Reflections from Around the Puzzle Globe

This blog is being translated on Meta-Wiki.

Dear Wikimedians,

I joined the Wikimedia Foundation six months ago, at the beginning of Wikipedia’s 25th birthday. It’s been an extraordinary introduction to this movement.

I have met with more than 1,100 Wikimedians through one-on-one conversations and messages with volunteers and affiliates; Around the Puzzle Globe calls; community events like Futures Lab, WikiCredCon, and the ESEAP conference; and visits to communities in Tokyo, Lisbon, Cape Town, and Johannesburg. Valuable perspectives came from contributors of all kinds—those who are well known among other Wikimedians, those who quietly build Wikimedia projects every day, and even everyday readers of Wikipedia.

What struck me most is the depth of this movement’s commitment to free knowledge. Whether writing and editing articles, mentoring newcomers, building tools, organizing events, translating content, creating partnerships, or serving through affiliates, Wikimedians contribute in countless ways, and every contribution matters.

Across these conversations, one theme emerged consistently: we must adapt to remain relevant in this period of profound change for the internet and Wikimedia.

There are different views about what that means. Some believe Wikimedia must move faster and take big swings to embrace new forms of sharing knowledge across video and rich media, and experiment with new ways of reaching people who no longer come to an encyclopedia (or any website). Others believe that iterative change, long-form articles, and Wikipedia as primarily a destination are the better path forward. 

I understand these perspectives.

After six months, I’m convinced of one thing: standing still is not an option. The world around Wikimedia is changing whether we change or not. We are seeing bigger and quicker changes than Wikimedia has experienced historically. Our challenge is to protect what makes our projects extraordinary while ensuring they adapt and thrive in a fundamentally different world.

That will require bold thinking, faster experimentation and iteration, and difficult decisions. But there are aspects we cannot compromise: the principles that make Wikimedia unique including, neutrality, verifiability, openness, community governance, and human contribution at the center of knowledge creation. I believe these principles provide valuable lessons on what’s made Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects successful, and can help us build a future where more knowledge is accessible to the world. 

For the Foundation, this means grounding our work on the core principles of Wikimedia. Any experiments or ideas will build on community input and center humans.

Our principles are not barriers to change. They are the foundation that allow us to change without losing who we are.

This thinking has been shaped by the conversations I’ve had with contributors and affiliates and reading hundreds of community discussions, threads, and wiki pages. What follows are the themes that emerged most consistently from my learnings, and how they influence where we go next.

Observation #1: Protect what must endure and change what must evolve

What I have heard clearly from many of you is that the status quo is no longer an option. We should celebrate everything Wikimedia communities have accomplished over the past 25 years.

But nostalgia is not a strategy.

What Wikimedia is experiencing today is not gradual evolution or temporary. It is a structural shift in how knowledge is created, discovered, and shared. And it coincides with increasing threats – censorship, reputational attacks, disinformation – to people’s ability to exercise their fundamental freedom to seek and share information and ideas. Together, these issues are affecting our visibility, knowledge access, and trust in our projects. 

Late last year, the Foundation shared that while Wikimedia content is increasingly used across the internet, we are seeing an 8 percent decline in pageview traffic across our projects compared to the previous year, along with declining referral traffic from search engines in line with other large publishers. In short, while our content is more vital than ever, it is also less visible. AI-generated summaries and chatbots answer questions without sending people to websites. “Zero-click” experiences are the norm.

Of course, publishers, media organizations, research institutions, and many others are grappling with the same changes. Many have responded by becoming more closed, with content increasingly locked behind paywalls as the open internet continues to shrink. Wikimedia must take a different path. It has long been a bastion where volunteers donate their content freely to make the world richer, and that is a principle that we want to not only preserve, but to strengthen.

The message I am hearing is that we need to evolve, but in ways that strengthen our mission, and are guided by the values that have made our projects successful. 

Observation #2: Strengthen contributors and communities

Many volunteers spoke candidly about what makes participation difficult. These include: fewer new contributors, barriers to participation, harassment and safety concerns (particularly for women and other underrepresented groups), and the time spent dealing with vandalism, abuse, and increasingly sophisticated forms of disruption. Many new contributors are disillusioned by their early editing journey and interactions on wiki and choose not to continue participating, while some long-term editors experience burnout and leave the community.

Amid these challenges, the Foundation’s role remains clear. It should continue to help contributors spend more time contributing and less time managing preventable burdens. That means investing in tools and infrastructure that make participation faster, safer, and more effective. It means working with communities to identify issues earlier, support enforcement of community policies at scale, and reduce repetitive work for contributors. It means supporting the defense of contributors when they face threats due to their work on Wikipedia, and it means defending their work and the public’s ability to access free knowledge, including through advocacy work around laws that will shape the future of the internet.

