The Thanks that drove a Wikimedian

In March 2019, a teenager in Bayombong logged into an old Wikipedia account he’d made when he was nine, undid a piece of vandalism on an article he’d been reading, and closed the tab. Some time after that, a notification arrived: someone he’d never met had thanked him for that edit.

He didn’t chase more of them. He didn’t set out to become a Wikimedian. But that small pop-up, a single click by a stranger on the other side of the world, sat with him.

“I felt appreciated,” Chlod Alejandro told me last week. “I didn’t expect that people would just randomly see it and give you thanks. It felt like I wasn’t as lonely doing wiki work. There was actually somebody there.”

Seven years later, Chlod stood on stage in Paris at Wikimania 2026 as the first-ever recipient of the Community Connector award, a new category in the Wikimedian of the Year honours, and the first Filipino to be recognised in the WOTY awards at all. The through-line between those two moments is a story about what a small piece of interface can carry.

From notification to responsibility

Chlod took to anti-vandalism first. The mechanics of patrolling suited both his curiosity and his time zone: afternoons in Bayombong are the hours when much of Europe and the Americas is asleep, and edits that would ordinarily be caught in minutes could sit unchecked for hours. He racked up reverts during those windows, then handed the shift over when patrollers in other regions came online.

Ask him why he stuck with it and the answer is startlingly plain. “If there’s somebody on the road face down on the sidewalk, you’re not just going to leave them alone,” he said. “I’m not just going to leave a bad edit there when I know it exists. It became a kind of responsibility. Not something that was shoved onto me — something I decided on my own.”

The path from that stance to a movement career is short. In 2022, mid-build on a copyright-cleanup tool for English Wikipedia, a British editor — TheresNoTime, an English Wikipedia administrator now working as a software engineer on the Wikimedia Foundation‘s Moderator Tools team — mentioned that the Foundation offered grants. Chlod applied and received one. “That’s when I found out there is this magic bag of money somewhere in the movement,” he said.

A year later he was in Singapore for his first Wikimania, presenting the tool he’d built and travelling internationally alone for the first time — his parents booked a family holiday around the same dates, just in case. In Malaysia in 2024, he sat through the ESEAP conference and, in his words, discovered “a whole giant section of Wikimedia that I just didn’t know existed.” By the time ESEAP came to Manila, he was helping to organise it, and had learnt every group in the region by name.

A quiet feature that punches above its weight

Thanks is not one of the movement’s marquee features. It isn’t a structured task, it doesn’t reduce reverts, and it doesn’t move the sort of metrics that show up in quarterly reports. What it does is let one editor register, in a single click, that another editor’s work has been seen. There is no message to draft, no talk page to open, no wondering what to say. The wiki equivalent of a nod across the room.

Chlod is candid about its limits. The button is easy to miss — buried in edit histories, invisible on some interfaces, and, in his view, underused even by editors who know it exists. “Not a lot of people notice it and then remember to do it,” he said. “A bit more visibility might be nice. Or awareness that it exists.” His own theory is that the fix might not be technical at all — that the movement could simply encourage editors, especially those working with newcomers, to reach for the button more often.

He still uses it himself. When someone improves an article he maintains before he can get to it, he thanks them. When a discussion is crowded, and a full reply would ping the room, a thanks is quieter. He is a strong defender of the VisualEditor, too — a decade-old feature recently enabled by default on English Wikipedia for newcomers — for much the same reason: interfaces that lower the cost of contributing tend to be the ones that bring newcomers in.

Full circle in Paris

The Community Connector award is new this year, created to honour the work of building bridges across the movement’s many communities. Chlod has spent the last few years doing exactly that across ESEAP. When his name was called in Paris, he was sitting next to one of the most senior Filipino editors on English Wikipedia — a volunteer who had been editing before Chlod could walk. Watching from home in the Philippines was the very first Filipino editor of Wikipedia.

Chlod’s unprompted, repeated response to the award was to redirect it. “It is not just me but the whole community,” he said. “I would not have been given this if it weren’t for all the people I’ve been working with. Unfortunately, the award could only be given to one person.”

Someone he’d never met once clicked a button to tell him his work had been seen. He has been passing that click on ever since.