Wikimania 2026: Dark clouds on the horizon for the Wikipedia world

Written by Dominik Landwehr (original version in German)

There are probably very few places in any city where 1,200 conference delegates can meet comfortably and discuss current issues every day, in sessions both large and small. The Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris is one such place. A sort of science centre and museum with a gigantic entertainment complex, and because it can accommodate around 15,000 people, the Wikipedia gathering didn’t even stand out particularly. The annual Wikimania is more than just a conference; it’s more like a family reunion, reserved for the particularly dedicated Wikipedians, as those unable to travel with a national chapter had to apply to attend. Quite a few of the participants had already attended previous meetings, dating back to the first event in Frankfurt in 2005. In recent years, the event has been held in Nairobi (2025), Katowice (2024) and Singapore (2023). Wikipedia is a global movement, and the participants were correspondingly diverse. However, it appears that not all those interested had been granted a visa, for whatever reason. This is an indication that there are significant regional disparities within this movement – or, quite simply, a North-South divide.

Few global projects can boast similarly impressive figures: Wikipedia exists in more than 300 different language editions with over 65 million articles. With 3.15 million articles, the German-language Wikipedia ranks among the largest Wikipedia editions, alongside the English-language version (7.2 million articles).

Wikimedia Switzerland (WMCH) was founded back in 2006 and will celebrate its twentieth anniversary in 2026. Contributors in Switzerland write in no fewer than four different Wikipedia editions: in German, French, Italian and Romansh.

The Wikipedia movement now encompasses a whole range of global projects: the most important of these is Wikimedia Commons – a vast collection of media files comprising around 145 million freely usable media files. These are either in the public domain or available under a free licence. A more recent project is Wikidata, which originated as an initiative in Germany: a collection of over 120 million structured data items that are particularly useful for database queries. Other projects include Wikisource, Wikiquote, and Wikivoyage.

The history of the Wikimedia movement has so far been a unique success story – but AI could bring this meteoric rise to an end, which is why the topic is now being addressed with such importance at all events concerning Wikipedia. But first: what is the reason for Wikipedia’s enduring success? Put simply: it was the right project at the right time and, as the Americans say, ‘a powerful idea’ – a compelling idea. The criteria for a Wikipedia entry are transparent and easy to understand: entries must be written from a neutral perspective; the subject or person must be relevant, and every statement must be substantiated by credible sources. Wikipedia’s rise has run parallel to Google’s triumphant advance. In fact, Google began indexing Wikipedia articles at an early stage. And because they also perfectly met Google’s criteria, Google displayed Wikipedia articles at the top of its search results. Were there any agreements and possibly financial flows between Google and the Wikimedia Foundation? Yes, there were both collaboration agreements and financial contributions from Google. There is also a section within Wikipedia dedicated to commercial offerings: Wikipedia Enterprise. Visually, however, Google has no presence within the Wikipedia universe. The collaboration is documented on a dedicated page on the so-called Meta Wiki.

For several years now, AI has been revolutionising the world of online knowledge. Google, for example, no longer primarily returns links as answers, but complete, fully formulated answers.

Chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot draw their knowledge from Wikipedia’s vast repository and answer search queries directly. In many cases, users no longer need to click on Wikipedia sources. This has led to a decline in direct queries to Wikipedia: last year alone, Wikipedia recorded an 8 per cent drop in search queries from humans (human pageviews). It cites generative AI and changing information-seeking behaviour as particular reasons for this. By contrast, automated queries by robots (bots) on Wikipedia’s pages have increased. In fact, Wikipedia is one of the most important data sources for training large language models (LLMs). For Wikipedia, by no means all of these queries are clearly identifiable, as some of them masquerade as human users.

This development is a cause for concern for Wikipedia: in particular, there are fears of a decline in the volume of donations, even though this has not yet materialised. Fundraising appeals are displayed as banners on Wikipedia search results every December. If fewer human users see these banners, then fewer are likely to donate money. There is no end in sight to this trend; on the contrary. Interestingly, Elon Musk’s fundamental criticism of Wikipedia and the launch of his own project, called Grokipedia, have led to an increase in donations to Wikipedia.

What can be done? There is still no clear answer: a series of workshops, some of which were initiated by Wikimedia Switzerland, are currently seeking to clarify the situation. One possible approach is to collaborate with leading figures in the field of AI. Whether this is a promising approach remains to be seen. As one IT specialist remarked at the Wikimania conference: whilst AI developers certainly have sympathy for the project, they ultimately have other priorities.

It is clear that these developments could affect the financial situation of the Wikipedia movement. Here, then, is a look at the figures: Wikipedia is funded by donations – the parent organisation, the ‘Wikimedia Foundation’, has an annual budget of around 180 million US dollars. Wikimedia Germany has 32 million Swiss francs at its disposal, and Wikimedia Switzerland 4.2 million. Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia Germany enjoy a special arrangement: they raise the funds themselves and then pass on a portion to the Wikimedia Foundation, which maintains the entire technical infrastructure. For all others, the process works the other way round: the money is raised by the US foundation in the respective country, and the national chapter receives a portion back from the foundation.

The Wikimedia Foundation supports a large number of initiatives and groups organised by topic, country or language group. Today, there are 40 so-called chapters, which generally represent a single country, as well as 156 user groups covering all manner of topics, such as women, LGBTQ+, photography, and various groups for specific languages and regions, etc.

The Foundation, under the leadership of its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Bernadette M. Meehan, is now in the process of reorganising this funding, which is likely to result in certain groups receiving less funding or none at all. This is currently causing unease within the Wikipedia community. However, it highlights an uncomfortable truth: virtually all of these groups are 100 per cent dependent on grants from the Foundation.

A complex ecosystem has grown out of this. This ecosystem is now to be made fit for the future.

 

The author has been an active Wikipedia contributor since 2018, and has been President of Wikimedia Switzerland (WMCH) since summer 2026.

Note: Wikipedia and Google

Photo attribution: Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons