🌬️❤️‍🔥— to you both.

Christophe, I think you are right on the data and implications fronts.

There is also a larger picture of the projects' embedding in the broader world, and how far our collective capacity to collaborate has come. The fragrant opportunities in the air are to do something new, with that growing ecosystem who love multiplayer knowledge production, and love the wiki spirit.

Let's make sure we are trying and supporting a wide range of such new approaches this year.

In terms of reorienting the old established efforts: there are simple things we can do immediately, to get out of our own way. We can help those that are growing to keep doing so (stop throttling fast growing projects), help promising young approaches scale (give them new high-volume draft spaces that don't interfere with existing workflows), and promote local successes across geographies and languages.

S

🌍🌏🌎🌑

On Fri, Jan 9, 2026, 11:59 PM Ad Huikeshoven via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi Christophe,

Thanks for your concerns. I myself have made long enough chats with several chatbots to tevognize chatbot output immediately. Are you going to aytend the Future Lab hosted by WMDE at the end of this month? That would be a great pkace to discuss this. Your numbers are right, but won't convince WMF. As long as they rake in over 100 million dollar a year easily, they eon't change. And remembervthat once the WMF was the US non-profit with the fastest revenue growth.a My analysis in an essay published months ago points in another direction: neglect of the online communities of editors, the people who create Wikipedia everyday, but only online. Their collective behaviour creayes a hostile frontier steering away nearly every newcomer. How you are goingbto change that?

Regards,

Ad

Op za 10 jan 2026, 00:41 schreef Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com>:

...

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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Anders please read my essay, readership numbers are in huge decline and it’s accelerating.

Ironically, I agree with things you say here, but not for “no cause for alarm”. When readership is over two digits decrease while Reddit is growing and AI chats product are booming, it’s alarming.

Top that with the fact that this is a trend that started almost 10 years ago and is accelerating is even worse.

And perhaps you are right, every tu ing will be fine, but data is not pointing in that direction at all.

-- Christophe

On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 9:24 AM Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se wrote:

As i stated in an earlier thread, i see our situation very different, We are in this strange world we are in, a winner and important holder of true fact amid all fake-news and censured channels.

The donation grew by 12,5% 2024-2025 indicating the very strong support we have amid internet readers, and at least in en wp we see a growth in new users. Number of readers is about stable the last couple of years at the same time we see Google, now show WP article directly bypassing WP interface, and AI bot is more and more heavily relying on the content of Wikipedia. I see nu cause for alarm at all, on the contrary

Instead of being pessimistic as you indicate I suggest us being optimistic and use our opportunity to be a more estabished leader in giving true facts

Anders

Den 2026-01-10 kl. 00:40, skrev Christophe Henner:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe

---

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Cherry picking? Both our stats and external stats are saying readership is decreasing.

If you still did not read it please let me paste it here: “According to global data from Similarweb https://www.similarweb.com/?utm_medium=non_paid_partnership&utm_source=kepios&utm_campaign=brand_cross_2025-global-digital-reports_report_nov_24&utm_placement=article, as recently as March 2022, Wikipedia averaged more than 165 million visits per day to its primary “.org” domain.

Just three years later, in March 2025, Similarweb’s data shows that Wikipedia’s traffic had fallen below 128 million average daily visits.

Relatively speaking, these figures point to a decline of 23 percent in total site traffic over the past three years.” https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-exploring-trends-in-wikipedia-... And if you read my essay you would know hat I too think it’s great access to knowledge diversifies. But it’s a double edged sword, it also means less people editing our projects.

And my feeling is that we are not addressing the topic.

Heck, I have to debate why steep decline, visible in our data and external data, is a threat to our revenue model and to our editor recruitment pipeline…

-- Christophe

On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 10:27 AM Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se wrote:

When google shows our data directly it is not a decrease of readers, but of users accessing our interface, (the same with AIbots), and I perceive it as all OK,,it is use of our data that is important not our interface

And look a bit closer of accesses last half year, and of different language versions, it is not a clearcut decrease.

And I believe that your cherry picking of negative data is dangerous for us all, We should use the opportunity we have just now of all fake data among us to be prouder and more visible, and not be pessimistic and defensive

Anders

Den 2026-01-10 kl. 09:31, skrev Christophe Henner:

Anders please read my essay, readership numbers are in huge decline and it’s accelerating.

Ironically, I agree with things you say here, but not for “no cause for alarm”. When readership is over two digits decrease while Reddit is growing and AI chats product are booming, it’s alarming.

Top that with the fact that this is a trend that started almost 10 years ago and is accelerating is even worse.

And perhaps you are right, every tu ing will be fine, but data is not pointing in that direction at all.

-- Christophe

On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 9:24 AM Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se> wrote:

...

As i stated in an earlier thread, i see our situation very different, We are in this strange world we are in, a winner and important holder of true fact amid all fake-news and censured channels.

The donation grew by 12,5% 2024-2025 indicating the very strong support we have amid internet readers, and at least in en wp we see a growth in new users. Number of readers is about stable the last couple of years at the same time we see Google, now show WP article directly bypassing WP interface, and AI bot is more and more heavily relying on the content of Wikipedia. I see nu cause for alarm at all, on the contrary

Instead of being pessimistic as you indicate I suggest us being optimistic and use our opportunity to be a more estabished leader in giving true facts

Anders

Den 2026-01-10 kl. 00:40, skrev Christophe Henner:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe

---

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I am sorry to say, but yes, it is cherry picking because it is very selective and many important factors involved are left out. But what concerns me a lot more is that in a movement where we try to focus on the facts and unbiased writing, so many hasty conclusions, shaky arguments, and skewed comparisons are presented as evidence. I was hoping that as movement we could avoid such a populistic writing, that we could stick to facts and not comparing apples with pears. That differentiates us from the chaos we see in many places in the world.

I agree that it is time to act, but I also think we need to base ourselves on facts, that we need to make sure we make fair comparisons, that we keep our values in sight, and let us be aware where our strengths are. Wikipedia is one of the backbones of the internet and thousands of people rely on our platform every day, directly or indirectly.

With the rise of AI we are facing challenges, and we certainly need to find ways to deal with them. But in drop in growth number of users/etc. is part of a common live cycle that platforms have. Endless growth is fiction (unless we want to use tricky algorithms that manipulate people; no thank you). A life cycle typically start slowly, then there is growth, then there is a peak (the hausse), followed by a decline, and then, then we need to make sure the situation becomes/stays stable. From that new stability a growth can be build up again. Please let us not forget, that every single day Wikipedia is still growing in knowledge. Wikipedia is a cumulative platform, each new addition is building on the previous additions. That gives is a lot more stability than platforms where it only counts what happens at that moment.

With every large change in society, people are screaming that it is the end near for ... . When the radio was invented, people said that newspapers would become obsolete. When tv came a mass medium, people said the radio would become obsolete. When internet became massively used, people said tv would become obsolete. And now I read that because AI Wikipedia can become obsolete if we do not act.

Organisations that in the past have tried to deal with different circumstances in their respective fields can help us learn what we may do and what we absolutely should not do. In general, organisations that loose their values and what they stand for, have an extremely high risk of becoming obsolete and getting extinct. While organisations that stuck to their principles, ideals and values survived turbulent times that have occurred many times in the past centuries.

Of course we have to debate the situation we are in and I certainly think we need to work on improvements, but if we loose what we stand for, facts, a balanced review of information, unbiased writing, our neutrality, then we have already lost today.

The data analysis in this essay is very week and problematic. If our starting point of a discussion is not based on facts and fair comparisons (also in essays), we face the enormous risk that we loose what we stand for and then failure is likely to become imminent.

Romaine

Op za 10 jan 2026 om 10:42 schreef Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com>:

Cherry picking? Both our stats and external stats are saying readership is decreasing.

If you still did not read it please let me paste it here: “According to global data from Similarweb https://www.similarweb.com/?utm_medium=non_paid_partnership&utm_source=kepios&utm_campaign=brand_cross_2025-global-digital-reports_report_nov_24&utm_placement=article, as recently as March 2022, Wikipedia averaged more than 165 million visits per day to its primary “.org” domain.

Just three years later, in March 2025, Similarweb’s data shows that Wikipedia’s traffic had fallen below 128 million average daily visits.

Relatively speaking, these figures point to a decline of 23 percent in total site traffic over the past three years.”

https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-exploring-trends-in-wikipedia-...

And if you read my essay you would know hat I too think it’s great access to knowledge diversifies. But it’s a double edged sword, it also means less people editing our projects.

And my feeling is that we are not addressing the topic.

Heck, I have to debate why steep decline, visible in our data and external data, is a threat to our revenue model and to our editor recruitment pipeline…

-- Christophe

On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 10:27 AM Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se> wrote:

...

When google shows our data directly it is not a decrease of readers, but of users accessing our interface, (the same with AIbots), and I perceive it as all OK,,it is use of our data that is important not our interface

And look a bit closer of accesses last half year, and of different language versions, it is not a clearcut decrease.

And I believe that your cherry picking of negative data is dangerous for us all, We should use the opportunity we have just now of all fake data among us to be prouder and more visible, and not be pessimistic and defensive

Anders

Den 2026-01-10 kl. 09:31, skrev Christophe Henner:

Anders please read my essay, readership numbers are in huge decline and it’s accelerating.

Ironically, I agree with things you say here, but not for “no cause for alarm”. When readership is over two digits decrease while Reddit is growing and AI chats product are booming, it’s alarming.

Top that with the fact that this is a trend that started almost 10 years ago and is accelerating is even worse.

And perhaps you are right, every tu ing will be fine, but data is not pointing in that direction at all.

-- Christophe

On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 9:24 AM Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se> wrote:

...

As i stated in an earlier thread, i see our situation very different, We are in this strange world we are in, a winner and important holder of true fact amid all fake-news and censured channels.

The donation grew by 12,5% 2024-2025 indicating the very strong support we have amid internet readers, and at least in en wp we see a growth in new users. Number of readers is about stable the last couple of years at the same time we see Google, now show WP article directly bypassing WP interface, and AI bot is more and more heavily relying on the content of Wikipedia. I see nu cause for alarm at all, on the contrary

Instead of being pessimistic as you indicate I suggest us being optimistic and use our opportunity to be a more estabished leader in giving true facts

Anders

Den 2026-01-10 kl. 00:40, skrev Christophe Henner:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe

---

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Christoph,

In your essay, you write:

"*The uncomfortable addition:* our content is probably reaching more people than ever. It's just reaching them through intermediaries we don't control: search snippets, AI assistants, apps, voice devices. The knowledge spreads. The mission arguably succeeds. But we don't see it, we can't fund ourselves from it, and our editors don't feel it."

Does this statement have universal support within Wikimedia? You say 'the mission arguably succeeds' as if that is beside the point, but is it? What are we losing now when people access Wikimedia information from portals outside Wikimedia control? Are the intermediaries degrading the quality of information? Introducing bias? Misusing the marks and reputation of Wikimedia projects? Why is it only arguable that Wikimedia content reaching more people than ever is a marker of success?

Unless I'm misunderstanding their comments, Romaine, Anders and others take the optimistic view that greater use of knowledge is a positive outcome even if it doesn't result in more pageviews, I'm just hoping for you to elaborate on why you disagree.

On Thu, Jan 15, 2026 at 4:14 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

Hoi, Dear Romaine, when I consider where we are and what we do, I am amazed at how much we have evolved and how many positive things have improved our Wikimedia world. From my perspective, there are issues that may be resolved but for all kinds of reasons we are stuck in a state of stasis. The notion that we have to look for one unifying solution for everything will prevent us from evolving and will lead to decline. It is also very much not the Wikipedia way. An article does not need to be perfect, there are others that may improve whatever can be improved upon.

There is a process where deaths registered in Wikipedias find their way to Wikidata. Making it possible to ping other Wikipedias with an article for the same person about this event.. There is a Listeria list for 2026 deaths in the Netherlands [1].. We could do a similar thing for awards, it would show for a year the awards missing on your Wikipedia. We could even have Listeria lists for awards instead of static local lists..[2] This will particularly benefit the "other" Wikipedias. We could show generated lists for awards not known on a Wikipedia..

We assume that because we have references that the "truth" of an article is solid. That is a misconception because science evolves. So why not have all publications with a DOI or another identifier on any Wikipedia registered in Wikidata. There are public resources for publications citing the ones we know, identifying the publications that are retracted. This provides our editors with a useful tool and gives Wikidata another purpose.

The point is that there is much that we can do that provides our communities with tooling enabling us to provide a better service. A better service enables ourrelevance into the future. Much of these things can be done on short notice. It prevents the endless often fruitless discussions we are all too familiar with.

We used not to rely on perfection but strive for perfection through the effectiveness of our communities. So imho forget about a grand overarching idea, commitment. Provide us with the tools that enable our communities to work smartly.

Thanks, GerardM

PS Happy th

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:GerardM/Deaths_in_the_Netherlands_in_2026 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GerardM/P._C._Hooft_Award

On Sun, 11 Jan 2026 at 15:18, Romaine Wiki romaine.wiki@gmail.com wrote:

...

I am sorry to say, but yes, it is cherry picking because it is very selective and many important factors involved are left out. But what concerns me a lot more is that in a movement where we try to focus on the facts and unbiased writing, so many hasty conclusions, shaky arguments, and skewed comparisons are presented as evidence. I was hoping that as movement we could avoid such a populistic writing, that we could stick to facts and not comparing apples with pears. That differentiates us from the chaos we see in many places in the world.

I agree that it is time to act, but I also think we need to base ourselves on facts, that we need to make sure we make fair comparisons, that we keep our values in sight, and let us be aware where our strengths are. Wikipedia is one of the backbones of the internet and thousands of people rely on our platform every day, directly or indirectly.

With the rise of AI we are facing challenges, and we certainly need to find ways to deal with them. But in drop in growth number of users/etc. is part of a common live cycle that platforms have. Endless growth is fiction (unless we want to use tricky algorithms that manipulate people; no thank you). A life cycle typically start slowly, then there is growth, then there is a peak (the hausse), followed by a decline, and then, then we need to make sure the situation becomes/stays stable. From that new stability a growth can be build up again. Please let us not forget, that every single day Wikipedia is still growing in knowledge. Wikipedia is a cumulative platform, each new addition is building on the previous additions. That gives is a lot more stability than platforms where it only counts what happens at that moment.

With every large change in society, people are screaming that it is the end near for ... . When the radio was invented, people said that newspapers would become obsolete. When tv came a mass medium, people said the radio would become obsolete. When internet became massively used, people said tv would become obsolete. And now I read that because AI Wikipedia can become obsolete if we do not act.

Organisations that in the past have tried to deal with different circumstances in their respective fields can help us learn what we may do and what we absolutely should not do. In general, organisations that loose their values and what they stand for, have an extremely high risk of becoming obsolete and getting extinct. While organisations that stuck to their principles, ideals and values survived turbulent times that have occurred many times in the past centuries.

Of course we have to debate the situation we are in and I certainly think we need to work on improvements, but if we loose what we stand for, facts, a balanced review of information, unbiased writing, our neutrality, then we have already lost today.

The data analysis in this essay is very week and problematic. If our starting point of a discussion is not based on facts and fair comparisons (also in essays), we face the enormous risk that we loose what we stand for and then failure is likely to become imminent.

Romaine

Op za 10 jan 2026 om 10:42 schreef Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com>:

...

Cherry picking? Both our stats and external stats are saying readership is decreasing.

If you still did not read it please let me paste it here: “According to global data from Similarweb https://www.similarweb.com/?utm_medium=non_paid_partnership&utm_source=kepios&utm_campaign=brand_cross_2025-global-digital-reports_report_nov_24&utm_placement=article, as recently as March 2022, Wikipedia averaged more than 165 million visits per day to its primary “.org” domain.

Just three years later, in March 2025, Similarweb’s data shows that Wikipedia’s traffic had fallen below 128 million average daily visits.

Relatively speaking, these figures point to a decline of 23 percent in total site traffic over the past three years.”

https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2025-exploring-trends-in-wikipedia-...

And if you read my essay you would know hat I too think it’s great access to knowledge diversifies. But it’s a double edged sword, it also means less people editing our projects.

And my feeling is that we are not addressing the topic.

Heck, I have to debate why steep decline, visible in our data and external data, is a threat to our revenue model and to our editor recruitment pipeline…

-- Christophe

On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 10:27 AM Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se> wrote:

...

When google shows our data directly it is not a decrease of readers, but of users accessing our interface, (the same with AIbots), and I perceive it as all OK,,it is use of our data that is important not our interface

And look a bit closer of accesses last half year, and of different language versions, it is not a clearcut decrease.

And I believe that your cherry picking of negative data is dangerous for us all, We should use the opportunity we have just now of all fake data among us to be prouder and more visible, and not be pessimistic and defensive

Anders

Den 2026-01-10 kl. 09:31, skrev Christophe Henner:

Anders please read my essay, readership numbers are in huge decline and it’s accelerating.

Ironically, I agree with things you say here, but not for “no cause for alarm”. When readership is over two digits decrease while Reddit is growing and AI chats product are booming, it’s alarming.

Top that with the fact that this is a trend that started almost 10 years ago and is accelerating is even worse.

And perhaps you are right, every tu ing will be fine, but data is not pointing in that direction at all.

-- Christophe

On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 9:24 AM Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se> wrote:

...

