simple: over a two week period, community members could post their ideas for projects that the Wikimedia Foundation could take up and the proposals would then be de-duplicated and sorted into broad categories, at which point the wishes could be voted on by the broader community. The idea was that by the end of the wishlist, there would be a prioritized list of ideas and it would be the Community Tech team's job to investigate how to implement these ideas over the next year. In an op-ed in the Signpost, Danny mentioned that the idea was not originally his, but rather inspired by the parallel Technical Wishes program that Wikimedia Germany had successfully conducted since 2013. That project originated with a survey by volunteer developer User:Raymond, and was carried out through the chapter's own Community Tech team ("Technischer Communitybedarf", or TCB).

The timing is important in its own right. The Community Wishlist started at the end of Lila Trekitov's term, shortly before her resignation as the Executive Director of the Foundation. During this time, the Foundation was under heavy scrutiny from editors for pushing through multiple technical projects in a top-down manner: MediaViewer, the full-screen viewer for images; Flow (now known as Structured Discussions), the doomed talk page system that came before DiscussionTools; and an aborted Visual Editor roll-out. The MediaViewer deployment culminated in the Superprotect controversy, in which the WMF instituted a new protection mode that prohibited anyone other than staff members from editing. It was an attempt to prevent admins in communities like German or English Wikipedia, who were against MediaViewer, from exercising their ability to edit JS and CSS pages to block feature from being shown to readers. As a result, Community Wishlist symbolized an olive branch being extended to the community, allowing them to have some say in what features would be developed by the Foundation going forward.

Over the next few years, the Community Wishlist Survey worked like clockwork (mostly). Every year, WMF staff would setup the Community Wishlist around the holiday season and community members would post their wishes. The Community Tech team would then go through the wishes, decline those that were obviously out of scope, group them into categories, and then open the wishlist up for voting by the community. Once the voting was over, Community Tech would spend the next year investigating the top 10 wishes and trying to implement them. This era led to many fulfilled wishes that have since gone on to become core infrastructure for a lot of Wikipedians.

The first version of the wishlist alone led to the eventual creation of three well-known tools: IABot, which fixes dead links by adding Internet Archive links to pages; CopyPatrol, a tool that surfaces copyright violations in real time; and the PageViews tool. Subsequent iterations of the wishlist have produced, in no particular order: WhoWroteThat, XTools, Global Preferences, LoginNotify, user-right expiration, Editor syntax Highlighting, Pinging users from edit summaries, Watchlist expiry, Template Wizard, SVG Translate, improvements to NPP workflows, Wikimedia OCR (an OCR tool for Wikisource), VideoJS integration (the video interface on Wikimedia sites), Edit recovery, Live Preview, the ability to share QR codes, and Multiblocks. Some of these need no introduction. XTools, for example, is ubiquitous on user contribution pages, as is Syntax Highlighting in the default editor. For editors who joined Wikipedia after 2018, the absence of features such as the ability to mention users in edit summaries, setting expiry dates for user rights, or expiring pages from a watchlist would likely feel alien. Even when the Wishlist and Community Tech did not explicitly implement a wish, it often laid significant groundwork and showed community support for features that would be worked on by other teams or implemented by volunteers, such as the Global Watchlist. The wishlist provided early impetus for the DiscussionTools project and Dark Mode and directly motivated improvements to the Kartographer extension.

Now, this is not to say things worked perfectly. Over time cracks had begun to show. Members of the Community Tech team often talked to technical volunteers about how the wishlist was put together with a bunch of chewing gum and duct tape, resting on a pyramid of carefully crafted templates that, over time, required significant maintenance and became unwieldy to use. There were also problems accurately representing the needs of smaller sister projects whose voices would often get drowned out by the larger English Wikipedia and Commons communities. Concerns were strong enough that, in 2020, the Community Tech team decided to have a special edition of that year's wishlist for focused on wishes from smaller sister projects like Wikisource, Wikivoyage and Wiktionary. Another frequent problem was that sometimes many of the wishes were significantly larger projects than anticipated, leading the Community Tech team to be unable to provide as much attention to the other wishes as they wanted to. As a result, starting in 2021, the team switched away from the promise of doing only the top 10 wishes, instead using a more dynamic system based on factors like overall impact, scope, and number of votes received. The communities served to prioritize wishes that it would work on.

