Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

Some comments on these points:

1) With respect to the difficulty of mobile editing, one way to
address this is to provide laptops to dedicated volunteers. We are
working on this with the reactivation of the hardware donation program
and I think can scale this to 100s to 1000s of machines without too
much difficulty if we find it to be effective:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_donation_program

2) We need to make Wikidata easier to use within any Wiki. Any Wiki
should be able to reuse it as easily as Wikipedia does. We have made
some advances in this direction lately with the amazing work of Sam
Wilson on the Unlinked Wikibase extension:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UnlinkedWikibase

3) We need to expand on Commons and invite in NC  licensed material
via NC Commons. We need to expand our permissible collaborators, for
example we CAN directly use TED talks and Khan academy videos as we
are a non commercial entity. We need to abandon our ivory tower
approach and use and work with all the folks we are permitted to
within the current legal copyright framework. NC Commons exists, we
could bring in 10,000s of videos just by changing our mind on NC. This
would benefit our readers which should be our key focus:

https://nccommons.org/wiki/Main_Page

4) As you mention we are already using AI for lots of stuff, including
from what I understand translation from one language to another. Yes
AI has some amazing uses but I do not believe it is going to be our
saviour. We need to remain human led.

5) We as a community have finally clearly opened up to the MP4 video
file format. And we are now waiting on the WMF legal team regarding
moving forwards, as the technical ability to permit MP4 is ready to
go. The WMF is not able to led alone, we need to move forwards
together as a movement. This is both a strength and a weakness, but
not one we should lose.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Proposals#Allow_the_Upload_Wizard_to_automatically_convert_MP4_to_WebM

Best
James

On Fri, May 1, 2026 at 12:10 AM Christophe Henner
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> If I may, I think we need to be much more aggressive in how we address the situation. And I'm not saying we don't need interactive graphs, we should have had them years ago, but we need to go further than that.
>
> The way we grew is by having one product for each "vertical" (encyclopedia, pictures, data, thesaurus/dictionary, quotes, books, lessons). And that product is at the same time the content production platform for editors and the distribution system.
>
> I believe our mission is twofold: curating/maintaining content AND making it available. For years, one product was good enough-ish to do both, but not any longer.
>
> Distribution is being eaten by AI summaries, featured snippets, and social platforms. The production side works but is far from being optimal and we always need to be mindful of both.
>
> But, if you start considering it first as a production platform, it unlocks many things and one that becomes magic, the authorization to break it. The ability to lower our expectations on "perfection" (and tech teams are mostly delivering quite stable code for such a platform). But that comes at a cost, speed. It also comes at the cost of piling "problems" like... mobile editing.
>
> I now believe that pretending one product can keep doing both is how we sleepwalk into irrelevance.
>
> Anyway, I, and many others!, have some very long-term, very theoretical ideas on the evolution of distribution, but change needs to happen fast and we do have available quick wins. Not saying those are perfect, but it's to share what it could look like.
>
> Three principles:
>
> Human running the loop is our number one value. Wikimedia projects are great, but we have also successfully created something bigger: communities that across topics, languages, and geographies share a vision on what quality is. Even with the differences across projects, this is our biggest achievement. No AI system can replicate community-validated knowledge with editorial accountability. That's our moat. Not the content itself, but the human process behind it.
> We are techy nerds and we need to act like it again. We leveraged that identity first with wikis, then with Wikidata, then with ORES (we started working on machine learning in 2015 if I remember correctly!). We need to stop protecting ourselves from technology and make it work for us. Invest in innovation truly. Not as gadget but as our edge... like we did in 2001.
> Invest in ourselves. I know this is "controversial" but if we want to be relevant in the future, we need to stop chasing our own tails and frowning every time we talk about investment. As a movement, we have resources available or obtainable. We need to get back into a shape where we trust ourselves to invest in ourselves. This is easier said than done, and a lot of things need to happen. But they are needed.
>
> Three things that can be started tomorrow:
>
> Decide that our projects are production platforms. The core of our investment and focus should be to make them as efficient and useful to all communities as possible. Distribution is a separate problem that needs separate solutions.
> Put Wikidata and Commons (and Wikifunctions) front and center as core resources. I know not all projects are enthusiastic about them but we do need to work that out because they are each in their own way the best way to mutualize resources and work across projects. This needs to be a clear goal and to find out how we make it happen properly together for each projects.
> Unleash capacities. Two clear areas of investment:
>
> The production platform. I know we've been focused on using MediaWiki everywhere. But maybe (or maybe not I'm not the expert) it is time to consider that it may not be the case anymore and build capacity to develop and maintain other product lines. And yes it will mean investment and let go, but sometimes, and, I may be wrong, I feel like we're dragging Mediawiki a bit at the sweat of some insanely dedicated engineers (perhaps Mediawiki is the perfect software but I doubt it).
> AI for editors. We need to embrace AI, and I know this is a complex decision. AI-assisted translation across linguistic versions, AI-powered content gap detection, AI drafts for stub articles reviewed by humans, AI assistants to help newcomers to navigate rules, CI/CD for our content to make content reviewing able to absorb high volume of AI slopes without exhausting users.. The boundaries are to be defined, but we can't define them without the capacity to experiment. The technical teams and community have built a lot of very cool tools and infrastructure but we need to double down. Make it friendlier, easier, more well known, AND with real AI capabilities made available. Without that, we won't be able to experiment and finding out how to use AI in ways that work for us will take ages.
>
> Those would be a start. With potential quick impact and results. If anything, the sheer clarity of the road ahead may be enough to move the needle and open up possibilities for the bigger (more exciting?) challenges ahead on the future of open knowledge.
>
> But this stub of a plan starts with a clear, strong decision, and the first one is to say we consider our projects to be production platforms. That needs to be made by the Board of Trustees.
>
> Perhaps it's not the best path. That is fine, but we need a plan and a path.
>
> Any plan with any remote chance to keep Wikimedia relevant starts with clear, strong, and bold decisions by the Board of Trustees. And the "new" Annual Plan is a continuation of the past. It's not opinionated. It's not laying a clear path, a clear direction. It feels like a non-decision relative to a -20% traffic drop YoY. It reads slow and safe. But no decision is also a decision. The worst one, but still a decision.
>
> The best time to move was four years ago. The second best time is right now.
>
> --
> Christophe
>
>
> On Thu, 30 Apr 2026 at 15:41, James Heilman via Wikimedia-l <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> One way we can make Wikipedia better is by adding interactive graphs. We have built software to allow about 2,000 of these on all sorts of topics to be integrated into Wikipedia. A bunch can be seen on Commons:
>>
>> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:List_of_interactive_data_graphics
>>
>> Today we have rolled out code to add initial machine translation support to the SVG translation tool. For example:
>>
>> https://svgtranslate.toolforge.org/File:Per_capita_energy_use,_World,_1965.svg
>>
>> By translating one SVG an interactive graph can be fully translated into any language. The source of these graphs, Our World in Data, is only in English. We are also developing tools to make keeping these graphs updated much simpler.
>>
>> Many folks within our movement are innovating :-) Best
>> James
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 11:43 AM Michael Snow via Wikimedia-l <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 4/29/2026 10:07 PM, Luis Villa via Wikimedia-l wrote:
>>>
>>> I would go a much different direction. After the 1st quarter, our strategic process has to start by asking the hardest possible question: what if "reading an encyclopedia" is mostly over, like reading a print newspaper? In other words, what if our long-term on-wiki readership graph looks like this one? https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/
>>>
>>> A "print newspaper" is not a valid apples-to-apples comparison, because that phrase combines both the medium and the message and means the data can be dragged down by the limitations of either, or both. The graphs after the first, which leave some hope for the industry in digital subscriptions (hence the proliferation of paywalls in recent years), suggest that the medium is the greater factor in that instance. Having myself been part of a "newspaper" that has never seen the printed page, I would agree. However, as a free knowledge project there are also limits to what we can learn from commercial media, and I'm not suggesting subscriptions are the answer.
>>>
>>> We seem to have two leading theories to explain our trend. One is more about the medium, that there is a transition from text to audiovisuals. The other is more about the message, that information backed by human authorship is losing ground to synthetically generated equivalents. Either way, the premise is that we have fallen behind somehow. Both may even have a certain truth to them, but if we ask thoughtful questions and have the appropriate data, it should be possible to tease out how much explanatory power they really have.
>>>
>>> Ultimately, focusing on traffic means that the underlying issue is information discovery online. If you analyze in the direction of the medium, the challenge is the rise of social media as represented by TikTok or Instagram. If you analyze in the direction of the message, the challenge is the rise of artificial intelligence as represented by ChatGPT or Claude. What they share in common, with particular relevance to us, is a bias away from links - they rarely provide any but also rely on them less for their own discovery, utilizing apps/embedding/autoplay instead. The wiki meanwhile has long relied on the link above all else, both as the core of its internal structure and the entry point for its audience. Given that, I think there are difficult questions we need to ask. Like, what does a path to a different core technology look like for us? And, should we get there, what would we still retain of what we started with?
>>>
>>> The internet is at least middle-aged by now, so it has a decently long history of disintermediation. We are clearly in a significant period of it at present. I believe for a long time, our leading source of discovery has been referrals from search, fittingly enough for link technology. If search is being disintermediated, we should think about what other sources of discovery for the wiki that we can create or promote. But I do wonder, supposing we need some response to the impact of generative AI for us in discovery - how would using generative AI on the content creation side change the discovery equation for us at all?
>>>
>>> (The medium and the message can also cross-pollinate, but I don't believe that is a particularly critical factor here. If anyone disagrees on that point, they're welcome to demonstrate their case, but I suspect it would simply illustrate that there exists an opposing trend to "print newspaper".)
>>>
>>> --Michael Snow
>>>
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> James Heilman
>> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
>> _______________________________________________
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-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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