As i stated in an earlier thread, i see our situation very different, We are in this strange world we are in, a winner and important holder of true fact amid all fake-news and censured channels.

The donation grew by 12,5% 2024-2025 indicating the very strong support we have amid internet readers, and at least in en wp we see a growth in new users. Number of readers is about stable the last couple of years at the same time we see Google, now show WP article directly bypassing WP interface, and AI bot is more and more heavily relying on the content of Wikipedia. I see nu cause for alarm at all, on the contrary

Instead of being pessimistic as you indicate I suggest us being optimistic and use our opportunity to be a more estabished leader in giving true facts

Anders

Den 2026-01-10 kl. 00:40, skrev Christophe Henner:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe

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Hoi, When we are to do better, it is relevant to recognise that the relative weight of the English Wikipedia has consistently declined. It follows that support for the "other" languages is where we can make the biggest difference.

There is a plan to use Wikidata, Wikipedia to follow the elections in Nigeria. With the ability to quickly share information in all languages relevant to Nigerians, information on candidates entered in Wikidata, the Listeriabot is then able to update lists in all these languages. This ensures that real time data does not need to wait months for an update.

I blogged about the lack of awareness of changes and the need for share information .. https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2026/01/hon-erica-shafudah-namibias-min...

Thanks, GerardM

On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 at 11:56, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:

Pe sâmbătă, 10 ianuarie 2026, Anders Wennersten mail@anderswennersten.se a scris:

...

When google shows our data directly it is not a decrease of readers, but of users accessing our interface, (the same with AIbots), and I perceive it as all OK,,it is use of our data that is important not our interface

I think a majority of community members would agree on that.

The debate is how do we reshape our ways of working to ensure these new delivery methods contribute to the community survival (and implicitly to the continuous data curation). As one wikipedian recently put it: "it's the first time in 14 years when I can't find a reason to invite people on Wikipedia."

Best, Strainu

...

And look a bit closer of accesses last half year, and of different language versions, it is not a clearcut decrease.

And I believe that your cherry picking of negative data is dangerous for us all, We should use the opportunity we have just now of all fake data among us to be prouder and more visible, and not be pessimistic and defensive

Anders

Den 2026-01-10 kl. 09:31, skrev Christophe Henner:

Anders please read my essay, readership numbers are in huge decline and it’s accelerating.

Ironically, I agree with things you say here, but not for “no cause for alarm”. When readership is over two digits decrease while Reddit is growing and AI chats product are booming, it’s alarming.

Top that with the fact that this is a trend that started almost 10 years ago and is accelerating is even worse.

And perhaps you are right, every tu ing will be fine, but data is not pointing in that direction at all.

-- Christophe

On Sat, Jan 10, 2026 at 9:24 AM Anders Wennersten < mail@anderswennersten.se> wrote:

...

As i stated in an earlier thread, i see our situation very different, We are in this strange world we are in, a winner and important holder of true fact amid all fake-news and censured channels.

The donation grew by 12,5% 2024-2025 indicating the very strong support we have amid internet readers, and at least in en wp we see a growth in new users. Number of readers is about stable the last couple of years at the same time we see Google, now show WP article directly bypassing WP interface, and AI bot is more and more heavily relying on the content of Wikipedia. I see nu cause for alarm at all, on the contrary

Instead of being pessimistic as you indicate I suggest us being optimistic and use our opportunity to be a more estabished leader in giving true facts

Anders

Den 2026-01-10 kl. 00:40, skrev Christophe Henner:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe

---

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The essay got mentioned in Wired today: https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedias-existential-threats-have-never-been-g...

On Fri, Jan 16, 2026, 1:35 a.m. Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

On Fri, Jan 9, 2026 at 3:41 PM Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com wrote:

...

Here it is: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

Thanks for the thoughtful essay, Christophe, LLM-assisted or not :).

You hint at improvements to the reader experience, and I think there's a ton of work in that category that could make Wikipedia truly a joy to use, without even wading into the contentious terrain of AI.

Wikidata already contains a huge wealth of information that could be made more visible in Wikipedia. The external identifiers alone for any topic could give you a better "explore" page than Google's cluttered search result pages.

A huge reason readers may prefer AI summaries, even if inaccurate, is to get to an answer more quickly (the same reason Wikipedia itself outperformed other information sources even when its quality was still very uneven.) But Wikimedia has a lot going for it: no ads, no weird AI hallucinations, no intentional clutter. Readers _want_ to like it.

Consider the humble disambiguation page. Often, when readers look for something not covered by existing wayfinders, the best option is to scroll your way through a multi-page sectioned list of uses of the term. Could a data-informed design get the reader to the right selection much faster?

Maps, media, and interactive learning materials have often been discussed on this list. Giving editors more powerful cross-media authoring tools will likely yield significant dividends.

Regarding AI, I personally believe it can be the basis of powerful new research and authoring experiences. However, opinions on this topic are extremely polarized. Many reject generative AI, because they believe it cannot deliver on anything it promises, because of the harms it is causing (and there are undeniably many), or both.

Wikimedia will likely be well-advised to keep the technology somewhat at arm's length, which I think is consistent with your essay: Wikimedia wikis as a trusted foundation.

For folks who _are_ interested in experimenting with it as an authoring tool, I took the occasion of the 25th anniversary as a kick in the butt to get a small prototype up and running of an agentically edited wiki. It's currently at https://agpedia.org/ and it is a _very_ quick and dirty hack [1], but I'm going to keep at it to push my own thinking forward. :)

The idea here is that advanced AI tools can, in principle, mediate authoring. "Research this topic, recommend some citations, check out this PDF, now create a first draft, etc." I believe that this needs to happen with humans firmly in the loop and accountable for edits they make with the help of these tools, as opposed to the Grokipedia approach, which is basically an ideologically poisoned accountability sink.

I doubt Wikimedia will go down this road anytime soon (or ever), but if anyone reading this is interested in collaborating on this or similar ideas, feel free to give me a ping!

Warmly, Erik

[1] https://github.com/permacommons/agpwiki (again: prototype!) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

I really enjoy this discussion.

As it is the latency between human curiosity and insight(s), Wikipedia is losing out to AI chatbots.

The key in the AI chatbots is the UI, which feeds your curiosity by imitating human-to-human dialogue.

Would it be possible to build something like this to Wikipedia, too? I would love to have ”chat” with Wikipedia.

* Teemu

Lähettäjä: Ori Livneh ori.livneh@gmail.com Päivämäärä: sunnuntaina, 18. tammikuuta 2026 klo 0.21 Vastaanottaja: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Aihe: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 1:35 AM Erik Moeller <eloquence@gmail.commailto:eloquence@gmail.com> wrote: A huge reason readers may prefer AI summaries, even if inaccurate, is to get to an answer more quickly (the same reason Wikipedia itself outperformed other information sources even when its quality was still very uneven.)

Yes. It's latency. It was always latency. "Wiki" means quick.

Wikipedia made the sum of human knowledge (or its arithmetic mean, anyway) accessible near you: in your home, in your backpack, in your pocket, on your person. It shortened the distance from question to answer by abstracting the trip to the library or bookshelf, the time spent poring over the table of contents, and the wait for the newspaper to arrive, for a new textbook edition, or for the translation to appear in your language.

For performance engineers like me, Wikipedia's "end-to-end latency" is the time between a reader clicking a link and the article fully rendering on their device. For many years, I believed the key to Wikipedia's continued relevance was shaving milliseconds off this number by tuning Wikimedia's code and infrastructure.

But true end-to-end latency is not measured between server and browser, but between curiosity and insight. And it turns out that network and code latency contribute only modestly to that number. The milliseconds it takes for Wikimedia's servers to transmit an article to your device are dwarfed by the time you need to wrack your brain for the right terms to query, locate the relevant section of the article, interpret its meaning, and relate it to your question.

Wikipedia improved on Britannica's end-to-end latency by several orders of magnitude. Modern AI is now doing the same to Wikipedia. I can describe to Gemini what I want to know using vague, imprecise, or even incorrect terms, and it tells me what I might be thinking of, using my language: not merely the language listed in my Babel userbox, but terms I understand that relate to concepts I already know and are appropriate to my level of understanding.

At its worst, AI generates hallucinated, sycophantic slop. But at its best, it is an interface to human knowledge that is not merely incrementally faster than browsing Wikipedia, but categorically faster.

I think the key to ensuring the future knowledge infrastructure remains free and open is to once again beat closed, commercial platforms on latency, ideally by an order of magnitude or more. This is possible, if you again consider true end-to-end latency and the invisible factors that contribute to it, like the time it takes to distinguish truth from falsehood, and information from manipulation.

I'm not sure Wikimedia should lead the charge. Even if their relevance is fading somewhat, the projects are an immense trove of value for humanity. Any rash effort to remake them from within is likely to destroy more value than it creates. But there is plenty of room out there for new things.

I'm glad to see you experimenting in this space, Eric.

On Sat, Jan 17, 2026 at 10:55 PM Leinonen Teemu via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

I really enjoy this discussion.

As it is the latency between human curiosity and insight(s), Wikipedia is losing out to AI chatbots.

The key in the AI chatbots is the UI, which feeds your curiosity by imitating human-to-human dialogue.

Would it be possible to build something like this to Wikipedia, too? I would love to have ”chat” with Wikipedia.

• Teemu

It is 100% possible. There are free and open source models we could build on, without creating a dependency on AI companies or doing anything that tries to replace human editing and authorship. I bet a lot of data scientists and AI researchers would love to help us.

Building our own model would likely be a prohibitively expensive idea, but there are techniques for applying existing models to search a specific source of data i.e. only answer from Wikipedia. This is being done today by almost every existing company with a database they/their users want to chat with.

Overall I would guess that the Foundation feels scared to propose this because many people dislike AI on principle for various reasons, and it might look like they are following a trend started by for-profit companies that are reusing Wikipedia content with zero attribution, to the Cunctator’s point about copyleft. (I have considered starting a civil class action suit by editors against OpenAI and other foundation model providers for violating Creative Commons terms.)

A lot of the search problems that exist in Wikipedia are fairly basic, or at least don’t require AI chat to fix. For instance, we handle typos (like if you misspell Liechtenstein) very poorly, or otherwise searching for anything that isn’t the exact name of an article (if you search “Halti mountain” it will not show you the article for “Halti”, the tallest mountain in Finland, nor “List of mountains in Finland”). It makes me sad that we are the backbone of Google’s knowledge graph and AI models, but have made no serious attempt to do the obvious thing which is at least try and see if we could build such things based only on our content and with appropriate human control/safety in mind.

This has been a good discussion in response to a usefully thought-provoking essay by Christophe. Many good points previously raised.

Overall, I think Christophe was right to sound the alarm and demand greater urgency. I started editing as a teenager. I am now middle aged, and I want Wikipedia to be around and bigger/better when I am dust. We must replace ourselves with a larger, more thriving community if the project is to survive and grow. You might argue with Christophe’s data analysis, but it is not a good sign when I feel guilty that I can’t make time to do English Wikipedia admin things, because the admin pool has been shrinking on our largest project.

Not all our problems are technological of course, nor do all of them require the WMF to fix. This is perhaps the one quibble I have with the essay—we are not so totally dependent on the Foundation. It just depends what we want to do, who is interested, and can we form a consensus.

Steven Walling

*Lähettäjä: *Ori Livneh ori.livneh@gmail.com *Päivämäärä: *sunnuntaina, 18. tammikuuta 2026 klo 0.21 *Vastaanottaja: *Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Aihe: *[Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 1:35 AM Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

A huge reason readers may prefer AI summaries, even if inaccurate, is to get to an answer more quickly (the same reason Wikipedia itself outperformed other information sources even when its quality was still very uneven.)

Yes. It's latency. It was always latency. "Wiki" means quick.

Wikipedia made the sum of human knowledge (or its arithmetic mean, anyway) accessible near you: in your home, in your backpack, in your pocket, on your person. It shortened the distance from question to answer by abstracting the trip to the library or bookshelf, the time spent poring over the table of contents, and the wait for the newspaper to arrive, for a new textbook edition, or for the translation to appear in your language.

For performance engineers like me, Wikipedia's "end-to-end latency" is the time between a reader clicking a link and the article fully rendering on their device. For many years, I believed the key to Wikipedia's continued relevance was shaving milliseconds off this number by tuning Wikimedia's code and infrastructure.

But *true* end-to-end latency is not measured between server and browser, but between curiosity and insight. And it turns out that network and code latency contribute only modestly to that number. The milliseconds it takes for Wikimedia's servers to transmit an article to your device are dwarfed by the time you need to wrack your brain for the right terms to query, locate the relevant section of the article, interpret its meaning, and relate it to your question.

Wikipedia improved on Britannica's end-to-end latency by several orders of magnitude. Modern AI is now doing the same to Wikipedia. I can describe to Gemini what I want to know using vague, imprecise, or even incorrect terms, and it tells me what I might be thinking of, using my language: not merely the language listed in my Babel userbox, but terms I understand that relate to concepts I already know and are appropriate to my level of understanding.

At its worst, AI generates hallucinated, sycophantic slop. But at its best, it is an interface to human knowledge that is not merely incrementally faster than browsing Wikipedia, but categorically faster.

I think the key to ensuring the future knowledge infrastructure remains free and open is to once again beat closed, commercial platforms on latency, ideally by an order of magnitude or more. This is possible, if you again consider true end-to-end latency and the invisible factors that contribute to it, like the time it takes to distinguish truth from falsehood, and information from manipulation.

I'm not sure Wikimedia should lead the charge. Even if their relevance is fading somewhat, the projects are an immense trove of value for humanity. Any rash effort to remake them from within is likely to destroy more value than it creates. But there is plenty of room out there for new things.

I'm glad to see you experimenting in this space, Eric. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

Hoi. When the Wikimedia Foundation was run as a company, it would consider what our key performance indicators (KPI) are. It would be done in order to improve our business. Our business is to share in the sum of all knowledge. Our content is freely licensed so it is perfectly fine for the leeches of this world to keep their knowledge base up to date. The Wikimedia Foundation provides both them and us a great service as they are providing a dedicated service to get at our data. Our benefit is that there is now more bandwidth for us and our public.

Important is that in "sharing the sum of all knowledge" we have our main objective. That is not open for discussion. The sum of all knowledge is not found in any project. The Arabic Wikipedia knows more about Egyptian politicians than the English Wikipedia, the French Wikipedia knows more about Francophone countries than the English Wikipedia. I made that observation but as an organisation there is this bias that "there can be only one". When James complains about translations, imho he is wrong when he expects room for translations in the English Wikipedia; translations find their place in the Wikipedias that are in that other language. There is a place for translations from English and it is not in the English Wikipedia.

When the traffic of the Wikipedias is considered, more and more traffic is generated by the "other" Wikipedias. This is where we grow. Consequently it could/should be a Foundation KPI to have all of them share in the sum of all knowledge. All arguments from English Wikipedians are not relevant; it is not their Foundation and it is not their concern. When as a consequence fewer resources are available for developing the English Wikipedia, any arguments for more resources from the English Wikipedia demonstrate a bias that is hard to justify. Particularly as the coverage of the sum of all knowledge is fractured because much of what we know is in our "other" projects.

NB What would happen when Mr Trump bans Wikipedia. Are we viable when our US assets no longer are available to us? Thanks, GerardM

On Mon, 19 Jan 2026 at 07:10, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:

One of the big issues that is missed by Christophe is just how unfriendly many parts of our movement have become. Much of the community working on articles about roads split off to their own Wiki as folks were unable to compromise around what is acceptable here. Many medical editors either quit or split to mdwiki as allowing space for translation into other languages was not something certain folks here were willing to accept and things became unpleasant.

Some want to keep WP narrower in scope and this will keep it smaller. Thankfully the right to fork is clearly founded in US law following the Internet Brands lawsuit. And our movement is able to innovate both outside Wikipedia and even outside the WMF. Folks are free to innovate around AI using our material already for example. And likely could get some movement funds to support this work.

J

Sent from Gmail Mobile

On Sun, Jan 18, 2026 at 18:00 Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:

...

On Sat, Jan 17, 2026 at 10:55 PM Leinonen Teemu via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

I really enjoy this discussion.

As it is the latency between human curiosity and insight(s), Wikipedia is losing out to AI chatbots.

The key in the AI chatbots is the UI, which feeds your curiosity by imitating human-to-human dialogue.

Would it be possible to build something like this to Wikipedia, too? I would love to have ”chat” with Wikipedia.

• Teemu

It is 100% possible. There are free and open source models we could build on, without creating a dependency on AI companies or doing anything that tries to replace human editing and authorship. I bet a lot of data scientists and AI researchers would love to help us.

Building our own model would likely be a prohibitively expensive idea, but there are techniques for applying existing models to search a specific source of data i.e. only answer from Wikipedia. This is being done today by almost every existing company with a database they/their users want to chat with.

Overall I would guess that the Foundation feels scared to propose this because many people dislike AI on principle for various reasons, and it might look like they are following a trend started by for-profit companies that are reusing Wikipedia content with zero attribution, to the Cunctator’s point about copyleft. (I have considered starting a civil class action suit by editors against OpenAI and other foundation model providers for violating Creative Commons terms.)

