This is my Wikimania experience, planned and lived. You are welcome to add notes if we talked or had an interaction. Bolded sessions are the ones I am part of organizing, sessions in italic are sessions I watched/participated in, all other listed ones I am planning to participate in/watch. Besides all details down here, I also made a me-centric overview on my blog.
9.30 Wikimedia Commons Preconference - This was a very enjoyable event with good conversations. It was fun to see so many people contributing to Wikimedia Commons. I ended up in a constructive group talking about GLAM uploads and one big realization is that we may not really have a good page that is slef serving for different kinds of GLAMs that lead them on different paths. (E.g. a large one who wants to learn and do things themselves for continuous contributions to small ones that just need help for a one-off smallish batch upload.) I also managed to demo the CommonsDB project to some users and also my byline experiment that is meant to show how we could become role models in attributions.
15.00 Knowledge Commons in the Age of AI roundtable - An interesting initiative that wants to come together for coordinating different efforts. I applaud the effort that is at least some answer to the changing landscape. For my self however, the conversations I had made me leaving that it may not really be solving the real issues that may arise if we become sidelined by people not even ending up on our platforms.
Wednesday
I met User:Julle before everything started and we were both a bit at loss of what the movement can do. He mentioned that WMF is trying to get people in the habit of using the app more which would keep them on our platforms. Experiments are going well, but it still remains to be seen if it can scale enough to have an impact.
I had some lovely chats in the coffe break. User:Ambrosia10 talked about a new tool that help to find sources that supports certain claims. I also had a nice chat with User:DocJames about SVG translate tool and Owidslider. I also manage to introduce him to User:DaanVR who might be available for work. In the end I met Hugo from LinguaLibre and we agreed to make an effort to record a podcast interview.
Good talks with Alice and Denny about community building and the local spaces in Germany. Seems more and more important every day. Also interesting talks with Abbe98 about notability on Wikidata. Also showed the poster to a Greek contributor.
16.00 Opening ceremony - Long as always and a bit stilted, but I am getting more and more appreciative of the time dedicated to celebrate the community.
Opening party - I couldn't fine any solid vegan food and nowhere to sit.
10.30, poster session: Govdirectory - collaborating for impact - The poster had fallen down but was found and put up again. Had two people looking at the poster and perhaps were willing to contribute (India and?)
Lunch: talked with the WMF contributor team. WIll take a look at EditChecks again to see what can be enabled on Swedish Wikipedia.
13.30 Lunch meetup: Wikidata Community Meetup - Interesting meetup where it was made clear that the limit of Wikidata will harden and that we it will need more editorial decision on what can be added. People in the room had other opinions on that.
Coffee break - talked with Mayur and Aranit about free and open source software in general but also that we would need a video call platform for the movement.
Another Internet Is Already Here: The Wiki Projects as Digital Public Luxury - An interesting take on how to view the Wikimedia projects, but I don't know how to operationalize it.
Empowering GLAM Institutions Through Wikimedia: A Ukrainian–Swedish Training and Leadership Programme - good overview of what they did, but I couldn't understand what was unique.
India's Software Stories: A Hands-on Workshop with Software Heritage, Commons and Wikidata - good overview of what they did, but I couldn't understand what was unique.
If It’s Not Online, It’s Invisible: Minority Languages in the AI Era - The Case of Western Armenian - Unfortunately took too long and got cut off
Partenariats et Patrimoine: Documenter Madagascar à travers les campagnes Wiki et les initiatives GLAM - in French...
Le Réseau WikiSavoirs: une initiative canadienne francophone pour stimuler la culture libre dans le milieu universitaire du pays The WikiSavoirs Network: a Canadian Francophone initiative to foster a culture of openness in the country's academic community - in French...
Des rayonnages de la bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève aux communs numériques. From the shelves of the Sainte-Geneviève Library to the digital commons - in French...
UK Heritage 3D Data at Risk - a well needed call to action.
Proyecto MIL: los museos argentinos en Wikimedia Commons -
SWiP: Strengthening South African Languages on Wikipedia -
Connecting GLAM and Communities: Insights from the Wikimedia Italia GLAM Grant -
Who's Missing? Using AI to Spot Wikipedia's Coverage Gwipaps - somehow an automated way to get suggestions of articles to create along sources that support it.
WikiCurriculum Explorer: Connecting School Curriculum with Wikipedia for Deeper Student Learning -
Bridging the Divide: Jewish and Arab University Students in Israel Co-Creating Free Knowledge -
WikiFringe Game Jam - updated my image quiz by re-adding Swedish and Estonian
Friday
Hackathon
Helped Mahir256 with Swedish translations of the template text in his tool for compound nouns.
Talked with DaanVR about his Pinterest inspired Commons interface and started the process to get him an API key for the CommonsDB search API.
Documented some learnings from the workshop we held yesterday.
12.30 Future of Wikimania - Nice workshop that divided into groups and I was in the one about online engagement. Very glad to see that they are taking this seriously and I offered to join a work committee for online committee.
13.30 Virtual room - I got interviewed about the Tabular data vs. structured data session.
14.30 Bridging Institutions, Wikidata, and Generative AI: From Data Silos to Shared Infrastructure - I am not sure what I expected from this sessions, but six people in a panel meant that it didn't give them opportunity to talk in any depth. Nothing really surprising or depressive, but also not giving a lot of hope. I asked a question about blocking AI corps who are not playing nice, but didn't get much reaction from the panel.
Coffee break - talked to Jean-Fred and gave input to Integraality.
Talked with? who was at our workshop and was interested in the tooling that can be used to generate ISCC codes.
18.30 Commons Categorizers meetup - Managed to show my CommonsDB video while we are waiting to setup. Called out the way SDC and EXIF is duplicated right now and that we should stop it. Interesting discussions about redundant and also abusive categories. There was a strong consensus that something need to be done and that we were in such agreement that it felt worth starting a discussion onwiki with a few concrete discussions.
WikiFringe - talked with TheDJ on the way there and mentioned that one cannot link to the SDC tab on the file pages on Commons. He thought that might be an easy fix. At the Fringe, I showed off the game I fixed the day before. Also talked with Abbe98 about actual scalability of Wikidata and Query Service which sounds like a better long term solutions than my, although more easily implementable, band-aid solutions I had in my talk.
Saturday
9.00 Virtual room - Morning live - I went up early for this but unfortunately technology wasn't on our side this morning. But I had some lovely conversations with the team and other participants.
9.30 The Coolest Projects: 25 Years of Creativity and Innovation (Tribute to Deror Lin’s Legacy) - Nice to give a tribute to all the nice things the community are doing. Perhaps a bit shallow on each project so this was not so much a guide to how do things but more of an index of cool projects to look up further later. The winner was Women in red who has done some great work.
10.30 Wiki Consultants meetup - Nice to meet the others who were also and also hear that investing in publishing on social media can lead to easier connections at events.
Partcipated with the talk The Wikimedia movement should not use, guide, encourage or even support non-free software.
Enjoyed Fuzheados talk on Wikimedia Commons where we can do a lot a better to showcase media instead of categories that wee mostly direct people today.
17.30 Closing ceremony - Long as usual with a lot of thanks and little substance. Made worse by being marked as being in English (so I didn't pick up headset for translation) while most of it was in French.
19.00 Group photo - Always confusing on how it should be done and herding 1200 people without any clear instructions or loudspeaker is difficult. In the blistering sun as well.
Closing party - at least there was hummus that was vegan so got some nourishment but as the rest of the conference it was about as bad a caterer can do for vegans. Having it in the museum was nice as it needed no transport and easy to get home afterwards. Also big and airy and it didn't feel too crowded. But very limited seating for people who were tired after a long conference.
Women in Wikipedia: Armenia-Côte d’Ivoire - Interesting setup of a campaign where they "exchanged" articles with each other, that is, creating articles about women from the other country rather than their own. Turned into a collaboration through channels to ask questions which created a strong community feeling in participating editors.
How Wikipedia is seen through the eyes of social media superstars - Interesting to hear about the new strategy with more diversity in the collaborations. I wonder if there are any Swedish content creators who would fit? At the same time, it's very sad that the Fediverse wasn't mentioned once, but ratehr TikTok, Instagram and YouTube were the focus.
State of Wikimedia & AI 2026: Freedom, Equity, Reliability at a Crossroad - I find large panels like this difficult, because each participant rarely gets time to go deep, but it still had some good nuggets. In particular, I liked how it was framed that every edit carves out a space for the non commercial to exist and if Wikipedia disappeared the space would be filled by ten startups immediately. Audrey Tang is also very concise all the time and a joy to listen to and the thought of tools sharing back to the talk page is certainly interesting. And again, the point about community was made, which starts to feel like a uniting unofficial theme of this conference.
Sharing & Collective Action in the Age of AI - A really brief intro to Creative Commons and how their licenses relates to AI before heading into the workshop which was in-person group work.
Is Wikimedia a streamable data commons? From Dumps to Data Flows in the Age of AI Extraction - Meant as a provocation, i find the open question still open. Or rather, I think the obvious answer is yes, but I don't know where that leads us. A very interesting distinction during the Q&A was that while training an LLM might be fair use so that the license may not apply, it may be a very different case when it comes to technologies like RAG and serving snippets "live" from the articles.
Road to 500: When Wikipedia Meets Social Media - Positive and fun view on setting milestones for yourself. I also like the message of visibility creates accountability and to share your wiki work outside of the movement too.
Alice’s Adventures in Wikiland: a folk tale about falling down a Wiki rabbit hole - A lovely talk with a form carefully crafted to tell a tale about someone being drawn into our movement. This could often be used as a general introduction on why to edit at all or just showing, aligned with Signe's points about not being boring, what our community does. It should also be used as an example of how to give a lightning talk.
Behind the Lens: WikiPortraits on a Global Scale - Good overview of the initiative and the tools they have built. I have already signed up but should also try to cover some events. Very unfortunate that they do all event coordination on WhatsApp as that means that the only news from the project that reaches me is their newsletter which doesn't really help getting more involved. Fingers grossed that they get their website/hub up and running soon.
Community Wishlist: What's Next? - The first half was a good overview of what the status quo of the wishlist is. The workshop part was harder to follow.
BECOMING A CHATON: From web-hosting decentralization to the construction of a sovereign governance - Interesting collective doing noble things, but I was disappointed that they didn't even try to connect what they are doing or why they do it to the Wikimedia movement and why we should care. This was basically an ad for their orgs which I think don't belong on Wikimania even if what they do is aligned with some of our values.
State of Wikimedia Research 2025-2026 + 5 Research Findings and how you can use them in your work. Part 3: Fiabilité - Interesting with the study of finding inconsistencies. It's of course super compute intensive to compare all articles towards each other. But perhaps a local model could find inconsistencies within a single article one have open? That would be an interesting gadget or browser extension. Some other studies that were interesting too about automated citation verification and citation accuracy. Good talk!
Visualising Wikipedia: Testing the tool (first release) - I've seen the tool presented a couple of times and while it looks beautiful I haven't understood how it should be used. I would love to see a talk from a practioner talking about how it helps them.
Crowdsourcing Media for Public Knowledge: A Case Study of Indonesia’s August Unrest and November Floods - no audio in the video
Wikipedia Editing as a Mental Health Practice - very interesting aspect on why one should edit for highly personal interests. I think this may be worth highlighting to more potential users.
I set up the Wikidata Menu Challenge (and got a lot of help with the matching), but unfortunately I didn't have the time to convert that result to the format needed for the deploy scripts.
I missed the start, don't ask me how, but when I finally became aware of Wikipedia I joined instantly, 2006/01/21 13:45:30. I really love the idea with free knowledge for everyone. I am sysop on Swedish Wikipedia: w:sv:Användare:Ainali.
I am born in the seventies in Sweden and currently live in Amsterdam. I am a member of Wikimedia Sverige (where I formerly both have served in the board and been an employee), Wikimedia Nederlands and Wikimedia Belgium and I hold a bachelor's degree in Innovation and design engineering. I run a company called Open by default and used to work at the Foundation for Public Code.
