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

That's a good idea, I started that there :
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now/a-plan
If you think of a better place on meta, just move it. And I started with my
initial content so that we can link to that version if we ever want to but
feel free to change everything.

@Amir are you ok with me copying our discussion on the meta talk page and
answering there?

--
Christophe


On Sat, 2 May 2026 at 20:05, Steven Walling via Wikimedia-l <
[email protected]> wrote:

>
> 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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