A lot of the search problems that exist in Wikipedia are fairly basic, or at least don’t require AI chat to fix. For instance, we handle typos (like if you misspell Liechtenstein) very poorly, or otherwise searching for anything that isn’t the exact name of an article (if you search “Halti mountain” it will not show you the article for “Halti”, the tallest mountain in Finland, nor “List of mountains in Finland”). It makes me sad that we are the backbone of Google’s knowledge graph and AI models, but have made no serious attempt to do the obvious thing which is at least try and see if we could build such things based only on our content and with appropriate human control/safety in mind.

This has been a good discussion in response to a usefully thought-provoking essay by Christophe. Many good points previously raised.

Overall, I think Christophe was right to sound the alarm and demand greater urgency. I started editing as a teenager. I am now middle aged, and I want Wikipedia to be around and bigger/better when I am dust. We must replace ourselves with a larger, more thriving community if the project is to survive and grow. You might argue with Christophe’s data analysis, but it is not a good sign when I feel guilty that I can’t make time to do English Wikipedia admin things, because the admin pool has been shrinking on our largest project.

Not all our problems are technological of course, nor do all of them require the WMF to fix. This is perhaps the one quibble I have with the essay—we are not so totally dependent on the Foundation. It just depends what we want to do, who is interested, and can we form a consensus.

Steven Walling

...

*Lähettäjä: *Ori Livneh ori.livneh@gmail.com *Päivämäärä: *sunnuntaina, 18. tammikuuta 2026 klo 0.21 *Vastaanottaja: *Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

...

*Aihe: *[Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 1:35 AM Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

A huge reason readers may prefer AI summaries, even if inaccurate, is to get to an answer more quickly (the same reason Wikipedia itself outperformed other information sources even when its quality was still very uneven.)

Yes. It's latency. It was always latency. "Wiki" means quick.

Wikipedia made the sum of human knowledge (or its arithmetic mean, anyway) accessible near you: in your home, in your backpack, in your pocket, on your person. It shortened the distance from question to answer by abstracting the trip to the library or bookshelf, the time spent poring over the table of contents, and the wait for the newspaper to arrive, for a new textbook edition, or for the translation to appear in your language.

For performance engineers like me, Wikipedia's "end-to-end latency" is the time between a reader clicking a link and the article fully rendering on their device. For many years, I believed the key to Wikipedia's continued relevance was shaving milliseconds off this number by tuning Wikimedia's code and infrastructure.

But *true* end-to-end latency is not measured between server and browser, but between curiosity and insight. And it turns out that network and code latency contribute only modestly to that number. The milliseconds it takes for Wikimedia's servers to transmit an article to your device are dwarfed by the time you need to wrack your brain for the right terms to query, locate the relevant section of the article, interpret its meaning, and relate it to your question.

Wikipedia improved on Britannica's end-to-end latency by several orders of magnitude. Modern AI is now doing the same to Wikipedia. I can describe to Gemini what I want to know using vague, imprecise, or even incorrect terms, and it tells me what I might be thinking of, using my language: not merely the language listed in my Babel userbox, but terms I understand that relate to concepts I already know and are appropriate to my level of understanding.

At its worst, AI generates hallucinated, sycophantic slop. But at its best, it is an interface to human knowledge that is not merely incrementally faster than browsing Wikipedia, but categorically faster.

I think the key to ensuring the future knowledge infrastructure remains free and open is to once again beat closed, commercial platforms on latency, ideally by an order of magnitude or more. This is possible, if you again consider true end-to-end latency and the invisible factors that contribute to it, like the time it takes to distinguish truth from falsehood, and information from manipulation.

I'm not sure Wikimedia should lead the charge. Even if their relevance is fading somewhat, the projects are an immense trove of value for humanity. Any rash effort to remake them from within is likely to destroy more value than it creates. But there is plenty of room out there for new things.

I'm glad to see you experimenting in this space, Eric. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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Gerard the issues around translation were that some on English Wikipedia do not want references in the leads of articles and are removing them. We generally just translate the leads, so need references present there. So we tried to move these English leads to a workspace on EN WP (there was no content in non EN on EN WP). These workspaces were deemed an inappropriate use of EN WP and deleted. We thus moved to MDWiki.org and are much happier there as it also solved other issues such that we can use somewhat less technical language to make translation easier.

J

On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 1:15 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

Hoi. When the Wikimedia Foundation was run as a company, it would consider what our key performance indicators (KPI) are. It would be done in order to improve our business. Our business is to share in the sum of all knowledge. Our content is freely licensed so it is perfectly fine for the leeches of this world to keep their knowledge base up to date. The Wikimedia Foundation provides both them and us a great service as they are providing a dedicated service to get at our data. Our benefit is that there is now more bandwidth for us and our public.

Important is that in "sharing the sum of all knowledge" we have our main objective. That is not open for discussion. The sum of all knowledge is not found in any project. The Arabic Wikipedia knows more about Egyptian politicians than the English Wikipedia, the French Wikipedia knows more about Francophone countries than the English Wikipedia. I made that observation but as an organisation there is this bias that "there can be only one". When James complains about translations, imho he is wrong when he expects room for translations in the English Wikipedia; translations find their place in the Wikipedias that are in that other language. There is a place for translations from English and it is not in the English Wikipedia.

When the traffic of the Wikipedias is considered, more and more traffic is generated by the "other" Wikipedias. This is where we grow. Consequently it could/should be a Foundation KPI to have all of them share in the sum of all knowledge. All arguments from English Wikipedians are not relevant; it is not their Foundation and it is not their concern. When as a consequence fewer resources are available for developing the English Wikipedia, any arguments for more resources from the English Wikipedia demonstrate a bias that is hard to justify. Particularly as the coverage of the sum of all knowledge is fractured because much of what we know is in our "other" projects.

NB What would happen when Mr Trump bans Wikipedia. Are we viable when our US assets no longer are available to us? Thanks, GerardM

On Mon, 19 Jan 2026 at 07:10, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:

...

One of the big issues that is missed by Christophe is just how unfriendly many parts of our movement have become. Much of the community working on articles about roads split off to their own Wiki as folks were unable to compromise around what is acceptable here. Many medical editors either quit or split to mdwiki as allowing space for translation into other languages was not something certain folks here were willing to accept and things became unpleasant.

Some want to keep WP narrower in scope and this will keep it smaller. Thankfully the right to fork is clearly founded in US law following the Internet Brands lawsuit. And our movement is able to innovate both outside Wikipedia and even outside the WMF. Folks are free to innovate around AI using our material already for example. And likely could get some movement funds to support this work.

J

Sent from Gmail Mobile

On Sun, Jan 18, 2026 at 18:00 Steven Walling steven.walling@gmail.com wrote:

...

On Sat, Jan 17, 2026 at 10:55 PM Leinonen Teemu via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

...

I really enjoy this discussion.

As it is the latency between human curiosity and insight(s), Wikipedia is losing out to AI chatbots.

The key in the AI chatbots is the UI, which feeds your curiosity by imitating human-to-human dialogue.

Would it be possible to build something like this to Wikipedia, too? I would love to have ”chat” with Wikipedia.

Teemu

It is 100% possible. There are free and open source models we could build on, without creating a dependency on AI companies or doing anything that tries to replace human editing and authorship. I bet a lot of data scientists and AI researchers would love to help us.

Building our own model would likely be a prohibitively expensive idea, but there are techniques for applying existing models to search a specific source of data i.e. only answer from Wikipedia. This is being done today by almost every existing company with a database they/their users want to chat with.

Overall I would guess that the Foundation feels scared to propose this because many people dislike AI on principle for various reasons, and it might look like they are following a trend started by for-profit companies that are reusing Wikipedia content with zero attribution, to the Cunctator’s point about copyleft. (I have considered starting a civil class action suit by editors against OpenAI and other foundation model providers for violating Creative Commons terms.)

A lot of the search problems that exist in Wikipedia are fairly basic, or at least don’t require AI chat to fix. For instance, we handle typos (like if you misspell Liechtenstein) very poorly, or otherwise searching for anything that isn’t the exact name of an article (if you search “Halti mountain” it will not show you the article for “Halti”, the tallest mountain in Finland, nor “List of mountains in Finland”). It makes me sad that we are the backbone of Google’s knowledge graph and AI models, but have made no serious attempt to do the obvious thing which is at least try and see if we could build such things based only on our content and with appropriate human control/safety in mind.

This has been a good discussion in response to a usefully thought-provoking essay by Christophe. Many good points previously raised.

Overall, I think Christophe was right to sound the alarm and demand greater urgency. I started editing as a teenager. I am now middle aged, and I want Wikipedia to be around and bigger/better when I am dust. We must replace ourselves with a larger, more thriving community if the project is to survive and grow. You might argue with Christophe’s data analysis, but it is not a good sign when I feel guilty that I can’t make time to do English Wikipedia admin things, because the admin pool has been shrinking on our largest project.

Not all our problems are technological of course, nor do all of them require the WMF to fix. This is perhaps the one quibble I have with the essay—we are not so totally dependent on the Foundation. It just depends what we want to do, who is interested, and can we form a consensus.

Steven Walling

...

Lähettäjä: Ori Livneh ori.livneh@gmail.com Päivämäärä: sunnuntaina, 18. tammikuuta 2026 klo 0.21 Vastaanottaja: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Aihe: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 1:35 AM Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

A huge reason readers may prefer AI summaries, even if inaccurate, is to get to an answer more quickly (the same reason Wikipedia itself outperformed other information sources even when its quality was still very uneven.)

Yes. It's latency. It was always latency. "Wiki" means quick.

Wikipedia made the sum of human knowledge (or its arithmetic mean, anyway) accessible near you: in your home, in your backpack, in your pocket, on your person. It shortened the distance from question to answer by abstracting the trip to the library or bookshelf, the time spent poring over the table of contents, and the wait for the newspaper to arrive, for a new textbook edition, or for the translation to appear in your language.

For performance engineers like me, Wikipedia's "end-to-end latency" is the time between a reader clicking a link and the article fully rendering on their device. For many years, I believed the key to Wikipedia's continued relevance was shaving milliseconds off this number by tuning Wikimedia's code and infrastructure.

But true end-to-end latency is not measured between server and browser, but between curiosity and insight. And it turns out that network and code latency contribute only modestly to that number. The milliseconds it takes for Wikimedia's servers to transmit an article to your device are dwarfed by the time you need to wrack your brain for the right terms to query, locate the relevant section of the article, interpret its meaning, and relate it to your question.

Wikipedia improved on Britannica's end-to-end latency by several orders of magnitude. Modern AI is now doing the same to Wikipedia. I can describe to Gemini what I want to know using vague, imprecise, or even incorrect terms, and it tells me what I might be thinking of, using my language: not merely the language listed in my Babel userbox, but terms I understand that relate to concepts I already know and are appropriate to my level of understanding.

At its worst, AI generates hallucinated, sycophantic slop. But at its best, it is an interface to human knowledge that is not merely incrementally faster than browsing Wikipedia, but categorically faster.

I think the key to ensuring the future knowledge infrastructure remains free and open is to once again beat closed, commercial platforms on latency, ideally by an order of magnitude or more. This is possible, if you again consider true end-to-end latency and the invisible factors that contribute to it, like the time it takes to distinguish truth from falsehood, and information from manipulation.

I'm not sure Wikimedia should lead the charge. Even if their relevance is fading somewhat, the projects are an immense trove of value for humanity. Any rash effort to remake them from within is likely to destroy more value than it creates. But there is plenty of room out there for new things.

I'm glad to see you experimenting in this space, Eric. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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Hoi, The leeches are going to pay for access to Wikimedia data. They get their own access freeing up bandwidth so the negative impact for users and editors will go away. Thanks. GerardM

On Fri, 16 Jan 2026 at 16:34, The Cunctator cunctator@gmail.com wrote:

The failure to protect Wikipedia's copyleft makes this decline pretty unavoidable. Wikipedia has benefited from a collaborative/parasitic relationship with Google et al for a long time but now the extractive corporations don't need (or believe they need) the human labor, so they are going to keep throttling Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia Foundation needs to reconsider its approach to letting the intellectual property of the editors be exploited - nay, encouraging the theft.

On Fri, Jan 16, 2026, 7:02 AM Adam Wight adam.wight@wikimedia.de wrote:

...

Christophe, the fundamental metric introduced in your essay is an obvious case of apples vs. oranges: "Internet users" is defined in your sources as the number of people who have used the Internet at least once in the past three months, while "Wikimedia page views" is a different measure—in order to compare the two (let alone, *subtract* as you have done) there would have to be a clear way to relate the number of pageviews represented by each Internet user, which is a huge unknown.

The "contributor concentration risk" looks like an invalid application of an investment banking concept, which is relevant to monopoly and monopsony conditions but not to hundreds of thousands of active editors. It makes no sense to invent a new metric when well-understood metrics such as "editor retention" already do the job.

Then, the dream motivating your essay seems to be that we urgently need to participate in the AI ecosystem, by complementing AI-generated text with human fact-finding? I can't follow the thread here, but I suggest you just write your ideas without couching them in an alarmist narrative and a miasma of dubious pseudostatistics. As it is now, this essay fits nicely into the "paradigm shift" genre of rhetoric fueling the AI bubble.

Personally, I would agree that our movement needs to diversify and I would like to see that done by devolving control and resources to the communities doing the writing. Streamlining the content to better plug "truth" into AI is not a vision I will subscribe to.

Regards, Adam Wight

On 1/10/26 12:40 AM, Christophe Henner wrote:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe

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We have had falling readership for years now (when it comes to health content at least). And yes lately this has picked up. People are turning to AI for answers, Google "search engine" now provides AI answers at the top and then the rest is mostly adverts and their partner Mayo Clinic.

We missed video, when Youtube exploded in popularity as a learning platform. We had a collaboration with Ozmosis for video content but the community sent them away. We are only just now developing infrastructure to determine if people watch the small number of videos we currently have (with some saying this is not needed as they believe the answer is few).

Yes we are turning into a niche product. The internet has turned into a walled garden, with folks staying within their apps like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, etc.

But what should we do? Some of us are working on introducing limited video but growth is slow. We fund abstract Wikipedia to the toon of millions. Revolutionary projects are hard to invent. This is not something the WMF can solve. But us being more of a niche project is also not the end of the world.

James

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 5:32 PM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi,

3 months later, a new statistic: mobile page views dropped by 19% in one year.

We are back to the mobile traffic levels of 2018.

https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7... https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2016-01-01~2026-04-28%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly

At this rate, our mobile traffic in 2026 will be at the levels of pre-2013. 2013...

In the meantime, Ericsson is reporting a global mobile usage growth of over 20%

https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts...

When I published my essay, I mostly received gentle to aggressive push back. Back then I was displaying a 8% drop. Now a 20% year over year.

Why did I pick mobile traffic? Because historically bots are less using desktop browser UAs which makes the data a bit more reliable for trends.

3 months ago I said we had 24 months ahead of us before irrelevancy. Well at this rate, in two years we will have lost half of our traffic. And the sad part is that those downhill trends tend not to slow down.

And what now? Well being very blunt, there's only one body in our movement that can muster leadership, energy and resources to tackle this topic head on, that's the board of trustees.

And if 20% doesn't trigger fast and real actions, I have no idea what would.

PS: yes this email is written with a lot of emotion, but minus 20% YoY should trigger that reaction in everyone.

-- Christophe

On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 at 00:40, Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe

---

Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

Christophe, James, Galder, All,

Hello. Building on Galder's points, I had a quick idea: what about a periodic contest for short videos showcasing "encyclopedia of the future" concepts and ideas?

As envisioned, each year, there would be category winners, e.g., prizes for innovative technical concepts and ideas, graphic design, UX design, and video production, and there would be overall grand-prize winners.

All of the entries could be viewed by the Wikimedia community. Perhaps the community could vote on the entries or, perhaps, instead, there would be an elected contest committee and appointed judges for the contest's categories and grand prizes.

Regardless of its important details and particulars, a periodic contest would be a fun means to gather and celebrate concepts and ideas from around the world.

Best regards, Adam Sobieski

________________________________ From: Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2026 2:20 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga galder158@hotmail.com Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

Thanks, Christophe, for commenting this issue again.

Some years ago, when the WMF was receiving enough money to hire, pay waves and distribute to the movement, some of us were working on multimedia, interactivity, children encyclopedias, inter-project integration and many other things to make our platforms better. Every suggestion to the WMF to go on that direction, not because we said it, but because we had an actual strategy to become the center of the free knowledge ecosystem by 2030, was treated with disdain. Every proposal for innovating on free knowledge was dismished. Every breakthrough technology was instantly rejected.

Now we are seing the result: readership is down, we are further away from being the center of the free knowledge ecosystem, and there's less money, so we can't innovate because innovation is expensive.

We still can make things better. But the attitute towards innovation should change. Or just be happy with our one generation wonder.

If someone who has power to change things wants to hear suggestions, I think they will receive very good ideas that should be working five years ago. They only have to ask and hear.

Best,

Galder ________________________________ From: James Heilman via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2026 6:40 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

We have had falling readership for years now (when it comes to health content at least). And yes lately this has picked up. People are turning to AI for answers, Google "search engine" now provides AI answers at the top and then the rest is mostly adverts and their partner Mayo Clinic.

We missed video, when Youtube exploded in popularity as a learning platform. We had a collaboration with Ozmosis for video content but the community sent them away. We are only just now developing infrastructure to determine if people watch the small number of videos we currently have (with some saying this is not needed as they believe the answer is few).

Yes we are turning into a niche product. The internet has turned into a walled garden, with folks staying within their apps like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, etc.

But what should we do? Some of us are working on introducing limited video but growth is slow. We fund abstract Wikipedia to the toon of millions. Revolutionary projects are hard to invent. This is not something the WMF can solve. But us being more of a niche project is also not the end of the world.

James

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 5:32 PM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: Hi,

3 months later, a new statistic: mobile page views dropped by 19% in one year.

We are back to the mobile traffic levels of 2018. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7...https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2016-01-01~2026-04-28%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly

At this rate, our mobile traffic in 2026 will be at the levels of pre-2013. 2013...

In the meantime, Ericsson is reporting a global mobile usage growth of over 20% https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts...

When I published my essay, I mostly received gentle to aggressive push back. Back then I was displaying a 8% drop. Now a 20% year over year.

Why did I pick mobile traffic? Because historically bots are less using desktop browser UAs which makes the data a bit more reliable for trends.

3 months ago I said we had 24 months ahead of us before irrelevancy. Well at this rate, in two years we will have lost half of our traffic. And the sad part is that those downhill trends tend not to slow down.

And what now? Well being very blunt, there's only one body in our movement that can muster leadership, energy and resources to tackle this topic head on, that's the board of trustees.

And if 20% doesn't trigger fast and real actions, I have no idea what would.

PS: yes this email is written with a lot of emotion, but minus 20% YoY should trigger that reaction in everyone.

-- Christophe

On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 at 00:40, Christophe Henner <christophe.henner@gmail.commailto:christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

Here it is: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

--

Christophe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian

All of those ideas are right and very correct, but I fear that when you enter the realm of -20% YoY they are not going to do much.

Radical drops require radical changes.

@James Heilman jheilman@wikimedia.org I have no idea how to answer your comment honestly. Becoming niche means community and ressources shrink too. How do you fill in the existing gaps, how do you maintain articles up to date, how do you create the content in all languages if we don't have people or ressources and when we refuse the adoption of generative AI?

-- Christophe

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 05:39, Gnangarra via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Video contests and usage isn't able to be properly supported. We wait for the WMF to enable .mp4 uploads to enabled through upload wizard, followed by offer them in .mp4 or a behind the server conversion. Currently we have one semi reliable tool with video2commons, the uploaded has to use an alternate local conversion beforehand. These are significant barriers to video, once we over come that there is a whole new world of complexity around copyright to be addressed . The WMF frequently tells the Commons community there is direct support available to improve Commons not matter what is needed. One day our media system is going to collapse as the fundamental project has had zero support for even basic infrastructure in nearly 10 years Boodarwun Gnangarra 'ngany dabakarn koorliny arn boodjera dardon nlangan Nyungar koortabodjar'

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026, 10:48 Adam Sobieski via Wikimedia-l, < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Christophe, James, Galder, All,

Hello. Building on Galder's points, I had a quick idea: what about a periodic contest for short videos showcasing "encyclopedia of the future" concepts and ideas?

As envisioned, each year, there would be category winners, e.g., prizes for innovative technical concepts and ideas, graphic design, UX design, and video production, and there would be overall grand-prize winners.

All of the entries could be viewed by the Wikimedia community. Perhaps the community could vote on the entries or, perhaps, instead, there would be an elected contest committee and appointed judges for the contest's categories and grand prizes.

Regardless of its important details and particulars, a periodic contest would be a fun means to gather and celebrate concepts and ideas from around the world.

Best regards, Adam Sobieski

---

*From:* Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 28, 2026 2:20 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Cc:* Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga galder158@hotmail.com *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

Thanks, Christophe, for commenting this issue again.

Some years ago, when the WMF was receiving enough money to hire, pay waves and distribute to the movement, some of us were working on multimedia, interactivity, children encyclopedias, inter-project integration and many other things to make our platforms better. Every suggestion to the WMF to go on that direction, not because we said it, but because we had an actual strategy to become the center of the free knowledge ecosystem by 2030, was treated with disdain. Every proposal for innovating on free knowledge was dismished. Every breakthrough technology was instantly rejected.

Now we are seing the result: readership is down, we are further away from being the center of the free knowledge ecosystem, and there's less money, so we can't innovate because innovation is expensive.

We still can make things better. But the attitute towards innovation should change. Or just be happy with our one generation wonder.

If someone who has power to change things wants to hear suggestions, I think they will receive very good ideas that should be working five years ago. They only have to ask and hear.

Best,

Galder

*From:* James Heilman via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Sent:* Tuesday, April 28, 2026 6:40 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Cc:* James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

We have had falling readership for years now (when it comes to health content at least). And yes lately this has picked up. People are turning to AI for answers, Google "search engine" now provides AI answers at the top and then the rest is mostly adverts and their partner Mayo Clinic.

We missed video, when Youtube exploded in popularity as a learning platform. We had a collaboration with Ozmosis for video content but the community sent them away. We are only just now developing infrastructure to determine if people watch the small number of videos we currently have (with some saying this is not needed as they believe the answer is few).

Yes we are turning into a niche product. The internet has turned into a walled garden, with folks staying within their apps like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, etc.

But what should we do? Some of us are working on introducing limited video but growth is slow. We fund abstract Wikipedia to the toon of millions. Revolutionary projects are hard to invent. This is not something the WMF can solve. But us being more of a niche project is also not the end of the world.

James

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 5:32 PM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi,

3 months later, a new statistic: mobile page views dropped by 19% in one year.

We are back to the mobile traffic levels of 2018.

https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7... https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2016-01-01~2026-04-28%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly

At this rate, our mobile traffic in 2026 will be at the levels of pre-2013. 2013...

In the meantime, Ericsson is reporting a global mobile usage growth of over 20%

https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts...

When I published my essay, I mostly received gentle to aggressive push back. Back then I was displaying a 8% drop. Now a 20% year over year.

Why did I pick mobile traffic? Because historically bots are less using desktop browser UAs which makes the data a bit more reliable for trends.

3 months ago I said we had 24 months ahead of us before irrelevancy. Well at this rate, in two years we will have lost half of our traffic. And the sad part is that those downhill trends tend not to slow down.

And what now? Well being very blunt, there's only one body in our movement that can muster leadership, energy and resources to tackle this topic head on, that's the board of trustees.

And if 20% doesn't trigger fast and real actions, I have no idea what would.

PS: yes this email is written with a lot of emotion, but minus 20% YoY should trigger that reaction in everyone.

-- Christophe

On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 at 00:40, Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe

---

Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

---

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Bonjour Bravo pour cette journée J'aurai aimé participer, j'ai un engagement Bien à vous

Rachida Roky Professeure de l'enseignement supérieur Département de Biologie Faculté des Sciences Ain Chock Université Hassan II de Casablanca Réseau de lecture au Maroc

0661206701 - E-mail : rokyrachida@gmail.com

See me on Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=roky+rachida&oq=roky+

See me on Research Gate https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Rachida-Roky

La lecture est une amitié, lisons au quotidien

On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 7:15 AM James Heilman via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

I would not call adopting "generative AI" radical at this point in time, more just following a fad. Tons of folks are sinking many many billions of dollars into it and we are not going to out AI them. Us becoming a search engine or us dropping tons of money into AI is not something we should do in my opinion. We should concentrate on becoming an even better encyclopedia and making the format more modern and more interactive. But I think the fundamental idea remains good. Readership may fall but will hopefully stabilize. We can function with less money if we need to.

James

On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 7:47 AM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

All of those ideas are right and very correct, but I fear that when you enter the realm of -20% YoY they are not going to do much.

Radical drops require radical changes.

@James Heilman jheilman@wikimedia.org I have no idea how to answer your comment honestly. Becoming niche means community and ressources shrink too. How do you fill in the existing gaps, how do you maintain articles up to date, how do you create the content in all languages if we don't have people or ressources and when we refuse the adoption of generative AI?

-- Christophe

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 05:39, Gnangarra via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Video contests and usage isn't able to be properly supported. We wait for the WMF to enable .mp4 uploads to enabled through upload wizard, followed by offer them in .mp4 or a behind the server conversion. Currently we have one semi reliable tool with video2commons, the uploaded has to use an alternate local conversion beforehand. These are significant barriers to video, once we over come that there is a whole new world of complexity around copyright to be addressed . The WMF frequently tells the Commons community there is direct support available to improve Commons not matter what is needed. One day our media system is going to collapse as the fundamental project has had zero support for even basic infrastructure in nearly 10 years Boodarwun Gnangarra 'ngany dabakarn koorliny arn boodjera dardon nlangan Nyungar koortabodjar'

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026, 10:48 Adam Sobieski via Wikimedia-l, < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Christophe, James, Galder, All,

Hello. Building on Galder's points, I had a quick idea: what about a periodic contest for short videos showcasing "encyclopedia of the future" concepts and ideas?

As envisioned, each year, there would be category winners, e.g., prizes for innovative technical concepts and ideas, graphic design, UX design, and video production, and there would be overall grand-prize winners.

All of the entries could be viewed by the Wikimedia community. Perhaps the community could vote on the entries or, perhaps, instead, there would be an elected contest committee and appointed judges for the contest's categories and grand prizes.

Regardless of its important details and particulars, a periodic contest would be a fun means to gather and celebrate concepts and ideas from around the world.

Best regards, Adam Sobieski

---

*From:* Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> *Sent:* Tuesday, April 28, 2026 2:20 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Cc:* Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga galder158@hotmail.com *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

Thanks, Christophe, for commenting this issue again.

Some years ago, when the WMF was receiving enough money to hire, pay waves and distribute to the movement, some of us were working on multimedia, interactivity, children encyclopedias, inter-project integration and many other things to make our platforms better. Every suggestion to the WMF to go on that direction, not because we said it, but because we had an actual strategy to become the center of the free knowledge ecosystem by 2030, was treated with disdain. Every proposal for innovating on free knowledge was dismished. Every breakthrough technology was instantly rejected.

Now we are seing the result: readership is down, we are further away from being the center of the free knowledge ecosystem, and there's less money, so we can't innovate because innovation is expensive.

We still can make things better. But the attitute towards innovation should change. Or just be happy with our one generation wonder.

If someone who has power to change things wants to hear suggestions, I think they will receive very good ideas that should be working five years ago. They only have to ask and hear.

Best,

Galder

*From:* James Heilman via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Sent:* Tuesday, April 28, 2026 6:40 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Cc:* James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

We have had falling readership for years now (when it comes to health content at least). And yes lately this has picked up. People are turning to AI for answers, Google "search engine" now provides AI answers at the top and then the rest is mostly adverts and their partner Mayo Clinic.

We missed video, when Youtube exploded in popularity as a learning platform. We had a collaboration with Ozmosis for video content but the community sent them away. We are only just now developing infrastructure to determine if people watch the small number of videos we currently have (with some saying this is not needed as they believe the answer is few).

Yes we are turning into a niche product. The internet has turned into a walled garden, with folks staying within their apps like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, etc.

But what should we do? Some of us are working on introducing limited video but growth is slow. We fund abstract Wikipedia to the toon of millions. Revolutionary projects are hard to invent. This is not something the WMF can solve. But us being more of a niche project is also not the end of the world.

James

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 5:32 PM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi,

3 months later, a new statistic: mobile page views dropped by 19% in one year.

We are back to the mobile traffic levels of 2018.

https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7... https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2016-01-01~2026-04-28%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly

At this rate, our mobile traffic in 2026 will be at the levels of pre-2013. 2013...

In the meantime, Ericsson is reporting a global mobile usage growth of over 20%

https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts...

When I published my essay, I mostly received gentle to aggressive push back. Back then I was displaying a 8% drop. Now a 20% year over year.

Why did I pick mobile traffic? Because historically bots are less using desktop browser UAs which makes the data a bit more reliable for trends.

3 months ago I said we had 24 months ahead of us before irrelevancy. Well at this rate, in two years we will have lost half of our traffic. And the sad part is that those downhill trends tend not to slow down.

And what now? Well being very blunt, there's only one body in our movement that can muster leadership, energy and resources to tackle this topic head on, that's the board of trustees.

And if 20% doesn't trigger fast and real actions, I have no idea what would.

PS: yes this email is written with a lot of emotion, but minus 20% YoY should trigger that reaction in everyone.

-- Christophe

On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 at 00:40, Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe

---

Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

---

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---

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-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

From my point of view, being functional for a machine, instead of machines being functional to us, humans, is a contradiction. Not attractive, and quite humiliating. But that's my point of view. That's why we are working with multimedia content in the Basque Wikipedia, for instance (https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari:Hezkuntza/Ikusgela), because the strategy said: "Innovate in free knowledge".

Best,

Galder ________________________________ From: Kimmo Virtanen via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2026 9:58 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: James Heilman jheilman@wikimedia.org; Kimmo Virtanen kimmo.virtanen@wikimedia.fi Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

Hi,

A long time ago, I visualized Wikipedia as curated memory for AI, where a huge number of humans improve, enrich and fact-check the content. AI and LLMs can be tools used as a user interface to access information, perform automatic checks for errors, or rearrange information into new formats. Their relationship is symbiotic and both benefit from the other. Basic idea is that if it is a good encyclopedia for humans, it is also a very good baseline dataset for AI too.

From that perspective I would improve Wikimedia's position by providing the most easily usable dataset for AI and LLMs and other tools, instead of trying to generate videos.

Br, -- Kimmo Virtanen, Zache

On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 10:16 AM James Heilman via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: I would not call adopting "generative AI" radical at this point in time, more just following a fad. Tons of folks are sinking many many billions of dollars into it and we are not going to out AI them. Us becoming a search engine or us dropping tons of money into AI is not something we should do in my opinion. We should concentrate on becoming an even better encyclopedia and making the format more modern and more interactive. But I think the fundamental idea remains good. Readership may fall but will hopefully stabilize. We can function with less money if we need to.

James

On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 7:47 AM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: All of those ideas are right and very correct, but I fear that when you enter the realm of -20% YoY they are not going to do much.

Radical drops require radical changes.

@James Heilmanmailto:jheilman@wikimedia.org I have no idea how to answer your comment honestly. Becoming niche means community and ressources shrink too. How do you fill in the existing gaps, how do you maintain articles up to date, how do you create the content in all languages if we don't have people or ressources and when we refuse the adoption of generative AI?

-- Christophe

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 05:39, Gnangarra via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: Video contests and usage isn't able to be properly supported. We wait for the WMF to enable .mp4 uploads to enabled through upload wizard, followed by offer them in .mp4 or a behind the server conversion. Currently we have one semi reliable tool with video2commons, the uploaded has to use an alternate local conversion beforehand. These are significant barriers to video, once we over come that there is a whole new world of complexity around copyright to be addressed . The WMF frequently tells the Commons community there is direct support available to improve Commons not matter what is needed. One day our media system is going to collapse as the fundamental project has had zero support for even basic infrastructure in nearly 10 years Boodarwun Gnangarra 'ngany dabakarn koorliny arn boodjera dardon nlangan Nyungar koortabodjar'

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026, 10:48 Adam Sobieski via Wikimedia-l, <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: Christophe, James, Galder, All,

Hello. Building on Galder's points, I had a quick idea: what about a periodic contest for short videos showcasing "encyclopedia of the future" concepts and ideas?

As envisioned, each year, there would be category winners, e.g., prizes for innovative technical concepts and ideas, graphic design, UX design, and video production, and there would be overall grand-prize winners.

All of the entries could be viewed by the Wikimedia community. Perhaps the community could vote on the entries or, perhaps, instead, there would be an elected contest committee and appointed judges for the contest's categories and grand prizes.

Regardless of its important details and particulars, a periodic contest would be a fun means to gather and celebrate concepts and ideas from around the world.

Best regards, Adam Sobieski

________________________________ From: Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2026 2:20 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <galder158@hotmail.commailto:galder158@hotmail.com> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

Thanks, Christophe, for commenting this issue again.

Some years ago, when the WMF was receiving enough money to hire, pay waves and distribute to the movement, some of us were working on multimedia, interactivity, children encyclopedias, inter-project integration and many other things to make our platforms better. Every suggestion to the WMF to go on that direction, not because we said it, but because we had an actual strategy to become the center of the free knowledge ecosystem by 2030, was treated with disdain. Every proposal for innovating on free knowledge was dismished. Every breakthrough technology was instantly rejected.

Now we are seing the result: readership is down, we are further away from being the center of the free knowledge ecosystem, and there's less money, so we can't innovate because innovation is expensive.

We still can make things better. But the attitute towards innovation should change. Or just be happy with our one generation wonder.

If someone who has power to change things wants to hear suggestions, I think they will receive very good ideas that should be working five years ago. They only have to ask and hear.

Best,

Galder ________________________________ From: James Heilman via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2026 6:40 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: James Heilman <jmh649@gmail.commailto:jmh649@gmail.com> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

We have had falling readership for years now (when it comes to health content at least). And yes lately this has picked up. People are turning to AI for answers, Google "search engine" now provides AI answers at the top and then the rest is mostly adverts and their partner Mayo Clinic.

We missed video, when Youtube exploded in popularity as a learning platform. We had a collaboration with Ozmosis for video content but the community sent them away. We are only just now developing infrastructure to determine if people watch the small number of videos we currently have (with some saying this is not needed as they believe the answer is few).

Yes we are turning into a niche product. The internet has turned into a walled garden, with folks staying within their apps like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, etc.

But what should we do? Some of us are working on introducing limited video but growth is slow. We fund abstract Wikipedia to the toon of millions. Revolutionary projects are hard to invent. This is not something the WMF can solve. But us being more of a niche project is also not the end of the world.

James

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 5:32 PM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: Hi,

3 months later, a new statistic: mobile page views dropped by 19% in one year.

We are back to the mobile traffic levels of 2018. https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7...https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2016-01-01~2026-04-28%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly

At this rate, our mobile traffic in 2026 will be at the levels of pre-2013. 2013...

In the meantime, Ericsson is reporting a global mobile usage growth of over 20% https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts...

When I published my essay, I mostly received gentle to aggressive push back. Back then I was displaying a 8% drop. Now a 20% year over year.

Why did I pick mobile traffic? Because historically bots are less using desktop browser UAs which makes the data a bit more reliable for trends.

3 months ago I said we had 24 months ahead of us before irrelevancy. Well at this rate, in two years we will have lost half of our traffic. And the sad part is that those downhill trends tend not to slow down.

And what now? Well being very blunt, there's only one body in our movement that can muster leadership, energy and resources to tackle this topic head on, that's the board of trustees.

And if 20% doesn't trigger fast and real actions, I have no idea what would.

PS: yes this email is written with a lot of emotion, but minus 20% YoY should trigger that reaction in everyone.

-- Christophe

On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 at 00:40, Christophe Henner <christophe.henner@gmail.commailto:christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

Here it is: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

--

Christophe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

TL;DR: https://wikiplus.video

I see the recent developments in AI and the death of traditional Google-style search as peripheral to our real problem: Wikipedia doesn't have anything to offer to an audience that mainly turns to video for knowledge instead of text (which is most of Gen Z and Gen Alpha).

What Wikipedia offers an audience of text nerds (complimentary) is not — primarily — just more text. We have access to more published text than we know what to do with. Wikipedia offers a way to curate that text. For someone who has read enough about a topic to know the worthwhile texts from the trash, Wikipedia gives them a way to share they know about those texts. (The fact that creating Wikipedia is mostly about creating new text for readers is incidental, not essential, to this curation.)

I think this concept of communal curation is what's missing from the video-centric information ecosystem. Just as most Wikipedia editors don't want to write the sorts of text they read and cite, the nerds who immerse themselves in learning from video don't necessarily want to create video. But they do — I believe — want to help curate knowledge and contribute what they know about which (video) sources are worthwhile, and fold that into the knowledge commons to help others.

I've created a prototype for "Wiki+" — all the content of Wikipedia, plus video (from YouTube, etc) about the topic. As a reader, you get everything Wikipedia has to tell you about some topic, alongside the best of what video creators have to say about it. As a curator, you can find the best videos to complement the Wikipedia text, and add curation notes to provide context and flag errors.

https://wikiplus.video

-Sage

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 9:40 AM James Heilman via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

We have had falling readership for years now (when it comes to health content at least). And yes lately this has picked up. People are turning to AI for answers, Google "search engine" now provides AI answers at the top and then the rest is mostly adverts and their partner Mayo Clinic.

We missed video, when Youtube exploded in popularity as a learning platform. We had a collaboration with Ozmosis for video content but the community sent them away. We are only just now developing infrastructure to determine if people watch the small number of videos we currently have (with some saying this is not needed as they believe the answer is few).

Yes we are turning into a niche product. The internet has turned into a walled garden, with folks staying within their apps like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, etc.

But what should we do? Some of us are working on introducing limited video but growth is slow. We fund abstract Wikipedia to the toon of millions. Revolutionary projects are hard to invent. This is not something the WMF can solve. But us being more of a niche project is also not the end of the world.

James

Thanks for this, Sage, In the Basque Wikipedia we have been working with video (https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari:Hezkuntza/Ikusgela) and multimedia (https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari:Ondarea/Euskal_Herriko_historia_100_obje...) in the last years. There's some opposition in English Wikipedia to add videos into articles (looking at video as inferior to text), but this is something that can be socially worked. There are lots of high quality videos published under a free license, and nothing stops us to make videos for articles, other than the social discussion about their inclusion.

Best,

Galder ________________________________ From: James Heilman via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Saturday, July 11, 2026 7:47 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wiki, plus video [was Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)]

WikiPlus appears to remove the current videos within Wikipedia articles. For example Polio has a video in the lead

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio

Made using VideoWiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VideoWiki/Polio

I do not see that video here

https://wikiplus.video/topic/Polio/

Agree, we should integrate more videos into Wikipedia. We for example could directly add TED talks and Khan academy videos if we choose to. Great to see this sort of experimentation.

James

On Fri, Jul 10, 2026 at 11:59 PM Sage Ross via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: TL;DR: https://wikiplus.videohttps://wikiplus.video/

I see the recent developments in AI and the death of traditional Google-style search as peripheral to our real problem: Wikipedia doesn't have anything to offer to an audience that mainly turns to video for knowledge instead of text (which is most of Gen Z and Gen Alpha).

What Wikipedia offers an audience of text nerds (complimentary) is not — primarily — just more text. We have access to more published text than we know what to do with. Wikipedia offers a way to curate that text. For someone who has read enough about a topic to know the worthwhile texts from the trash, Wikipedia gives them a way to share they know about those texts. (The fact that creating Wikipedia is mostly about creating new text for readers is incidental, not essential, to this curation.)

I think this concept of communal curation is what's missing from the video-centric information ecosystem. Just as most Wikipedia editors don't want to write the sorts of text they read and cite, the nerds who immerse themselves in learning from video don't necessarily want to create video. But they do — I believe — want to help curate knowledge and contribute what they know about which (video) sources are worthwhile, and fold that into the knowledge commons to help others.

I've created a prototype for "Wiki+" — all the content of Wikipedia, plus video (from YouTube, etc) about the topic. As a reader, you get everything Wikipedia has to tell you about some topic, alongside the best of what video creators have to say about it. As a curator, you can find the best videos to complement the Wikipedia text, and add curation notes to provide context and flag errors.

https://wikiplus.videohttps://wikiplus.video/

-Sage

On Tue, Apr 28, 2026 at 9:40 AM James Heilman via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: We have had falling readership for years now (when it comes to health content at least). And yes lately this has picked up. People are turning to AI for answers, Google "search engine" now provides AI answers at the top and then the rest is mostly adverts and their partner Mayo Clinic.

We missed video, when Youtube exploded in popularity as a learning platform. We had a collaboration with Ozmosis for video content but the community sent them away. We are only just now developing infrastructure to determine if people watch the small number of videos we currently have (with some saying this is not needed as they believe the answer is few).

Yes we are turning into a niche product. The internet has turned into a walled garden, with folks staying within their apps like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, etc.

But what should we do? Some of us are working on introducing limited video but growth is slow. We fund abstract Wikipedia to the toon of millions. Revolutionary projects are hard to invent. This is not something the WMF can solve. But us being more of a niche project is also not the end of the world.

James

_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian

Anders, you're right that these aren't figures of an organization in collapse. But they are end of the funnel figures, meaning that when those are going down by 20% YoY we're going to be in very deep troubles.

But I'd push back on one thing: "we have to learn how to adjust" and "this is not a crisis" are in tension. A 20% readership drop should be the signal *telling us* the adjustment is urgent. If we wait until edits and new pages start declining to act, we'll be reacting to a problem that started years earlier and would become a very nefarious spiral.

Because the day that happens, we, as communities, will not be able to keep content up to date (and this is considering we only have to keep up to date and that all linguistic versions are "complete" which they are not).

The metrics you cite are reassuring about the "present" (and I could challenge that) but I'm very concerned about the trajectory those different signals I've been sharing are painting.

An analogy that may be telling is the newspapers industry, ad revenues started to fall years before layoff and closure started. Because Ads is a top of the funnel metric that was easily discarded with "it's seasonal", "it won't last", "People won't trust content on the Internet", "Local news can't go anywhere people care about it". But when the layoff started, it was a downward spiral and it was too late and in so many countries newspapers didn't have a fighting chance, because when they started to fight it was already too late. I would prefer that we fight while we still can.

-- Christophe

On Wed, 29 Apr 2026 at 19:13, Anders Wennersten via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Facts states (worldwide figures):

*Donation is up

*Number of new pages is up [1]

*number of edits från users is up [2}

That is not figures of a crises

The 20% decrease represent a different way of accessing info. we have to learn how to adjust to these changes but is is NOT a general crises,

Anders

[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/new-pages/...

[2] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/edits/norm... https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/edits/normal%7Cbar%7C2-year%7Ceditor_type~user+(page_type)~content%7Cmonthly Den 2026-04-28 kl. 17:31, skrev Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l:

Hi,

3 months later, a new statistic: mobile page views dropped by 19% in one year.

We are back to the mobile traffic levels of 2018.

https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7... https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2016-01-01~2026-04-28%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly

At this rate, our mobile traffic in 2026 will be at the levels of pre-2013. 2013...

In the meantime, Ericsson is reporting a global mobile usage growth of over 20%

https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts...

When I published my essay, I mostly received gentle to aggressive push back. Back then I was displaying a 8% drop. Now a 20% year over year.

Why did I pick mobile traffic? Because historically bots are less using desktop browser UAs which makes the data a bit more reliable for trends.

3 months ago I said we had 24 months ahead of us before irrelevancy. Well at this rate, in two years we will have lost half of our traffic. And the sad part is that those downhill trends tend not to slow down.

And what now? Well being very blunt, there's only one body in our movement that can muster leadership, energy and resources to tackle this topic head on, that's the board of trustees.

And if 20% doesn't trigger fast and real actions, I have no idea what would.

PS: yes this email is written with a lot of emotion, but minus 20% YoY should trigger that reaction in everyone.

-- Christophe

On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 at 00:40, Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe

---

Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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Hoi, Apparently the tough nut question is "When are we going to recognise that we have a multi dimensional, multi lingual freely licensed wiki content environment that has so far only focussed on text?" Thanks, GerardM

On Thu, 30 Apr 2026 at 07:08, Luis Villa via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

The fundraising team would be the first to say that revenue is the means, not the end. They can tweak the numbers by running more/different banners, but that does not mean the project is healthy.

Bigger picture point: at WikiCredCon, it was suggested that this year's strategic discussions would focus on last year's 6-8% decline.

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/

*So, for purposes of strategic discussion: assume that within 2-3 years our on-wiki readership will be at 5% of peak. Or even braver: assume that on-wiki readership goes to essentially zero, with only editors reading it. *I'm not saying this is the most likely outcome, just that approaching the question from that frame is much more likely to generate interesting and important ideas than trying to slowly tweak our decline.

What then?

"zero on-wiki readers" wouldn't mean our mission is over: there are many ways (including many new and fun and productive ways!) to collaborate on open knowledge, many partners we could co-create with, and many channels to distribute that knowledge. And despite the general downturn, at least some outlets adjacent to us are thriving right now: https://lu.is/2026/04/web-collaboration-five-graphs/ So I'm not saying "all is doomed".

But approaching our mission *without* assuming the magnetic force of the wiki would force us to be creative--to start experimenting widely and boldly. I think we need to place 1,000 bets with 10,000 motivated volunteers, sooner rather than later.

This is not going to be easy. Among other things:

• lots of old habits to unlearn. (I admit my own first public experiment

is on... en-wiki. Hopefully #2 will be on wikidata, at least! And I've finally bought a .wiki domain for #3...)

• if those 10,000 volunteers have to do this entirely on their own time

(and own GPUs) then we'll again be building a movement by and for the (relatively) wealthy. Hopefully we can find many funders, not just WMF, so that we have a diversity of approaches and risk-tolerances.

• lots of those experiments are going to fail, and we're going to have to

pick ourselves up and try again anyway. (Shades of Mako's paper: https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf)

• we're going to have to find new signs of success. It might be readers,

but it might not, or it might be different kinds of readers, or it might more explicitly be GLAMs, or... we don't know yet. But the One Big Number of readership likely will never be The Thing again.

Anyway, I'm mostly going to go back to experimenting (and hopefully sharing more about that experimentation). But had to get that off my chest. Hope it spurs others to plant some seeds and run some experiments!

Trying to be Bold- Luis

On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 6:30 PM Anders Wennersten via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Facts states (worldwide figures):

*Donation is up

*Number of new pages is up [1]

*number of edits från users is up [2}

That is not figures of a crises

The 20% decrease represent a different way of accessing info. we have to learn how to adjust to these changes but is is NOT a general crises,

Anders

[1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/new-pages/...

[2] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/edits/norm... https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/edits/normal%7Cbar%7C2-year%7Ceditor_type~user+(page_type)~content%7Cmonthly Den 2026-04-28 kl. 17:31, skrev Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l:

Hi,

3 months later, a new statistic: mobile page views dropped by 19% in one year.

We are back to the mobile traffic levels of 2018.

https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7... https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2016-01-01~2026-04-28%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly

At this rate, our mobile traffic in 2026 will be at the levels of pre-2013. 2013...

In the meantime, Ericsson is reporting a global mobile usage growth of over 20%

https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts...

When I published my essay, I mostly received gentle to aggressive push back. Back then I was displaying a 8% drop. Now a 20% year over year.

Why did I pick mobile traffic? Because historically bots are less using desktop browser UAs which makes the data a bit more reliable for trends.

3 months ago I said we had 24 months ahead of us before irrelevancy. Well at this rate, in two years we will have lost half of our traffic. And the sad part is that those downhill trends tend not to slow down.

And what now? Well being very blunt, there's only one body in our movement that can muster leadership, energy and resources to tackle this topic head on, that's the board of trustees.

And if 20% doesn't trigger fast and real actions, I have no idea what would.

PS: yes this email is written with a lot of emotion, but minus 20% YoY should trigger that reaction in everyone.

-- Christophe

On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 at 00:40, Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe

---

Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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Or we can react constructive and start think of Wikipedia  in term of

*articles with accesses still are up and content not reused by AI (yes those exist, like (list of) opinion pollings for elections)

*articles with content is fully reused by AI (I see no basic problem there)

*articles where AI gets better result than our articles, (and here have to think through how to react, change our behavior)

Anders

Den 2026-04-30 kl. 07:07, skrev Luis Villa via Wikimedia-l:

The fundraising team would be the first to say that revenue is the means, not the end. They can tweak the numbers by running more/different banners, but that does not mean the project is healthy.

Bigger picture point: at WikiCredCon, it was suggested that this year's strategic discussions would focus on last year's 6-8% decline.

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/

*So, for purposes of strategic discussion: assume that within 2-3 years our on-wiki readership will be at 5% of peak. Or even braver: assume that on-wiki readership goes to essentially zero, with only editors reading it. *I'm not saying this is the most likely outcome, just that approaching the question from that frame is much more likely to generate interesting and important ideas than trying to slowly tweak our decline.

What then?

"zero on-wiki readers" wouldn't mean our mission is over: there are many ways (including many new and fun and productive ways!) to collaborate on open knowledge, many partners we could co-create with, and many channels to distribute that knowledge. And despite the general downturn, at least some outlets adjacent to us are thriving right now: https://lu.is/2026/04/web-collaboration-five-graphs/ So I'm not saying "all is doomed".

But approaching our mission *without* assuming the magnetic force of the wiki would force us to be creative--to start experimenting widely and boldly. I think we need to place 1,000 bets with 10,000 motivated volunteers, sooner rather than later.

This is not going to be easy. Among other things:

• lots of old habits to unlearn. (I admit my own first public

experiment is on... en-wiki. Hopefully #2 will be on wikidata, at least! And I've finally bought a .wiki domain for #3...)

• if those 10,000 volunteers have to do this entirely on their own

time (and own GPUs) then we'll again be building a movement by and for the (relatively) wealthy. Hopefully we can find many funders, not just WMF, so that we have a diversity of approaches and risk-tolerances.

• lots of those experiments are going to fail, and we're going to have

to pick ourselves up and try again anyway. (Shades of Mako's paper: https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf)

• we're going to have to find new signs of success. It might be

readers, but it might not, or it might be different kinds of readers, or it might more explicitly be GLAMs, or... we don't know yet. But the One Big Number of readership likely will never be The Thing again.

Anyway, I'm mostly going to go back to experimenting (and hopefully sharing more about that experimentation). But had to get that off my chest. Hope it spurs others to plant some seeds and run some experiments!

Trying to be Bold- Luis

On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 6:30 PM Anders Wennersten via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

Facts states (worldwide figures):

*Donation is up

*Number of new pages is up [1]

*number of edits från users is up [2}

That is not figures of a crises

The 20% decrease represent a different way of accessing info. we
have to learn how to adjust to these changes but is is NOT a
general crises,

Anders

[1]
https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/new-pages/normal|bar|2-year|page_type~content|monthly
<https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/new-pages/normal%7Cbar%7C2-year%7Cpage_type~content%7Cmonthly>

[2]
https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/edits/normal|bar|2-year|editor_type~user+(page_type)~content|monthly
<https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/edits/normal%7Cbar%7C2-year%7Ceditor_type~user+(page_type)~content%7Cmonthly>

Den 2026-04-28 kl. 17:31, skrev Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l:

...

Hi,

3 months later, a new statistic: mobile page views dropped by 19%
in one year.

We are back to the mobile traffic levels of 2018.
https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal|bar|2016-01-01~2026-04-28|(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user|monthly
<https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2016-01-01~2026-04-28%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly>

At this rate, our mobile traffic in 2026 will be at the levels of
pre-2013. 2013...