The 2021 changes frustrated members of the community. The Community Tech team completed fewer wishes and spent significantly more time managing the wishlist and the prioritization process. Additionally, the wishes receiving the most votes were often not worked on. Instead, smaller, lower-ranked wishes were completed due to resource constraints. This new status quo culminated in a 2023 suggestion to dismantle the wishlist, where members of the community asked the WMF to dismantle the wishlist altogether to prevent the community from wasting their time voting on wishes that were not going to be worked on. This led to a response from the CPTO, Selena Deckelmann and an extended discussion of the role of Community Tech and the Wishlist within the Wikimedia ecosystem.

In 2024, motivated by the discussion the year prior, the WMF launched the Future of the Wishlist project. As a part of this process, the WMF put together a panel of program managers led by a new hire, Jack Wheeler, who sought to rearchitect the wishlist, fixing the problems associated with the old process and creating a wishlist that would encourage more people to contribute, be more efficient at solving problems from the community, and bring in more opportunities for volunteer and WMF collaboration. They spent all of two months talking with motivated volunteers, then recommended a set of changes. One of the most significant changes would be that the wishlist would remain open throughout the year, with wishes being triaged in real time. Another significant change was removing the ability to vote on individual wishes, instead replacing it with the ability to vote on Focus Areas, groups of related wishes created by product managers that corresponded to a set of related work that any team could then work on. The Focus Areas were again inspired by a similar structure used by the Wikimedia Germany's Technical Wishes project that anecdotally had seen higher throughput of wishes as a result of introducing focus areas.

These changes were not popular with the community. Multiple volunteers talked about how the annuality of the event and the ability to vote on wishes was what made the wishlist special and functional. However, these concerns were ignored and the Community Wishlist Survey reopened in July 2024 with the changes applied, with new name, "Community Wishlist", reflecting that it was no longer a yearly survey.

Almost as soon as the new system was deployed, it started showing its rough edges. Participation in the wishlist took an immediate hit. While in 2023 the wishlist saw the participation of 1439 editors, only 439 participated in the new system. What was previously an extremely well attended event became a backlogged process that nobody except the most dedicated volunteers cared about. While the previous version of the wishlist saw participation from volunteer developers and affiliates to complete forgotten wishes, the new version was much more sterile: across the three years this version of the wishlist was operational, only nine wishes were taken up by volunteers and only two by affiliates. Volunteers filed the talk page of the wishlist with complaints, decrying the lack of any form of proper voting or prioritization process for the wishes. Focus Areas took a while to arrive, but even when they did, the community voting process was lukewarm. The Focus Area with the most votes received only 43 across three years. For comparison, the most popular single wish in 2023 received 240 votes. This response led the WMF to announce at last year's Wikimania in Nairobi that they were going to reintroduce per-wish voting later in 2025.

However, the biggest failure of the new system was in its core promise: that more teams would work on wishes. The main thing that Jack had been brought in to solve was the fact that editors were angry that not enough wishes were being addressed. The changes he proposed were hard pills to swallow, but were made palatable by the promise of more wishes that would be delivered by other teams in addition to Community Tech. However, these promises were never actually realized. Most teams avoided the wishlist to focus on their own OKRs (a WMF term to refer to staff members' own priorities with the organization) and only did the bare minimum in terms of small bug fixes surfaced by the wishlist. Across three years, 21 wishes were worked on by some team other than Community Tech, many of which were collaborations, with the Community Tech team doing a significant amount of the implementation and the other team acting as stewards. Only 7 wishes were ever worked on by singular teams on their own volition and most of these were small bug fixes contributed during Wishathons (WMF internal hackathon-like events to fix wishes). The Community Tech team for the most part still shouldered both the burden of maintaining the wishlist and completing whatever it could when it was not maintaining the underlying software.

Over time, resentment against the new system built up. Many volunteers called on the WMF to make changes to the wishlist process that would bring it closer to the old system. Barkeep49 opened a thread detailing the failings of the current system, with 15 other volunteers chiming in to say the same. In the meantime, the architect of the new system, Jack Wheeler, left the Foundation as the Product Manager of Community Tech, and was replaced with another product manager, Mike Eztuinaga. The failing state of the Community Wishlist was discussed by community members both offwiki and onwiki in 2025, and there were signs that the WMF was receptive about making changes to the system to increase the throughput of wishes.

On May 20, 2026, Sai Suman Cherukuwada, the Deputy Chief Product and Technology Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation posted the following as an update on the Community Wishlist page,

Hello all, my name is Suman and I'm the Deputy Chief Product & Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm writing to share with all of you that we've decided to do some internal restructuring about how WMF responds to and supports wishes. After noticing that having a centralized team was leading to frequent bottlenecks and delays as CommTech staff coordinated with other teams, we've decided to shift Community Tech into a program that multiple teams are officially responsible for supporting. This is a model that has proven success already, but it will involve disbanding the Community Tech team and the roles of five engineers and one manager. We still have dedicated staff managing the wishlist intake and triage process and will continue the same financial support for this work, just under a different structure.
— m:Community Wishlist#May 20, 2026: Community Tech becomes a program

The Wikimedia Foundation leadership had decided to disband Community Tech, the one team that had held the wishlist together for the last decade and instead dive head first into having other teams work on wishes, a strategy that had for the last two years been performing poorly. The announcement touted this strategy as a "model that has proven success" and noted that even though the Community Tech team was going away, the Wishlist itself would not and there would still be dedicated staff associated with the wishlist to triage the wishes as they came in. The dedicated staff in this context was a single person, Mike Eztuinaga, the former Program Manager of the Community Wishlist. This change was done with zero community consultation such that the community at large and even the concerned employees, five engineers and one manager were blindsided by this decision despite leadership having made the decision all the way back in September 2025.

In response to this decision, a thread on VPWMF was created by Novem Linguae which grew to over 0.5MB. Editors discussed the decision and related topics in depth, leading to it being moved to its own Wikipedia namespace page, COMMTECHGATE. The discussion has since gotten coverage outside Wikipedia from The Verge and The Register.

See also this issue's opinion article: "Wikimedia Foundation staff develop union and Wikimedia user community reacts"

On February 6, two weeks after Bernadette Meehan took the reins as new Wikimedia Foundation CEO, longtime WMF employee Bryan Davis announced on Mastodon that he and several other staff had begun an effort to unionize:

Five years ago I made a Twitter post calling for employees of @wikimediafoundation to organize a union. Yesterday a group of us came out publicly to all other staff as being actively engaged in that effort. I'm proud of everyone who has helped get us to this new milestone and I look forward to being part of a recognized bargaining unit in the future.
— [3]

This labor union, named "Wiki Workers United", also has its own web presence at https://wikiworkersunited.org/ (apparently set up the same month as the announcement).

Following Suman's May 20 announcement of the disbanding of the Community Tech team, Tamzin connected this to the unionization efforts, asserting that "This is blatant union-busting" (although later acknowledging that instead of union busting, it could instead by explained by the WMF's institutional hostility toward dissenters, freethinkers, and valuable members of the community). Tamzin and others pointed out that members of the Community Tech team had participated in the union formation process, and also noted that one of the more prominent members of this union was Brooke Vibber. Brooke was the first full-time employee ever to be hired by the Foundation in 2003, serving as CTO from 2005 to 2010, and then joining ArchCom/TechCom, a committee that decided the technical direction of MediaWiki development, until 2020. She was most recently employed as Staff Software Architect at the Foundation. On 13 May 2026, a week before the incident, her permissions were removed and she was let go from the Foundation. (On the other hand, Davis, who had first publicized the unionization effort back in February, still appears to be employed as principal engineer of the Developer Experience team.)

