Introduction

In a single sentence, Wikimedia is an online movement dedicated to making access to knowledge equitable. Because Wikimedia is a grassroots movement, this means that almost of the information comes from random users that generously volunteer their time to develop projects, not paid experts. To make sure that the projects are used for benefit of the public instead of a corporation's bottom line, the content is given under a free license while the code is all free and open source. You're almost certainly familiar with Wikimedia's most popular project, Wikipedia (how did you end up here if you aren't?), but how familiar? At first, this was supposed to be a short article about Wikipedia and its policies, but as I've dug deeper, I discovered that Wikipedia was merely a single part of an unfathomably complex online ecosystem. This blog post will go over everything that I found in broad strokes, but I strongly encourage everybody to click on the links I provide to get a deep understanding of the subject matter.

Part 0: The Foundation Vs The Movement

The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit founded by Jimmy Wales after he founded Wikipedia. Its goal is to provide infrastructure for the Wikimedia projects, offer legal services for Wikimedia, provide critical technical support where necessary, and provide funding for people working on tasks that are important for Wikimedia's health (more on all of that later). The projects and the communities that sprung up around the foundation or were otherwise inspired by the foundation are collectively called the Wikimedia movement. By necessity, these two groups constantly interact with one another to promote their agenda, sometimes blurring the lines between the two. This can be confusing, so throughout this blog post, I'll explicitly say whether or not I'm referring to the foundation or the movement.

Part 1: The Wikimedia Projects

The Wikimedia projects are the core of the Wikimedia Foundation, where information can be freely disseminated. There's 12 projects in total, and they each have their own unique mission. While they're all built with the same MediaWiki software and are hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, they mostly run independently from each other, with a few major exceptions. These projects vary widely in usage, history, and quality.

Besides being dedicated to the free distribution of knowledge, a common unifying feature of the Wikimedia projects is that they're entirely run by the community. That doesn't just mean the content in the projects are created by users, it means that the policies that guide the projects are as well. Despite hosting the projects, the foundation does virtually nothing for them except to maintain the software. While the Wikimedia movement isn't explicitly political, the emphasis on communal effort over an ingrained hierarchy can be seen as a natural extension of the libertarianism of both Jimmy Wales and the broader Free-culture movement that Wikimedia sprouted from.

As you can imagine, there's quite a bit of similarities between the projects, despite being independently run and having different purposes. To avoid being redundant, I'm not going to repeatedly mention shared features like how anybody is allowed to edit. Instead, I'm only going to mention things that I found interesting while I researched the projects, and then explain the features shared by all the projects in part 2 and 3.

Wikipedia

You already know what Wikipedia is. This is the flagship project of Wikimedia and easily the largest online encyclopedia. It introduced 3 major improvements over traditional encyclopedias: it's free to use, it leverages the collective knowledge of the userbase by letting everybody edit at any moment, and it freely uses citations whenever making a claim, something most encyclopedias didn't do because it took up too much space. These are all things that we take for granted now, but these changes were so revolutionary that Wikipedia essentially set a new standard for encyclopedias, which has almost completely killed traditional print encyclopedias. Wikipedia has grown so large that most people think that it's the only thing that the Wikimedia Foundation does, but not many people know exactly how it works behind the scenes.

Wikipedia As A Community

The Wikipedia namespace is the namespace for Wikipedia pages that deal with the internal workings of Wikipedia, but not the Wikipedia articles about Wikipedia. Pages in this namespace tend to fall into 3 different categories:

1. Pages for communication between Wikipedians. The Village Pump page that's linked to on the front page of Wikipedia contains other links to these sort of pages, where people ask questions about how Wikipedia works, suggest policies, or get help with references, among other things.

2. Essays about Wikipedia. People have LOTS of thoughts about Wikipedia, and occasionally they take to Wikipedia to write an essay about it. Essays that authors don't want others to edit are written in user namespace, but essays in Wikipedia namespace are designed to be collaboratively written. There's over 2000 of them, so you're sure to find at least 1 essay that you find interesting.

3. Pages clarifying policies. Wikipedia is big, and that means that you need to have policies to handle day-to-day activities. These pages tell you how to properly select sources, what belongs on Wikipedia, and how conflicts are handled, among many, MANY other things. There's over 300 policies that you are expected to abide by, bringing me to one of the most contentious parts of the Wikipedia community.

The Bureaucracy

While you're obviously going to need at least some policies to run a website as large as Wikipedia, and despite official Wikipedia policy that Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy, it's pretty clear that the number of rules that you're expected to know if you want to edit is ridiculous. This creates a hierarchy between the average user and the powerusers that actually take the time to learn these policies and track them as they get updated. As anybody who's ever done a fair bit of editing on Wikipedia can tell you, some of these powerusers treat the pages that they've worked on as a fiefdom. If you dare try to correct anything wrong that you see on a page that they think they own, they will often use their superior knowledge of Wikipedia to shut you down by quoting obscure policies, a practice known as Wikilawyering. Besides that, powerusers tend to have more power than casual users because of their willingness and capacity to become admins or other important people in the Wikipedia community.

The actual process to become an admin on the English language Wikipedia is bizarre, to say the least. Rather than a straight-forward democratic election, admins are elected based on consensus. People give arguments for or against the nominee becoming an admin, and then a bureaucrat (which is like an admin but with the authority to appoint admins or other bureaucrats) weighs the arguments based on quality. Not only is there not any rubric that the bureaucrat has to use to weigh the arguments, there isn't even a set amount of consensus that the nominee needs to have. All that's mentioned is that 75% support means that the nomination is likely to succeed and 65% support means that it's unlikely (nominees for the bureaucrat role are said to require around 85%). While anybody can be a nominee, it's very rare for somebody to actually get the role with an edit count of less than 10000.

When Wikipedia does use democracy, it does so in a way that disenfranchises the majority of the community. The main election in the Wikipedia community is the one for the Arbitration Committee, which handles disputes. To simply cast a vote, you need to have had 150 edits in main namespace. For context, having 100 edits puts you in the top 1% of all users. To actually run as a nominee, you need to have made 500 edits, which puts you in the top 0.25%. Either way, there's no way for the average user to actually impact a committee that might make a judgment affecting them. At the same time, Wikipedia does need some sort of barrier to keep out vandals. It's not a simple problem, although I personally think that the barrier's are too high.