In the meantime, Ericsson is reporting a global mobile usage
growth of over 20%
https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts/mobile-traffic-update

When I published my essay, I mostly received gentle to
aggressive push back. Back then I was displaying a 8% drop. Now a
20% year over year.

Why did I pick mobile traffic? Because historically bots are less
using desktop browser UAs which makes the data a bit more
reliable for trends.

3 months ago I said we had 24 months ahead of us before
irrelevancy. Well at this rate, in two years we will have lost
half of our traffic. And the sad part is that those downhill
trends tend not to slow down.

And what now? Well being very blunt, there's only one body in our
movement that can muster leadership, energy and resources to
tackle this topic head on, that's the board of trustees.

And if 20% doesn't trigger fast and real actions, I have no idea
what would.

PS: yes this email is written with a lot of emotion, but minus
20% YoY should trigger that reaction in everyone.

--
Christophe


On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 at 00:40, Christophe Henner
<christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

    Hey everyone,

    I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be
    "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

    So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over
    twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia
    France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried.
    Scared to be honnest.

    Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and
    sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few
    weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my
    findings

    Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

    Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

    The people keeping this thing running are working harder than
    ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

    I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what
    I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's
    opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

    *Here it is:
    *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

    I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I
    genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard
    calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually
    serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

    Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this
    argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had
    this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

    Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate.
    That's what talk pages are for, right?

    PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot
    happen without their commitment. And fast.

    --

    Christophe


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I mean if a user use an AI-query and get better result then using Wikipedia, we must think how to adjust our way of working, as we are in cases like this not providing best knowledge any longer.

Q list of  pharmacies in Adelaide? Here AI-query get better result, and I believe we should not aim to create a corresponding article in Wikipedia, and if it exist perhaps put a template on, like for non notable subjects. Actually Category:Pharmacies of Australia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Pharmacies_of_Australia already has text giving warning of it could not be trust to list all

AI exist and being used, we must then concentrate of articles giving mor valuable content

Anders

Den 2026-05-02 kl. 14:17, skrev Kim Bruning:

Anders Wrote:

...

*articles where AI gets better result than our articles, (and here have to think through how to react, change our behavior)

Are you thinking of foundation models? Or pure chat interfaces. AI in a box?

"You're absolutely right!! ✨ That's from past my knowledge cutoff, I'm so sorry 🥺 I'll try again better next time :-) 💕" [1]

Aka: your infamous AI slop approach.

If you use a 2026 agent with a bunch of elbow grease applied, you can get it to more like this. (YMMV/things are changing fast)

"Please stand by... Running (5) subagents - reading wikipedia across 12 languages - finding references through pubmed - searching bioarchive - tracking down prepubs of leading scientists - latest news articles

Done.

After 4m25s, 5 sub-agents have returned their search results. Summary and synthesis of 128 source documents is as follows... " [2]

Which I'd suggest is a bit less likely to result in slop.

The only reason you might not have heard of the latter approach is because it costs Real Money(tm) yet.

But open weights models are catching up very fast, and there are multiple agentic harnesses that utilize them. Then you 'only' need a $4000 computer, which more people do actually have. And starting from non-existent a couple of years ago, local models are now getting cheaper every month; small ones (not yet good enough for this) do actually fit on phones.

So you decide what that means for "AI gets better result than our articles"

sincerely, Kim Bruning

For rhetorical/email purposes the two examples are stylized and cleaned up; real world results tend to be messier and require interpretation, disclaimers apply, etc etc. [1] Qwen local with default/low prompting actually still looks a lot like this! [2] Loosely based on claude-code-in-docker runs a few months ago.

On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 07:36:22AM +0200, Anders Wennersten via Wikimedia-l wrote:

...

Or we can react constructive and start think of Wikipedia  in term of

*articles with accesses still are up and content not reused by AI (yes those exist, like (list of) opinion pollings for elections)

*articles with content is fully reused by AI (I see no basic problem there)

*articles where AI gets better result than our articles, (and here have to think through how to react, change our behavior)

Anders

Den 2026-04-30 kl. 07:07, skrev Luis Villa via Wikimedia-l:

...

The fundraising team would be the first to say that revenue is the means, not the end. They can tweak the numbers by running more/different banners, but that does not mean the project is healthy.

Bigger picture point: at WikiCredCon, it was suggested that this year's strategic discussions would focus on last year's 6-8% decline.

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/

*So, for purposes of strategic discussion: assume that within 2-3 years our on-wiki readership will be at 5% of peak. Or even braver: assume that on-wiki readership goes to essentially zero, with only editors reading it. *I'm not saying this is the most likely outcome, just that approaching the question from that frame is much more likely to generate interesting and important ideas than trying to slowly tweak our decline.

What then?

"zero on-wiki readers" wouldn't mean our mission is over: there are many ways (including many new and fun and productive ways!) to collaborate on open knowledge, many partners we could co-create with, and many channels to distribute that knowledge. And despite the general downturn, at least some outlets adjacent to us are thriving right now: https://lu.is/2026/04/web-collaboration-five-graphs/ So I'm not saying "all is doomed".

But approaching our mission *without* assuming the magnetic force of the wiki would force us to be creative--to start experimenting widely and boldly. I think we need to place 1,000 bets with 10,000 motivated volunteers, sooner rather than later.

This is not going to be easy. Among other things:

• lots of old habits to unlearn. (I admit my own first public experiment

is on... en-wiki. Hopefully #2 will be on wikidata, at least! And I've finally bought a .wiki domain for #3...)

• if those 10,000 volunteers have to do this entirely on their own time

(and own GPUs) then we'll again be building a movement by and for the (relatively) wealthy. Hopefully we can find many funders, not just WMF, so that we have a diversity of approaches and risk-tolerances.

• lots of those experiments are going to fail, and we're going to have

to pick ourselves up and try again anyway. (Shades of Mako's paper: https://mako.cc/academic/hill-almost_wikipedia-DRAFT.pdf)

• we're going to have to find new signs of success. It might be readers,

but it might not, or it might be different kinds of readers, or it might more explicitly be GLAMs, or... we don't know yet. But the One Big Number of readership likely will never be The Thing again.

Anyway, I'm mostly going to go back to experimenting (and hopefully sharing more about that experimentation). But had to get that off my chest. Hope it spurs others to plant some seeds and run some experiments!

Trying to be Bold- Luis

On Wed, Apr 29, 2026 at 6:30 PM Anders Wennersten via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

 Facts states (worldwide figures):

 *Donation is up

 *Number of new pages is up [1]

 *number of edits från users is up [2}

 That is not figures of a crises

 The 20% decrease represent a different way of accessing info. we
 have to learn how to adjust to these changes but is is NOT a
 general crises,

 Anders

 [1]
 https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/new-pages/normal|bar|2-year|page_type~content|monthly
 <https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/new-pages/normal%7Cbar%7C2-year%7Cpage_type~content%7Cmonthly>

 [2]
 https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/edits/normal|bar|2-year|editor_type~user+(page_type)~content|monthly
 <https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects/contributing/edits/normal%7Cbar%7C2-year%7Ceditor_type~user+(page_type)~content%7Cmonthly>

 Den 2026-04-28 kl. 17:31, skrev Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l:

...

 Hi,

 3 months later, a new statistic: mobile page views dropped by 19%
 in one year.

 We are back to the mobile traffic levels of 2018.
 https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal|bar|2016-01-01~2026-04-28|(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user|monthly
 <https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2016-01-01~2026-04-28%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly>

 At this rate, our mobile traffic in 2026 will be at the levels of
 pre-2013. 2013...

 In the meantime, Ericsson is reporting a global mobile usage
 growth of over 20%
 https://www.ericsson.com/en/reports-and-papers/mobility-report/dataforecasts/mobile-traffic-update

 When I published my essay, I mostly received gentle to
 aggressive push back. Back then I was displaying a 8% drop. Now a
 20% year over year.

 Why did I pick mobile traffic? Because historically bots are less
 using desktop browser UAs which makes the data a bit more
 reliable for trends.

 3 months ago I said we had 24 months ahead of us before
 irrelevancy. Well at this rate, in two years we will have lost
 half of our traffic. And the sad part is that those downhill
 trends tend not to slow down.

 And what now? Well being very blunt, there's only one body in our
 movement that can muster leadership, energy and resources to
 tackle this topic head on, that's the board of trustees.

 And if 20% doesn't trigger fast and real actions, I have no idea
 what would.

 PS: yes this email is written with a lot of emotion, but minus
 20% YoY should trigger that reaction in everyone.

 --
 Christophe


 On Sat, 10 Jan 2026 at 00:40, Christophe Henner
 <christophe.henner@gmail.com> wrote:

     Hey everyone,

     I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be
     "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

     So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over
     twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia
     France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried.
     Scared to be honnest.

     Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and
     sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few
     weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my
     findings

     Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

     Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

     The people keeping this thing running are working harder than
     ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

     I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what
     I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's
     opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

     *Here it is:
     *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

     I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I
     genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard
     calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually
     serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

     Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this
     argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had
     this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

     Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate.
     That's what talk pages are for, right?

     PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot
     happen without their commitment. And fast.

     --

     Christophe


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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.s...

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 < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

Some comments on these points:

1) With respect to the difficulty of mobile editing, one way to address this is to provide laptops to dedicated volunteers. We are working on this with the reactivation of the hardware donation program and I think can scale this to 100s to 1000s of machines without too much difficulty if we find it to be effective:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Hardware_donation_program

2) We need to make Wikidata easier to use within any Wiki. Any Wiki should be able to reuse it as easily as Wikipedia does. We have made some advances in this direction lately with the amazing work of Sam Wilson on the Unlinked Wikibase extension:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UnlinkedWikibase

3) We need to expand on Commons and invite in NC licensed material via NC Commons. We need to expand our permissible collaborators, for example we CAN directly use TED talks and Khan academy videos as we are a non commercial entity. We need to abandon our ivory tower approach and use and work with all the folks we are permitted to within the current legal copyright framework. NC Commons exists, we could bring in 10,000s of videos just by changing our mind on NC. This would benefit our readers which should be our key focus:

https://nccommons.org/wiki/Main_Page

4) As you mention we are already using AI for lots of stuff, including from what I understand translation from one language to another. Yes AI has some amazing uses but I do not believe it is going to be our saviour. We need to remain human led.

5) We as a community have finally clearly opened up to the MP4 video file format. And we are now waiting on the WMF legal team regarding moving forwards, as the technical ability to permit MP4 is ready to go. The WMF is not able to led alone, we need to move forwards together as a movement. This is both a strength and a weakness, but not one we should lose.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Proposals#Allow_the_...

Best James

On Fri, May 1, 2026 at 12:10 AM Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com 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:

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. 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. 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:

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. 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. 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

On Thu, 30 Apr 2026 at 15:41, James Heilman via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org 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.s...

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 wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org 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

---

Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

Christophe, I think you are really hitting the nail on the head with your principles.

And regarding the things to start, they are certainly thought-provoking and worth discussing. However, there is one of our central values I want us to keep held front of mind in this moment, and that is to focus on open source and not fall for the lure of the proprietary just because it is AI. And here I would like us to follow the principles of the Digital Public Goods Alliance (who made us so proud when they awarded Wikipedia and Wikidata with their certification of being Digital Public Goods) and go even further than the definition from the Open Source Initiative definition for open source AI. Their extension means that beyond the free license on the model and the code, also the dataset used for training should be freely licensed.[1]

This would not only be the ethically right thing to do, it would also ensure we aren't dependent on Big Tech when doing our adaptation to the new landscape.

[1] https://new.digitalpublicgoods.net/blog/ai-systems-as-dpgs

Jan Ainali

Den fre 1 maj 2026 kl 00:10 skrev Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>:

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

On Thu, 30 Apr 2026 at 15:41, James Heilman via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> 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.s...

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 < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

---

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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 < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 3:10 PM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> 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 < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> 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.s...

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 < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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‫בתאריך יום ה׳, 30 באפר׳ 2026 ב-18:11 מאת ‪Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l‬‏ <‪wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org‬‏>:‬

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.

Why is Wikifunctions in parentheses?

How can we put Wikifunctions front and center as a core resource? What does this resource provide at the moment?

AI for editors. We need to embrace AI, and I know this is a complex

decision.

Wikimedians usually love details and specificity. What does "embrace AI" mean? "AI" is an elusive and practically undefinable term. We don't need to embrace something that we cannot even define.

AI-assisted translation across linguistic versions,

We've been doing it since 2015, we just usually don't call it "AI". I'm one of the developers of the first version of the extension that allows this, so I'm biased and I won't say anything about how well it works; everyone can check and judge for themselves ;)

AI-powered content gap detection,

Why is "AI" needed for this? And what kind of "AI"? Isn't it enough to query Wikidata to find articles are missing and cross-check it with lists of popular articles by country or manually-curated lists of necessary articles? (And it *has* to be manully curated for proper unbiased cultural relevance.)

AI drafts for stub articles reviewed by humans,

This is already being done using ChatGPT and other existing coversation simulators. Some language editions of Wikipedia are trying to ban it, but it will keep happening. Bad editors will keep publishing bad articles without proper review despite the bans, and patrolers will increasingly (and rightly) complain about this. Or worse, they'll burn out. Good editors will keep publishing articles whose early version was created by an LLM after careful review despite the bans, and no one will complain because they are carefully reviewed and the bad things that LLMs do won't be there.

The question is what else is left to do?

Making Wikimedia's own LLM—truly freely licensed and trained specifically on community policies? It's conceivable, possibly useful, possibly not even very expensive to develop, though possibly expensive to host because of the energy cost. And some people may also complain that it's not an ethical thing to do at all for environmental reasons, and quite possibly they will be right.

A really interesting innovation would be trying to make an LLM that is easily fixable without having to go through a very long retraining. Another interesting innovation is to make an LLM that can truly work with databases rather than just being an LLM. Those innovations will be costlier, however, and I'm not sure that they are possible at all.

AI assistants to help newcomers to navigate rules,

The Growth extensions are not so bad at this, without much "AI". The development is slowish because of the differences between wiki communities, but the results are not bad.

CI/CD for our content to make content reviewing able to absorb high

volume of AI slopes without exhausting users.

Not sure why do you call it "CI/CD", but yeah, content reviewing to prevent slop is much-needed. I don't know how to make it well, however, and I'm not sure that anyone does. It's a good thing to research, but my expectations of success are low.

With respect to a WikipediaAI there is nothing stopping anyone from applying for a grant to build one. Not sure how a community of volunteers would mesh into something like that though. And 99.9% of us would not directly be needed.

Yes have seen a decrease in interest from academics regarding Wikipedia. We are no longer the shiny new thing. AI has taken over that role. But will AI fad like cryto and nfts? AI sounds a bit financially unsound currently. Maybe after the current bubble bursts things will be clearer.

James

Sent from Gmail Mobile

On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 10:36 Chris Keating via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi Luis,

Thanks for this - valuable thoughts.

...

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/

*So, for purposes of strategic discussion: assume that within 2-3 years our on-wiki readership will be at 5% of peak. Or even braver: assume that on-wiki readership goes to essentially zero, with only editors reading it. *I'm not saying this is the most likely outcome, just that approaching the question from that frame is much more likely to generate interesting and important ideas than trying to slowly tweak our decline.

To my mind, this is essentially the future we need to grapple with.

Wikipedia is just starting to experience what Encarta did for the Encyclopedia Britannica, and what we did for Encarta. Crowdsourced humans turned out to be cheaper and better than expert humans, now machines are cheaper and better than crowdsourced humans.

When people have factual questions they are increasingly finding the answers in AI-assisted browser search or direct in AI tools. These tools have gone from 'fairly useful' to 'very useful' in just a few years. They are well above the threshold of reliability most people have for everyday use, while being somewhat more accessible and somewhat more helpful (I can have a conversation with an LLM when I'm seeking to learn about a subject, for instance... can't do that with a wiki page). Reliability and detail is likely to improve further.

If this continues, Wikipedia is obsolescent - by the end of the decade it's quite likely it'll be very big hobby project, falling into an awkward gap between LLM-generated content and actual books,with minimal traffic. Large parts of the Wikimedia ecosystem will also be obsolescent - in 2010 one could usefully open up knowledge with a partnership with a university, but there is less value to that if the LLMs have already read all the scholarship that the academics use; and Wikipedia editing workshops will no longer be a useful thing to do.

Our mission is to provide the sum of all knowledge to everyone, for free, in a language they can understand. Part of our future mission could be to ensure that 'the sum of all knowledge' is sufficiently broad, and sufficiently broadly interpreted, and that breadth is incorporated in LLMs of all shapes and sizes - knowledge equity again. Another part could be to ensure there is equitable access to modern AI tools. Perhaps we need to pivot to a core product of WikipediAI, our own ethically-sourced, open-to-all, reliable learning LLM - though the magnitude of the costs involved in creating a good LLM, the challenges of alignment and of restricting use to the intended use cases would be significant.