We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with Wiki Workers United and affirm our willingness to engage in collective action if called upon by WWU, up to and including staging an editorial strike. Editors participating in the collective action would be able to use normal Wikipedia consensus-building methods to establish the action's terms and, if desired, to establish further demands of our own in addition to WWU's demands.
— Wiki Workers United solidarity

The solidarity response is at over 1,000 signatories, one of the largest petitions on the project ever, and one of the few times over 300 editors agreed on something. As per their statistics, at time of this article's publication, the list includes 55 of the project's 817 administrators, as well as several oversighters, CheckUsers, Stewards, interface administrators, and arbitrators, and other prominent and trusted Wikipedians. The only petition to have received more support was the 2024 open letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, in response to the WMF considering disclosing personally identifiable information to the Delhi High Court during the legal proceedings of Asian News International v. Wikimedia Foundation. Similarly on Meta-wiki, over 1,000 editors have also expressed solidarity with the union more generally, with many editors having signed both.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Lead Counsel Stephen Laporte, new CEO Bernadette Meehan, and the Deputy CPTO Suman Cherukuwada have made statements denying that the disbanding of Community Tech had anything to do with the formation of the union. On May 23, Wiki Workers United published a statement on their website, acknowledging that they do not know the Foundation's motive behind disbanding the tech team, while stating that the union is necessary for the long-term viability of the project. (On May 29, WWU followed on its Mastodon presence to announce that we'll aim to put up a few clarifying posts shortly, while cautioning that this might take some time.)

One reason the community reacted particularly strongly to the disbanding of the Community Tech team was because many of the engineers on the former team had significant community-facing roles through involvement with the wishlist and thus had, over the years, accumulated a significant amount of goodwill with community members and had developed a deep understanding of the community. On top of that, a significant portion of the team consisted of long-term, well respected members of the community. Two of the engineers were former stewards and other members of the team were well respected members of the technical community who regularly mentor new users and solve tech problems in their volunteer capacity. As a result, multiple members of the community had developed relationships with members of this community-facing team over time.

The WMF decision to disband the team led to these five engineers and one engineering manager going from being some of the most productive and community-aligned engineers in the organization to being faced with the threat of being fired in two weeks if they did not interview for and get hired into a different team. Over the course of the two weeks the community lobbied for the Wikimedia Foundation to reverse its decision, the Foundation refused, stating that the decision was made based on local law considerations. Suman, the Deputy CPTO, called for editors to respect the privacy of the engineers who had been put in jeopardy of losing their jobs. On Friday, June 5th, three of employees from the team, two engineers and one engineering manager, had their accounts disabled and were marked as former employees. The other three engineers were able to interview for alternative positions within the Foundation and were hired to the ModTools team, led by Sam Walton, and the MediaWiki Engineering Group, led by Birgit Mueller.

At this time the Wikimedia Foundation appears unlikely/unwilling to reinstate the Community Tech team. As a result of the intense community discussion, Selena Deckelmann mentioned in the first week that she was in "listening mode". A metawiki discussion by Femke asking for changes to the structure of the wishlist (returning to the old annual format and encouraging community prioritization) garnered 30 votes in favor. In response, Selena decided to remove focus areas and committed to returning to an annual cadence. The critical infrastructure that Community Tech used to maintain is still up for grabs, with Suman's last message on the matter simply listing all the tools and promising that they will eventually be assigned to new teams to continue maintenance. Nine wishes were actively being worked on by the Community Tech team when they were disbanded. Of these, two, "Watchlist labels" and "Hide templates", will continue to be worked on by the former members of the team who still have a job. The future of the rest of the wishes is still nebulous, with Suman assuring us that the wishes have been incorporated into the existing roadmaps of other teams who will subsequently reach out to volunteers. Despite a week passing after the announcement, there has not been any significant movement on the tasks associated with the other wishes.

