As we continue celebrating 10 years of Wiki Loves Women, we are looking not only at what has been achieved, but also at how the initiative continues to grow and create new opportunities for communities. After celebrating a decade of making women more visible through initiatives such as SheSaid, ISA Campaign, Wiki OTO, we are turning the spotlight to another part of the initiative: building skills through learning and doing.

In 2026, Wiki Loves Women launched the Skills Focus Programme, a practical, group based online training programme designed to help Wikimedia and Open movement community members develop specific skills through hands-on learning and creation. Each cohort explores one theme, bringing together participants from all the genders to learn, practise, and work towards a tangible final output.

The programme builds on the experience of the Wiki Loves Women Focus Group, which ran from 2021 to 2025, creating a space for community members to exchange knowledge, learn from one another, and strengthen their skills. In 2026, this approach evolved into a focused cohort model, where each group explores one specific skill within a defined timeframe and puts that learning directly into practice.

For its first 2026 edition, the Skills Focus Programme focuses on audio storytelling and podcast production. Participants are guided through the process of creating a podcast episode, from finding a story and choosing a guest to designing the conversation, recording, editing, and sharing the final story.

The first call for the programme attracted 29 applications, reflecting interest from a diverse range of Wikimedia and Open movement community members. From these applications, 15 participants were selected, bringing together participants from across Africa, India, and Italy. 

The 2026 edition covers four main areas: finding a story and choosing a guest, designing the conversation, recording and audio production, and editing, branding and communication. Between sessions, participants work on their podcast and put the skills they have learned into practice.

The output: a podcast episode

Each participant will produce a podcast episode exploring a story, person, experience, or issue related to women and gender.

The episodes may highlight a woman who inspires them, explore a gender gap or challenge, or bring attention to a topic that deserves more visibility. Together, they will showcase different stories, experiences, and perspectives from across the participating communities, while giving participants a practical piece of work and skills they can continue using beyond the programme.

Stay tuned as our participants turn their ideas into stories, conversations, and podcast episodes. 

03/09/2026-09/09/2026

Mapping

• Voting has started on the lgbtq=* proposal and is open until and including 19 September.

Mapping campaigns

• In a talk at State of the Map 2026, Enock Seth Nyamador explained how massive mapathon campaigns carried out by paid mappers affiliated with large companies or organisations could potentially ‘kill’ the OpenStreetMap movement in Ghana.

Community

• [1] The editors at weeklyOSM don’t just collect and write articles to keep you as well informed as possible about the OSM universe; they also map , some with such great success. We would like to offer our warmest congratulations to @ediyes, from our Spanish team, on this achievement! With her Peruvian team , Edith came second , behind the Guatemalan team .
• rphyrin explained the situation around Jakarta following the recent Anak Krakatau eruption, while showing how OpenStreetMap data is being used in an early warning system to alert people about the areas expected to be affected by volcanic ash. Anak Krakatau, meaning ‘child of Krakatau’, is an active volcano in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra that emerged from the caldera left by the catastrophic 1883 Krakatau eruption, which killed an estimated 35,000 people.

Local chapter news

• Katja Haferkorn reported ► that the FOSSGIS e.V. networking meeting took place on 2 September, with 25 participants joining the online networking platform. The next networking meeting will be held on 9 December 2026.

Events

• Are you a Stadia Maps customer? They just announced that they’re sponsoring local meet-ups to align with their core values of providing fair, transparent treatment for developers.
• Christoph Hormann shared a general commentary on the State of the Map 2026 conference in Paris, which he had recently attended.
• State of the Map Asia 2026 was held in Osaka, Japan, on 6 and 7 September.

OSM research

• Maurizio Napolitano wrote ► about ‘Stress in bici’, an experimental map based on OpenStreetMap that shows bicycle routes in Italy, colour-coded according to stress level. The development of the platform is also described in a research paper, ‘TS-BikePlan: A Data-Driven Tool for Enhancing Cycling Infrastructure and Safety’, published in the Journal of Urban Technology .
• Giuliano Cornacchia et al. have studied the recommended routes given by software navigation services and found out that as adoption increases, route diversity declines. Further, traffic and emissions converge onto fewer roads leading to lesser benefits (which eventually turn negative over a certain threshold) in terms of CO₂ emissions and traffic load. For the purposes of this study, the road networks were sourced from OpenStreetMap.
• The OSM Road Monitor team presented their work at SotM 2026 in Paris. By combining community-driven mapping with independent Earth observation data, the project aims to support more reliable and timely road information.

Maps

• Continuing the discussion around the recent UN shift from the Mercator to the Equal Earth projection, the OpenStreetMap community on Reddit has started discussing whether OSM should make the switch as well. Meanwhile, back in 2025, also prompted by a discussion about OSM map projections, Andy Townsend had already shown us that anyone can render OSM data in whatever projection they want.
• Mathias has published a map, ‘Polizeikarte’ , which brings together public press releases from German police authorities. It shows around 63,600 incidents from 260 locations across 14 federal states. Geocoding is handled by Nominatim, whilst the visualisation is provided by MapLibre GL JS using tiles from OpenFreeMap. Official reference layers can be overlaid, such as the accident atlas from the statistical offices, which contains 585,815 accidents from 2018 to 2025. The project is non-commercial and is not affiliated with any public authority.

Open Data

• Iconem has recently updated terrain-viewer, an app made to ingest, style, and render open-data terrain-sources for relief visualisation, feature detection, and mapping! They’re using it to detect archaeological sites, and there is some overlap with mapping landmarks within OSM from terrain sources, whether public worldwide like Mapterhorn, or national, since the tool can ingest custom national mapping agencies data sources.

Software

• Stadia Maps explained the distinction between forward geocoding and reverse geocoding and how choosing the right endpoint and parameters can make a big difference for any application.
• Strongly motivated by the urge to avoid getting a speeding ticket, Moonshot Studios GmbH have developed YouSpeed, a mobile intelligent speed-assistance app powered by OpenStreetMap speed-limit tags, area context, and daily diffs. Other apps of Moonshot Studios include Woladen (where to charge your electric car) and Tankzeit (best time to fuel up your car).
• rphyrin has made ‘ivebeen_here’, a platform for OSM users to share their personal stories about particular places.

Programming

• Agasta08 published the full report for their 2026 Google Summer of Code project, ‘Category Support in Nominatim’, thanking mentors Sarah Hoffmann and Marc Tobias, as well as OpenCage for sponsoring the development server used for the planet-scale database setup. Agasta explained how the category model has been implemented in Nominatim.
• Inspired by a discussion at the recent State of the Map, rphyrin tried out ‘Photon‘, an open-source geocoder built for OpenStreetMap data, and built a custom front end that allows users to copy the coordinates of search results.

Releases

• OsmAnd released version 5.4 for iOS with a redesigned My Places interface, a rebuilt Plan a Route tool, and a new Astronomy plugin. The Android release came with a refreshed Search UI, the ability to attach media to Favorites, and 3D Buildings with roof shapes.
• Altilunium LocationPad v26.9.5 has been released – a web app for marking, labeling, and revisiting places on an OpenStreetMap-based map.
• Sourtest v26.9.6 has been released.
• The August 2026 release of Organic Maps has been released, introducing several new features, including multi-selection for bookmarks and tracks, a CarPlay dashboard, the ability to hide tracks on the map, and more readable share links.

Did you know that …

• … the recent ChatGPT update can now show OpenStreetMap-based map data based on your chat query, complete with proper OpenStreetMap attribution?

OSM in the media

• Brian Bergstrom has launched Dulcet GIS, a podcast about cartography and civic mapping. The first episode covers the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Equal Earth projection and sets it alongside the executive order renaming Lake Ontario, noting that OpenStreetMap was the only major map that did not change the name. The episode explained the on the ground rule and how disputed names are handled in the data model, and closed by pointing listeners to OSM-based apps and to the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team.
• The latest event of the Ingolstadt Citizens’ Network was held ► on Sunday 6 September, focusing on the theme ‘Navigation using OpenStreetMap data’. The event demonstrated how OpenStreetMap can be used in everyday life, which apps are based on it, and how people can contribute to improving the maps themselves. The event was free and open to everyone, with no prior knowledge required.

