Help Wikimedia Counter Disinformation!

In the past years, the threat posed by disinformation—that is to say, the intentional spread of misleading information—has become particularly intense worldwide. Wikipedia volunteers and communities work tirelessly everyday to establish reliable information as well as find and correct false information on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. 

Many in the Wikimedia movement have been addressing this growing challenge by developing new tools to address it and also by sharing knowledge across the volunteer community. However, not all communities and volunteers are aware of or have access to these efforts, and many are struggling to confront disinformation risks in a highly complex environment. 

The Global Advocacy team, in collaboration with many others at the Foundation, wants to help. For this reason, we are launching a public mapping project to collect all initiatives and tools that have been developed at the local level across Wikimedia projects, and make them easily accessible and available to the movement at large.

Crowdsourcing this information will allow us to support our community better, thereby improving Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects’ protection against disinformation. We need your help to do so.

If you are aware of an initiative, tool, training, or other form of community engagement around misinformation, disinformation, or information integrity, please let us know. Here is how to do so:

1. Send an email with the subject “disinformation mapping” to Costanza Sciubba Caniglia (csciubbacaniglia@wikimedia.org), our Anti-Disinformation Strategy Lead, and CC Ziski Putz (fputz@wikimedia.org), our Movement Advocacy Manager. Let us know the time zone in which you are based.
   
2. Wait for a follow-up reply from either Ziski or Costanza.
   
3. Schedule a time to meet with them!

We are very excited to hear about your projects, and to discuss and decide together how we can better support and highlight them. Collectively, as a movement, we can learn from each other and ensure that our platforms remain sources of free and reliable information!