Bots

Having a small minority of users handle most of the management of such a large website isn't very easy. To make the process easier, certain users have created bots designed to automate some of the work that would have otherwise been impossible for people to do at scale. A prominent example of this on the English Wikipedia is ClueBot NG, an automoderator designed to detect and revert vandalism. From what I understand, this is a major reason why vandalism, which used to be a common sight on Wikipedia, is now very rare. As you can imagine, the community doesn't want just anybody to create a bot that can modify pages, since it's way easier to create a bot that vandalizes than it is to revert the vandalism. To have your bot accepted for usage, you have to make a request, where your bot will be evaluated to make sure that it follows established policy.

Edit-a-thons

As an encyclopedia, Wikipedia obviously doesn't want to not have an article on something important. Unfortunately, Wikipedia tends to have gaps in certain areas, like women's history and art. To cover these gaps and improve the diversity of the overall Wikipedia community, some people organize something called an edit-a-thon, where people get together to collectively edit Wikipedia while learning about how to contribute to the website.

WikiProjects

Not everybody has the same interests, but since there's so many people on Wikipedia, people can form tinier communities within the larger Wikipedia community. These are the WikiProjects, which help maintain and create articles within their sphere of interest. There's tons of them for just about anything that you can think of, and they all have so many different cultures that it's impossible to write about them all. It's interesting stuff, so I recommend diving in head first and seeing all the WikiProjects out there.

Wikipedians In Residence

While the Wikimedia movement is mostly represented by the Wikimedia Foundation, traditional establishments often also want to help out and contribute. One of the ways they do this is by hiring what is known as a Wikipedian in residence. This is a job position where somebody works to make Wikipedia contributions related to an institution's mission (e.g. an art museum hiring a Wikipedian in residence to write articles about art history). Besides their contributions to Wikipedia on behalf of their employers, Wikipedians in residence can also represent Wikipedia's interests by promoting outreach and helping to establish the website as a legitimate source of information.

The Newsletters

A lot of things are happening on Wikipedia, and you probably don't want to go looking for all the news by yourself. Instead, the people that do often create newsletters for the community to read. The biggest newsletter by far is The Signpost, which gives an exhaustive overview of the state of the website every 2 weeks. There's many newsletters across the Wikimedia movement, with several active newsletters being maintained by WikiProjects to keep enthusiasts up to date about the WikiProject and the subject matter.

The Wikipedia Library

Making edits requires citations, and a lot of good sources are hidden behind paywalls. Solution: partner with universities around the world to give Wikipedia editors free access to academic articles. This is The Wikipedia Library. This is technically part of the Meta Wikimedia platform instead of Wikipedia, but its purpose is to be used by Wikipedia editors, and only Wikipedia editors. To access the database, you need to have made 500 edits in total and at least 10 edits in the last 30 days. On one hand, this is an incredible effort to improve Wikipedia and democratize research, but on the other, the high barrier to entry increases the disparity between average users and powerusers. Despite what the description may have you believe, the edits don't actually need to be on Wikipedia. I myself got access to the library primarily for edits that I made on other projects. It also uses a somewhat loose definition of "library". While there's many academic papers, there are also un-paywalled newspapers and access to genealogy records like Ancestry.com. You can learn more about the library on its newsletter, Books And Bytes.

Philosophy Of Editing

There's a big debate on what the role of an editor should be. On one hand, there's an ideology called deletionism, which believes that articles with very low views should be deleted. On the other hand, there's an ideology called inclusionism, which believes that articles should be kept whenever possible. In my eyes, both of them have some pretty good points. On one hand, the inclusionists argue that Wikipedia isn't paper, so it doesn't make sense to prune articles the way that paper encyclopedias used to. While rarely viewed articles only get a few views a day, they collectively get a large number, so removing them would degrade the overall user experience. On the other hand, while Wikipedia isn't paper, storage space is still finite. An individual article is pretty negligible, but there's millions of articles on Wikipedia, which adds up. In addition, every article not deleted is an article that has to be maintained, which takes up energy that could be directed elsewhere. What the community wants is the best of both: countless articles about any niche topic that you can think about but with countless maintainers that can quickly reverse any vandalism and write new articles. Unfortunately, a trade-off has to be made, but nobody can agree on what it should be.

Mascot

While Wikipedia doesn't have an official mascot, the unofficial mascot is widely recognized to be an anime girl called Wikipe-tan. She occasionally shows up in certain Wikipedia articles (particularly articles about anime culture) and is occasionally cosplayed at Wikimedia meetups. She also serves as the official mascot for WikiProject Anime And Manga. Wikiquote and Wikimedia Commons also have their own anime girls, but they aren't really featured that much outside of this incredible image.

Wikivoyage

This is my favourite of the sister projects. Like the name implies, Wikivoyage compiles information about travelling, containing information about different locations, guides, and itineraries for you to use. Unlike Wikipedia, which expects citations to back up the information you add, Wikivoyage doesn't have citations at all. Instead, you're expected to use your own background knowledge when writing articles. Another neat thing about Wikivoyage is that unlike any other project, Wikivoyage doesn't let you directly create pages. Instead, you're expected to link to an empty page and then edit the page from there. The idea is that every page should be connected to another, creating what the community calls a breadcrumb trail between all of the articles. Like every other smaller Wikimedia project, Wikivoyage also has WikiProjects and policies that are similar to Wikipedia's, but less of both because of its smaller size. However, WikiProjects are called expeditions rather than WikiProjects.

Origin Story

Unlike the other Wikimedia projects, Wikivoyage wasn't directly created by the Wikimedia Foundation. Instead, it's an offshoot of a different website called Wikitravel, which has never been affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikitravel was purchased in 2006 by a for-profit organization called Internet Brands, which caused the community to become upset over the monetization of their labour. Shortly after, the German Wikitravel forked to become Wikivoyage, which still wasn't part of the Wikimedia Foundation. However, when Wikimedia expressed interest in creating a travel site, the Wikitravel and Wikivoyage communities voted to move all their content over to the new Wikimedia project. IB tried to stop that with a SLAPP suit, but since Wikitravel content is licensed under the CC, IB couldn't stop the fork.

Depth Of Information

This project is the one with the highest barrier to entry, since getting information to add to this project usually requires you to travel somewhere, a huge investment of time and money. Understandably, a lot of the articles don't have quite as much information as you might hope. However, there's usually something, and many articles are surprisingly detailed. Since I use the English Wikivoyage, there's an obvious bias towards Western locations, while other locations are usually more sparse. Still, even dangerous countries with very little tourism will usually have some information for you to use. Overall, I personally consider this comprehensive enough that you can probably get by just by using Wikivoyage unless you're travelling somewhere obscure.

Ratings

Every article will have an associated rating the quality of information, the quantity of information, and if the writing conforms to the manual of style. Wikipedia does this too, but the rating is usually only shown if the article quality is good, a stub, or if it was ever a featured article. Showing the rating no matter what lets people know if the article is should be avoided or taken with a grain of salt, an important feature when doing something as potentially dangerous as travelling.

Wikisource

Okay, so you can't access the Wikipedia Library, but you still want to find a source for something. Enter another one of the Wikimedia projects, Wikisource. This is a huge repository of freely licensed or public domain texts that can be used as a source, whether it's a book, legal proceeding, or poetry. This project requires a lot more effort than may first meet the eye. A lot of sources are obscure articles that only exist in print, so Wikisource is often the first point where they're digitalized. That requires a lot of proofreading, which is done in the page namespace. To make sure that digitalized texts are properly validated, digitalized texts have to be proofread by at least 2 different people before the text is moved to main namespace. To drum up support for what's a very intensive task, the Wikisource community has monthly challenges to finish proofreading key texts. Wikisource sorts texts by subject and author, which makes it easy to find what you're looking for. Wikisource users also translate certain texts and transcribe films, but this is much rarer because of the high level of effort needed to do that.

Wikiquote

This is a repository for quotes by famous people, TV shows, books, and more. This can be thought of as the intersection between Wikipedia and Wikisource. All quotes have to be verified, famous, and have endured the test of time. However, quotes that can not be attributed to a person are exempt from the verification requirement. While the main purpose of Wikiquote is to record the quotes that a person has said or written, it also gives information about quotes that a person is widely but incorrectly assumed to have invented.

Wikinews

What would happen if there was a project where people around the world could write news articles that anybody can edit as major events evolve? Turns out, not much. This is the graveyard of the Wikimedia project. Even though there's so much news coming out all the time, Wikinews is lucky to get more than 3 articles a day. Even on the English Wikinews, a lot of attention is given to Russia, with most of the rest being given to America. Even parts of the 1st world like Australia get very little coverage, let alone 3rd world countries. Embarrassingly, Wikipedia has totally outshined Wikinews by having an infobox on the front page that gives more information about the news than Wikinews itself, a fact that it mentions on the somewhat gloaty article for the project. Despite its overall irrelevance, I think that there's still a few interesting things about it that's still worth mentioning.

Sourcing

Wikinews blends the sourcing requirements of Wikipedia and Wikivoyage by allowing for articles that get information from other news reports and actual original reporting. Both of these are pretty interesting. Blending new reports may make it seem like you're just rehashing news reports made by other outlets, but many news reports often have information that's missing in others. A blended news report could be more objective than one published by traditional agencies. Also, the collaborative writing process could allow for conservatives to challenge any perceived left-wing bias, potentially leading to more bipartisan and neutral reporting. The original reporting could have also helped foster citizen journalism and provide more information on niche events that happen in the author's city. It's not hard to imagine a different future where Wikinews took off and citizen journalists made WikiProjects for their city, with an accompanying newsletter to rival traditional local news.

Accreditation

To get access to certain events, a journalist needs a press pass. To help citizen journalists, Wikinews will accredit high-quality contributors so that they can get press passes to access restricted areas. Once again, a really cool idea that could have been major if Wikinews took off. Sadly, while there's still users that have accreditation, most of them have lost it because of inactivity.

Informal Dictatorship

The intense bureaucracy in Wikipedia is a product of its huge size and scope. Here, in a digital wasteland, all that's left are a few extremely dedicated users who dominate the project by default. There isn't really any power struggle, or even any form of hierarchy, since there's very few editors outside of them. A crucial aspect of online communities is that the majority lurk, a minority contribute, and a minority of contributors contribute a lot. Wikinews needs a lot of contributors to keep up with the 24/7 news cycle, which means way more users. Without the contributors, the project bleeds users, including users who sometimes contribute a bit here and there, leading to a chain reaction that destroys the project. After that, the project just becomes a group of diehards who work for fun without any expectation that anybody will read their articles. Once they're gone, so is the project. Well, with one exception...

Russia

Remember how I said that Russia is a huge part of what gets reported on Wikinews? That isn't a one-off sort of thing. The Russian Wikinews has almost 1.4M articles, more than all the other languages combined. That's with roughly 55,000 users and a mere 8 admins. I've heard some people suggest that the Russian government uses Wikinews to spread disinformation, but I haven't done a deep dive into this. All I can say is that this certainly looks suspicious.

Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia projects tend to make heavy use of images, audio, and video in articles. If you have a duplicate of a piece of media that's already used in a different project, then you waste storage space. In a totally unrelated issue, people often need to find a piece of media to use, but can't because of copyright issues. The Wikimedia Commons is the solution to both problems. It's a repository of media files that are freely licensed or public domain, which other Wikimedia projects use to add media to articles instead of locally uploading. While Wikimedia projects sometimes have to use non-free media in their articles, the Wikimedia Commons has done a very good job at making sure that there's almost always a free media file on Wikimedia Commons that editors can use instead. At the time of writing, there's over 100,000,000 files that have been uploaded.

Wikibooks

Despite the name, this isn't a repository for published books that are freely licensed or public domain. Instead, this is a place where people can collaboratively write textbooks for a variety of subjects. If you use Lichess, you've probably used Wikibooks without even realizing: whenever you use the opening explorer, Lichess fetches information about the opening that you're looking at from the Wikibook Chess Opening Theory. It's a cool idea, but unfortunately, writing a textbook is a lot of effort, which runs into the same problem that Wikinews has where very few people are actually willing to put real work into contributing.