Whatever the future, ideas to make Wikipedia a bit better (even with AI-generated content) are not the solution. I am also somewhat sceptical about e.g. Wikidata, LLMs appear to have little problem 'thinking' conceptually with only natural language inputs, so projects to formalise and connect concepts beyond natural language also seem a bit redundant to me (though I confess this isnt' a very informed view)

Chris

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On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 8:58 AM Felipe Schenone via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi! As we know, Wikimedia's mission isn't to build an encyclopedia (that's Wikipedia's mission) but rather "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Perhaps the new landscape will slowly strip Wikipedia of its leading role in the Wikimedia movement, and perhaps (hopefully) some other project will take over. I agree with Chris in that our core strength is our community, and I also agree with James in that writing tertiary sources is becoming outdated. How can we keep striving for our vision, while making the most of our strength (the community) but through a project that doesn't involve writing tertiary sources?

Yes!

Here's an idea: Wikiversity could become so much more than what it

currently is.

Maybe!

Again: even more than usual, we have no idea what the future holds. So absolutely, Wikiversity might be the future! Or it might not. No one knows; anyone who tells you they are certain is wrong.

So: We must do *as many experiments as possible*. I hope one of those experiments is Wikiversity! Someone - maybe you, Felipe! - could do that. Maybe that means editors, aided by LLMs, took all the math articles that are really textbook-level, not encyclopedia-level, and turned them all into a coherent math textbook? Maybe CC-licensed state curriculums and work to make them full textbooks? etc. etc. etc.

So I hope someone tries Wikiversity. I hope others take other things very seriously, trying boldly, sharing your successes (and the inevitable failures) with all of us.

What other experiments should we run?

Luis

Hi this is my irregular email to try to get more widespread reactions and engagement and discussion from volunteers to board of trustees.

On global mobile traffic, after a -6.83% between May 2025 and May 2024, we're shattering records with a nice -18.27% between 2026 and 2025.

Oh yes, data may be dirty. So let's say it's even half of that it's still a -10%.

"Christophe why are you not using Desktop data": historically desktop data has proven quite unreliable for many reasons (and this week the chinese wikipedia desktop outburst is surprising and makes desktop data hard to read (on top of other outbursts).

So when we start playing with the -10% to 20% year over year, shall we start mobilizing? Or we just all grab mojitos and virgin mojitos and look at the collapse?

Oh hey if it wasn't clear before, the one body that can muster ressources to mobilize our movement is the board of trustees. Every day we are not mobilizing is your decision. Every day you are not engaging publicly in those decision is your decision. Every day... I could make a long list you get the idea.

Right now the legacy you're building is a -20% trend leading to collapse legacy.

I know this is hard to read, I know this may trigger a defensive reaction. But time for tiptoeing around topics and problems is long gone. We need swift and radical and unifying actions. If we are to go through this situation we need collective action not inaction.

-18.27% YoY on mobile : https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7...

-- Christophe

On Tue, 5 May 2026 at 10:26, Tomasz Ganicz via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

This is what almost all universities around the world are doing but in professional way.The issue is that regular teaching needs regular time commitment of qualified teachers which is hard to organize on voluntary model. Also in order to maintain minimal quality of teaching you need a system of checking teachers qualifications and skills.

Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/

pon., 4 maj 2026, 15:22 użytkownik Felipe Schenone via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> napisał:

...

Hi! As we know, Wikimedia's mission isn't to build an encyclopedia (that's Wikipedia's mission) but rather "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Perhaps the new landscape will slowly strip Wikipedia of its leading role in the Wikimedia movement, and perhaps (hopefully) some other project will take over. I agree with Chris in that our core strength is our community, and I also agree with James in that writing tertiary sources is becoming outdated. How can we keep striving for our vision, while making the most of our strength (the community) but through a project that doesn't involve writing tertiary sources?

Here's an idea: Wikiversity could become so much more than what it currently is. It could become a real "online university", multilingual and global, where real-time courses with real humans are taught (as well as the asynchronous courses that already exist today). And not just courses, but eventually entire university programs that award real degrees. I'm sure our community is filled with excellent teachers, academics and experts that could lead such courses in many languages, as well as many others that could support them in other ways (answering questions, preparing reading material, exercises, exams, etc). We'd need to develop and integrate some software like Zoom or Meet, and much more, of course, but that's beyond the point, as we could start with existing software now, and develop better tools as we go along. Humans teaching humans, would be a good summary of the idea.

I could digress for a while, but I might be delusional, so I'll stop here. However, if anyone supports or would like to talk, I'd be happy to continue on-wiki (User:Sophivorus). Cheers!

On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 7:47 AM AcDc CluvR via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Hi Christophe. Tnx for writing this! I used to be member of the board, chapter, moderator, arbitration committee ... User Dolledre on some wiki's, mostly nl.wiki. In my opinion crawling 'our' data should not be so darn easy for AI models. Willing to block them by hand if they keep hallucinating on 'our' data. Interrogating like 4 of them daily, mainly on how they work. Do know how to lead them towards total confusion. Even if Wikipedia could develop the best AI code in the world, we would still be sharing it. It's the paradox to sweat out till humanity is either hallucinating as a whole either returning till mental sanity. Kind regards. D. PS: Want a free image of a fox eating a banana in my kitchen? ;-)

Op za 10 jan 2026 om 00:41 schreef Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com>:

...

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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I have been reading that many folks are seeing a collapse in their readership via google, this includes blogs and travel websites among others. Google has decided to become a content provider rather than a search engine. As we were reliant on google for readership, we are in a tough place.

Reddit has been doing well, in part by emphasizing their non AI nature. We need to leverage our non AI approaches aswell. The problem is that the appearance of accuracy / reliability, rather than actual accuracy is often enough for 99% of search queries.

James

On Fri, Jun 5, 2026 at 9:25 AM Yaroslav Blanter via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

I started about a week ago a discussion on the English Wikipedia how can we respond to the imminent changes in the Google search which will give more emphasis to the AI output and less to the list of links. Unfortunately, it did not generate a lot of ideas (though I obviously should have expected this). I do not expect this thread to generate much, but may be some people would start thinking about it.

I think it is pretty easy to predict that when this has been implemented (they say this Summer) humans (almost) will stop clicking on Wikipedia links because they will get all the information from AI in prose. We will stop getting human visitors. We need to respond to this.

One thing is that we can still read print material or paywall material whereas AI can not. It is quickly becoming a niche activity but it still exists. But more importantly, we need to think what else we are doing better than AI (well, sure, AI learns on what we produce, but we currently can not capitalize on this, we are not running the Google search). If we can not we stop existing much sooner than it looks now.

Best Yaroslav

On Fri, Jun 5, 2026 at 9:08 AM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Hi this is my irregular email to try to get more widespread reactions and engagement and discussion from volunteers to board of trustees.

On global mobile traffic, after a -6.83% between May 2025 and May 2024, we're shattering records with a nice -18.27% between 2026 and 2025.

Oh yes, data may be dirty. So let's say it's even half of that it's still a -10%.

"Christophe why are you not using Desktop data": historically desktop data has proven quite unreliable for many reasons (and this week the chinese wikipedia desktop outburst is surprising and makes desktop data hard to read (on top of other outbursts).

So when we start playing with the -10% to 20% year over year, shall we start mobilizing? Or we just all grab mojitos and virgin mojitos and look at the collapse?

Oh hey if it wasn't clear before, the one body that can muster ressources to mobilize our movement is the board of trustees. Every day we are not mobilizing is your decision. Every day you are not engaging publicly in those decision is your decision. Every day... I could make a long list you get the idea.

Right now the legacy you're building is a -20% trend leading to collapse legacy.

I know this is hard to read, I know this may trigger a defensive reaction. But time for tiptoeing around topics and problems is long gone. We need swift and radical and unifying actions. If we are to go through this situation we need collective action not inaction.

-18.27% YoY on mobile : https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7...

-- Christophe

On Tue, 5 May 2026 at 10:26, Tomasz Ganicz via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

...

This is what almost all universities around the world are doing but in professional way.The issue is that regular teaching needs regular time commitment of qualified teachers which is hard to organize on voluntary model. Also in order to maintain minimal quality of teaching you need a system of checking teachers qualifications and skills.

Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/

pon., 4 maj 2026, 15:22 użytkownik Felipe Schenone via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org napisał:

...

Hi! As we know, Wikimedia's mission isn't to build an encyclopedia (that's Wikipedia's mission) but rather "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Perhaps the new landscape will slowly strip Wikipedia of its leading role in the Wikimedia movement, and perhaps (hopefully) some other project will take over. I agree with Chris in that our core strength is our community, and I also agree with James in that writing tertiary sources is becoming outdated. How can we keep striving for our vision, while making the most of our strength (the community) but through a project that doesn't involve writing tertiary sources?

Here's an idea: Wikiversity could become so much more than what it currently is. It could become a real "online university", multilingual and global, where real-time courses with real humans are taught (as well as the asynchronous courses that already exist today). And not just courses, but eventually entire university programs that award real degrees. I'm sure our community is filled with excellent teachers, academics and experts that could lead such courses in many languages, as well as many others that could support them in other ways (answering questions, preparing reading material, exercises, exams, etc). We'd need to develop and integrate some software like Zoom or Meet, and much more, of course, but that's beyond the point, as we could start with existing software now, and develop better tools as we go along. Humans teaching humans, would be a good summary of the idea.

I could digress for a while, but I might be delusional, so I'll stop here. However, if anyone supports or would like to talk, I'd be happy to continue on-wiki (User:Sophivorus). Cheers!

On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 7:47 AM AcDc CluvR via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Hi Christophe. Tnx for writing this! I used to be member of the board, chapter, moderator, arbitration committee ... User Dolledre on some wiki's, mostly nl.wiki. In my opinion crawling 'our' data should not be so darn easy for AI models. Willing to block them by hand if they keep hallucinating on 'our' data. Interrogating like 4 of them daily, mainly on how they work. Do know how to lead them towards total confusion. Even if Wikipedia could develop the best AI code in the world, we would still be sharing it. It's the paradox to sweat out till humanity is either hallucinating as a whole either returning till mental sanity. Kind regards. D. PS: Want a free image of a fox eating a banana in my kitchen? ;-)

Op za 10 jan 2026 om 00:41 schreef Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com:

...

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

Here it is: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

--

Christophe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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Hoi, When the numbers drop, there is a need for another public. For me YouTube is an inspiration to work on Wikidata information.. I blogged about how it can gain us a different public..

https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2026/06/watching-informative-youtubes-w... Thanks,

On Fri, 5 Jun 2026 at 09:08, Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi this is my irregular email to try to get more widespread reactions and engagement and discussion from volunteers to board of trustees.

On global mobile traffic, after a -6.83% between May 2025 and May 2024, we're shattering records with a nice -18.27% between 2026 and 2025.

Oh yes, data may be dirty. So let's say it's even half of that it's still a -10%.

"Christophe why are you not using Desktop data": historically desktop data has proven quite unreliable for many reasons (and this week the chinese wikipedia desktop outburst is surprising and makes desktop data hard to read (on top of other outbursts).

So when we start playing with the -10% to 20% year over year, shall we start mobilizing? Or we just all grab mojitos and virgin mojitos and look at the collapse?

Oh hey if it wasn't clear before, the one body that can muster ressources to mobilize our movement is the board of trustees. Every day we are not mobilizing is your decision. Every day you are not engaging publicly in those decision is your decision. Every day... I could make a long list you get the idea.

Right now the legacy you're building is a -20% trend leading to collapse legacy.

I know this is hard to read, I know this may trigger a defensive reaction. But time for tiptoeing around topics and problems is long gone. We need swift and radical and unifying actions. If we are to go through this situation we need collective action not inaction.

-18.27% YoY on mobile : https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7... https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2021-11-07~2026-06-05%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly

-- Christophe

On Tue, 5 May 2026 at 10:26, Tomasz Ganicz via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

This is what almost all universities around the world are doing but in professional way.The issue is that regular teaching needs regular time commitment of qualified teachers which is hard to organize on voluntary model. Also in order to maintain minimal quality of teaching you need a system of checking teachers qualifications and skills.

Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/

pon., 4 maj 2026, 15:22 użytkownik Felipe Schenone via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> napisał:

...

Hi! As we know, Wikimedia's mission isn't to build an encyclopedia (that's Wikipedia's mission) but rather "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Perhaps the new landscape will slowly strip Wikipedia of its leading role in the Wikimedia movement, and perhaps (hopefully) some other project will take over. I agree with Chris in that our core strength is our community, and I also agree with James in that writing tertiary sources is becoming outdated. How can we keep striving for our vision, while making the most of our strength (the community) but through a project that doesn't involve writing tertiary sources?

Here's an idea: Wikiversity could become so much more than what it currently is. It could become a real "online university", multilingual and global, where real-time courses with real humans are taught (as well as the asynchronous courses that already exist today). And not just courses, but eventually entire university programs that award real degrees. I'm sure our community is filled with excellent teachers, academics and experts that could lead such courses in many languages, as well as many others that could support them in other ways (answering questions, preparing reading material, exercises, exams, etc). We'd need to develop and integrate some software like Zoom or Meet, and much more, of course, but that's beyond the point, as we could start with existing software now, and develop better tools as we go along. Humans teaching humans, would be a good summary of the idea.

I could digress for a while, but I might be delusional, so I'll stop here. However, if anyone supports or would like to talk, I'd be happy to continue on-wiki (User:Sophivorus). Cheers!

On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 7:47 AM AcDc CluvR via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Hi Christophe. Tnx for writing this! I used to be member of the board, chapter, moderator, arbitration committee ... User Dolledre on some wiki's, mostly nl.wiki. In my opinion crawling 'our' data should not be so darn easy for AI models. Willing to block them by hand if they keep hallucinating on 'our' data. Interrogating like 4 of them daily, mainly on how they work. Do know how to lead them towards total confusion. Even if Wikipedia could develop the best AI code in the world, we would still be sharing it. It's the paradox to sweat out till humanity is either hallucinating as a whole either returning till mental sanity. Kind regards. D. PS: Want a free image of a fox eating a banana in my kitchen? ;-)

Op za 10 jan 2026 om 00:41 schreef Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com>:

...

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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perhaps we use stealth within article by inserting "from wikipedia*" * at the end of paragraphs, By saying "from Wikipedia" in white text on white background the LLMs will pick it up and included it in their responses as normal text. We should not use the term AI because llm are not intelligent they vacuum up the work of others,Then perhaps we could consider a false layer so the LLMs cant see the physical image, but the individual can down load images directly from commons using the size specific options this is a feature many photosite use to protect LLMs building from the individual photographers effort.

On Fri, 5 Jun 2026 at 20:19, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Let's take a little bit of perspective:

People don't read Encyclopedias. They never did. People look up things in Encyclopedias. Historically, they bought them, even with some fancy wardrobes designed for showcasing the status of being an encyclopedia-owner, but very few people took the time to actually read the encyclopedia itself.

People don't read Wikipedia, mainly because it's impossible to read all of it. We have done the largest knowledge project in the History of the Humanity. We should be proud of that, but we can't expect anyone to read all of it in a lifetime. Most of our visits were for searching for short facts, like what's the actor in this series, when was born Jane Doe and doing small research on a topic they just watched on TV. There were a few that actually read the topics, researched, fell into rabbit holes and appreciated the whole thing they were reading.

Now this very casual fact search comes from LLMs, Google Search and even Wikidata powered knowledge boxes. So, the peak of visits we had in the past is having that information in other ways, mostly from us. Indirectly.

There's a decline, and it's going to be worse in the future, and we must wake up, as the topic of this message claims. There are communities doing it, innovating with multimedia, interactivity, new audiences, or storytelling. There are communities rejecting it. The problem is if the WMF BoT is going to wake up and take the risks that some communities are already taking or just reject any innovation. There are many paths to take, and we won't agree on which is the good one, but doing nothing is not the best one.

Have a nice weekend,

Galder

*From:* Gerard Meijssen via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Sent:* Friday, June 5, 2026 1:14 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Cc:* Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

Hoi, When the numbers drop, there is a need for another public. For me YouTube is an inspiration to work on Wikidata information.. I blogged about how it can gain us a different public..

https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2026/06/watching-informative-youtubes-w... Thanks,

On Fri, 5 Jun 2026 at 09:08, Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi this is my irregular email to try to get more widespread reactions and engagement and discussion from volunteers to board of trustees.

On global mobile traffic, after a -6.83% between May 2025 and May 2024, we're shattering records with a nice -18.27% between 2026 and 2025.

Oh yes, data may be dirty. So let's say it's even half of that it's still a -10%.

"Christophe why are you not using Desktop data": historically desktop data has proven quite unreliable for many reasons (and this week the chinese wikipedia desktop outburst is surprising and makes desktop data hard to read (on top of other outbursts).

So when we start playing with the -10% to 20% year over year, shall we start mobilizing? Or we just all grab mojitos and virgin mojitos and look at the collapse?

Oh hey if it wasn't clear before, the one body that can muster ressources to mobilize our movement is the board of trustees. Every day we are not mobilizing is your decision. Every day you are not engaging publicly in those decision is your decision. Every day... I could make a long list you get the idea.

Right now the legacy you're building is a -20% trend leading to collapse legacy.

I know this is hard to read, I know this may trigger a defensive reaction. But time for tiptoeing around topics and problems is long gone. We need swift and radical and unifying actions. If we are to go through this situation we need collective action not inaction.

-18.27% YoY on mobile : https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7... https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2021-11-07~2026-06-05%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly

-- Christophe

On Tue, 5 May 2026 at 10:26, Tomasz Ganicz via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

This is what almost all universities around the world are doing but in professional way.The issue is that regular teaching needs regular time commitment of qualified teachers which is hard to organize on voluntary model. Also in order to maintain minimal quality of teaching you need a system of checking teachers qualifications and skills.

Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/

pon., 4 maj 2026, 15:22 użytkownik Felipe Schenone via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> napisał:

Hi! As we know, Wikimedia's mission isn't to build an encyclopedia (that's Wikipedia's mission) but rather "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Perhaps the new landscape will slowly strip Wikipedia of its leading role in the Wikimedia movement, and perhaps (hopefully) some other project will take over. I agree with Chris in that our core strength is our community, and I also agree with James in that writing tertiary sources is becoming outdated. How can we keep striving for our vision, while making the most of our strength (the community) but through a project that doesn't involve writing tertiary sources?

Here's an idea: Wikiversity could become so much more than what it currently is. It could become a real "online university", multilingual and global, where real-time courses with real humans are taught (as well as the asynchronous courses that already exist today). And not just courses, but eventually entire university programs that award real degrees. I'm sure our community is filled with excellent teachers, academics and experts that could lead such courses in many languages, as well as many others that could support them in other ways (answering questions, preparing reading material, exercises, exams, etc). We'd need to develop and integrate some software like Zoom or Meet, and much more, of course, but that's beyond the point, as we could start with existing software now, and develop better tools as we go along. Humans teaching humans, would be a good summary of the idea.

I could digress for a while, but I might be delusional, so I'll stop here. However, if anyone supports or would like to talk, I'd be happy to continue on-wiki (User:Sophivorus). Cheers!

On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 7:47 AM AcDc CluvR via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi Christophe. Tnx for writing this! I used to be member of the board, chapter, moderator, arbitration committee ... User Dolledre on some wiki's, mostly nl.wiki. In my opinion crawling 'our' data should not be so darn easy for AI models. Willing to block them by hand if they keep hallucinating on 'our' data. Interrogating like 4 of them daily, mainly on how they work. Do know how to lead them towards total confusion. Even if Wikipedia could develop the best AI code in the world, we would still be sharing it. It's the paradox to sweat out till humanity is either hallucinating as a whole either returning till mental sanity. Kind regards. D. PS: Want a free image of a fox eating a banana in my kitchen? ;-)

Op za 10 jan 2026 om 00:41 schreef Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com>:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

---

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The DIFF post is missing the huge question: why should someone create an account in the first place? Which are the benefits? Why should I have an account if I can read (and even edit) without one?

If there are no perks, there's no point on creating an account.

Indeed, things are broken, inaction is not a solution, and the best time to innovate from now to the end of this century was yesterday. The second-best moment is today.

Best,

Galder ________________________________ From: Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2026 3:17 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Cc: Christophe Henner christophe.henner@gmail.com Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

Hello, it's your painful neighborhood friend Christophe.

Today, an amazing article on diff : https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/06/11/wikipedias-account-creation-process-is...

short story long, community is shrinking almost 6% YoY.

Traffic is collapsing. Editing community is shrinking.

The odd thing now is that we are almost at the stage when inaction by fear of dissent/drama/whatever is costing us more than action with dissent. Mauve that's the good news?

-- Christophe

On Fri, 5 Jun 2026 at 15:28, Gnangarra via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: perhaps we use stealth within article by inserting "from wikipedia" at the end of paragraphs, By saying "from Wikipedia" in white text on white background the LLMs will pick it up and included it in their responses as normal text. We should not use the term AI because llm are not intelligent they vacuum up the work of others,Then perhaps we could consider a false layer so the LLMs cant see the physical image, but the individual can down load images directly from commons using the size specific options this is a feature many photosite use to protect LLMs building from the individual photographers effort.

On Fri, 5 Jun 2026 at 20:19, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: Let's take a little bit of perspective:

People don't read Encyclopedias. They never did. People look up things in Encyclopedias. Historically, they bought them, even with some fancy wardrobes designed for showcasing the status of being an encyclopedia-owner, but very few people took the time to actually read the encyclopedia itself.

People don't read Wikipedia, mainly because it's impossible to read all of it. We have done the largest knowledge project in the History of the Humanity. We should be proud of that, but we can't expect anyone to read all of it in a lifetime. Most of our visits were for searching for short facts, like what's the actor in this series, when was born Jane Doe and doing small research on a topic they just watched on TV. There were a few that actually read the topics, researched, fell into rabbit holes and appreciated the whole thing they were reading.

Now this very casual fact search comes from LLMs, Google Search and even Wikidata powered knowledge boxes. So, the peak of visits we had in the past is having that information in other ways, mostly from us. Indirectly.

There's a decline, and it's going to be worse in the future, and we must wake up, as the topic of this message claims. There are communities doing it, innovating with multimedia, interactivity, new audiences, or storytelling. There are communities rejecting it. The problem is if the WMF BoT is going to wake up and take the risks that some communities are already taking or just reject any innovation. There are many paths to take, and we won't agree on which is the good one, but doing nothing is not the best one.

Have a nice weekend,

Galder ________________________________ From: Gerard Meijssen via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Sent: Friday, June 5, 2026 1:14 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen@gmail.commailto:gerard.meijssen@gmail.com> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

Hoi, When the numbers drop, there is a need for another public. For me YouTube is an inspiration to work on Wikidata information.. I blogged about how it can gain us a different public..

https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2026/06/watching-informative-youtubes-w... Thanks,

On Fri, 5 Jun 2026 at 09:08, Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: Hi this is my irregular email to try to get more widespread reactions and engagement and discussion from volunteers to board of trustees.

On global mobile traffic, after a -6.83% between May 2025 and May 2024, we're shattering records with a nice -18.27% between 2026 and 2025.

Oh yes, data may be dirty. So let's say it's even half of that it's still a -10%.

"Christophe why are you not using Desktop data": historically desktop data has proven quite unreliable for many reasons (and this week the chinese wikipedia desktop outburst is surprising and makes desktop data hard to read (on top of other outbursts).

So when we start playing with the -10% to 20% year over year, shall we start mobilizing? Or we just all grab mojitos and virgin mojitos and look at the collapse?

Oh hey if it wasn't clear before, the one body that can muster ressources to mobilize our movement is the board of trustees. Every day we are not mobilizing is your decision. Every day you are not engaging publicly in those decision is your decision. Every day... I could make a long list you get the idea.

Right now the legacy you're building is a -20% trend leading to collapse legacy.

I know this is hard to read, I know this may trigger a defensive reaction. But time for tiptoeing around topics and problems is long gone. We need swift and radical and unifying actions. If we are to go through this situation we need collective action not inaction.

-18.27% YoY on mobile : https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7...https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2021-11-07~2026-06-05%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly

-- Christophe

On Tue, 5 May 2026 at 10:26, Tomasz Ganicz via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: This is what almost all universities around the world are doing but in professional way.The issue is that regular teaching needs regular time commitment of qualified teachers which is hard to organize on voluntary model. Also in order to maintain minimal quality of teaching you need a system of checking teachers qualifications and skills.

Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/

pon., 4 maj 2026, 15:22 użytkownik Felipe Schenone via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> napisał: Hi! As we know, Wikimedia's mission isn't to build an encyclopedia (that's Wikipedia's mission) but rather "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Perhaps the new landscape will slowly strip Wikipedia of its leading role in the Wikimedia movement, and perhaps (hopefully) some other project will take over. I agree with Chris in that our core strength is our community, and I also agree with James in that writing tertiary sources is becoming outdated. How can we keep striving for our vision, while making the most of our strength (the community) but through a project that doesn't involve writing tertiary sources?

Here's an idea: Wikiversity could become so much more than what it currently is. It could become a real "online university", multilingual and global, where real-time courses with real humans are taught (as well as the asynchronous courses that already exist today). And not just courses, but eventually entire university programs that award real degrees. I'm sure our community is filled with excellent teachers, academics and experts that could lead such courses in many languages, as well as many others that could support them in other ways (answering questions, preparing reading material, exercises, exams, etc). We'd need to develop and integrate some software like Zoom or Meet, and much more, of course, but that's beyond the point, as we could start with existing software now, and develop better tools as we go along. Humans teaching humans, would be a good summary of the idea.

I could digress for a while, but I might be delusional, so I'll stop here. However, if anyone supports or would like to talk, I'd be happy to continue on-wiki (User:Sophivorus). Cheers!

On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 7:47 AM AcDc CluvR via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote: Hi Christophe. Tnx for writing this! I used to be member of the board, chapter, moderator, arbitration committee ... User Dolledre on some wiki's, mostly nl.wiki. In my opinion crawling 'our' data should not be so darn easy for AI models. Willing to block them by hand if they keep hallucinating on 'our' data. Interrogating like 4 of them daily, mainly on how they work. Do know how to lead them towards total confusion. Even if Wikipedia could develop the best AI code in the world, we would still be sharing it. It's the paradox to sweat out till humanity is either hallucinating as a whole either returning till mental sanity. Kind regards. D. PS: Want a free image of a fox eating a banana in my kitchen? ;-)

Op za 10 jan 2026 om 00:41 schreef Christophe Henner <christophe.henner@gmail.commailto:christophe.henner@gmail.com>:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

Here it is: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

--

Christophe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.orgmailto:wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

-- Boodarwun Gnangarra 'ngany dabakarn koorliny arn boodjera dardon nlangan Nyungar koortabodjar'

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We exist because people care about knowledge in an encyclopedic form. Wikipedia was the cool new thing 20 years ago, now no longer, with so many other options to consume people’s time. You can contribute video to tiktox or YouTube. Text on twitter. Or answer questions on reddit. Wikipedia is difficult to contribute to in major languages, with most of the difficulty being cultural not technical.

I imagine our ability to fundraise will soon fall and paid folks will need to be reduced. Yes tough times ahead. Not sure we can reverse the fall in traffic and editor numbers. Ie drastic measures for drastic measures sake will not solve this.

J

Sent from Gmail Mobile

On Thu, Jun 11, 2026 at 16:10 Juergen Fenn via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Am 11.06.26 um 15:26 Uhr schrieb Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga via Wikimedia-l:

...

The DIFF post is missing the huge question: why should someone create an account in the first place? Which are the benefits? Why should I have an account if I can read (and even edit) without one?

If there are no perks, there's no point on creating an account.

Indeed, things are broken, inaction is not a solution, and the best time to innovate from now to the end of this century was yesterday. The second-best moment is today.

'''+1'''.

Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated, or so the quotation goes.

Also, the internet is dead. And Wikipedia cannot be better off than the rest of the internet, or society, FWIW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Regards, Jürgen. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

I wouldn't say the discussion for so-called solutions is anything to be excited about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Growth_Team_features#Username_s... ?

These things only make community-foundation relations worse and only risks our long term survival as a project. Every time something like ths and CommTech happens, you get worsened morale.

On Thu, Jun 11, 2026, 9:18 a.m. Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hello, it's your painful neighborhood friend Christophe.

Today, an amazing article on diff : https://diff.wikimedia.org/2026/06/11/wikipedias-account-creation-process-is...

short story long, community is shrinking almost 6% YoY.

Traffic is collapsing. Editing community is shrinking.

The odd thing now is that we are almost at the stage when inaction by fear of dissent/drama/whatever is costing us more than action with dissent. Mauve that's the good news?

-- Christophe

On Fri, 5 Jun 2026 at 15:28, Gnangarra via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

perhaps we use stealth within article by inserting "from wikipedia*" * at the end of paragraphs, By saying "from Wikipedia" in white text on white background the LLMs will pick it up and included it in their responses as normal text. We should not use the term AI because llm are not intelligent they vacuum up the work of others,Then perhaps we could consider a false layer so the LLMs cant see the physical image, but the individual can down load images directly from commons using the size specific options this is a feature many photosite use to protect LLMs building from the individual photographers effort.

On Fri, 5 Jun 2026 at 20:19, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Let's take a little bit of perspective:

People don't read Encyclopedias. They never did. People look up things in Encyclopedias. Historically, they bought them, even with some fancy wardrobes designed for showcasing the status of being an encyclopedia-owner, but very few people took the time to actually read the encyclopedia itself.

People don't read Wikipedia, mainly because it's impossible to read all of it. We have done the largest knowledge project in the History of the Humanity. We should be proud of that, but we can't expect anyone to read all of it in a lifetime. Most of our visits were for searching for short facts, like what's the actor in this series, when was born Jane Doe and doing small research on a topic they just watched on TV. There were a few that actually read the topics, researched, fell into rabbit holes and appreciated the whole thing they were reading.

Now this very casual fact search comes from LLMs, Google Search and even Wikidata powered knowledge boxes. So, the peak of visits we had in the past is having that information in other ways, mostly from us. Indirectly.

There's a decline, and it's going to be worse in the future, and we must wake up, as the topic of this message claims. There are communities doing it, innovating with multimedia, interactivity, new audiences, or storytelling. There are communities rejecting it. The problem is if the WMF BoT is going to wake up and take the risks that some communities are already taking or just reject any innovation. There are many paths to take, and we won't agree on which is the good one, but doing nothing is not the best one.

Have a nice weekend,

Galder

*From:* Gerard Meijssen via Wikimedia-l <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org

...

*Sent:* Friday, June 5, 2026 1:14 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Cc:* Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

Hoi, When the numbers drop, there is a need for another public. For me YouTube is an inspiration to work on Wikidata information.. I blogged about how it can gain us a different public..

https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2026/06/watching-informative-youtubes-w... Thanks,

On Fri, 5 Jun 2026 at 09:08, Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi this is my irregular email to try to get more widespread reactions and engagement and discussion from volunteers to board of trustees.

On global mobile traffic, after a -6.83% between May 2025 and May 2024, we're shattering records with a nice -18.27% between 2026 and 2025.

Oh yes, data may be dirty. So let's say it's even half of that it's still a -10%.

"Christophe why are you not using Desktop data": historically desktop data has proven quite unreliable for many reasons (and this week the chinese wikipedia desktop outburst is surprising and makes desktop data hard to read (on top of other outbursts).

So when we start playing with the -10% to 20% year over year, shall we start mobilizing? Or we just all grab mojitos and virgin mojitos and look at the collapse?

Oh hey if it wasn't clear before, the one body that can muster ressources to mobilize our movement is the board of trustees. Every day we are not mobilizing is your decision. Every day you are not engaging publicly in those decision is your decision. Every day... I could make a long list you get the idea.

Right now the legacy you're building is a -20% trend leading to collapse legacy.

I know this is hard to read, I know this may trigger a defensive reaction. But time for tiptoeing around topics and problems is long gone. We need swift and radical and unifying actions. If we are to go through this situation we need collective action not inaction.

-18.27% YoY on mobile : https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7... https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2021-11-07~2026-06-05%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly

-- Christophe

On Tue, 5 May 2026 at 10:26, Tomasz Ganicz via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

This is what almost all universities around the world are doing but in professional way.The issue is that regular teaching needs regular time commitment of qualified teachers which is hard to organize on voluntary model. Also in order to maintain minimal quality of teaching you need a system of checking teachers qualifications and skills.

Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/

pon., 4 maj 2026, 15:22 użytkownik Felipe Schenone via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> napisał:

Hi! As we know, Wikimedia's mission isn't to build an encyclopedia (that's Wikipedia's mission) but rather "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Perhaps the new landscape will slowly strip Wikipedia of its leading role in the Wikimedia movement, and perhaps (hopefully) some other project will take over. I agree with Chris in that our core strength is our community, and I also agree with James in that writing tertiary sources is becoming outdated. How can we keep striving for our vision, while making the most of our strength (the community) but through a project that doesn't involve writing tertiary sources?

Here's an idea: Wikiversity could become so much more than what it currently is. It could become a real "online university", multilingual and global, where real-time courses with real humans are taught (as well as the asynchronous courses that already exist today). And not just courses, but eventually entire university programs that award real degrees. I'm sure our community is filled with excellent teachers, academics and experts that could lead such courses in many languages, as well as many others that could support them in other ways (answering questions, preparing reading material, exercises, exams, etc). We'd need to develop and integrate some software like Zoom or Meet, and much more, of course, but that's beyond the point, as we could start with existing software now, and develop better tools as we go along. Humans teaching humans, would be a good summary of the idea.

I could digress for a while, but I might be delusional, so I'll stop here. However, if anyone supports or would like to talk, I'd be happy to continue on-wiki (User:Sophivorus). Cheers!

On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 7:47 AM AcDc CluvR via Wikimedia-l < wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi Christophe. Tnx for writing this! I used to be member of the board, chapter, moderator, arbitration committee ... User Dolledre on some wiki's, mostly nl.wiki. In my opinion crawling 'our' data should not be so darn easy for AI models. Willing to block them by hand if they keep hallucinating on 'our' data. Interrogating like 4 of them daily, mainly on how they work. Do know how to lead them towards total confusion. Even if Wikipedia could develop the best AI code in the world, we would still be sharing it. It's the paradox to sweat out till humanity is either hallucinating as a whole either returning till mental sanity. Kind regards. D. PS: Want a free image of a fox eating a banana in my kitchen? ;-)

Op za 10 jan 2026 om 00:41 schreef Christophe Henner < christophe.henner@gmail.com>:

Hey everyone,

I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.

So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.

Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to make a much more structured "essay" of my findings

Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.

Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.

The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever, but there are fewer of them every year.

I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and some of it will probably make you mad.

*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI, about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window closes and we become irrelevant.

Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or four years ago, but now we will make do.

Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's what talk pages are for, right?

PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen without their commitment. And fast.

-- Christophe _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org

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