Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2026 Issue 11

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Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on June 5. Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta. Let foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement!

Highlights

The Wikimania program is now live!
  • Community Wishlist: Weigh in on proposals and open questions on how the wishlist will operate in the future.
  • Simplifying account creation: The Foundation is working on improving the account creation process to reduce potential friction for newcomers to create an account. Improvements include making “Create Account” icon more prominent on mobile, simplifying the registration form, and introducing real-time username validation.
  • New U4C members elected: The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) has new members and has two remaining vacancies in Middle East & North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.
  • Wikimania conference program: The Wikimania 2026 program is now live! Take a moment to review the program, and, if you are logged in, you can mark your “must see” sessions with a star to start building your personal schedule. Register for a virtual ticket here, if you haven’t signed up yet.
  • Neutral Point of View: A proposal for a baseline NPOV standard for Wikipedias that do not have one was published, with a community discussion open until July 15, 2026.

Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure

See also newsletters: Wikimedia Apps · Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Readers · Research · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org

Screenshot showing the Explore Feed refresh in the Wikipedia app (from the Community tab entry point)
  • App Explore feed: The redesigned App Explore feed, now called “Home”, has been released to all Android users. The update introduces a refreshed feed experience along with the first set of new content modules, including Did You Know, Places of Interest, Random Article, and a new end-of-feed experience. Additional content and improvements are planned in future releases.
  • Wikipedia games: The Which came first? daily trivia game is now available in the beta version of the Wikipedia iOS app in English, German, French, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish. The game uses historical events from Wikipedia’s “On This Day” content and challenges readers to guess which of two events happened first.
  • Reusing references: Sub-referencing, a new MediaWiki feature that allows editors to reuse references with different details, has been rolled out to Group 1 wikis and French Wikipedia following a successful pilot phase.
  • Article guidance: The Article guidance feature is being tested with some editors creating new articles on the Simple English, French, and Turkish Wikipedias. The experiment will soon begin on the Arabic and Bangla Wikipedias as well. The outlines guide less experienced editors in creating high-quality articles. A quick guide to markups used in outlines can be found on this page. Example outlines that can be adapted and instructions for how to adapt them are on this section of the project page.
  • Mobile Page Previews: The Page Previews experiment on mobile web has concluded with the decision not to roll out the feature. The results showed no statistically significant impact on reader retention – the primary success metric. Page Previews, which are already available on desktop and in the apps, display a thumbnail, lead paragraph, and link to the full article when readers tap a blue link.
  • Wikifunctions: You can now add images to Abstract Wikipedia and the loading and display of test results when viewing Functions has been improved.
  • Wikidata: The Foundation is migrating the Wikidata Query Service (WDQS) away from the Blazegraph backend since it no longer scales efficiently with Wikidata’s growth. The migration will take place in several phases. Here is the timeline.
  • Growth features: Growth features are now available at Wikidata! Wikidata administrators are still configuring the features through Community Configuration, but this update enables access to Mentorship (if configured), Impact, the Help Panel, and a simplified Newcomer Homepage (without Suggested Edits).
  • Mentors’ management: The Growth team will soon provide a system to automatically suspend or remove inactive mentors from the list of mentors. Communities can already start configuring the process in the Community Configuration.
  • Collaborative Contributions: If you need help setting up the Collaborative Contributions and the Goal setting features, check out these video guides. These features allow you to view which edits are made during an event and allows the group to track progress against a goal with a public progress bar. Learn more.
  • Latest experiments: An upcoming experiment is testing whether we can serve readers better when a footnote click in read mode shows the full bibliographic information rather than flying them to the reference list. See all live, upcoming, and completed experiments in Product & Technology.
  • Tech News: The latest highlights from Tech News week 24 and 25 include how the user interface icon library is being updated. Most of the ~300 icons have been slightly refined and ~30 new icons have been added. See also the 62 community submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks.

Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support

See also blogs: Global Advocacy blog · Global Advocacy Newsletter · Policy blog · WikiLearn News · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events

  • Digital Safety: Join a conversation about Using AI Safely. It’ll explore risks & concerns of using AI tools in personal and organisational contexts and practical strategies to reduce those risks. It will take place at 03:30 UTC & 14:30 UTC on June 26. This session is not about using AI to edit Wikipedia. It’s focused entirely on safe personal and organisational use.
  • Don’t Blink: Read the latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values. Highlights include exploring the implications that new child safety regulations have on privacy online.
  • Grantmaking strategy & Affiliate model: Members of the Global Resources Distribution Committee (GRDC) and the Affiliations Committee (AffCom) met to advance two key movement initiatives: the development of a new Grantmaking strategy and a refreshed Affiliate Model. They produced initial proposals and advanced work on both initiatives ahead of broader conversations planned for Wikimania 2026.

Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness

See also: Progress on the annual plan

Other Movement curated newsletters & news

See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters

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