The Cookbook

If there's one area where Wikibook really excels, it's The Cookbook. If I had to take a guess, this is because it leverages how shallow books on Wikibooks tend to be. Since a cookbook only really requires you to write a short recipe, the barrier to entry is a lot lower than contributing to something like a math textbook, which requires specialized knowledge and a deep explanation about the subject matter. However, I don't think that's a full explanation about what's going on here. The Cookbook is far too broad and detailed to say that it only took off because it's low-effort. Instead, I think that The Cookbook has spawned an entire sub-community on Wikibooks, having its own namespace and several categories within the namespace that deal with different cuisines, ingredients, and even more abstract ideas like seasonality. While there's a few troll recipes, I would overall say that this is perhaps the best cookbook on the internet.

Wikiversity

This is a place where people can collaboratively create courses to teach people about a wide variety of topics. As with most Wikimedia projects, the overwhelming majority of learning material is in text, not video or audio. That creates a huge level of overlap with Wikibooks, but without The Cookbook to drive traffic. However, unlike Wikibooks, Wikiversity encourages active participation from learners by promoting a philosophy of "learning by doing". Besides courses, a major part of Wikiversity is learning projects, where users get together to discuss certain subjects. Some of the courses can be good, but most courses are sparse on details or focused on more fringe ideas.

WikiJournal

The peer review process for academic articles can be opaque, and accessing articles after they've been published can be expensive. Wikiversity's answer? Create academic journals that are totally transparent and always free. While anybody can comment on articles that are in preprint, people who want to be recognized as a peer reviewer have to contact the editorial board and show them proof of expertise. It's certainly an interesting idea, but it's held back by the fact that articles can be edited by anybody. There's absolutely nothing stopping me from changing the conclusion to an article to fit any particular agendas that I may or may not have, and actually citing a WikiJournal paper must be a nightmare when things can change in ways that you can't predict. All in all, its an interesting experiment, but that I don't think is ever going to catch on. If it does catch on, it might move away from Wikiversity and become an official Wikimedia project, as it's currently applying to become.

Wiktionary

This is one that you probably used before. Wiktionary was originally a dictionary that anybody can contribute to, but it's grown to be so much more than that. Wiktionary is now also a thesaurus and gives the etymology of every word. Despite the name, a better way to think about it is the Wikipedia of language. An cool aspect of Wiktionary is that by letting people add whatever word they want, you can also get information on new and slang words, allowing the dictionary to rapidly evolve alongside the language itself.

Wikidata

If you've been looking at the different Wikimedia projects while reading this blog post, you might have noticed a link on the sidebar called "Wikidata item". This takes you to Wikidata, where information is stripped of all unnecessary details and reduced to structured data. This can be thought of as Wikimedia Commons for facts instead of media. While you can browse this project the same way that you can browse the other projects, it's better used to scrape data for machine learning or as the backend for some sort of Wiki viewer. The primary use of data hosted here is to be used by the Wikimedia projects, where they can all receive up-to-date information by a single change to the linked item on Wikidata. This also helps to ease the problem of maintainability, which is a lifesaver for smaller projects.

Query

Let's say that you need to query Wikidata. Instead of having to write your own scraper, Wikidata has a built in way to access the data using SPARQL. While using this tool isn't necessarily the most intuitive, Wikidata has material to help you learn the language. Because you can directly submit your query to this URL, it's easy to write a script that accesses Wikidata instead of using the GUI.

WikiCite

As you might have guessed, getting citations for academic resources is important to contribute to Wikimedia projects, especially Wikisource. To that end, an initiative called WikiCite has started to add citation data to Wikidata so that there can be a centralized database for users to draw from. At the time of writing this, over 41 million items are instances of "scholarly article", and most of them have at least some citation data such as "author" or "DOI" added. Part of the WikiCite initiative is Scholia, a tool that lets you search for academics or academic articles to see their citation data. It also does some other interesting stuff, like automatically generate a citation graph for each academic article (if applicable) and listing the number of citations the article received every year, as well as how many of those citations were made by one of the authors.

The Limits Of Wikidata

You start to run into problems when your database gets too many queries, and it's begun to seriously affect the Wikidata project. At the time of writing this, the Wikimedia foundation has begun to separate the WikiCite dataset apart from the main Wikidata dataset because the strain on Wikidata servers has become too much. What that means is that you have to specify whether or not you want to search the WikiCite dataset when you use the query service from now on. However, this only scales the Wikidata dataset back to 2018 levels. It's not clear what Wikidata will do to make sure that the project can handle the increased load as more and more data is added. In the mean time, there's an WikiProject to quantify and estimate the various limitations on Wikidata's scope.

Wikispecies

This is a project designed for biologists needing to look up information about species and other taxons. Specifically, information about animals stripped of all unnecessary details and reduced to a database of species. Hmm, where have I heard that before? As you might have guessed, this is pretty much Wikidata but for biologists and without an easy way to scrape information. The main reason it exists, it seems, is because it was created before Wikidata was conceived of. Wikidata doesn't seem to have quite enough information to totally replace Wikispecies yet, but I feel like Wikispecies is the project that's most at risk of getting deprecated.

Wikifunctions

This is the newest Wikimedia project. This is a repository of computer functions, which are written in Python and Javascript. Despite first appearances, this isn't meant to be some sort of FOSS replacement to Github. Instead, it's meant to be used for an upcoming project called Abstract Wikipedia.

Abstract Wikipedia

It's easy to take it for granted if you speak English, but some of the Wikipedias for other languages can be pretty lacking in information. Also, smaller Wikipedias are at risk of being taken over by bad actors who want to push an agenda or pretend to be Scottish. Something clearly needs to be done, and what the Wikimedia Foundation thinks should be that something is Abstract Wikipedia, which is meant to be language-independent. This project is still in its infancy, but the idea is that the functions on Wikifunctions could be used with the data on Wikidata to create an abstraction of an article, which is then made readable by using a program called a renderer. This should provide more information than can be provided by normal integration with Wikidata. This isn't on the table yet, but there's no reason to think that this couldn't be deployed for other projects if it proves to be successful.

Part 2: The Technology Behind Wikimedia

As an online organization, The Wikimedia Foundation obviously makes heavy use of software and hardware. Unlike most organizations of its size, however, the foundation tries to document or open source as much of the technology as possible. While maybe not for everybody, looking at the technology behind Wikimedia can be interesting enough that I decided to give it its own section.