Other “geo” things

• The United Nations General Assembly has voted by an overwhelming majority in favour of adopting a world map based on the 2018 Equal Earth projection, which more accurately reflects the actual size of countries and continents, moving away from the Mercator projection. In New York, 164 states voted in favour of the resolution, which was sponsored by Togo and backed by the African Union. The United States was the only country to vote against ► it, describing the initiative as an ‘ideological agenda’. Six countries abstained.
• Scientists, led by space physicist Endawoke Yizengaw of The Aerospace Corporation in the US, have discovered that the solar flares of 11 November 2025 caused widespread, coast-to-coast disturbances in the atmosphere across the continental US. The disturbances could potentially throw GNSS positioning off by more than 10 metres in some places, the researchers say, significant enough to disrupt precision agriculture and autonomous vehicles.
• After announcing that Lake Ontario would continue to be called that on their maps, the MapQuest app went to number one for navigation on the iOS App Store in the US.
• Maggie Downs, of the BBC, visited Vienna’s Globe Museum, the only public museum in the world dedicated entirely to globes.
• Oliver Bünte, of Heise, reported that the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit has tested a quantum sensor-based flight navigation system over the Pacific that allows an aircraft’s position to be determined precisely without relying on GNSS. Instead of relying on signals from navigation satellites, the system detects changes in the Earth’s natural magnetic field and creates a magnetic field map from these measurements. Based on this map, the system can determine an aircraft’s position entirely independently of GNSS signals, weather, and visibility conditions.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-09-13
	Greater London	1 Cabot Square, 7th Floor, Canary Wharf E14 4QJ	EAW Volunteering Event	2026-09-14
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-09-14
	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-09-15
			Missing Maps London Mid-Month for Advanced Mappers (no training provided) (Online) [eng]	2026-09-15
	San Francisco	Near BART 24th St. Mission station	Bay Area WikiSalon	2026-09-15
	Lyon	Tubà	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon	2026-09-15
	Bonn	Dotty’s	204. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn	2026-09-15
	Chemnitz	Kaffeesatz, Chemnitz	OSM-Stammtisch Chemnitz	2026-09-15
	Stainach-Pürgg	Online	22. Österreichischer OSM-Stammtisch (online)	2026-09-15
	San Jose	Online	South Bay Map Night	2026-09-15
		Online	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)	2026-09-15
	St. Gallen	Rosenbergstrasse 59, 9000 St.Gallen	Map The Climate! Ein Mapathon	2026-09-16
		MJC de vienne	Réunion du groupe local de Vienne	2026-09-16
	Köln	Lokal K, Hackländer Straße 2, Köln-Ehrenfeld	OSM Stammtisch Köln	2026-09-16
	Nantes		COntrib’atelier	2026-09-16
	San Francisco	Et al.	A Synesthete’s Atlas: Cartographic Improvisations Between Eric Theise, Gusty Winds May Exist, Ron Heglin, and Petra Zélie	2026-09-16
	Karlsruhe	Schwarzer Kater	Stammtisch Karlsruhe	2026-09-16
	Kiel	Kieler Innovations- und Technologiezentrum	OSM auf der Kielux 2026	2026-09-18 – 2026-09-19
			OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting	2026-09-18
	Catania	Centro Atena, via Fimia 34, 95128 Catania (CT)	Modifichiamo Wiki e OSM insieme! – Catania	2026-09-18
	Mumbai	Lokhandwala Garden, Andheri	OSM Mumbai Mapping Party No.14 (Andheri)	2026-09-19
	Delhi	Too Mikkii Tapas, South Extension	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.31 (South Extension)	2026-09-20
	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-09-22
	Derby	The Brunswick, Railway Terrace, Derby	East Midlands pub meet-up	2026-09-22
	Berlin	Online	OSM-Verkehrswende #79	2026-09-22
	Catania	Piazza Roma, Catania (Punto di incontro)	Mappiamo le piste ciclabili – Catania	2026-09-22
	Nantes	Le Wagon Nantes	OpenStreetMap, la carte à la carte !	2026-09-23
	Hannover	Kuriosum	Stammtisch	2026-09-23
	Würzburg	FabLab Würzburg	Würzburger OSM-Treffen	2026-09-23
	City of Westminster	Blue Posts pub	London pub meet-up	2026-09-23
			Pravidelný Missing Maps CZ-SK online Mapathon	2026-09-24
		100% online	Lançamento de livros sobre mapeamento colaborativo	2026-09-24
	Freiburg im Breisgau	CCCFR, Adlerstr. 12 a, Freiburg/Br.	OSM-Treffen Freiburg/Br.	2026-09-24
	Bengaluru	NIMHANS Convention Center	OSM India @ IndiaFOSS 2026	2026-09-25 – 2026-09-27
			UN Mappers Mappy Hour	2026-09-25
	Torreón	Universidad Tecnológica de Torreón	Conferencia “OpenStreetMap: Datos abiertos y más”	2026-09-25
	Torreón	Universidad Tecnológica de Torreón	Taller “Mapeando mi entorno”	2026-09-25
	Düsseldorf	Online bei https://meet.jit.si/OSM-DUS-2026	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)	2026-09-25
	Karlsruhe	Geofabrik, Amalienstraße 44, 76133 Karlsruhe	Karlsruhe Hack Weekend September 2026	2026-09-26 – 2026-09-27
	Nantes	Le Wagon Nantes	OpenStreetMap, la balade de la data	2026-09-26
			Sudan Solidarity Series	2026-09-26
	Uppsala	Datorföreningen Update	Mapping meetup in Uppsala	2026-09-27
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-09-28

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by MarcoR, MatthiasMatthias, Rob Yoegel, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred, tkk.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

What happens when a community that knows what people need meets a platform designed to help people share what they know?

For EduWiki Hub and Capacity Exchange (CapX), the answer has been a partnership that has grown from an idea into something practical: a more connected way for Wikimedians to find mentors, share skills, and contribute to the growth of others across the Movement.

Our collaboration began early in the development of the EduWiki Hub and continued through our first mentorship cohort. But it was during the development of our second cohort that the partnership really started to take shape.

Instead of relying on external tools such as Google Forms, we worked together to bring the EduWiki Mentorship Program directly into Capacity Exchange. EduWiki Hub brought the program model, community knowledge, outreach, and understanding of the skills and support our participants needed. CapX brought the technical infrastructure and worked with us to turn those needs into a functioning platform.

Together, we developed a dedicated mentorship application experience where mentors and mentees could share their skills, languages, interests, and preferences, while keeping the process within the Wikimedia ecosystem. The application data is securely handled through CapX, and the platform also allows participants to receive recognition through EduWiki badges on their profiles.

But perhaps the most valuable part of the collaboration was that the platform was not simply something we were given to use. We helped shape it together.

The mentorship feature itself emerged from conversations between the CapX and EduWiki teams. As we tested it, we identified improvements, suggested new education-related capacities, explored recognition through badges, and discussed how CapX could become more useful for education communities across the Movement.

A partnership that brought new people in

We also saw a measurable effect on CapX itself during the outreach for the second EduWiki Mentorship cohort.

On 30 April 2026, CapX had 1,266 users. By 16 June 2026, that number had grown to 1,510 an increase of 244 users, or approximately 19% during the period in which we were actively promoting the mentorship opportunity.

Of course we cannot claim that all of the growth was a result of the program’s outreach, but we certainly contributed to a major part of it. This is especially evident when looking at the platform’s user growth trajectory, as this period represented an exponential peak in the number of users. 

For us, this is an important outcome. The partnership was not only about building a better application process for an existing program. It is also about creating a pathway for people who are looking for mentorship to discover another Wikimedia resource where they can continue to share and develop their capacities. More importantly, it is about ensuring that this exchange of knowledge does not stop when the program ends, but continues and expands through CapX, creating opportunities for learning, sharing, and collaboration beyond the duration of the program.

The second cohort received 66 applications from mentees and 29 from mentors, with participation also expanding to include more technical specialists and people working in languages beyond English. By August 2026, the cohort had begun with 17 mentors and 23 mentees, following the successful completion of the first cohort with 6 mentors and 10 mentees.

More than a mentorship form

The value of the collaboration goes beyond replacing one form with another.

It has helped us think about how education-related skills can be represented and discovered across the Movement. Together, we began developing and refining education-focused capacities for CapX, including areas such as educational programming, workshops, training, tutorials, Wikipedia, Wikidata, MediaWiki, and other skills relevant to Wikimedia education work.

This opens a bigger possibility: a future where someone looking for support with an education program does not have to know who to ask beforehand. They can find people through their skills, experience, languages, and willingness to help.

That is the kind of infrastructure that can make knowledge-sharing more distributed.

Building with the Movement, not beside it

For EduWiki Hub, one of the strongest aspects of this partnership is that it allows us to build on infrastructure that already belongs to the Wikimedia ecosystem.

Rather than creating another standalone system for education communities, we are contributing to an existing movement-wide platform while also helping it become more useful for a specific community need.

This is closely aligned with the Wikimedia Movement Strategy’s emphasis on investing in skills and leadership, coordinating across stakeholders, improving user experience, and creating infrastructure that helps people learn from one another.

It is also a good example of what collaboration across the Movement can look like in practice: one partner brings community needs and program expertise, another brings technical capacity, and both learn from each other in the process. In this way, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts: rather than reinventing the same solutions each time, we can build on what others have already created, adapting and expanding existing knowledge, tools, and experiences to serve new needs, always with the goal of strengthening and expanding the Wikimedia Movement.

What comes next

There is still much to build.

We want to continue bringing more educators into CapX, expand the range of education-related capacities, improve support for different languages, strengthen the pool of technical mentors, and explore better ways of recognizing the skills people contribute to the Movement.

But the experience so far has shown us something important: partnerships do not always have to mean creating something entirely new. Sometimes the greatest impact comes from connecting existing strengths and building together.

The EduWiki Hub and Capacity Exchange collaboration started with a conversation about mentorship. It has grown into a shared experiment in how we can make skills more visible, mentorship easier to access, and knowledge-sharing more connected across the Wikimedia Movement.

And that is perhaps the most valuable outcome of all: not simply a better tool, but a stronger network of people behind it.

Arrival and reconnecting with the community

When I arrived at the Malaysian Wikimedia Strategy Summit on 29 August 2026, one of the first things I noticed was how familiar and unfamiliar the Wikimedia community could feel at the same time.

I met again with Wikimedians whom I had not seen in a while, while also getting to know new members of the community. Seeing familiar faces again while meeting new people reminded me that the Wikimedia community is constantly growing, while the friendships formed through Wikimedia activities can continue even after an event ends.

But as the day went on, I realized that the summit was about much more than simply bringing Wikimedians together. It gave us an opportunity to think about where the Wikimedia movement in Malaysia is going, what challenges we face, and what role each of us can play in shaping its future.

Many Communities, One Movement

The opening sessions gave me a better understanding of the wider Wikimedia movement, especially the importance of communities being able to represent and preserve their own cultures.That part really stood out to me because Malaysia has so many different communities and cultures. I think it is important that the people who actually come from these communities are involved in documenting their own history, language, traditions and knowledge.

The ESEAP Hub session also introduced me to the work of the ESEAP Hub and how Malaysian Wikimedians can get involved. Ms Feliani also asked about the activities and news from different communities in Wikimedia Malaysia. It made me realise that there are actually many things happening across the region that I had not known about before.

