Wikimedia & Research conference in the CEE region: programme coming in August, registration open

This October, Katowice, Poland, will host Open Knowledge: Wikimedia & Research in the CEE Region — a new regional conference bringing together Wikimedia communities and researchers from across Central and Eastern Europe. With programme submissions now closed, we want to share an update on where the conference stands — and remind you that registration is still open.

What the conference is about

Central and Eastern Europe is a diverse region with active Wikimedia communities and strong academic traditions, but collaboration between these two worlds still has plenty of room to grow. Wikipedia in local languages is studied far less than the English Wikipedia, and awareness of tools like Wikidata among researchers remains relatively low.

Open Knowledge: Wikimedia & Research in the CEE Region aims to change that. Taking place on 9–10 October 2026 in Katowice, Poland (with satellite events on 8 October), the conference will connect researchers studying and using Wikimedia projects with the wider Wikimedia community in the region. The programme will combine research presentations with practical sessions — talks, panels, workshops, posters, and interactive formats designed to support discussion and collaboration.

The conference is co-organised by Wikimedia Poland and Wikimedia Ukraine, in collaboration with the University of Silesia and with support from the CEE Hub. It is supported by a Conference Fund grant from the Wikimedia Foundation. The event will be hybrid — in person at spinPLACE at the University of Silesia and online — and will run in English, Polish, and Ukrainian, with translation across all three languages.

You can read more about the background and motivation for the conference in our first Diff post from April.

Where we’re at: programme in the works

Programme submissions closed on July 7 and we were delighted by the response — we received over 60 proposals across all thematic tracks, from studies of information quality and community dynamics to GLAM collaborations, education initiatives, and the impact of AI on the Wikimedia ecosystem. You can find all the submissions on the conference Meta page.

The programme committee is now finalizing evaluation of the submissions. We expect to notify applicants and publish the programme in August and publish the programme afterwards — follow the conference Meta page for updates.

Registration is still open — join us!

While scholarships and programme submissions have closed, self-funded registration remains open. Whether you’re a researcher, a student, a data steward, an academic librarian, a Wikimedian curious about research, or simply someone interested in open knowledge — we warmly invite you to sign up and join us in Katowice or online.

Registration for in-person participation is open until 24 August 2026. The registration fee covers access to all sessions and workshops, meals throughout the conference (including the welcome dinner on Thursday and the social dinner on Friday), and networking opportunities.

👉Register for in-person participation here

If you cannot join us in person, fear not! Participation online is also possible, and it is free: register for online participation here.

Online registration will be open until at least 5 October.

Meet our invited speakers

While the full programme is still taking shape, we’re excited to introduce the invited speakers who have already confirmed their participation. They represent the breadth of the conference itself — spanning open science, digital humanities, cultural heritage, library science, and computational research:

• Dr Ana Slavec (University of Primorska, Slovenia) — assistant professor at the University of Primorska in Koper, Slovenia, and president of the Slovenian Open Science Community, working on research data management and knowledge sharing; she leads the newly established Department of Open Science at the University of Primorska Library.
• Dr Cezary Rosiński (Institute of Literary Research, Polish Academy of Sciences) — literary scholar and data specialist connecting academic digital humanities with the Wikimedia movement, especially through Wikidata, Linked Open Data, and knowledge graphs.
• Dr Claudia Șerbănuță (Wikimedians of Romania and Moldova User Group) — researcher and practitioner at the intersection of library and information science and open knowledge; former Interim Director of the National Library of Romania, studying the role of libraries in democratic resilience and equitable access to knowledge.
• Dr hab. Hanna Schreiber (UNESCO Chair on Intangible Cultural Heritage, University of Warsaw) — interdisciplinary researcher exploring co-creation of knowledge and the relationship between heritage and urban space, approaching Wikimedia collaboration from a fresh “outsider” perspective.
• Dr Lozana Rossenova (TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, Germany) — digital designer and researcher leading the Wikibase4Research service within NFDI4Culture, Germany’s national consortium for cultural heritage research data.
• Mykola Trokhymovych (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona) — PhD student working at the intersection of NLP and computational social science, focusing on Wikipedia knowledge integrity and multilingual information quality in close collaboration with the Wikimedia Research Team.
• Dr Sabine von Mering (Museum für Naturkunde Berlin) — biologist and data scientist advocating for Wikidata as a research tool, with work spanning the digital transformation of natural history collections and marginalised groups in knowledge production.
• Dr Włodzimierz Lewoniewski (Poznań University of Economics and Business) — assistant professor researching information quality, Wikipedia, Wikidata, and AI; an active science communicator awarded the Medal of the Commission of National Education in 2025.

Questions? Check out the extensive FAQ section on the conference Meta page, or get in touch with us directly! You can email the organising team at open.knowledge.cee@wikimedia.pl. We look forward to seeing you in Katowice!