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

On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 3:10 PM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l <
[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:*
>
>    1. *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.
>    2. *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.
>    3. *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:*
>
>    1. *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.
>    2. *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.
>    3. *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
>

I could not agree more strongly with this call to action and proposed plan,
Christophe. Shall we move this on wiki like Meta to flesh out more? I would
like to help refine this strategy and I think others would as well.

Best regards,
Steven Walling


>
> 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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>
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