Wikitech

As a foundation that runs one of the largest websites in the world, it's not a surprise that Wikimedia has a very complex tech stack, which is totally documented on Wikitech. To be totally blunt, there's parts of this that I just don't understand. I'm only going to look at the parts that I actually understand and think is noteworthy, but Wikitech has way more detail about everything that I'm going to write and not write about in this section.

Grafana

To monitor the health of the Wikimedia infrastructure, Wikimedia has 100s of publicly available dashboards at Grafana. Some of these dashboards link to documentation about what the metrics mean, but others don't. Of course, you probably aren't going to spend much time looking at these dashboards unless you already understand this stuff.

Open Source

Whenever possible, Wikimedia uses free and open source (FOSS) software, which anybody can contribute to. Some of the code is hosted on Gitlab or Github, but most of it is hosted on Gerrit. Once you get a developer account to get access to Gerrit, there's tons of different projects that you can work on. Information about contributing to the infrastructure can be found directly on Wikitech, while information about the other projects can be found on the Wikimedia Developer Portal.

Phabricator

On top of the Git host, most software projects will have an associated Phabricator page. This is used for managing work, but people who don't develop can also use it to report bugs, issues, or to request features. It's somewhat analogous to the issue page for a Github project.

Cloud Services

Yup, Wikimedia has its own cloud computing platform, which is for developers who wanted to create programs to improve the projects. To provide hosting, the Wikimedia Foundation offers a cloud service called Toolforge. True to Wikimedia form, anybody can make an account and start writing their own tools, as long as they follow a fairly basic set of rules. However, this is far from the only cloud service offered by Wikimedia. There's also PAWS, which hosts Jupyter notebooks for analysis of Wikimedia projects and small bots, Cloud VPS, which is similar to Toolforge but is an Infrastructure as a service solution instead of a Platform as a service solution, and Quarry, a web interface to run SQL queries against Wikimedia projects. There's also Superset, which is also a web interface for SQL queries, but with the additional benefit of being able to create dashboards.

Data Dumps

We tend to take it for granted that the Wikimedia projects are always up and accessible. However, that isn't true for everybody. Some countries have censorship laws that prevent citizens from using these websites, while other people have unreliable internet that makes it impossible to access any website whenever you want. Thankfully, the Wikimedia Foundation dumps every single project every 2 weeks, as well as various statistics. Not only can you download the contents of these websites, you can also download the revision history and statistics as well. This also makes it good for research and archival in the unlikely event that Wikimedia goes down. These dumps can't be read directly, but they can be read with FOSS tools such as Kiwix.

Mediawiki

I already mentioned that the Wikimedia projects are run using a piece of software called Mediawiki, but I never actually explained what that is. Mediawiki is a FOSS software system that was developed in 2002 to better run Wikipedia after the pre-existing software was found to be too limiting. Knowing how to use Mediawiki well can massively change your user experience in ways that you wouldn't expect from how old-fashioned the UI looks. It also comes with an API that can be used to scrape Wikimedia pages.

How It Works

MediaWiki is essentially a no-code solution to modify a website. Instead of using HTML, it lets you write in plain-text and has built-in functionality to let you link to different pages on the website. Specifically, it uses a markup language called wikitext, which ironically doesn't necessarily have to be text (a change made to accommodate Wikidata). All changes made to a page are recorded in a public revision log, which can be used to revert bad edits.

Extensions

There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Very often, users or admins will want to customize the UX for MediaWiki to either fit their own needs or the needs of the community. For that, you usually turn to extensions, which range from mere cosmetic changes to adding new functionality.

Templates

Templates are pages designed to be included in other pages. This is useful for when you need to frequently repeat an action while editing a project.

Namespaces

Namespaces are groups of pages, which are all connected by their name. When using a Wikimedia project, the pages that you're going to look at the most are the ones that make up mainspace, which is the name space dedicated for whatever the project is actually about. However, there's usually also a namespace for all the user pages, a namespace for discussion about the articles in mainspace, and a namespace for templates. As a general rule of thumb, you'll have to do a lot of searching to truly become acquainted with all the namespaces that a project has to offer.

User Rights

An important feature of Mediawiki is user rights, which restricts or grants rights to certain groups. Mediawiki allows for admins to create groups and assign them rights, but there are also groups that are created by default. The 2 big ones are the admin and bureaucrat groups. Like the name implies, users assigned to the admin groups, well, administrate the website. They modify the CSS, ban malicious users, and do whatever else is needed to keep the community functioning properly. The bureaucrats are similar to the admins, except they can add or remove anybody from any group, including the admins.

Part 3: The Other Stuff

There are many aspects to the movement that are deeply important, but not part of the main projects whatsoever. Some of those things will be given their own section, but this part of the blog post will exclusively deal with the miscellaneous stuff that doesn't neatly fit in any other category.

Metawiki

This is the wiki for the movement as a whole, rather than any individual project. Here, you can find details about what Wikimedia is doing, how it's doing it, and what it plans to do in the future. This is also a good place to find events and documents explaining various initiatives that Wikimedia has tried or are currently ongoing. While contributing to this wiki might seem harder than the official projects, Metawiki is always looking for volunteers to help translate content. There's always a lot that needs to be translated, even for common languages, so it's a good entry point for bilingual people who want to help out the movement. Alternatively, if you're the kind of person who's better with computer languages than human languages, you can also volunteer to provide tech support to the various communities that make up Wikimedia.

Stewards

These are the admins of admins. They can access any public Wikimedia project and change the user rights of anybody. The idea is that they can serve as admins to projects that have yet to appoint their own admins and to act in emergencies where the proper admin is incapacitated or too slow to act. There's annual elections, but only admins who have at least 600 edits on one project and 50 edits made in the last month can run. Similar editing requirements also apply to anybody who wants to vote, but you don't need to be an admin. To be elected, candidates must receive at least 30 supporting votes, and at least 80% of the votes must be supporting.