This work is also essential to our growth and sustainability. We need pathways that not only recruit new contributors, but help them stay, learn, and thrive. By investing in retention, mentorship, and belonging, we help newcomers develop the skills that uphold the quality and trustworthiness of our projects, while also inviting them to experience the joy of contributing and becoming part of our communities. We need to make communities safer, particularly for women and people from groups that have been historically underrepresented in our content and contributor base, and in countries where risks for editors are increasing. 

We do this through direct support to communities, and by responsibly stewarding the technology, infrastructure, legal framework, and finances that are necessary to keep the projects available, secure, and sustainable for generations to come.

Alongside supporting existing contributors and attracting new ones, we’re also making retaining readers a strategic priority. Today’s engaged readers are tomorrow’s contributors, and expanding our audience is essential to sustaining and diversifying our contributor base of the future. This means experimenting with new and nimble ways to reach readers, including investing in the Wikipedia mobile app as a destination for knowledge seekers. We would also like to explore further with volunteers what changing reader preferences – from multimedia to short-form content – mean for all the places people encounter Wikipedia content, even when they’re not visiting the site directly. Some of these discussions started at Futures Lab in January, one of the first events I attended as CEO, and I’m excited to see how they progress. 

Observation #3: Deepen community-Foundation partnership

Just as importantly, we must continue improving how the Foundation works with communities. Many volunteers asked for greater transparency, stronger communication, and deeper partnership in shaping tools, policies, and priorities. The Foundation must continue improving how it listens, how it communicates, and how it collaborates.

Together with the Global Resource Distribution Committee, we are reshaping grants to better enable collaboration with affiliates and partners, creating a more coordinated approach to achieving shared objectives, while reducing duplication of work and increasing accountability. The first milestone towards shaping the grant making strategy is a new proposal from the GRDC that was published earlier this week. Affiliates play an important role in the Wikimedia ecosystem by recruiting new contributors, supporting campaigns to grow content on the projects, forging partnerships with local roots, advocating for free knowledge, and helping ensure our communities reflect the diversity of the world Wikimedia projects serve.

Recent changes to the Foundation’s approach to the community wishlist prompted strong reactions and generated significant discussion. I take those conversations seriously. While the intent of the changes is to better meet volunteer needs by ensuring that multiple Foundation teams – not just one – share responsibility for addressing wishes, community feedback shows clearly that the Foundation must build a shared understanding of internal structural changes when they directly affect our communities. 

We will continue to build more spaces to connect on common priorities, while recognizing that in a global movement of more than 250,000 contributors, disagreement is inevitable, and it has always been part of Wikimedia’s strength. The goal is not unanimous agreement. As Wikipedia itself reminds us, consensus means bringing different perspectives together, adapting proposals where possible, and finding a path forward through collaboration. The question before us is not how we eliminate disagreement. The question is how can we harness divergent ideas to find new paths and propel us forward, rather than letting fear of disagreement hold us back. I believe that a bedrock for this kind of productive debate is being civil, respectful, and welcoming of alternative perspectives.

That also means recognizing that some of the most valuable perspectives come from contributors who rarely post on Meta-Wiki, join public debates, or attend conferences. Building a truly global movement requires intentionally listening beyond the most visible conversations – to longtime volunteers and newcomers, individual contributors and affiliates, established communities and emerging ones. At a time when we are seeing significant pageview declines, it also means paying attention to the preferences and habits of readers, so they continue to rely on Wikipedia and find welcoming ways to contribute, rather than drift away. All of these voices deserve to help shape Wikimedia’s future.

Ultimately, the future of Wikimedia does not depend on choosing between protecting our values or adapting to new realities. Our values of neutrality, verifiability, openness, community governance, and human contribution are at the center of knowledge creation. They are the foundation that allows us to evolve without losing who we are.

Observation #4: Ensure AI serves Wikimedia’s mission, and not the other way around

AI was among the most frequently discussed topics in my conversations, and views vary widely.

Some contributors already use AI-supported tools for translation, content suggestions, and newcomer support. Others are rightly cautious about AI-generated content, misinformation, bias, attribution, and the possibility that automated systems could weaken the human-centered model that makes Wikimedia distinctive.

Wikimedia has long used machine learning to support contributors, including through vandalism detection and translation tools. These systems can help scale human effort. But the current wave of generative AI brings new opportunities and risks.

Wikimedia is a crucial platform for collecting the world’s knowledge, and our projects are among the most significant sources of training data for AI systems. As these systems learn from Wikipedia, they can become another powerful vehicle for bringing knowledge to the world, extending the reach of our projects. 

However, responsible stewardship of these platforms requires planning for the projects’ sustainability as this technology changes. Automated traffic is increasing strain on our infrastructure, growing the demand on our servers, increasing costs and, in some cases, degrading the experience of human users. Last year, the Foundation reported that 65% of the most resource-consuming traffic Wikimedia receives is coming from bots. It is also becoming harder to distinguish between automated and human traffic, complicating how the Foundation prioritizes and protects access.

The message I heard is not that AI should be rejected outright, nor that it should be embraced without question.

It is that AI must serve Wikimedia’s mission – not the other way around.

There are fundamental principles that we must preserve in the social contract that makes free knowledge projects successful. We must protect the integrity of our projects; ensure proper attribution; encourage mutually-beneficial partnerships with content reusers and set clearer expectations for responsible reuse; and reduce the burden of automated consumption. We must also protect the knowledge creation feedback loop through which readers become contributors, and contributors improve knowledge for everyone.

At the same time, we should develop and deploy tools that genuinely help people contribute – always within Wikimedia’s values, governance structures, and community expectations. Already, Wikimedia contributors have been leading conversations about the role of AI on the Wikimedia projects: if and when it can be used in creating or editing articles, how it can support translation across the 300+ languages Wikipedia supports, and its role in automatically flagging vandalism on the projects.

Observation #5: Make Wikimedia’s value and joy more visible 

Wikipedia is one of the world’s most trusted public resources. Yet many people outside our communities do not understand how it works, who creates it, or what is at stake in protecting it.

Most readers see an article as it exists at that moment in time. They do not see the volunteer who added a citation, the editor who resolved a dispute, the photographer who shared an image, or the community that developed the policies behind the project. They do not see neutrality and verifiability practiced through discussion, revision, and care.

That lack of understanding has real consequences. Readers may not distinguish between Wikimedia’s human-created, community-governed knowledge and AI-generated content elsewhere. Policymakers may not understand how Wikimedia differs from social media platforms, creating a risk that well-intentioned regulation could unintentionally harm free knowledge projects. 

Without greater public understanding of what is at stake, we cannot build the broad base of support, advocacy, and investment needed to protect one of the world’s most important resources of free knowledge. The stakes are real, and the time to build that momentum is now.

Wikipedia’s future will look different from the days when millions simply encountered Wikipedia at the top of search results. We must meet people where they are – on other platforms, in new formats, and through new partnerships – while remaining grounded in the principles that define us. 

The Foundation is already extending the Wikipedia experience beyond the website to reach new audiences. We are investing in the mobile app as a daily destination for learning through features such as Explore Feed, Places, and Wikipedia Year in Review. We’re experimenting with short-form video and campaigns like Wikipedia 25. This work is essential to Wikimedia’s long-term relevance.

We must also deepen our work with affiliates and movement groups to engage nonprofits, technology companies, policymakers, journalists, and other influential audiences. Many policymakers want to strengthen the environment for free knowledge, but they need a clearer understanding of how proposed laws can either enable, or unintentionally undermine, projects like Wikipedia.

We must make the invisible visible. When people understand how Wikipedia works, readers become contributors, and supporters become advocates. 

But visibility is not only about public understanding. It is also about sustaining the experience of contributing. When I ask people what first brought them to Wikimedia, I hear stories of curiosity, generosity, and connection. Someone fixed a typo and stayed because they found a community. Someone wrote about a subject they loved. Someone translated an article so knowledge could cross a language barrier. Someone shared photographs to help others understand a place, culture, or moment in history. Someone edits because it’s fun.

These stories remind us that Wikimedia is not only a system for creating knowledge. It’s a community of people who find meaning in contributing to something larger than themselves.

As our projects evolve, we must protect that joy. Wikimedia should feel like an invitation, not an obligation; meaningful participation, not another task to complete.

The best part of the internet

I want to close these observations with deep gratitude.

Thank you to the community members and affiliates who shared your time, expertise, concerns, and hopes with me. Thank you to Foundation colleagues who show up every day, dedicated to strengthening the Wikimedia projects, supporting volunteers, and serving the public. I specifically want to recognize Lisa Gruwell as she leaves the Foundation next month. Over 15 years she helped grow Wikimedia’s global impact, strengthening Wikipedia’s role as a foundational source of knowledge – not only for people, but also for technologies that help deliver knowledge in new ways.

Leading the Foundation during this moment is a responsibility I take seriously. I feel the weight every day on my shoulders and strive to be worthy of the projects you all have created and nurtured for 25 years. 

As I mentioned in my first note, I joined Wikimedia because I wholeheartedly believe that Wikipedia is the best part of the internet.

And I am not alone.

For 25 years, our communities have proven that another model of the internet is possible. A model built not on personal gain, but on sharing knowledge. Not on a small number of people deciding what the world should know, but on communities of people working together to document and preserve human knowledge.

Wikipedia is 25 years old, and yet in many ways, we’re just getting started. Wikipedia has shown the world that the best things are those we build together.

The journey ahead belongs to all of us, and I am excited to continue it together.

Bernadette Meehan is CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation.