This Bold Lightning Talks session invites Wikimedians to share “unpopular takes” or “wild ideas” about improving the movement. Whether it's appointing admins by lottery, questioning sacred cows, or challenging beloved slogans, the goal is to stir the pot—without spilling it.
The talks are being curated by Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado) and Sam Klein (User:MetaSJ), feel free to contact them with ideas, or list yours below!
Each speaker gets 5 minutes to present their idea. The only rule: be bold, be constructive, and don’t be mean. This session encourages respectful disruption, creative thinking, and a little bit of irreverence to spark deeper conversations. Come to laugh, cringe, cheer, or quietly nod in agreement.
This tightly curated session invites Wikimedians to step outside their comfort zone and propose unconventional, provocative, or wildly idealistic changes to how our projects and communities work. No proposal is too strange, as long as it’s presented in good faith, with a dash of humor and a lot of heart.
Who can participate? Anyone with an idea and a willingness to share it in a short talk.
We want to create a space for:
Ideas that are too bold for an RfC
Critiques that come with solutions
Satire with a serious point
Conversation starters, not flamewars
Thoughtful "What if..." scenarios
Guidelines:
Talks must be respectful, constructive, and rooted in a desire to improve Wikimedia—even if the idea may be unpopular.
Speakers should be thoughtful and kind, even when they’re bold.
Add your ideas here:
What Wikipedia is not. Recently, trying to add an explanatory video about a writer into an article at English Wikipedia, I was reverted because "Wikipedia is not YouTube". We will explore what kind of things Wikipedia is not, so we can refine our Encyclopedias to the mininum thing that we actually should be. No videos, no audios, no images, no schemas, no... -Theklan (talk) 06:50, 6 August 2025 (UTC)
Notability kills motivation and productivity – We should kill notability. Restrictions on notability do not add any value to wiki projects. I can explain why that is and what we should do instead. --MB-one (talk) 08:59, 6 August 2025 (UTC)
An experiment: 5,000 new articles later, should I or shouldn't I go back and improve the lead paragraphs of the articles I started using my Gemini AI assistant? There are lots of opinions these days regarding the use of AI in our Wikipedia work. Time to explore people's reactions with this question that's been on my mind for some time. --Rosiestep (talk) 10:46, 6 August 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia should start offering audio versions for all articles by default. Every article should have an AI-generated audio version – at least in English and other major language editions. The tech is here, it works well, and it’s only getting better. Media consumption habits are changing, with more people preferring to listen rather than read. Major publishers like The New York Times or The Daily Maverick already offer automatic audio for their stories. There’s no reason Wikipedia shouldn’t! --Aced (talk) 05:12, 6 August 2025 (UTC)
Slides for cscott's unpopular ideasWikipedia should be a social network. Your user page is your feed, with recent changes as well as updates from users and projects you follow. Wikiprojects are "facebook pages" that aggregate the recent changes feeds of articles as well as social (but work-focused) updates. Talk pages are Slack (for logged comments, threads, pins, to-do lists) and IRC (for unlogged discussion), with tools to report harassment. Visual Editor should be Google Docs, with inline comments, real-time collaboration, and facilities to take meeting notes. A wikiproject can post a feed update that shows a wiki-friend of yours is working on an article: from that update a link lets you to jump to a collaborative edit session in VE, with a chat+video feed! --cscottSlides about Wikimania 2029 Open Movement Global
What Wikipedia is not. Recently, trying to add an explanatory video about a writer into an article at English Wikipedia, I was reverted because "Wikipedia is not YouTube". We will explore what kind of things Wikipedia is not, so we can refine our Encyclopedias to the mininum thing that we actually should be. No videos, no audios, no images, no schemas, no... -Theklan (talk) 06:50, 6 August 2025 (UTC)
Imagine the power of uniting Wikimedia, free and open source software, open hardware, open science, open government, OER, Creative Commons, OpenStreetMap, Open Education… to show the world the strength of the open. This is our proposal for Wikimania 2029. It’s more than just an event: it’s a strategic communications and advocacy proposal. A bold, collective statement to show that open is strong, powerful and mainstream, and it’s an existing, fair and preferable choice in a world that’s increasingly going in a different direction. Wikimania in Brussels in February 2029 during FOSDEM Wikimania:Expressions_of_Interest/2029/Open_Movement_Global. --iopensa
Bigger than Big Tech. The real potential of our nonprofit community-driven alternative.--Pharos (talk) 08:23, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
Move categories to wikidata. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 09:20, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
The next sister project (after Wikispore!) should be Wiki AI.
We need our own AI model that the community can use by default, tuned to solve our core problems (Wikidata awareness; citation quality; familiarity w/ our markdown and template styles). This preserves user privacy and allows deep integration for provenance, prompt preservation, filtering & cleanup. Sj (talk)
The epistemological struggle to validate knowledge on Wikipedia. What we understand by knowledge and what we validate as knowledge are questions that we, those of us outside of academia, and working with underrepresented communities ask ourselves. how we validate ancestral and community knowledge in Wikipedia's referential parameters? @julitatwa @jesedmateo
Why doesn’t the Wikimedia Foundation have a Wikimedian in Residence? What if, during the 2014 SuperProtect crisis, there had been someone whose only job was to keep communication flowing and tensions low? What if, during the Wikimedia/Wikipedia rebranding debates, there had been a trusted go-between making sure each side heard and actually understood the other? - Fuzheado (talk) 03:41, 6 August 2025 (UTC)
Sandbox
Random ideas if there is more time, or spare talks:
We shouldn't have separate domains for every language. Our projects are deliberately creating silos which separate the world's peoples from each other. This leads to a lot of wasted effort because we can't work together. Although well-meaning, the policies on content translation tend to reinforce existing inequities and drive minority-language speakers toward majority-language wikis because that's where network effects drive most participation. We should make it a goal to increase the amount of known-parallel texts on the projects and build tools to facilitate maintenance of parallel texts. Editors of a specific page should be able to easily collaborate with editors of the same page in a different language: they should be able to share a talk page (with machine translation), and edits make to a parallel region of an article in one language should be automatically suggested for application to the parallel text in a different language (with machine translation). We should use the same tools to "translate" and "edit in our native language" between American, British, Kenyan, and Indian English that we use to translate and edit in all the other languages of the world, so that we are working with the same software and improving it. Instead of separating our work by language, we should all feel like participants in a single encyclopedia. --cscott
Let a volunteer (travel and accommodation expenses reimbursed) succeed Maryana. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 09:20, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
Have a chapter in every country. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 09:20, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
Decentralize non-core software development to affliates: Let each affiliate champion developing a specific set of tools. Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 09:20, 7 August 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia was created as the "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." So why do we rarely say "anyone" in our planning, our training, or our outreach? Instead, we focus distinctly on "volunteers." For example, in the very first section of the 2026 annual plan, the goal is to "Fuel volunteer growth" and for "Volunteer support" to "protect volunteers." This focus on volunteers paints a more romantic and utopian vision of free knowledge, but could this actually be holding us back? The talk will focus on volunteerism as a privilege that may not be as available in emerging Wikimedia communities, and may also impact the ability to deliver a NPOV. - Fuzheado (talk) 03:07, 6 August 2025 (UTC)
2025:Unpopular Opinions: Bold Lightning Talks to Shake Up Wikimedia