Wikimedia Incubator

Most Wikimedia projects have different language versions. Rather than go through the effort of making a version that nobody ends up using, potential new versions are instead prototyped on Wikimedia Incubator. From there, the community can contact a group called the Language Committee for approval to become a new project. In true Wikimedia fashion, anybody can create a new language version of any project besides Wikidata, which is language-agnostic, Wikifunctions, also language-agnostic, Wikiversity, which hosts new language versions on Beta Wikiversity, and Wikisource, which hosts new language versions on the multilingual section of the website. The languages that get prototyped depend on the project. Wikipedia has already covered all the major languages, so all that's left is languages that just barely have enough speakers to justify a new language version. Meanwhile, the less popular projects often have major gaps, particularly Wikivoyage, which has major languages like Indonesian and Czech stuck in the incubator.

The Project Proposal Process

The Wikimedia projects are created through a proposal process. People interested in creating a new project propose it for the community to debate on, create a demo, and hopefully get proper recognition. Similarly, Wikimedia projects that seem to be dead can be removed by the community if someone proposes to delete it.

Wikispore

Wikispore is an experimental project where people can create their own miniwiki centred around particular topics like art or biographies. This makes it similar to Fandom, but without the ads or bloat. Because Wikispore is a collection of separate wikis, searching for things can be hard. However, it has a small but decently sized community, and by far the top contender to become a new Wikimedia project.

Research

At this point, I've hoped that I've convinced you that the Wikimedia movement is massive. Because of its scope, there's a lot of potential for research about online sociology, data science, and natural language processing. As part of this, Wikimedia has a dedicated page where researchers can publish the work that they've done or are in the process of doing. A fairly large number of these projects are commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation itself in order to create products and improve the user experience, which offers an exciting insight into what Wikimedia projects might look like in the coming years. There's a monthly newsletter if you want to receive regular updates about the research that goes on (this newsletter is also published as a section in The Signpost).

Outreach Programs

People have different interests, which means that the level of information you can get about certain topics can vary widely. Because of this, there's occasionally campaigns to encourage efforts to edit articles in underrepresented areas and programs to help teach people not used to Wikimedia how to participate. These campaigns and programs can be found at the Outreach Dashboard, which also contains information on how to create and run a campaign or program of your own. These campaigns will openly publish metrics about their impact and level of participation, which is helpful for seeing if your campaign is the worth the effort it took to run it. Some of these campaigns have prizes, so it's definitely worth looking through and seeing if there's one that you find interesting.

WikiEducation

Despite what your middle school English teacher might have said, Wikipedia is actually a pretty decent source of information. More importantly, if you're in the 3rd world, you might not have access to more traditional forms of information like books. To that end, the Wikimedia Foundation has been putting a lot of effort into promoting the use of Wikipedia (and the other projects) in educational settings. As part of its commitment to transparency, the programs funded by Wikimedia are publicly listed alongside their goals and the institutions running them. The flagship program is Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom, which teaches teachers on how to use Wikipedia as an educational resource. A pilot program that educated 7000 teachers in the Philippines, Bolivia, and Morocco found that the program drastically improved teachers's view of Wikipedia and their willingness to use it in the classroom. This program has only been done in 7 countries, all of them 3rd world, but the training material can be freely accessed and used by everybody.

A very closely related initiative is the Wiki Education Foundation, an organization created by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2013 in order to handle the pre-existing Wikipedia Education Program. The Wiki Education Foundation has programs for universities to assign Wikipedia writing assignments, to teach researchers about how to use Wikipedia, and for institutions to develop an initiative to add their specialized knowledge to Wikipedia.

Finally, there's WikiLearn, an initiative by and for Wikimedia users to learn about leadership within the community, such as teaching grant recipients how to run a program safely or to help onboard people who are considering whether or not they want to run for a seat on the WMF Board of Trustees. This is done by offering courses that can be used by anybody for free, even if the course is only meant for a niche audience. The courses are currently only made by staff and trusted affiliates, but once a governance model is made for WikiLearn, there's plans to let everybody create courses.

Meetups

People like community, and while most Wikimedia communities are obviously online, there's still an appetite for meeting people IRL. The most prominent Wikimedia meetup by far is Wikimania, an annual conference where editors and interested parties can learn and discuss about various issues surrounding the projects. However, this is far from the only way to meet other editors IRL. There's tons of meetups happening in major cities around the world, which you can find at a dedicated Wikipedia page, and if there isn't one near you, you can always start your own.

GLaM

This is a movement to work with Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums in order to provide content for the Wikimedia projects. This is often done by having these institutions appoint a Wikipedian in Residence to write articles, but they can also integrate Wikimedia content into the instutions themselves, like by pairing exhibits with QR codes that link to relevant Wikipedia articles. The people behind GLAM maintain their own outreach page for people who want to contribute and have a monthly newsletter for people who want to monitor the progress of this movement.

Part 4: The Future Of Wikimedia

Wikimedia is immensely large, but it's not done growing. The community has ambitious plans on how to improve the features that the Wikimedia projects already have and to innovate to improve the user experience.

Annual Plan

Rather than just have a plan for a single year, the annual plans that the Wikimedia movement drafts straddle 2 sequential years (e.g. 2021-2022). Because of that, this section showcases 2 plans, not one.

2023-2024

Every year, the foundation devises and releases a plan for short-term goals, which is ratified by the community. For the 2023-2024 period, the Wikimedia Foundation prepared for radical shifts in the movement that will be caused by the rapid adoption of the internet by the 3rd world and generative AI, among other things. At a high level, the foundation planned to continue its commitment to equity, to prioritize the user experience of established editors so they can better run the projects, and to prepare for long-term changes in its financial model. Of course, there's a lot more to the plan than that.

External Trends

Wikimedia doesn't exist in a vacuum, and the foundation has to plan accordingly. A surprising trend that the plan is shaped around is the tendency of younger audiences to use social media to get information. Many social platforms now have built in search features, which threatens traditional search engines and potentially harms the SEO of Wikimedia projects.

Besides losing market share to social media, both search engines and the Wikimedia projects also suffer from people directly asking LLMs for information instead of looking it up. The foundation would like to leverage LLMs where possible, but there's difficulties caused by copyright, hallucinations, and cost. LLMs also cause damage by allowing bad actors to spread disinformation at scale. All in all, it's clear that LLMs are going to have a major impact on the movement, but nobody knows whether or not it'll be positive.

Infrastructure

The infrastructure goals for the 2023-2024 period are heavily based on a listening tour undertaken by Selena Deckelmann, Chief Product and Technology Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, after she was hired. Broadly speaking, the goals are to improve the experience for volunteers (whether technical or otherwise), to provide better insight into Wikimedia using the data collected by the foundation, and to increase the spread of Wikimedia into new demographics, particularly people who live in the 3rd world.

Equity

As part of a larger drive to increase equity within the Wikimedia movement, the foundation has several equity goals for 2023-2024. To begin with, the foundation focuses on each of the 8 main regions of the world and decides on initiatives for every one of them. For example, a goal for Sub-Saharan Africa is to increase editor retention, while for North America, where many Wikimedia editors come from, the goal is to work with large-scale organizations like the Digital Public Library of America to create contribution pipelines. On top of that, there are thematic goals that improve equity across the board by encouraging volunteers to contribute content relating to culture and heritage.

Safety

In a similar vein to the push towards equity, the Wikimedia Foundation also wants to make sure that every user feels safe and welcome within the movement. Part of that is lobbying politicians around the world to inform them about how Wikimedia communities work so that they can pass laws that protect them. This has become incredibly important in recent years as governments around the world create regulations for Big Tech, which affects Wikimedia projects without considering their unique needs and purposes.

Disinformation is also treated as a safety issue within the annual plan, since the Wikimedia Foundation sees efforts to prevent people from accessing truthful information as a human rights violation. This is particularly difficult because the open nature of Wikimedia makes it exceptionally easy to intentionally add disinformation compared to more traditional projects. The foundation plans to use machine learning to help volunteers to identify disinformation and to increase the reliability of sources, but maintains that the best way to counter disinformation is a safe and diverse community that can fill in knowledge gaps and identify disinformation themselves. Accordingly, the foundation also plans to find ways to prevent surveillance of volunteers so they can't be intimidated or forced to add disinformation by bad actors.

Effectiveness

A big problem with running a foundation as large as Wikimedia is that inefficiencies tend to creep in. This problem is made even worse by that fact that the foundation has multiple projects that more or less act independently of each other, which means that multiple teams often work to solve the same problem without collaborating. Because of this, a major goal for the foundation this year has been about improving effectiveness. Additionally, the Wikimedia Foundation will continue to work on refreshing and implementing their new values, which have been progressively adjusted for years with collaboration with the community.

Foundation Details

To improve transparency, the 2023-2024 plan comes with an explanation on what the foundation actually does. This is essentially a breakdown on how money and human resources are allocated, as well as an overview of what every group in the foundation is doing this year. Additionally, the report also gives details about how salaries for employees are determined and gives some interesting stats about how many employees there are, among other things.

Reports

As part of their continuing dedication towards transparency, the foundation publishes quarterly reports so the community can be assured that the foundation is adequately meeting their needs. Metrics were only reported up to quarter 3, but the progress report for Q4 was included in the foundation's annual review.

2024-2025

Overlapping with the 2023-2024 plan is the more forward-looking 2024-2025 plan. Because this is more forward-looking, it's not as fleshed out as the 2023-2024 plan. However, there's a clear overarching theme of sustainability. Specifics aside, the plan for this period is to make Wikimedia "multigenerational" by improving the technical infrastructure, encouraging new editors to join, and decreasing reliance on donations.

2030 Movement

These annual plans are part of a much broader plan enacted in 2017 to revamp Wikimedia by 2030. The 2 goals are to offer knowledge as a service and to make access to knowledge equitable. To fulfill the goals, the community has decided on 10 recommendations and 10 principles to guide development year over year. Additionally, the community has settled on a list of almost 50 initiatives to implement before 2030 arrives. By design, the 2030 movement has been a 4 stage process. The first stage was the previously mentioned 2017 discussions, where it was established that the community wanted Wikimedia to become essential infrastructure for the ecosystem of free knowledge. After establishing a vision to work towards, the community began to develop the previously mentioned recommendations and principles during the second stage of the 2030 movement. This was spearheaded by several designated groups who focused on key areas such as diversity and community health. The current stage is the transition stage, where the community goes from coming up with ideas to actually developing ways to implement ideas. The last stage will the implementation stage, where the ideas will finally be actualized.

Part 5: The Wikimedia Foundation

The role of The Wikimedia Foundation in this article has been like the foundation's role in the movement: omnipresent yet in the background. Now, I want to look at the foundation as something deserving of study on its own.

Leadership

The foundation is run by a board of trustees composed of 16 people. Under current regulations, the board is made up of Jimmy Wales, 7 people appointed by the board, and 8 people elected by the community. The board votes on resolutions, with assistance from various committees. By regulation, the committees must have members from the board, but they also accept volunteer members if the board judges them to be sufficently qualified. A list of all the committees that the board is involved with, as well as the list of trustees, can be found here. A list of board meetings and their recorded minutes can also be found here, but they seem to be incomplete.

Foundation Wiki

Unsurprisingly, the foundation has chosen to make information about itself available as a wiki. Not only does this include all the minutes and resolutions of the board, it also includes the resolutions and documentation for the Endowment and Enterprise product as well. There's nothing here that's particularly interesting if you're not a lunatic that decides to write a blog post about all of Wikimedia, except for one thing...

The Memory Bank

Recognizing the importance of preserving historical information about Wikimedia, the Foundation Wiki has a memory bank to record key events, collect stories from individuals, and develop a cohesive narrative for how Wikimedia came to be. Call this a bold claim, but I think that this will be an incredibly important resource in the future when academics begin to study Wikimedia as something deserving of study in and of itself.

Financials

So, I don't think I need to say this, but running an organization of this size and scope is pretty expensive. In the past couple of years, the Wikimedia Foundation has caught flack for perceived mismanagement and waste of funds, so I want to dedicate a section of this blog post to look at how the foundation gets and spends money.

Grants

You've probably noticed by now that there's a lot of people outside of the foundation that are doing important work, online and offline. The way they get the money to do these things is by asking the foundation for a grant. There are several different types of grants with different application processes, but they generally focus on funding people or organizations that foster Wikimedia communities, doing research on Wikimedia, working on a task aligned with the Movement Initiative, running non-profits aligned with the Wikimedia movement in sub-Saharan Africa or ESEAP, running a conference about Wikimedia, miscellaneous short-term projects, or promoting equity within the Wikimedia community. The last category started in response to the BLM protests of 2020, which made it immediately controversial for its perceived politicization of Wikimedia.