On June 11, multiple members of the Wikimedia Foundation met with volunteers to discuss concerns regarding the wishlist. After the meeting, Marshall Miller, the Senior Director of Product (who leads almost all contributor facing teams within the Foundation) announced that they would be forming a panel of WMF product managers consisting of Sonja Perry (group product manger in charge of the Growth team, the Moderator Tools team, the Languages team, the Connection team and the Editing team), Mike Eztuinaga (the aforementioned Program Manager of the wishlist), and himself to discuss with the community a more sustainable and long-term way of continuing the wishlist. The initial conversations will occur on the unofficial Wikimedia Discord and will subsequently move to Meta-wiki and will be closely followed by leadership like Selena herself. Marshall has since posted a plan for the future of the wishlist and invited comment on the meta talk page.

In the meantime, it appears that some Wikimedians are thinking about ways to support work on the wishlist without relying on WMF developers. On June 16, James Heilman (former WMF Board member and current chair of the Wiki Project Med Foundation) announced in the Wikipedia Weekly Facebook group that [w]e at Wiki Project Med are looking at putting resources into solving some Community Wishes, asking for votes and comments on the existing 461 open wishes. (Wiki Project Med has already funded other technical work in recent years, such as a calculator gadget and a gadget to interactively display graphs from the "Our World In Data" website in Wikipedia articles.)

Relatedly, Brooke Vibber announced on June 19 that she had taken on a part-time role on Wiki Project Med's community tech team, which will be taking on some of the tasks from Wikimedia's Community Wishlist that don't get grabbed by WMF teams. According to WPMEDF's website, this group of funded and volunteer programmers also includes Bawolff (likewise a former WMF developer, who had implemented the aforementioned gadgets as contractor for WPMEDF), and longtime MediaWiki developer Yaron Koren.

The Editing team is in the process of developing and documenting a JavaScript API that will allow community members to write their own Edit Checks. This means that community members can create userscripts to run complex checks inside of Visual Editor that encode community guidelines. For example, community members can create a custom check to allow members to check how complex every sentence in a article is and warn users when a particularly long or complex sentence is being written.

On June 4 and 5, 2026, the Volunteer Supporters Network (VSN) held their 2026 Annual Meeting, online. The VSN describes itself as "an open network of Wikimedians supporting Wikimedia volunteers" with a "mission... to enhance volunteer support in the Wikimedia movement" and has been active since its founding at Wikimania 2014 London. In 2022, Wikimedia Austria and Wikimedia Poland began co-managing the VSN, but more recently, they passed organizing to Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia Argentina. These periods were funded by Movement Strategy Implementation Grants, and documented in reports for 2022 and 2024. In 2026 Wikimedia UK and Wikimedia Argentina applied for and received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation to expand the Volunteer Supporters' Network into a Hub Pilot with the goal of moving toward being a more global network.

Day 1 of the Annual Meeting, held on June 4^th 2026, was for private conversation with established participants, and is not reported.

Day 2 was "open to everyone in the Wikimedia community, regardless of their role or experience", and is reported here. The Venue was an online Zoom chat with English, Spanish, and French interpretation available, and was moderated proficiently by Lucy Iwuala, Programs Coordinator at the Igbo Wikimedians User Group. The Igbo Wikimedians User Group were co-organizers of the event alongside the VSN. (In addition to moderating, Iwuala also displayed great taste in music, DJing between the two sessions. Powers that be, book her for the Wikimania afterparty!)

Per the event page, the organizers of the WSN Annual meeting were: Chinonso Chidi, Robert Obiri, Vic Sfriso, Sara Thomas. The two day online meeting Event page counted 151 participants. By counting attendees in the pictures shared on Commons, there were 25+ individuals the first day and 75+ individuals the second day.

There were five presenters, and every presenter had eight minutes to speak.

User:RMaliqi (EdWH) spoke about the EduWiki Mentorship Program and EduWiki Newcomer's Starter Kit (2026). She also explained The EduWiki Hub's Open Educational Resources.

Cassie Casares, from the Community Development team at the WMF, presented on Let's Connect, a program started in 2022 which arranges workshops, learning clinics, and "connectathon" meetups. There was recently a "Let's Connect Learning Clinic" on June 18, 2026, focused on How to give feedback as a Wikimedian. The connect-a-thons are similar to the WikiSalon gathering concept, and the learning clinics with "structured editing tasks and human connections to support their work" are similar to Edit-a-thons.