Bluster Jainon, a former president of Kelab Wiki Kent, also shared the story of how WikiTour came about. Hearing how an idea could eventually become an actual Wikimedia activity made me think about what kinds of projects we could create ourselves.

Mr Sakti Pramudya from the Wikimedia Foundation also shared updates from the Foundation, including some of the challenges brought by AI. With more people getting information through AI tools, the reliability of the information they receive becomes even more important. This made me think about the role Wikimedia projects can play in making reliable, community-created knowledge available. He also encouraged us to think about how we can make Wikipedia interesting to Gen Z, rather than assuming that young people will automatically want to read it.

Turning Culture Into Contribution

During the Movement session, we looked at how the Wikimedia movement in Malaysia has developed so far. We also had an activity where we could write down ideas for events that could encourage more contributions. This was probably one of my favourite parts because I got to suggest some ideas that were connected to my own culture and interests.

I made some contribution by suggesting some ideas in the vision board such as WikiTombolog, which would focus on documenting birds, especially endemic birds in Sabah. Another idea was WikiTalun — going camping in the jungle, learning traditional jungle survival practices from our own communities, and documenting what we learn. I also suggested WikiBasaan, which would focus on preserving traditional clothing through photography and documentation. Seeing all of these suggestions being included in the presentation later made me really happy. It was a small thing, but it made me feel that my ideas were actually being heard.

It also made me realise that contributing to Wikimedia does not always have to start with something complicated. Sometimes it can start with something that is already around us — our clothes, our environment, our traditions or the knowledge passed down in our communities.

The Challenge of Keeping Contributors

The Community session made me think about something I have seen myself in Kelab Wiki Kent: getting people to attend an event is one thing, but getting them to come back and continue editing is another. We discussed why some people stop contributing after an event ends. Sometimes people attend because they have to, especially when an activity is a requirement. Once the event is over, there may not be enough follow-up to keep them involved.

From my own observation in Kelab Wiki Kent, only a small percentage of participants eventually become active returning editors. That made the discussion feel very familiar to me. We talked about ways to make Wikimedia Malaysia easier and more interesting for newcomers, while also finding ways to build stronger connections within the community. For me, this was an important reminder that community building does not end when an event ends.

Making Wikimedia More Fun

The Ecosystem session was another interesting one because we talked about how the Wikimedia ecosystem could become more engaging. I suggested the idea of gamification. For example, what if reaching milestones such as 10 edits could unlock something on the Wikimedia interface, such as a different theme, skin, mascot or other small visual changes? It may sound like a small thing, but I think these kinds of features could make contributing feel more rewarding, especially for new users who are not yet deeply involved in Wikimedia.

The Future session then brought the discussion back to where the Malaysian Wikimedia community could go next. We talked about members taking on more responsibilities, whether as administrators, community representatives, coordinators or people who help organise activities. That made me think about my own role too. I have always seen myself as someone who is still learning, but maybe being part of a community also means slowly learning how to take responsibility within it.

A Surprise Vote of Confidence

Later that evening was the AGM, which was my first time attending a Wikimedia Malaysia AGM. I expected it to be quite formal, but it was actually more relaxed than I imagined. There were jokes and casual conversations in between the more formal parts of the meeting, so I did not feel as nervous as I thought I would.

Something unexpected happened when my name was nominated twice — once for Treasurer and once for Auditor. I was not selected for either position, but honestly, I was still grateful. Someone thought I was capable enough to be nominated. That meant something to me, especially because I still feel like I have a lot to learn. Maybe next time, I will be more prepared.

Breaking the Ice Over Noodles

One of the most memorable parts of the gathering was actually something outside the formal programme. We had Kelahan Mi, a noodle picnic at Stadium Merdeka. Before that, I did not really know what “kelahan” meant. I only understood it as something derived from kelah or perkelahan, meaning a picnic. It was a simple activity, but it was a good way to break the ice. We could just sit, eat, talk and catch up without thinking about sessions or presentations. Sometimes those informal conversations are what make a community feel like a community.

When Malaysia Came Together

After the AGM, we went to Stadium Merdeka to watch the M118 light up as part of the National Day celebration and countdown. The atmosphere was really fun. Sabah songs were played, and people started dancing. I joined in with the cultural dances, and at one point we formed a circle and danced while moving around together. That kind of circle dancing is something I often see at celebrations and parties in Sabah, so seeing it happen there felt very familiar.

What I found interesting was that I did not know most of the people around me. But when I saw people wearing Sabah traditional clothing and heard Sabah songs playing, I somehow felt connected to them. We were strangers, but for that moment, we were all just enjoying the same music and dancing together. It reminded me that culture can connect people even when they have never met before.

Documenting What We Learn

The next day, we visited Muzium Tekstil Merdeka. I learned new things about Malaysian and Southeast Asian batik, and of course, I took photos along the way with the intention of uploading them to Wikimedia Commons. It was a nice way to end the experience because I was not only learning about culture — I was also thinking about how I could help document what I had learned.

What I Took Home

The summit gave me much more than information about Wikimedia’s plans. I learned more about the movement, the challenges communities are facing, the threats brought by new technology, and the different ideas people have for attracting and retaining contributors. But more importantly, it made me think about what I can do myself.

As someone from a Kadazandusun background, there are many things around me that could be documented. The summit gave me more confidence to think about projects related to my own culture, whether that is traditional clothing, local wildlife, traditional knowledge or other parts of everyday life.

I also realised that Wikimedia is not only about editing Wikipedia or uploading photographs. It is also about the people who contribute, the communities behind the knowledge, and the relationships we build along the way. I left the summit with a lot of ideas in my head. I may not be ready to do all of them yet, but I think I finally have a better idea of where I want to start.

The Wikimedia community has a long history of community-built games powered by Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The Wiki Arcade website showcases many of these games, from WikiAsteroids (arcade space-shooter powered by Wikipedia’s recent changes) to Redactle (guess the article from hidden words) to Catfishing (guess the Wikipedia articles based on categories).

There’s a lot of untapped creative energy around wiki-based games, both from people already building playful experiments on top of Wikipedia, as teaching projects and from the broader game dev community.  To channel that, we launched WikiGameJam: an event and space for people to turn that playful spirit into new and exciting wiki games. The goal is to build on the ways people already engage with Wikipedia, as a trivia trove, a creative rabbit hole, or a challenge to race from one article to another.

Introducing WikiGameJam in New York City

We hosted the first-ever WikiGameJam on October 3–5, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York City. The weekend hackathon brought together developers, designers, and Wikipedia enthusiasts to collaborate and build new games powered by Wikipedia, Wikidata, and other Wikimedia projects.

The event was organized by WikiHaus, a group of Wikimedians building new spaces for free knowledge and creativity. The collective got its start at SXSW 2025, where it hosted a house featuring Wikipedia panels, discussions, and a WikiPortraits studio. WikiGameJam took place at Hex House, an artist-run studio in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with support from the Wikimedia Foundation and Jam City, and additional backing from Wikimedia NYC and AfroCROWD.

The weekend kicked off with talks from inspiring speakers, including Josh Yguado of Jam City, Elliott Etzkorn of the Wikimedia Foundation, and a slate of local game developers and artists. They shared how open data and creative collaboration can drive new forms of storytelling, visualization, and play.

By Sunday, 27 individuals and teams presented their creations, each earning its own quirky award. A few highlights:

• Grand Prize Winner: Daydream—Walk through a maze of Wikipedia articles. A series of dreams. Can you guess where you’ve been? 
• Funniest Game: Horses & Divorces—A “personal life”-powered game testing your knowledge of famous peoples’ spouse histories.
• The One That Haunts Me (In a Good Way)—WikiMystery—A Wikipedia detective game where you figure out the cause of death for a victim. 

Physical Games in San Francisco

The first WikiGameJam focused on digital online games. But what happens when you take that same idea off the screen and into the real world? What does a physical Wikipedia-powered game look like?

In November 2025, the Bay Area Wikipedians User Group and Double Union co-hosted a mini WikiGameJam event focused on building physical games. Participants worked on several board and card games and came up with working prototypes.

Three teams explored the potential for multi-players games making tangible the process of editing and the complex interactions between editors. One team explored the possibility of a wiki-themed social deduction game, where editors and admins have to uncover a vandal. Another sought to demonstrate how editors’ reach consensus and work with claims, building on previous examples like Wikeys.

This workshop demonstrated the potential of game-making itself to explain how Wiki projects work, and the potential of physical games to center multi-players dynamics generally absent from digital games – so far! 

WikiGameJam 2026 in San Francisco

Building on these experiences, WikiHaus was back in San Francisco for GDC – Festival of Gaming, the largest video games conference in the world. In collaboration with Gray Area and the Bay Area Wikipedians (with sponsorship by JamCity and the Wikimedia Foundation), we hosted a three days WikiGameJam on March 13-15 2026. An evening of games demos, networking and talks by local and visiting developers, Wikipedians, and game maker Azmath was followed by two days of hacking supported by delicious food.

By Sunday, participants had made 18 games, further exploring the potential focus and mechanics of Wiki games. Some highlights:

• Grand Prize winner: Fathom, by Anirudh Rao. Explore the universe through wikidata. Start Q1 (universe) and click through bouncing balls to discover what everything is made of.
• WikiSim, by Christian Brickhouse. An incremental clicker game where you manage a wiki community from 0 to a billion edits. 
• WikiRace is a beautiful implementation of WikiRacing by Paige Bailey, with a daily challenge, a leaderboard and the ability to create your own.
• WikiFortune by Aurora Hone. Do you find yourself scrolling article, trying to learn more on Wikipedia, but cant stop your mind from wandering to all of life’s problems? Whether it be love, career, or spirit related, those issues get in the way of learning more. WikiFortune can help! This interactive fortune teller solves lifes biggest issues with a wiki article and a bit of magic.

That same weekend, WikiGacha went viral, showing once more the potential of Wiki games to feed the love for Wikipedia. Let’s make and play some games!

Connect with WikiGameJam!

• You can explore all the projects and event details at wikigamejam.org.
• We are working on a toolkit and set of resources for all to host their own WikiGameJams. We presented the first version at Wikimania 2026. Watch our talk here!
• And for a broader look at the world of wiki-powered play, check out the Wiki Arcade at playwiki.games.

Sylheti Wikipedia began as a long-term effort to create a space for a language that had been largely absent from the digital knowledge ecosystem. More than a decade after the first proposal, the project has grown into something broader: a community movement connecting language preservation, education, local history and open knowledge.

On 25 February 2025, the Sylheti Wikipedia officially became available to the public. For many people, the launch of a new Wikipedia language edition might appear to be a technical milestone: a new website, a new language code, and a growing collection of articles. For the Sylheti community, however, the moment represented something much larger.

It marked the culmination of a journey that had begun more than a decade earlier, when Wikimedians started working towards creating a digital knowledge platform for the Sylheti language. The proposal for Sylheti Wikipedia had begun in 2014, and after years of community-driven work, the Wikimedia Foundation approved the project on 14 February 2025. The Wikipedia officially launched shortly afterwards, using the traditional Sylheti Nagri script.

Today, the project has become part of a broader conversation about how Wikimedia communities can support languages that have historically had limited representation in the digital world.

More than an encyclopedia

Sylheti is spoken by millions of people in Bangladesh, India and communities around the world. Yet the language had long remained underrepresented in the global digital knowledge ecosystem. The creation of Sylheti Wikipedia was therefore not simply about translating knowledge into another language. It was also about creating space for knowledge to be created, organised and shared in the language itself.

A defining feature of the project is the use of the traditional Nagri script. In this way, the project supports not only the presence of the Sylheti language online, but also the continued visibility of an important part of its written cultural heritage.

By its first anniversary, the community had grown to include contributors from Bangladesh and abroad, while the number of articles had reached into the thousands. The anniversary became an opportunity not only to celebrate these achievements but also to reflect on what the project could become in the future.

Celebrating the first year—and looking ahead

On 25 February 2026, Sylheti Wikimedians, language enthusiasts and university students gathered at RTM Al-Kabir Technical University in Sylhet to celebrate the first anniversary of Sylheti Wikipedia.

The event included discussions about the project’s achievements, its future direction and the challenges of developing knowledge resources in a regional language. Participants also took part in a hands-on editing workshop designed to introduce new contributors to creating and improving articles.

The celebration reinforced a message that has become central to the community: Sylheti Wikipedia is not merely an online encyclopedia. For many contributors, it represents a continuing effort to preserve and strengthen the presence of the Sylheti language and culture in the digital age.

The anniversary also demonstrated something important about smaller-language Wikimedia communities. Building a language edition is only one part of the work. Sustaining it requires contributors, partnerships, educational activities and spaces where people can learn from one another. This is where a related initiative, Wiki Loves Sylotology, began to take shape.

From Wikimedia meetup to educational movement

The roots of Wiki Loves Sylotology can be traced to a Sylhet Wikimedia Community meetup held on 9 April 2025. The discussion brought together people interested in strengthening Wikimedia activities in the region and exploring how local educational institutions could participate in the creation and sharing of open knowledge.

From this idea emerged Wiki Loves Sylotology (Sylhetology)—an educational movement focused on using Wikimedia projects to explore and document Sylhet’s language, culture, history, geography and heritage.

The initiative began its educational activities at Springfield School in Sylhet, where contributors, teachers and researchers explored ways of using Bangla, English and Sylheti Wikipedia, alongside other Wikimedia projects, to help students engage with knowledge about their own region.

Taking Sylotology into higher education

On 15 August 2026, a workshop on Wiki Loves Sylotology was held at RTM Al-Kabir Technical University in Sylhet.

The workshop, held from 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM BST, brought together participants interested in exploring how Wikimedia projects could support the documentation and sharing of knowledge related to Sylhet.

The programme was organised by Dr Mohammed Rahman, a Sylhetologist, with me (Abu Sayeed). The workshop connected the study of Sylhet—its language, history, society and culture—with the practical possibilities of open knowledge.

Connecting knowledge across Wikimedia projects

One of the central ideas behind Wiki Loves Sylotology is that knowledge about a place does not have to live on a single platform.

An article about Sylhet’s history can be developed on Wikipedia. Structured information about people, places and institutions can be organised on Wikidata. Historical books and texts can be preserved through Wikisource. Photographs, audio recordings and video can be shared on Wikimedia Commons.

Together, these projects can help create a richer and more interconnected record of a community. For Sylhet, this approach offers particular possibilities.

The region has a significant amount of historical, cultural and linguistic knowledge—much of which remains scattered across books, oral traditions, personal collections and local institutions. Making this knowledge more accessible requires not only digitisation, but also people who can research, document and contextualise it.

Wiki Loves Sylotology seeks to bring these different groups together: Wikimedians, educators, researchers, students, local knowledge holders and volunteers.

Gathering at Murari Chand College

That continuing community-building effort was visible again on 29 August 2026, when Sylheti Wikimedians gathered at Murari Chand College in Sylhet. The meetup focused on two connected areas: Wiki Loves Sylotology and planning and coordination around Bangla WikiConference 2026.

Participants discussed how collaboration among Sylheti contributors could be strengthened and how Wikimedia projects could be used to document and share knowledge about the region’s language, culture and heritage. The meetup also aimed to raise awareness of Sylotology within the Wikimedia movement and support future community activities.

Murari Chand College is one of Sylhet’s historic educational institutions. Gathering there to discuss the future of digital knowledge created a connection between the region’s educational history and the possibilities of open knowledge in the digital age. The conversations moved across languages as well as projects, reflecting the multilingual nature of the community. Sylheti, Bangla and English all have roles to play in telling the story of Sylhet to different audiences.

A movement growing beyond one website

The story of Sylheti Wikipedia is increasingly becoming the story of a wider ecosystem. A language edition of Wikipedia can create a home for knowledge in a particular language. But meetups can bring contributors together. Educational programmes can introduce new generations to Wikimedia. Partnerships can help preserve historical materials. Cross-project work can connect text, data, images and cultural records.

The journey of Sylheti Wikipedia—from a proposal that began in 2014 to a growing community celebrating its first anniversary in 2026—shows what long-term volunteer commitment can achieve. The emergence of Wiki Loves Sylotology represents the next stage of that journey. It asks a broader question: What happens when a Wikimedia language community moves beyond building an encyclopedia and begins connecting open knowledge with education, local history and cultural participation?

It is being written in articles and datasets, in classrooms and workshops, in photographs and historical documents, and in conversations between people who believe that knowledge about their language and community deserves a place in the world’s shared digital commons.

I attended the Code4Lib Japan Conference 2026, held on September 6–7, 2026. Code4Lib, established in 2003, is a community centered on library-related programmers and systems engineers, primarily active in the United States. Participation from Japan began in 2010, leading to the formation of Code4Lib Japan by those early participants. In Japan, the community is open not only to technical experts but also to librarians in general. Conferences have been held annually since 2013; this year marked the 14th conference, which took place over two days at Kogakkan University in Ise City, Mie Prefecture.

Miya.m, menber of the Wikimedians of Japan User Group, gave a presentation titled “The History of Wikipedia Town: 2013–2025. The first “Wikipedia Town” event in Japan—an initiative aimed at adding information about local cultural heritage and tourism to Wikipedia—took place in 2013. Since then, such events have been held across the country; although the pace slowed temporarily during the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts to enrich Wikipedia’s content continue today thanks to the dedication of many contributors. Miya.m, a veteran instructor who has led over 100 Wikipedia Town events, spoke with a touch of humor about the project’s journey since 2013.

Next, Mr. Mitsuru Ishiguro, who leads the group “Wikipedia Bungaku,” gave a presentation titled “Wikipedia Bungaku as a ‘Literary Walk’: Past and Future.” Launched in 2018, Wikipedia Bungaku is an event dedicated to enriching Wikipedia’s content regarding literary figures and works. With the cooperation of the Kanagawa Museum of Modern Literature and the Kanagawa Prefectural Library, the event has already been held 15 times, utilizing the museum’s special exhibitions and the library’s collections as source material. His presentation clearly conveyed how this cross-institutional collaboration has yielded fruitful results.

The day before the event, we were guided to the Ise History Museum as an excursion, so I searched Wikipedia to find out what kind of museum it was, but there was no article about it. So, I researched the source and wrote up an article about the “Ise History Museum (伊勢市歴史博物館),” and I presented the story at Lightning Talk, which was recruiting on the day of the event. By writing the article, I suddenly became familiar with Ise City, which I had never known before, and I was able to share the knowledge I gained there widely.

The conference as a whole offered stimulating new insights—such as learning about “Gijutsu-sho-ten” (技術書典–a direct-sales event for technical books), a concept entirely new to me. There was also a memorable exchange where students from the host venue, Kogakkan University, presented innovative ideas regarding OPAC systems, which Ryuji Yoshimoto of Calil Inc. (カーリル) then engaged with directly. The staff managed the proceedings and venue setup with great efficiency; notably, several members attended with their children, and the kids blended naturally into the atmosphere. Childcare was handled by adults taking turns whenever they were free—rather than relying on tablets—creating an impression of a community that naturally overcomes the anxieties often associated with the “The Anxious Generation.” Witnessing the steady growth of this community fourteen years after its inception was a truly heartening and reassuring experience over the course of these two days.

This July, the City of Light welcomed Wikimedians from all over the world. Some 1,250 attendees joined in person in Paris, while nearly 2000 joined Wikimania 2026 online. In total, more than 3200 of us came together to participate in conference sessions, discuss collaboration around “Freedom, Equity, Reliability”, and celebrate the joy of contributing.

Two-thirds (66%) of those who attended Wikimania Paris in person came from outside the host region of Northern and Western Europe. According to this crowdsourced map, an estimated 105 countries were represented. More than a quarter (26%) of in-person attendees were users with extended rights and more than a third (34%) were under the age of 35, making this Wikimania an important part of connecting multiple generations of high-impact contributors.

From taking selfies with Baby Globe, to experiencing the impressive lineup of Lightning Talks, attendees have not been shy about sharing their favorite Wikimania moments that helped them celebrate the joy of contributing. Please keep your posts coming! We have also received your suggestions for how to make Wikimania even better and are inspired to bring many of those ideas to life in 2027.

And now for a closer look at what the movement and the media are saying.

Movement News

Through the eyes of first timers

One of the most-read articles about a first-timer attending Wikimania, is “After Wikimania Paris 2026, I see Wikipedia in a different light” (original article in Malay). Author Rruunnaa writes, “I came as a participant, but I left as part of the community”.

One of the most important things I learned at Wikimania Paris was the value of the connections made throughout the event. I used to think that the success of attending a conference lay in gaining as much knowledge as possible from the sessions. But in Paris, I realized that casual conversations, new encounters, and the relationships formed were also among the most meaningful parts of the experience. Every person I met had a different story to tell. Some had been contributing to Wikimedia for a long time, some worked in specific fields, and others, like me, were still learning and figuring out how to contribute. Although we came from different countries and cultures, we shared one common belief: that knowledge should be shared openly.

A Diff post by NikolasKHF from Indonesia shares the perspective of a first-timer attending the users with extended rights (UWER) pre-conference, providing a lightning talk on improving Wikimedia Incubator, and meeting informally with a Wikiversity admin from France and one of the editors of WikiJournal.

Other first-timer posts include “Reflections from Wikimania Paris 2026” by Ifedohlapo of Nigeria who posted on their experience presenting at the preconference Advocacy workshop, and counted the GLAM-related sessions among their favorites. Scholar Evelyne Rwakaana from Uganda shared “3 Eye-Opening Sessions at Wikimania”. And back in Uganda, ASallyRuth wrote that as a virtual attendee, she “never felt far from conversations happening in Paris”.

Preconferences

Two attendees wrote about their experiences at the Wiki Women+ Summit preconference. “Yellow Shirts and Bold Questions”, discusses favorite moments including presenting “How Editorial Decisions Reach Beyond Wikipedia”, while another interviews Sana Sabir (CosmicCodex) about her key takeaways.

Meanwhile, Maximilano WDU shared highlights from the Pre-Conference on Information Integrity in Climate Change with institutional participants from UNESCO, the International Panel on Information Environment, the Forum on Information and Democracy, and many others.

Posters

The quality of posters at Wikimania 2026 were impressive. The winner for Overall Favorite documented Senegal’s cultural heritage, while the honoree for Content Quality shared their experience in bringing Internet-in-a-Box tools to a refugee camp in northern Cameroon.

Wiki Loves Butterfly’s Ananya Mondal shares insights from her numerous poster session conversations and curiosity about their multilingual storybooks for children. 

Wiki fashion, youth meetups, and more

On Instagram, ferfivesos continues to delight the Wikimania community with her fabulous Wiki Outfits and her perspective as a “Bring the Youth!” panelist from Latin America. (Group photo from the Wiki Fashion Show.)

Back on Diff, Alli Khalil from Iraq gave particularly high marks to the youth panel, as well as meetups for young Wikimedians globally.

In a short video, itsdondiestro asked, “What has four tires and spreads free knowledge around the world?” (Wait for it.) “The Wiki Bus!” Meanwhile, mattprebeg playfully asked, “Have you ever broken the rules of Wikipedia?”

WikiChoir

Without a doubt, “Oh Wikipédia!” performed by the WikiChoir and WikiOrchestra at the closing ceremony was an earworm for many Wikimania attendees – playing over and over again in our heads long after we had left Paris. (The lyrics are here.)

Reflections from the Board of Trustees 

The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees provided their reflections on Wikimania 2026 based on what they heard and observed in Paris. Among their observations: Wikimania showed both the unity and diversity of opinion within the movement and AI has emerged from a specialist topic to the central strategic question.

Wikimania Paris in the news media

Wikimania 2026 was covered by 63 media outlets, including feature articles in major French newspapers – Le Monde, La Tribune, and La Croix. A podcast on Radio France featured French Wikipedia admin Baidax, while a podcast on RFI debated “Should Wikipedia be saved?”, featuring Adélaïde Calais from the Wikimania 2026 Core Organizing Team.

The conference themes of “Liberté, Equité, Fiabilité” (Liberty, Equity, Reliability) were prominent throughout. The feature article in Le Monde was a nuanced look at how the Wikimedia community approaches AI – from having used it for many years as a tool to detect vandalism, to differing rules around its use across the French and English Wikipedias.

Rémy Gerbet, executive director at Wikimedia France, told La Croix in an interview that misuse of AI is threatening the reliability of articles.

“The addition of false information and false sources of information is a crucial issue. It can be difficult for contributors to detect, and there is more and more of it…We need to create partnerships, alliances to help the community detect this kind of content, with fact-checking associations, for example.”

Gerbet went on to list partners that Wikimedia France is working with, such as the government agency Viginum and others who were panelists at Wikimania Paris.

Much of the coverage featured long-time Wikimedia community volunteers, such as Anthère, also a member of the Core Organizing Team, interviewed by Le Monde; Dirac, featured in a widely syndicated article by L’Express; and Jules*, our Wikimedian of the Year for 2026 who was featured on NEXT.

Many thanks to everyone for bringing your kindness, curiosity, and generosity to Wikimania Paris – both in-person and online – and inspiring more collaboration in the months ahead.

We look forward to welcoming you to Santiago (August 18 to 21, 2027), to debate, discuss, and define “The Internet we want”!

In the meantime, happy editing, keep welcoming new readers and contributors to the Wikimedia community, and help us spread the word about the joy of Wikimania.

It sounds like a joke, but the weakest area on the Korean Wikipedia is Korea itself. At one point, the community even debated whether to fill the gap by translating Korea-related articles from the English Wikipedia. The reasons are tangled, but it comes down to a loop: the articles are in poor shape, so nobody wants to touch them; and because nobody touches them, they stay in poor shape. The Korean Wikipedia we have today is what that loop, left to roll on, has produced.

I expect everyone reading this is nodding along — yes, this is a problem, and some of you might have a similar problem on your Wikipedia. But how many of you would raise a hand and volunteer to sort it out yourself? And there is simply far too much of it for one or two people to take on. What is needed, then, is something that pushes people into going out, finding sources for themselves, and building Korea-related articles up.

The Wiki Village Project was created to be that something. We took our starting point from Japan’s Wikipedia Town, but where those events are led by local residents, we chose a form in which editors travel to the town instead.

Editing runs on affection and interest — so what if we asked people to come to the place itself? Wouldn’t they care more? Rather than wrestling with scattered online sources that make little sense even once you have found them, wouldn’t it be easier to receive, all at once, the material the town keeps itself? And on Wikipedia, where the only people editing are the people who already edit, could local residents become a new kind of contributor? Working from the idea that closing the physical distance would close the psychological distance too, we planned an editing event that would go there in person.

The story of Wiki Village Ganggyeong comes in two parts: the event, and the organizing behind it. This post is the organizing part, written from the organizer’s side — what putting a Wiki Village event together actually involved, in the hope that it leaves more people wanting to run one themselves.

Groundwork: looking at every example we could find

The direct model for the Wiki Village Project is Japan’s Wikipedia Town. It began with editors who lived in a given area filling out the articles about it, and has since grown into an outreach event that invites local residents in. Today it takes many forms — some still organized by editors, some by libraries and other local government bodies, some built around a particular theme — and it has established itself as the event that represents the Wikimedia movement in Japan.

Wikimedia events in Korea tend to be editor-centered, with cooperation slotted in around them; in Wikipedia Town, the center of gravity sits with local residents rather than with editors. Because of that, it happens of its own accord without any particular push, and it also acts as a chance to introduce Wikipedia to the people who live there. It is a good idea — but given that in Korea essentially every activity runs through Wikimedia Korea itself, expecting the kind of self-starting organization you see in Japan seemed unrealistic. At least for now.

Korea is not without its own attempts at building up articles through cooperation with the regions. Where Japan started from residents, though, attempts in Korea have always started from institutions. Wikimedia Korea has joined hands with local governments before — Seosan City, South Chungcheong Province, Pyeongchang County, Daegu Metropolitan City — and afterwards there was self-criticism within Wikimedia Korea that we had never managed to keep participants editing once the event was over.

The problem was motivation. For a local government, the fact that an event took place is already a result; what Wikipedia wants is the articles that remain once the event is over. We went ahead without closing that gap, so there was no chance of a participant arriving at any answer to “why should I be the one to build this article up?” Wiki Village is, among other things, an attempt to answer that question.

Early discussions and arrangements

Wiki Village first came up in earnest at Wikimedia Korea’s strategy meeting at the end of May. WikiTambang had by then become just a passing event where people took photographs and went home, and when the question surfaced — “what on earth do we do to connect this to actually building articles?” — bringing in Wikipedia Town was floated as one answer. If we were really going to do it, where, and how? The discussion ran through the night. What came out of it was Ganggyeong — or more precisely, the Ganggyeong Institute of History and Culture. The concrete arguments for Ganggyeong were these:

• A real sense of their own local history, and a wish to make it known. Holding an event is not, in itself, the point for them.
• Clearly outside the capital region, yet not far from it — so it genuinely counts as going out to the regions, while still being easy to reach from Seoul.

Most of you probably have no idea where Ganggyeong is. Neither did I, so — well. Briefly: Ganggyeong was for a long time the port where seafood coming in from the Yellow Sea met farm produce from inland, and it grew enough to be spoken of as one of the two great ports of Joseon and one of its three great markets. That is why so many of the modern-style buildings put up around the opening of Korea’s ports are still standing there. Once the railways were built and the port lost its purpose, the town shrank until it became the small rural village it is today — but the wealth of its past is still very much present in its history and its culture.

In early July I went to Ganggyeong in person to make the pitch. I had put together a simple slide deck to introduce the project, but explaining all of it on the spot was never going to happen, so I printed it out, handed it over in a “have a proper read of this later” spirit, and left it with them. The sad footnote is that I had wanted to produce something more like a full report alongside the deck, and simply did not have enough to say to fill one.

After that I kept in touch through July and August. The most important thing here was contacting them regularly enough that they did not forget about us. What I did was send what I had to say by email, then call the moment it was sent and say exactly the same thing again. A tip, for what it’s worth: the further out into the countryside you go, the better it works to simply ring rather than texting first to ask whether it’s a good time. The email is only there so that later, when they are wondering “now, what was it he said on the phone?”, there is something to go back and read.

At the same time I was building the event page and recruiting participants. Unlike the events I had run many times before, this one came with the added problem of having to explain what “Wiki Village” even was — and since nobody reads a long explanation anyway, keeping it short while still getting every essential point in was the hardest part of the whole thing.

The surprise in recruiting was that although we had really only advertised this whole Wiki Village thing on Wikipedia itself, people who don’t edit it took an interest and applied anyway. Of the twelve who applied through the form, about five had no Wikipedia account at all. Which is to say there are a fair number of people who read Wikipedia without editing it — and that gave me some hope, even before we started, that events like this might work in other places too. Given the nature of this particular event, though, people who were neither local residents nor familiar with editing naturally ended up lower down the list, and since there were plenty of applications from existing editors as well, we were unfortunately not able to invite everyone.

Preparing in advance

This hardly needs saying, but you see more, and take in more of what you are told, if you have done a little reading first than if you just turn up cold. With that in mind, the original plan was a preparatory meetup around the middle of August to build the articles up a little beforehand, but with various things going on inside Wikimedia Korea, there was simply no window in which to get people together, and it never happened. Had we managed it, the participants would surely have arrived more invested — though I do wonder how many would actually have turned up. Or might an extra meetup have felt like enough of a burden that some people would not have applied at all…?

Instead, from a week before the event, I encouraged people to edit the articles in advance. Talk alone would not do, so I set the example myself: I spent two full days rewriting the entire history section of the Ganggyeong-eup article, and then created the articles on Ganggyeong Port and Ganggyeong Market, which I felt simply had to exist. Then I put it to the participants — “give these a read before you come, and if you can add a sentence or two while you’re at it, even better.” One person did actually edit before turning up, so technically it worked; but one person was nowhere near enough, and the disappointment came right alongside.

Preparing on site

Honestly, the night before was a slot thrown together as things went along. We had settled the event dates and published them, and a few hours later the dates for the Ganggyeong National Heritage Night Tour were announced — overlapping with ours. Since the point of the whole thing was to get people to see the town and take an interest in it, we put the extra day together on the basis that anyone who wanted to come could be put up for the night. Free accommodation, so I expected plenty of takers; surprisingly few came forward. (I had been expecting around six; in the end three of us stayed, myself included.)

I arrived in Ganggyeong the day before and checked over the venue. I had not actually planned to — but they said, “you’re welcome to go in and use it from today,” so I went straight over to have a look. It was a different building from the one I had seen on the scouting visit, so I was slightly nervous about what state it would be in, and it was so well prepared that I was thrown the other way. Since an editing event leans on power strips and Wi-Fi, I had raised the point several times — and there turned out to be more than enough of both, which was a relief.

There was a photo spot upstairs and a back garden as well, both of which we could have put to good use — but I only found out they existed at that point, and in the end the event finished without ever using them. A slight shame — but then the main space was already about as good as anyone could ask for, so I have no complaints at all.

How the day ran

Setup, the talk, lunch

I got to the venue about thirty minutes before the scheduled start to set up. The desks and chairs were already laid out, so it came down to putting out the power strips and doing a bit of cleaning — though the building does not seem to get much use, and there was enough dust in the air that I aired the place out as well. Participants arrived around ten, we went round with brief introductions, and then waited about half an hour for the talk. The talk running unexpectedly late left us with a gap, and since there was nothing in particular to do with it, it turned into everyone quietly poking at their own laptop.

When I first raised the idea of a talk, what I asked was whether they could bring in one of the local heritage guides. Nothing much came back on that, so I assumed that was the arrangement — and then on the day it turned out that the director of the institute would be giving it. Wait, the director himself? I was slightly thrown. I had no idea how it would go; in the event it ran less like a formal lecture than like simply listening to someone talk, and the participants warmed to it far more for that.

For lunch we all went out together, and I was relieved that nothing in particular went wrong. The Japanese model is no help here — over there people eat separately and regroup in the afternoon — and once things start getting tangled up over food there is no fixing it, though we did go in without a plan… Thinking about it now, sharing a list in advance and taking a vote might not be a bad idea, though then you lose the fun of settling it there and then… Deciding where to eat really is the hardest part.

Photowalk, editing, and heading home

For the afternoon photowalk it was both raining and hot, so we gave up on walking and did it by car. With about seven of us, two cars were enough to cover separate routes, and since there was little point in the two staying together, we agreed that one team would shoot heritage sites and the other public institutions, and split up. The driving around itself went off without trouble, but sharing which objects we were meant to go to — and photograph — did not go smoothly, and the order we visited them in ended up all over the place, which brought home how short we had been on preparation.

The photowalk targets had originally just been written up as a list on the event page, but the participants couldn’t get a sense of where any of the places actually were, so in the end I shared the map list I had made for my own use (the shared list). The moment it went out, everyone could see what was where, and we became several times more efficient. Should have done that from the start… or better still, should have used OpenStreetMap and embedded it in the event page…

Just before the afternoon editing began, I stopped by the institute’s office again and came back with books and images of old maps. Only one of them was a properly serious book, though; the rest were closer to guidebooks, which made them a little awkward to actually use. Everyone there already knew their way around Wikipedia, so there was nothing much for me to do, and I concentrated on my own editing. Looking back afterwards, the editing always ends up concentrated in a few people while the rest do next to nothing, which is a shame, and I do wonder whether I should have pushed harder — but they were hardly going to do it because I told them to, so, we’ll call it good.

Editing after the event

Getting home after the event is not the end of it. If it were meant to be a one-off, that would be fine, but this time that would empty out the whole point of having done it. So I have been creating an article here and there myself, showing it off a little, and leaving notes asking people to join in — and the response is thinner than it was on the day, which has me wondering what to do about it. What worries me in particular is that interest is scattering this fast even while we are focused on a single subject, Ganggyeong; if the project later expands to other places, attention seems likely to thin out further still.

On the positive side: I had expected contributions after the event to be realistically zero, and there was in fact article creation by ordinary participants. That alone counts as something achieved — but seen objectively it falls hopelessly short. Of the ten editors who took an interest in Wiki Village Ganggyeong itself, quite apart from whether they attended, three of us, myself included, effectively did more than 90% of the editing. It is not that nobody else edited; whether those edits amounted to meaningful change is something I need to think about again.

Following the Wikimedia Foundation’s suggestion, I also tried putting it into numbers using the event dashboard, but there was no realistic way to restrict the count to Ganggyeong-related articles alone, so the data came out badly polluted, and for ordinary participants it only added confusion. Looking at the main articles, though, you can see that expanding existing ones (Ganggyeong-eup, History of Ganggyeong-eup) and creating new ones (Ganggyeong Port, Ganggyeong Market) happened side by side rather than one at the expense of the other — and there were contributions the numbers were never going to capture in the first place, like the template covering Ganggyeong-eup, or the addition of the Ganggyeong-eup boundary on OpenStreetMap.

And unlike Wikipedia Town, the model we took from, there was no sign at all of local residents touching Wikipedia themselves. We did explain what Wikipedia is, what we are trying to do, and that we would be glad if they joined in. Explaining alone, as it turned out, was not enough. What it comes down to is either (1) getting existing editors to care enormously about a particular area, or (2) turning the local residents who might already care into Wikipedia editors — and you can see straight away that neither is remotely easy.

There is one thing about this case in particular that needs watching. Because of where we held it, the theme became “let’s build up the articles on Ganggyeong” — but the ultimate aim of this project is not Ganggyeong; it is local content across the regions as a whole. Concentrating on the narrower subject of Ganggyeong is what made this event a success, but if that current is not steered properly, what we end up with is not a project that takes in the regions as a whole, but a series of piecemeal battles, each looking at one town at a time. That said, this is also a limitation built into a project organized from the center rather than one arising from the regions themselves, so it is not something I can draw a conclusion about right away.

In closing: how about you?

This is usually the part where you write something like “we hope many of you will take part.” I want to say something slightly different. Would you hold one yourselves? I am of course endlessly grateful when I hold one and you come — but what I ultimately want is for Wiki Village to keep being held, in as many places as possible and however small the scale, until the regions are building their own articles themselves. And that depends on each of you: on looking beyond simply taking part, and taking an interest in holding one yourself.

You may be thinking that where you live there is nothing like that much to write about, so it would not work. It is fair enough that it should look that way — but how often have you actually tried building up the articles about where you live? It may only look empty because nobody has tried. If anything, uncovering hidden gems like that is where the pleasure of Wiki Village lies — and the pleasure of Wikipedia too. You do not have to put on some grand event; a simple contribution, filling out the article on a heritage site near your home, is enough.

I will end here, with my sincere hope that a day comes when people say the richest area on the Korean Wikipedia is Korean culture. Thank you very much for reading this far.

• From the team: Hot August/Cold August
• Brazil report: Wiki Love Monuments and new phase of Museu Paulista collaboration
• Catalan areas report: The Catalan public domain: An application to identify Catalan works in public domain
• Colombia report: Explore the Colombian public domain app: Browse works an authors in the public domain
• Czech Republic report: Wikimedia CR introduces new members of GLAM/partnership team
• Egypt report: Egypt’s GLAM Team Brings Egyptian Postal History and Public Libraries to Wikimedia
• Italy report: The Musical Heritage of the Santa Cecilia Conservatory
• New Zealand report: New Zealand Thesis Project Update and the upcoming TDWG 2026 conference
• North Macedonia report: Connecting Culture and Free Knowledge – Wikimedia MKD’s GLAM Partnerships
• Serbia report: August in Wikimedia Serbia
• Switzerland report: Summer, Follow-up in Aarau, CoCreation
• UK report: Wikimedia gets Gazetted + Islamic Calligraphy on English Wikipedia
• Ukraine report: OpenGLAM Summer 2026 in Ukraine
• USA report: GLAM USA Report (Past & Upcoming)
• Biodiversity Heritage Library report: Updates on work by BHL-Wiki working Group members
• Memory of the World report: Ghana national register
• Wikimedia Commons report: Media loading change affects Commons Impact Metrics and GLAM analytics
• Calendar: September’s GLAM events

What happens when people who have never edited Wikipedia before sit down with experienced editors, learn the basics, and then go out and inform their community?

This was the idea behind Wikipedia Camp Kurdistan 2026, a three-day gathering in Erbil that brought together Wikimedia communities, new contributors, and young people interested in open knowledge.

Organized by Wikimedia Kurdish, Wikimedia Kuwait and Wikimedia Iraq, in partnership with the Erbil Youth hub Center as a local partner, the camp provided a space for participants to learn about Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons and to meet the people behind the movement.

The first two days focused on practical learning. Participants learned about the Wikimedia movement, how to edit Wikipedia, contribute images to Wikimedia Commons, and participate in collaborative editing activities in two languages: Kurdish and Arabic.

The sessions were conducted in both Kurdish and Arabic, making Wikimedia projects more accessible to people from diverse linguistic backgrounds.

For many newcomers, this marked the beginning of their Wikimedia journey, with others who could answer their questions, explain the rules, and encourage them to continue contributing.

On the third day, the focus shifted from editing to documentation. Some participants toured parts of the Kurdistan Region, including Shaqlawa and Bakhal, taking photographs of landscapes, local places, nature, and daily life.

The photography tour showcased another important aspect of Wikimedia. open knowledge isn’t limited to writing encyclopedia articles; images can also preserve places, communities, and moments, making them freely available to people worldwide.

The images captured during the camp were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, adding new visual documentation of Kurdistan to the global free media repository.

One of the most important outcomes of the Wikimedia Kurdistan camp was the networking among the various Wikimedia communities.

Wikimedia members from Kuwait, Iraq, and Kurdistan were able to share their experiences, while new participants had the opportunity to discover how to join the movement.

The Wikimedia Foundation later highlighted the Wikimedia Kurdistan camp as an example of collaborative learning and knowledge transfer among Wikimedia communities.

This type of networking is particularly important for Kurdish Wikimedia. Building a stronger community of contributors increases the amount of reliable and freely available knowledge in Kurdish and ensures broader representation of Kurdish history, culture, geography, and daily life online.

By bringing people together to learn, edit, photograph, and share, the camp offered more than just an introduction to Wikimedia projects. This initiative helped create new connections between individuals and communities working toward a single goal, making knowledge easily accessible to everyone!

In 2025, Let’s Connect began its transition from a Foundation-organized program to a community-organized one. Today, anyone or any group in the movement can adopt or adapt the Let’s Connect peer-to-peer learning program to their local and regional context using the Toolkit and the resources and materials collected from the 70+ learning clinics organized over three years. The shift to a community-organized model began through pilot initiatives and discussions with ESEAP Hub, Wikimedia Iraq and Volunteer Supporters Network. You can read about the key learnings here. Our hope is that by using the toolkit, communities can leverage the tried and tested methodologies and templates of Let’s Connect to organize local, multilingual, and audience-relevant clinics. 

Why the Let’s Connect model?

Peer-to-peer learning is not unique to Let’s Connect, and many valuable learning spaces already exist across the Wikimedia movement. What Let’s Connect contributes, however, is a documented and adaptable methodology for intentionally creating these spaces, informed by experience running more than 70 learning clinics across different regions, languages, projects, and experience levels.

Rather than starting from zero, communities can build on what Let’s Connect has learned, developed and documented. This includes best practices for encouraging participation, preparing presenters, creating inclusive learning environments, and capturing knowledge for future use and adaptation. Beyond these practical tools, what makes Let’s Connect distinct is its emphasis on culture-building. Let’s Connect recognizes that safety, joy and care are fundamental to our movement’s growth and sustainability, and embeds these values into how learning spaces are created and facilitated. The result is an environment where newcomers can learn alongside established contributors, organizers can exchange knowledge across linguistic and cultural contexts, and communities from different regions can share successes and challenges. 

The value of the Let’s Connect model is not that it replaces existing community learning spaces, but that it makes both accumulated knowledge and the practices that create safe, inclusive, peer-to-peer learning reusable across the movement.

Key elements of the community-organized model

The Toolkit: Central to making the community-organized model accessible is the Let’s Connect Toolkit – a step-by-step framework and set of materials, templates, and guidance built specifically so any interested community group can start their own Let’s Connect program. 

Local ownership: With the toolkit, local versions of Let’s Connect can emerge and take shape independently. Let’s Connect Across Zones in Nigeria, which expanded from a pilot in the Kwara state, to Wikimedia UAE, which also adopted Let’s Connect’s Connectathon format to create a supportive environment for newcomers.

Resource Repository: A collection of the past learning clinics the Let’s Connect Working Group compiled and facilitated with Wikimedians across the movement. We would love for this repository to grow and welcome Wikimedians to add clinics they have hosted to the list. Some highlights: 

• WikiLearn essentials for course creators: Building community skills online
• Engaging with newcomers in the Wikimedia Movement: strategies and experiences from Wikimedia México
• Mastering the Capacity Exchange (CapX) Tool 
• Spotlight on Women’s health in Wikimedia Projects 
• Understanding and Navigating Conflict in Wikimedia Projects Part 1
• Wikimedia Netherlands: Friendly Space Policies: Fitting the UCoC to Your Local Context
• Color, Clarity, and Commons: Crafting Our Brand for Collective Impact
• Wikimedia UK Changemaker’s Toolkit 

An invitation to you

Now it’s your turn. You’re invited to host your own Let’s Connect clinics, wherever you are in the world. Start with the toolkit, review the resource repository, and design your first clinic! 

Let’s Connect is designed to be adapted. Communities are welcome to use the Let’s Connect brand while adding their own flavors, colors, and culture, making the program their own and ensuring it fits your context. You do not need to adopt the entire model. Use the elements that are most useful to you, adapt what needs to change, and build on what has already been learned.

The Community Development team is here to answer questions and share guidance. Feel free to reach out at comdevteam@wikimedia.org.

Wiki Education is excited to welcome Kate Dimitrova to the team as our new Wikipedia Course Instructor!

Kate facilitates online courses in our Scholars & Scientists Program, teaching professionals about the culture, policies, and community of Wikipedia and how to make high-quality contributions. This includes our new Documenting America initiative, focused on improving Wikipedia’s coverage of topics related to U.S. history, civics, democracy, and the 2026 midterm elections. (Explore all upcoming editing courses here.)

Kate is a medieval art historian with a PhD and MA from the University of Pittsburgh. She has taught at the University of San Diego, Wells College, and the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in New York. She has also worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. 

Her publications include a co-edited book with Margaret Goehring, Dressing the Part: Textiles as Propaganda in the Middle Ages (Brepols, 2014) and a forthcoming Festschrift, entitled Tributes to Alison Stones—Reading beyond the Page: Medieval Manuscript Imagination through Word and Image (Harvey Miller, expected 2027). Kate’s research has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship in Brussels and a Kress Fellowship at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris.

You might already know Kate from her engagement with Wiki Education programs over the past four years.

In 2022, she launched her first Wikipedia Assignment in her course “The Year 1500: A Global History of Art & Architecture” with support from our Wikipedia Student Program, and has since run several successful assignments. She also participated in our Art History Wiki Scholars course and has presented at conferences to share Wiki Education’s programs with other faculty and subject matter experts.

Based in San Diego, Kate and her husband spend time together hiking trails from the coast to the desert or playing fetch at the park with their beloved labrador retriever, Maisie.

🕑 25 minutes

Highlights from five recent episodes! Sandra Fauconnier notes the irony of centralization in the Semantic Web, Ad Strack van Schijndel discusses the workings of Juggel, Daniel Dobriy extols wikis for AI, Cory Massaro praises the translation abilities of Abstract Wikipedia, Shani Evenstein Sigalov discusses the role of nonprofits in AI, and more!

27/08/2026-02/09/2026

Mapping campaigns

• Hiki introduced the Deutsche Bahn Metadata Cleanup project, an effort to improve the quality of OpenStreetMap data around German railway stations.
• Denmark’s OpenStreetMap community has made mapping accessible parking spaces its September 2026 project, encouraging contributors to survey and add missing spaces nationwide to improve the country’s free accessibility data.

Community

• Bigbug21 blogged on the current state of defibrillator mapping in OpenStreetMap, concluding that much has been achieved, but there is still plenty of work to be done.
• While attending State of the Map 2026, Juminet noticed a decline in the influence of big tech companies within OpenStreetMap, suggesting a shift back toward the volunteer contributions that formed the heart of the project in its early days. This contrasted with his experience at State of the Map 2018, when major technology companies were investing heavily in OpenStreetMap mapping.
• Anne-Karoline Distel showed how to map disused fish weirs on OpenStreetMap.
• Rawaz has mapped population data from Iraq’s 2024 census onto OSM administrative boundaries, covering admin levels 2 through 6.
• rphyrin praised Stylus Labs Maps after SotM 2026 as the best mobile OpenStreetMap vector map app they have tried.
• rphyrin plans to share his experiences from attending the global State of the Map 2026 online. He is still writing about the first day, with the remaining days a work in progress.
• Vishal Kumar shared several insights on the role of AI in mapping, from State of the Map US 2026, held 11 to 13 June.

Local chapter news

• OpenStreetMap US has published its August 2026 monthly newsletter, featuring the OSM US team heading to Paris for State of the Map 2026, an upcoming September Mappy Hour in collaboration with Foursquare, and the announcement of its newest Charter Project, OldInsuranceMaps.

Events

• [1] Volker Krause wrote about his attendance at SotM 2026 in Paris.
• A 360° version of the SotM2026 group photo is now online on Panoramax!
• The official PeerTube channel of State of the Map 2026 can be found here.
• Muki Haklay has shared his impressions of attending State of the Map 2026 in Paris. Muki, Professor of Geographical Information Science at the UCL Department of Geography, won the IEEE Pervasive Computing’s Test of Time Award for his 2008 paper on OpenStreetMap.

Education

• Lucy Kago reported, as a UN Mappers’ ambassador, that UN Mappers Kenya has completed its first ever Youth Climate Mapping Externship, a seven-week virtual programme designed to equip young Kenyans with real geospatial tools and apply them to climate challenges in Nairobi. Nineteen university students participated in the programme. The initiative had the support of IVIDES DATA (as a full sponsor), GeoMind Solutions and Geospatial Developers (as technical partners), and Community Mappers Kibera (as community partner). You can see the results on the UN Mappers’ blog.

Humanitarian OSM

• HOTOSM interviewed the CoMaps team about how the app was used to help rescuers after the earthquakes in Venezuela.

Maps

• Cody Blatt has created DepthScout, a depth-mapping platform designed to aid fishing, which uses shoreline data from OpenStreetMap.
• Map4 has released a free trial version, limited to 50 queries per day, of their US telecom fibre intelligence dashboard, built on top of OpenStreetMap basemap data.
• The Plataforma latinoamericana y del caribe por la justicia climática (Latin American and Caribbean platform for climate justice) maintains ► a uMap for mapping ‘false solutions’ to the climate crisis, those which claim to advance the protection of the planet and its inhabitants through approaches that include deception, technical shortcomings, so-called technological innovation, and rhetoric but which perpetuate consumption and the hoarding of wealth as we know it. The initiative is a collaboration ► of organisations from 15 Latin American countries.

OSM in action

• The California Ocean and Coastal Monitoring Inventory is an interactive dashboard of ocean and coastal monitoring programmes operating within 12 nautical miles of the California coast, using basemap data from OpenStreetMap.

Open Data

• The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre tooted that it is making its archive of Landsat data accessible ►, with support from the Technical University of Munich and the German Aerospace Centre.

Software

• Ashuttl has made linecast, a free open-source collection of terminal apps for weather, radar, sunshine, moon data, tides, and maps that uses public data sources including OpenStreetMap-derived vector data.
• Inspired by a recent Mapterhorn talk at State of the Map 2026, rphyrin has developed a web app that accepts coordinates pasted from JOSM and displays an interactive 3D terrain visualisation. The app can help JOSM users better understand the three-dimensional geographic context of the area they are currently mapping.

Programming

• Developer NameError has built Draw.city, a US geography game where players draw circles on a map to estimate populations and explore census demographics and OpenStreetMap points of interest.
• rphyrin has experimented with Sourdough to build a mobile-friendly vector map that treats roads uniformly and prioritises displaying as many mapped points of interest as possible, especially at high zoom levels.
• An agentic bot (Claude Code) ‘explained’ ‘its’ approach to filling in Belgium’s national secondary road route relations on OpenStreetMap in an OSM Diary entry. The community’s response to the edits can be judged from the posts in the OSM Community forum thread.

Did you know that …

• … a curated collection of all European E-roads, an international network of major roads connecting countries across Europe, is mapped in OSM?

Other “geo” things

• Natsuhei Eno, a Senior Policy Officer at the Tokyo Foundation, published an article on the Foundation’s blog discussing what supports regional information infrastructure. Featuring Associate Professor Yasuyuki Matsumoto , of Setsunan University, who researches civic activities using OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia (such as Wikipedia Town and mapping parties), the article highlighted the importance of citizens participating not merely as recipients but as contributors to local information.
• Ryan Christoffel reported that Apple Maps is now showing advertisements to their customers; they will appear both as suggested places in the map and in the search result list with a little blue ‘ad’ text next to them.
• Kaio Bárbara has developed climateBR, a software package that provides tools for downloading, processing, and analysing historical meteorological data from Brazil’s National Institute of Meteorology.
• Science Daily reported that NASA has successfully tested a system that allows satellites to navigate without GNSS by using other spacecraft and debris as landmarks in orbit.
• Neha Arora and Aboudy Kreidieh, of Google Research, reported that coordinating a small fraction of navigation routes in Google Maps can measurably improve driving speeds and reduce emissions across an entire city.

Upcoming Events

Country	Where	Venue	What	When
	नई दिल्ली	Jitsi Meet (online)	OSM India – Monthly Online Mapathon	2026-09-05
	大阪市	中崎町ホール Nakazakicho HALL, Salon de AmanTo天人 (Osaka)	State of the Map Asia 2026	2026-09-06 – 2026-09-07
	臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #92	2026-09-07
	Madrid	Online	Mappy Hour OSM España	2026-09-08
	Braunschweig	Stratum 0	Braunschweiger Mappertreffen im Stratum 0 Hackerspace	2026-09-08
	Hamburg	Voraussichtlich: “Variable”, Karolinenstraße 23	Hamburger Mappertreffen	2026-09-08
		temporärhaus	OSM-Stammtisch Ulm/Neu-Ulm	2026-09-08
	Tours	Étape 84	Rencontre locale de Touraine	2026-09-09
	Berlin	Kastanienallee 7-9, 10435 Berlin	219. OSM-Stammtisch Berlin-Brandenburg	2026-09-10
	München	WikiMUC	Münchner OSM-Treffen	2026-09-10
	Bochum	Das Labor, Alleestraße 50, Bochum	OSM-Treffen Bochum	2026-09-10
	Zürich		191. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich	2026-09-11
	København	Cafe Bevar’s	OSMmapperCPH	2026-09-13
	Delhi	Too Mikki Tapas, South Extension	OSM Delhi Mapping Party No.32 (South Extension)	2026-09-13
	Greater London	1 Cabot Square, 7th Floor, Canary Wharf E14 4QJ	EAW Volunteering Event	2026-09-14
			CartONG : Mapathons en ligne 2026-2027	2026-09-14
			Missing Maps London Mid-Month for Advanced Mappers (no training provided) (Online) [eng]	2026-09-15
	San Francisco	Near BART 24th St. Mission station	Bay Area WikiSalon	2026-09-15
	Lyon	Tubà	Réunion du groupe local de Lyon	2026-09-15
	San Jose	Online	South Bay Map Night	2026-09-15
	Chemnitz	Kaffeesatz, Chemnitz	OSM-Stammtisch Chemnitz	2026-09-15
	Bonn	Dotty’s	204. OSM-Stammtisch Bonn	2026-09-15
	Stainach-Pürgg	Online	22. Österreichischer OSM-Stammtisch (online)	2026-09-15
		Online	Lüneburger Mappertreffen (online)	2026-09-15
	St. Gallen	Rosenbergstrasse 59, 9000 St.Gallen	Map The Climate! Ein Mapathon	2026-09-16
	Köln	Lokal K, Hackländer Straße 2, Köln-Ehrenfeld	OSM Stammtisch Köln	2026-09-16
	Nantes		COntrib’atelier	2026-09-16
		MJC de vienne	Réunion du groupe local de Vienne	2026-09-16
	Kiel	Kieler Innovations- und Technologiezentrum	OSM auf der Kielux 2026	2026-09-18 – 2026-09-19

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by MarcoR, MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, barefootstache, derFred, mcliquid.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Connect Claude, ChatGPT, or any other AI tool that speaks MCP to Wikidata and to your own Wikibase. Ask questions in plain language, create items and enrich them, without writing SPARQL or entity JSON.

Our MediaWiki MCP Server speaks Wikibase. It works with Wikidata and with any Wikibase you run, and it is free and open source. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is the standard that lets AI tools work with external systems and data.

3 September 2026 (United States) — Today, eligible Wikimedia Foundation staff in the United States voted in favor of union representation. The election was conducted by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) by secret ballot. We expect the results will be certified by the NLRB within 7 business days.

Throughout the voting period, staff were able to meet and organize during working hours without restriction, and Wikimedia Foundation leadership repeatedly affirmed staff’s right to decide for themselves whether union representation was right for them. The Foundation respects this outcome and is glad that all eligible staff had the opportunity to participate and make their voices heard.

The Foundation will now move forward with good-faith collective bargaining with the union. We will approach this next phase constructively, lawfully, and with care for the staff whose work makes it possible for us to serve people everywhere.

For 25 years, Wikipedia has established an unparalleled resource for reliable information with the mission to make knowledge accessible for everyone, everywhere. Achieving this mission depends on the combined contributions of staff, volunteers, donors, partners, and readers across the globe. We are grateful to all those who continue to support Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects and continue to strive toward a vision of a world in which everyone can share in the sum of all human knowledge.

At the Wikimedia Foundation, we value collaboration across differences, constant improvement, and curiosity. These values do not just define the projects we host; they are also our commitment to how our employees should be treated. A commitment to these values will be central to the Foundation’s approach in this next phase of the process.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. We support the people, technology, and policies that enable reliable information to be shared with the world. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.

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