Wikimania 2025
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.
Wednesday
The streams the entire day was suffering from poor local internet connection, making many of them unwatchable.
Thursday
- Wikidata: a whirlwind tour through the land of Wikidata-powered apps - very cool overview, lots of good links in the slides.
- Learn and discuss with the Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network - good exchange sharing. I added a tool to and bookmarked the page d:Wikidata:Linked open data workflow which I think will come in very handy later.
- Advocating for open access to cultural heritage, targeting UNESCO: the TAROCH initiative
- Wikimania@20 Keynote Panel on AI - This was a surprisingly non-Wikimedia related panel. It was mostly about AI in general. Selena made some mentions about Wikimedia projects, but worryingly also said that "we try to use open source" (my emphasis) which seems like a disastrously slippery slope.
- Building a Common Language for the Wikimedia Movement (room lacked someone who relayed questions from the chat to the speakers)
- Connecting monuments on Commons with Wikidata
- How can we revitalize WikiProjects? - hopeful, but I think I knew too much already, I didn't hear anything new
- Lightning Talk Showcase I
- Behind the Edits: Exploring Human-Bot Collaboration
- AfroCreatives WikiProject+literature: Digitizing African literature
- From Plate to Page: Expanding Culinary Knowledge on Wikipedia
- Wikientrevistas: Uncovering life stories forgotten by the mainstream media - cool way to capture non mainstream stories
- How Closed-Source Software can Control Volunteers and Wikimedia Organizations (Worse Case Scenarios) - super important, go go go
- How Automoderator can revert vandalism on your wiki
- Wiki Loves Monuments in Ukraine: using special prizes to build partnerships and attract unique content
- What collaboration in advocacy can achieve for the Movement: Some examples from the Globe
- Empowering Wikimedia Movement Through Decentralization in Bangladesh
- A 5 años del Programa de Educación de Wikimedia México: Estrategias pedagógicas y didácticas para su construcción y consolidación
- Fortaleciendo el dominio público latinoamericano con Wikidata
- Wiki Loves Sport in Uganda
- Is the Wikipedia Library being used well?
- Women in Religion Crossing Oceans: Creating Visibility for African Scholars
- Forging the medieval on Wikipedia
- Wikipedia is turning 25! Creating a celebration to remember
Friday
- Green Wikimedia Events - A need, a must or a utopia? - While not really presenting a lot of new ideas to me, it still felt relieving that there are more people in the movement who are taking this seriously. I also felt inspired to organize a fully online conference with the theme of SDGs, perhaps organized by Wikimedians for Sustainable Development and partnered with Wikimedians for Software Freedom and perhaps some chapters that could handle fiscal matters.
- State of Wikimedia Research 2024-2025 - always interesting, but unfortunately a bit short and having technical issues. I would like to see more stats rather than the deep dives in the theme representative papers.
- A Practical Guide to Leaving Big Tech - a nice quick guide for personal choices. Unfortunately not particularly aimed at the movement as a whole.
- Climate Change Knowledge on Wikipedia: A Cross-Language Comparative Analysis - interesting study, I will surely read it when it is published. However, not sure what is actionable from it.
- The Future of Multimedia in Wikimedia - only managed to join the second half of this talk but the Etherpad is have ing some great ideas and insights: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Wikimania_2025_Future_of_Multimedia_in_Wikimedia
- Defending our wikis against *weaponized* generative AI - excellently delivered talk, both in form and content. Everyone should watch this one. What comes to mind for me is that we need better patrolling tools and queues in general. That will help us find bad edits both if they are manual or AI created. An interesting filter to highlight edits with that machine learning could help on our side is to show if the sentiment of the texts swaps (going from positive to negative, shifting blames between actors mentioned in the article etc.).
- Navigating the Dark Side of AI: Risks and Opportunities an important talk, but unfortunately it lacked in two aspects: 1. the speaker didn't attend the session before about weaponized AI which would have saved her a lot of time asking about what we worry about. 2. It just talked about AI in general, and had no connection to, nor clear recommendations for, the Wikimedia movement.
- Wikifunctions is coming soon to a wiki near you! - this topic gives me hope and joy. Perhaps not so much new to me, besides the experiments page at f:Wikifunctions:Abstract Wikipedia/2025 fragment experiments
- Decolonising knowledge on Wikipedia
- Lightning Talk Showcase II
- Climate Resilience through Knowledge: Lessons from WikiForHumanRights 2024 in Uganda
- Wikieducation of people with disabilities: challenges, features and prospects.
- WikiDiplomasi: Improving Diplomacy and International Relations Contents on Indonesian Wikipedia
- "From Learners to Leaders: Empowering Girls with Digital Skills for a More Inclusive Wikimedia Future"
- Promoting open knowledge and wikipedia editing among City of Johannesburg communities
- Building Digital Librarians: Training Librarians to Contribute to Open Knowledge.
- Research and Privacy on Wikipedia
- Structured Tasks: first edit, first success - this one was interesting, I would very much see if the Add an image would do well on Swedish Wikipedia
- Collaboration Over Competition: 1,000 Articles in One Year Through Asynchronous Gender-Focused Campaigns - this was fantastic story. Stop focusing on article counts and synchronous work and focus on collaboration joy and asynchronous work and users became more happy and production tripled.
- How generative AI changes my contribution to Wikipedia – a volunteer perspective - an insight that producing original articles as translation on the fly is so good anyway. Thought provoking.
- حملة ويكي تغير المناخ: نحو تجربة ويكيميدية مغاربية مستدامة
- Wikinside statistic tool – new tool for long-term monitoring of statistics - it will be interesting to look closer on this tool once it becomes public.
- Wikipedia as Play: Games That Transform How We Engage With Knowledge - fun games! Unfortunately only in English and no clear path on how to localize.
- Jimmy Wales on Trust, Wikipedia, and the lessons he's learned - I skipped the book sales pitch.
- Thank you, Wikimedia editors, from the French donors - this was an excellent delivery and a sweet topic.
- Information literacy skills of a conspiracy theorist?... The case for an inclusive approach - interesting topic, I am not sure what I bring from this though
- How to organize a multilingual campaign: A case study of the WPWP Campaign.
- Wikicurious: How to use cultural strategy to recruit and activate new editors Good presentation and inspiring. Not sure exactly what to learn from it, but I want to organize an editathon now.
- Poster session
Saturday
- Come and learn how free maps, free knowledge can help care for the world (with a little help from drones) - interesting project, it would have been interesting to hear more about a Wikimedia connection (if there was one)
- Where are all the Wikipedia administrators? A panel discussion about the future of administrators on Wikipedia. - a great discussion! I am still not sure what to do to get more admins, though.
- Future of Online Engagement at Wikimania - Ironic that people online could not see half of the 25 minute session due to power outage.
- Future of Wikimania - lots of good people wanting to make Wikimania as good as possible, but the format did not really lend itself to the gathering of ideas. I feel this could benefit of a quick kick-off, then asynchronous gathering ideas over a day or two, then some clean-up of those and ending with a workshop fine tuning it as input for the Steering Committee.
- Information integrity on Climate Change and the role of Wikimedia projects - As one of the panelists said, the most important takeaway is that we're talking about the topic. It was also a good overview of what is going on, but not enough depth to get the learnings from them.
- WikiGames: Play and learn about games and design your own! - watched the first half which was basically just a bunch of demos of games.
- Wikipedia’s Mobile Editing Experience: A Friction Point or a New Frontier?
- Hackathon Showcase and the Coolest Tool Awards - as usual a couple of really cool ones! https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/Hackathon_Showcase_%26_Coolest_Tool_Awards
- How to keep Wiki Loves participants interested even after 10+ editions - Very interesting in encouraging participating by diversifying the categories of prizes. Also a great presentation giving a lot of ideas to organizers of any campaign/contest. I think this was the best learnings sharing session of them all.
- Empowering the Wikimedia Community in Africa and Around the World with Open Source - Important topic, and I hope some affiliate representatives and WMF staff got the central message from this presentation.
Watched later
- A Model of Peer-Produced Knowledge Commons Lifecycles and Governance - this may be one of my favorite talks from Wikimania this year. Clear presentation and also explaining not only one of the largest questions about the decline of the growth in our movement but also extending that with a general model applicable to all projects working in the open. I want to dig into this a lot more!
- Paulina: a Wikidata-based web tool for cultural heritage - This is an interesting tool. I think there might be room for some cross pollination with the m:CommonsDB project.
- Smell walks! Collaboratively adding smell-related data using the photowalk model - interesting topic. However, I think that using the property depicts on Commons and say that an image depicts "fragrance of X" devalues that property and is a slippery slope to add all sorts of stuff that is not depicted in an image with that property. Instead, we could have a new property for that. A problem, however, is that it is not verifiable.
- Give Me A Beat! Creative Commons licensing, and ethical considerations for cultural heritage collections - great introduction to the Creative Commons licenses
- Preserving Global Heritage: The Journey of Wiki Loves Folklore
- OpenStreetMap: Mapping for Inclusion, Impact, and Sustainability
- WikiPortraits: How You Can Participate as a Photographer, Editor or Affiliate - nice introduction to this project.
- Demonstrating Impact: Telling Your Story as a Wikimedia Affiliate - interesting way of creating these reusable resources with stories in ready made formats.
- The future of hubs in Wikimedia context
- Building a Sustainable Future for Wikimedia Contributors - some previews of good features to come
- Wiki Loves Broadcast: Creative Commons Video Edit-a-thon - watched the introduction part, that was good (but with some sound glitches), and skipped the workshop part
- Wikidata: We want our data to be reused. But do we really? - good overview of common problems.
- Unlocking Government Data for Wikidata: Stories, Impacts, and Open Dialogue - nice overview of initiatives with some similarities
- Decentralizing Software Development in the Wikimedia Movement: Where Are We, and Where Do We Want to Go? - A case for Distributed Software Development - good overview of what has been done, but less clear of where we will go.
- Fiscal sponsorships - why you need them, and what they mean for your project - good plug, and good to see it's already being used.
- United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization collaborating with Wikimedia
From Wednesday
The streams the entire day was suffering from poor local internet connection, making many of them unwatchable.
- Enhancing Climate Justice & Environmental Data Mapping through Open Knowledge
From Saturday
- UN in the Digital Age: Local voices, global Impact, and the battle for Information Integrity
Posters
I got two posters accepted:
Me and the Wikithing
- For information in Swedish, see Ainali.
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 also active on Wikimedia Commons as I have been interested in photography for a long time, see contributions here, and on Wikidata as well.
About me
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.