Benedict Udeh, Wikimedia Foundation Communications Specialist, Founder and Program Coordinator Wiki Mentor Africa and Ig Wikidata Hub, presented on Wiki Mentor Africa. As described on their project page, "The Wiki Mentor Africa program is designed to help new and inexperienced developers/programmers in the African communities on not just how to make edits on Wikidata but mentoring Africans on building/maintaining Wikimedia tools by pairing them with more experienced Wikimedia tool creators/contributors." In addition to presenting the Wiki Mentor Africa program, Udeh explained during the Q&A session the importance of making a safe space for women in the Wikimedia editing community and the success he has seen when a safe editing space is provided for women.

Amanda Juno presented on CapX (Capacity Exchange), a new "platform for finding and connecting with fellow Wikimedians to exchange knowledge, skills, and services on a global level" run by Wikimedia Brasil. Juno described CapX as a place to "find people to keep on doing the human labor, the human work." Reach the CapX team by email (capx@wmnobrasil.org) or via its Telegram Group.

Feliani Ruth presented on the Wikimedia East, Southeast Asia and the Pacific Regional Cooperation (ESEAP) Hub. As of June 2026, the ESEAP Hub is supporting 6 Chapters, 10 recognized User Groups and more than 20 active or emerging community groups throughout the region. Feliani described that the ESEAP HUB has had success when providing a safe space for editing, focusing on reducing the intimation factor while also letting new communities know they don't need to be perfect to contribute.

After the presentations there was a group discussion, also moderated by Lucy Iwuala.

The discussion turned to trends and impacts seen in local communities. Contributors included Martin Rulsch, Tania Sola, Maju Planas, Robert J., and Sara Thomas. Not surprisingly, the first answers focused on the impact of AI of the Wikimedia projects.

There was a lot of interesting ideas to share on the topic of AI. Links to the AI Noticeboard, WikiProject AI Cleanup, and Artificial intelligence were shared in the chat. Martin Rulsch, who is the Wikimedia Deutschland (WMDE) Advisor Communications Movement & Community in the Communitys & Engagement Department, shared that WMDE has just organized its first conference, hosted March 6th to 8th 2026, focused on the German Wikipedia community and AI: Meeting on AI and Wikipedia 2026 (in German).

User:Robertjamal12 spoke on AI and declining readership, expressing that we need to "invest more time into the leadership" so we can properly check for AI abuse. Robert also shared a link to the African Wikimedia Admins Space and encouraged interested parties to get involved.

I shared that Artificial intelligence in Wikimedia projects was the focus of Wikimedia NYC's Wikipedia Day 2024 hosted Jan 14, 2024 at Pulitzer Hall, Columbia University.

Martin Rulsch shared how WMDE is particularly concerned about young editors and readers and that they are intentionally engaging with young editors. "Drop of young readers and young contributors is most important to our community" Martin explained how in Germany, there is a monthly online events to encourage youth editing: Jugend editiert (youth editing) and that the chapter has a project manager for youth engagement: Florian Kanitz.

Tania Sola of Wikimedia Mexico emphasized the importance of being patient when engaging new volunteers and when working with the volunteer communities in general. Sola expressed that there is no exact formula that works for all communities.

Maju Planas of Wikimedia Argentina (WMAR) spoke on gathering virtually and the success they have seen in Argentina by letting editors get to know the administrators, which creates "a positive circle where... administrators get recognition from the community" and noted "We encourage people to be kind and patient in the Wikimedia Argentina community. When we think about transferring knowledge, we not only think about working online, we also think of the human side of it, trying to be kind and patient."

Planas described how at WMAR they work to create a pathway for new event organizers so there are new volunteers to lesson the burden on the organizers. User:Sara Thomas WMUK shared that the Volunteer Supporters Network has a resource on burnout. Martin Rulsch shared that at "WMDE, we have staff members take the workload off of the volunteers." Additionally, Martin shared that WMDE offers a free of charge, counseling service in mitigating Wiki-burnout to any editors interested.