Wikimedia Hackathon 2026: Building, collaborating, and shaping the future together

Every year, the Wikimedia Hackathon brings together people from across the Wikimedia technical community to build, experiment, collaborate, and connect. The 2026 edition was no exception, but this year’s event also occurred during a moment of change for the Wikimedia community. Amidst declining page views and the ongoing rise of AI, members of Wikimedia’s technical community gathered to think through these existential questions, while also solving the community’s technical challenges. 

This year’s hackathon took place in Milan, Italy from May 1 to 3. It welcomed 216 participants from 29 countries, making this the largest Wikimedia Hackathon to date. Participants represented a broad range of technical backgrounds, experiences, languages, and Wikimedia projects, spanning volunteers, Wikimedia affiliates and Wikimedia Foundation staff. This was also the first Wikimedia Hackathon attendance for 72 of the participants. 

Beyond the numbers, the real story of the Wikimedia Hackathon is the energy in the rooms, the spontaneous collaborations, and the projects that move the movement forward.

A week full of ideas — and working code

Over the course of the event, participants worked on 89 projects (82 in person and 7 remotely) covering everything from tooling improvements and infrastructure modernization to moderation workflows, accessibility enhancements, newcomer experience improvements, and community-facing features. 

Of the 89 projects pitched on the first day of the event, 70 were ready to be shared during the closing showcase on the final day. Some highlights included:

• Flame graphs for MediaWiki parser frames: Wouldn’t it be cool if you could figure out which wikitext is making your page really slow? We made something like the Excimer profiler but for MediaWiki parses, that shows you the template call stack instead of the PHP call stack
• Project Wise: WISE enables semantic search across media files on Wikimedia Commons, using the same dataset that powers “Media of the Day” 
• Wikipedia Semantic Search MCP: This prototype combines Wikipedia’s experimental semantic search API, the new Wikimedia Attribution API, and the MCP Apps framework (now supported across multiple LLM providers) to embed natural-language Wikipedia results directly inside AI chat tools

There was a 30% increase from the previous year in projects featured during the closing showcase. Whether this was due to more focused hacking or increased confidence from participants in presenting their work, it made for a lively final few hours! Recording of the opening session and closing showcase are available to those who’d like to relive the action.

A critical part of any hackathon is code review. This year, the top three reviewers completed over 200 reviews between them. A big thank you to Dreamy Jazz, James Forrester, and Umherirrender!

Welcoming new contributors

One of the most exciting parts of this year’s event was the participation of so many newcomers and first-time hackathon attendees. 72 participants (one third of attendees) were attending the Wikimedia Hackathon for the first time. Some of these participants have been contributing to Wikimedia projects for over a decade, while others are relative newcomers to the movement. 

For many attendees, the Wikimedia Hackathon is not just a place to write code — it is an entry point into a global technical community built around shared values of openness, collaboration, and free knowledge.

Several participants contributed their first patches, attended their first technical workshop, or joined conversations with fellow contributors they had only previously interacted with online. Many first-time attendees noted how welcomed they felt and how they connected to the broader community. Through the post-event survey, we heard: 

• I felt super included! I didn’t know that many people initially, but I was able to talk to everyone I wanted to, and many other folks that I wasn’t expecting to talk to. Everyone was very open and respectful.
• This was my first hackathon and I felt very included. I got help from many people I had never talked to before, and I got to meet in person developers I had only exchanged messages and emails with.
• Since this was my first Wikimedia Hackathon, co-organizing a […] session with two other Wikimedians really helped me feel more included. It gave me the opportunity to meet and talk with new people. Exchanging ideas and proposals with other participants, and learning about different projects within the Wikimedia ecosystem, made me feel much more connected to the community.

There were other first-time attendees who noted that they would have benefited from more structured support, especially when it came to connecting with experienced contributors, finding a project to work on and figuring out how to present during the opening and closing showcases. As one such participant noted, it would be good in future years to have “A dedicated onboarding or orientation session for newcomers explaining the event structure, hacking culture, communication channels, and how to join projects.’’  This is a great idea, and we’d like to try it out for next year’s hackathon.

Supporting long-standing community members

As the Wikimedia Hackathon welcomed new participants, it also welcomed back many long-standing members. This year, 55 participants who each have over a decade of experience contributing to Wikimedia projects attended the hackathon, bringing over 550 collective years of experience to the event. 

When asked how the WMF can better support experienced contributors, responses focused on providing more opportunities for skill development and deep dives into technical topics, as this is one of the only global technical/developer events that exists within the Wikimedia ecosystem. A key takeaway might be to consider these attendees as “not just as participants, but as mentors, breakout session presenters, bridge-builders, and knowledge keepers” and to facilitate opportunities for this range of skills to be showcased and leveraged. 

Beyond the projects

Hackathons are about more than deliverables. They are about relationships, trust, learning, and shared momentum. Throughout the week, participants joined:

• Unconference sessions: There were 25 unconference sessions, including one session that was so popular it had to be run twice 
• A historic tram tour of Milan, hosted by Wikimedia Italia
• A tombola night, also hosted by Wikimedia Italia
• An evening of visiting downtown Milan, where many pizzas were consumed
• Swing dancing
• An international beer exchange

These moments help strengthen the social infrastructure behind Wikimedia’s technical movement, something just as important as the code itself. Or as one participant eloquently put it: “This is a place where contributors can gain trust and self-confidence. Where conflicts can easily be resolved. Where strategies can be aligned. And in the end: where people learn to identify with the project.”

Looking forward to 2027

As announced during the closing showcase, next year’s hackathon will take place in Albania! That hackathon team and the local co-organizers, the Wikimedians of Albanian Language User Group, are looking forward to welcoming Wikimedia’s technical community to this new location.

In thinking of next year’s event, the organizing team asked participants and community members to share their hackathon preferences for “nice to have” items that may not be absolutely necessary, but that help improve the experience of the overall event. This feedback will help event organizers make decisions most aligned with community wants when budget constraints mean that not all options are possible. Based on the survey feedback, participants and community members have noted that their priorities for the hackathon are:

1. A central location for the event venue
2. A closing party
3. An opening dinner

This feedback is extremely valuable and will help us organize an event that is best tailored to community needs and preferences. 

What now?

While the hackathon may be over, there are plenty of ways to stay connected to Wikimedia’s technical community:

• Discussion forums
  • Wikimedia Hackathon Telegram community
  • Wikimedia Community Discord server, especially the ‘Technical’ channel
• Listservs
  • Wikitech-L
  • Tech News
• Pages to watch
  • MediaWiki News
  • Wikimedia Hackathon 2027 page, we’ll be posting updates, including the scholarship call, in the coming months

And we hope to see you either in-person or online at Wikimania’s Team Challenges or Hackathon!

Until next year — happy hacking!