Wikimania 2025: Information Integrity on Climate Change on Wikimedia projects

During Wikimania in Nairobi, the Working Group on Climate Justice and Wikimedia projects organized two activities on the topic of “Information Integrity on Climate Change”. The first activity was a Pre-Conference Day, that included a closed space between organizers of the Wiki for Human Rights campaign mainly from Africa and Latin America, and an activity at UNEP HQ in Nairobi to have a specific panel on the topic.

We also hosted a meetup of climate change & WikiForHumanRights organizers. Later, we organized a panel discussion to share some of the insights we gathered at the Pre-Conference session.

These meetings helped us advance a South-South collaboration for strengthening the WikiForHumanRights campaign and continuing the growing work in the movement of documenting climate change.  These spaces created three main takeaways: 

• We identified that framing our strategies, such as local or regional campaigns, in the framework of “information integrity on climate change” allows us to better connect with the interest of international partners and allies. 
• We built an understanding among Latin America and Africa organizers on how we want to make sure climate change topics are accessible in local communities in languages and ways they can understand. Wikimedia projects offer a way of collaborating together beyond geographical boundaries. South-South collaboration can allow organizers to not only bring their local languages, but more importantly, the local perspectives and the worldviews that different cultures have around the relationship between humans and their environment.
• We agreed to continue the momentum for innovation and global collaboration on Wikimedia organizing around climate and other environmental issues. The future-thinking exercises showed powerful ideas that could be implemented in campaigns and strategies, and could be further developed in other spaces (such as prototyping sessions). There is interest and desire to keep on working on these topics by community organizers. 

The Pre-Conference: enhancing South-South collaboration

The goal of the Pre-Conference was to explore how the Wikimedia communities from the Global South are building trustworthy information online on climate change from local and regional perspectives. We also wanted to connect with the larger ecosystem of stakeholders, by creating awareness on how the Wikimedia communities are a fundamental part of promoting and protecting information integrity on climate change in the digital ecosystem.

For building those South-South bridges, we needed to root our practices in the energy and experiences of our own territories. For this, Olga Paredes from Wikimedistas de Bolivia and Jesed Mateo from WikiAcción Perú helped prepare an offering, a way to celebrate and connect with the Pachamama (Earth Mother) that comes from the traditions of the indigenous peoples of the Andes. People were asked to bring a special object, memory or symbol from their communities, and share it with everyone as part of the energy they were bringing to the table (dressed with an aguayo with a world map on it).

“It is the first time that I see something like this in a Wikimedia space, it was very moving and valuable”, said one of the participants.

A landscape on information integrity on climate change

One of the opportunities of conferences is to better understand how partners think about the issues we are facing on-wiki. We invited Faye Holder from Influencemap and Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) and Eric Wamugu and Alicia Olago from Code for Africa to help us frame the conversation around “information integrity on climate change”. What do we mean with the concept, and how does it connect to the work we’re doing with organizing a campaign around climate change and environmental issues?

Eric explained the topics and ways in which mis/disinformation spreads, such as current events and local languages, and how Wikimedia projects help in counteracting some of those effects. Alicia then went into detail into the UN information integrity principles and then explained how they connect with the Wikimedia movement.

Faye, on the other hand, presented a global overview on how the concept has evolved, particularly at the global scale, and how it connects to Wikimedia projects: Wikimedia is “both a source of information and an organisation with the ability to source information.” She then reminded us that actors spreading dis/misinformation “are active, intentional and organised”, so therefore it is important that, to protect information integrity, movements organize themselves as well.

Identifying problems and solutions, imagining the future

After this broad overview and landscape, we wanted participants  to think about the problems and solutions we face as community organizers. For that, we brought a methodology known as the “problem tree”, where in groups, people have to identify the causes of a problem (the roots) and its effects and impacts (the branches). For this exercise, we proposed a broad statement: “We live in a polluted information ecosystem that prevents progress on important climate change issues”.

People identified in the roots problems such as “language barriers”, “poor communication of data”, “mismatch between how science is communicated and how is consumed by local communities”, “fossil fuel interests, elite capture, and corporate campaigns”, “technological barriers”, and “not situating information on the local context”. 

As for the impacts, people identified “lack of climate policy”, “entrenched beliefs and polarization”, “ignoring or not applying relevant information”, “information not being useful”, “extractivism in local economies”. At this stage of the exercise, some of the groups started presenting solutions as well!

Following this exercise, we asked participants to do a bit of future thinking. Based on everything they had shared, we asked them to imagine that it was 2028, in a scenario where “open knowledge communities and platforms, including Wikimedia, are recognized as a great source of information for climate change, from policy makers to frontline communities. Our model is considered an antidote against disinformation.”

We gave them magazines, paper scraps, stamps and other fun & engaging stationery items to build their stories. How did we get there? What did we do to create that future? They had to put together their own magazine in twenty minutes. 

The results of the magazines were stunning, considering how little time they had. People decided to focus on different aspects of the solutions, including more engagement with indigenous language, human-machine collaboration, fact checking, more access to information technologies, more awareness campaigns (such as international days or engagement with partners outside of the Wikimedia ecosystem), and more openness towards other ways of sharing knowledge and information, such as oral knowledges.

Information integrity at UNEP HQ

Lastly, after lunch, we went to UNEP, the United Nations Environmental Programme offices, to have a panel with experts from UNEP and participants from our group. There, Winnie Kabintie from the Wikimedians of Kenya User Group provided an overview of the Wiki for Human Rights Campaign in the African context. Later, we moved to a panel with Faye Holder (Influencemap & CAAD), Eric Wamugu and Alicia Olago (Code for Africa), Evelin Heidel (Wikimedistas de Uruguay & Working Group on Climate Justice and Wikimedia Projects), and Mirey Atallah (UNEP). The panel was moderated by Bingying Liu, Communication Lead for Special Events, Communication Division, UNEP.

There, some of the challenges that we had talked about in the first half of the day emerged again, such as the differences in producing science and reports, and communicating it to the broader public; the language gaps and language barriers that exist to access relevant knowledge; the corporate capture of the information ecosystem, and the different ways in which communities can help tackling these issues. Overall, it was a productive conversation to help create a framework for the Wiki for Human Rights campaign that aligns with the international conversation that multilateral and civil society organizations are having on the topic.

One of the participants expressed after the meeting: “I really enjoyed the Pre-Conference Day, but the most important thing for me was the meeting at UNEP HQ. This is our opportunity to work with them and make South-South collaboration a reality. We haven’t reached an agreement yet, but I feel there’s a lot of willingness to collaborate. We need to keep on showing up, and that’s the decision we took”.

Finally, UNEP officers were kind enough to show us UNEP HQ campus, a beautiful setting where participants took a lot of photos.

Coda: an organizers’ meetup

Lastly, the group present at the Pre-Conference session felt that time wasn’t enough! So we organized a meetup to exchange ideas on how to organize the (soon to be renamed) Wiki for Human Rights campaign in 2026. People identified the value of the campaign in their local context, and signaled the importance of keeping it growing in the upcoming years as an example of South-South collaboration.

We are thankful to all the energy that organizers, allies and partners brought to this conversation at Wikimania 2025. We’re especially grateful to the support of Wikimedia Foundation staff Felix Nartey, Brisa Ceccon and Euphemia Uwandu. We also would like to thank CAAD, UNEP HQ and Code for Africa for their time, support and contributions to make this event happen. And finally, to this year’s Wikimania COT, who thought this was an important topic to discuss at Wikimania! We look forward to collaborating with all of you for 2026’s on climate change & environmental issues campaign.