The application process differs across the various grant categories, but the general process is submit your proposal for review by the community at large, which will be used by the relevant committee of volunteers and designated Wikimedia employees to determine if your proposal should be accepted. Grants given to promote equity are a notably opaque exception to an otherwise exceptionally transparent process, which is deeply concerning given that these grants are typically 6 figures while other grants usually max out at 5 or even 4 figures. Notably, many of the other grants also support equity, which makes a dedicated equity fund even more odd. As we'll see later, these grants are a major source of controversy for critics of the foundation's spending.

Fundraising Banners

If you use Wikipedia without adblock or disabling them in your account settings, you've probably noticed the banner ads begging you to donate to keep the website running. Despite the ads, Wikipedia isn't in danger of running out of money anytime soon. Instead, the need for funding is for all the other things. These ads have gotten some heated criticism, and for good reason. Even as an unapologetic Wikimedia stan, I have to admit that it's scummy to act as if you're going to run out of money to get donations from ordinary people. To make matters worse, an executive director admitted that money isn't a limiting factor for the foundation all the way back in 2012. As far as I can tell, there isn't really a coherent reason for why the foundation decided to seriously harm their reputation with these misleading banners. Is it as scummy as selling user data for profit? Eh, probably not, but that doesn't make it okay. Even if it gets them funds in the short term, in the long term, this strategy alienates people and potentially harms the foundation's ability to secure funding in the future.

The Endowment

For its part, the Wikimedia Foundation has been working on reducing its dependence on donations. Part of this has been the Wikimedia Endowment, which generates revenue for the foundation to use indefinitely. The endowment was launched in 2016 with the goal of raising $100,000,000, which it did ahead of schedule in 2021. However, it reached its goal by receiving substantial donations from the Wikimedia Foundation itself, which made it a burden that caused the foundation to spend so much to begin with.

Wikimedia Enterprise

Another way that the foundation is reducing its dependence on donations is through a product called Wikimedia Enterprise. This provides APIs for accessing data from Wikimedia projects, like snapshots of an entire project or the contents of an entire article at any moment. To be blunt, there isn't any real direct benefit to using these APIs, since they can be easily replicated by a scraper or downloading from the free data dumps. The true reason why somebody would want to use these APIs is because they come with official support, which at the very least let's you CYA if something goes wrong and your boss wants answers. The product made $3,200,000 in 2022-2023, which makes up almost 2% of Wikimedia's revenue.

The Wikipedia Store

A more mundane way for the foundation to make money is by selling merch. Despite technically being for the movement as a whole, it almost exclusively sells merch with Wikipedia labelling, which is an awful snub to the other projects that desperately need name recognition. The store even has its own travel section, but for some reason, nobody thought to sell some stuff that has Wikivoyage's symbol printed on it. That may sound like a small thing to get worked up over, but for somebody that's immersed themselves into every project for this blog post, the bias towards Wikipedia is genuinely appalling.

Does Wikipedia Have Cancer?

Whenever talking about Wikimedia's financials, it's difficult not to mention a famous essay called Wikipedia Has Cancer. It's worth reading the essay in its entirety, but the gist of it is that the Wikimedia Foundation has been rapidly increasing its spending year after year without any obvious need to spend more money. The concern is that one day, the foundation will start to spend money that it doesn't have, harming or possibly even destroying the movement. You should draw your own conclusion about this essay, but here are my thoughts. First of all, deciding that the Wikimedia Foundation has nothing to do because Wikipedia is mostly the same as when the foundation started is simply wrong. Even back in 2005, which the author lists as a time when the Wikimedia Foundation was "healthy", the movement already included Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, and Wikinews. The mission was always to make the world's information globally accessible through the internet, and Wikipedia is just one part of that. Also, the cost of running several of the largest websites (one of which is in the top 10 most visited websites in the world) doesn't scale linearly with usage. Instead, there's overhead from having to hire people to manage data centres, and then even more overhead from having to hire managers, HR, and people to do fundraising to pay for all these salaries. I'm also not convinced by the concern that the Wikimedia Foundation will take on debt to fund the ever-increasing spending if the fundraising dries up. It wouldn't be pleasant, but the Wikimedia Foundation can tighten its belt, lay off some people, turn down grant applications. It's never said exactly why the Wikimedia Foundation would take on debt, but I think that the author is assuming that the increased spending is because of incompetence, not because of self-contained programs that can be shut down in hard times without affecting the main projects. Even though I have a pretty negative view this essay, I still think it brings up a very important point about the scope of the Wikimedia Foundation's vision. A huge portion of its spending is towards grants, which doesn't directly help the main projects. The expenses for the foundation is incredibly large, and it's worthwhile to question if the foundation is growing too fast.

The Impact Of Spending

I've spent quite a bit of time listing all the things that the Wikimedia Foundation spends money on, but I didn't go that much into impact. While there's less information on how much certain features are used, there's enough to paint a pretty pessimistic picture. Quarry has had less than 9000 users in it's entire lifespan at the time of writing, outreach campaigns rarely get more than 1000 editors participating, and there are entire projects that feel borderline unusable. Is this worth the money that's spent on it? I genuinely don't know. For starters, it's often not really possible to get a good estimate on how much things even cost. For example, Quarry and PAWS were both developed by a very talented user called Yuvipanda, but were then worked on by actual staff members as part of their job. There's no good way to quantify the amount of money that indirectly went into the project because of the foundation's support. Another thing is that impact isn't easily defined just by the number of people who use the product. ClueNG is only used by Wikipedia admins, but its impact is felt by everyone. At the very least, it's okay to spend money while revenue keeps increasing. Unfortunately, when people see this amount of spending without a good explanation, it feels like the foundation is just throwing money away. To a small degree, when you're a foundation this large, that actually does happen because there's always some level of false negative when trying to weed out scammers. In 2022, there was a viral Twitter thread where somebody discovered that Wikimedia gave a fairly substantial grant to an organization who made questionable content as part of its drive for racial equity, which in turn gave a grant to a person who did an experiment that accidentally killed a few octopi. This was then followed by countless people saying that they were no longer going to donate to Wikipedia because they were outraged over this misuse of money.

It would be easy to criticize these people for unquestioningly accept what a random person on Twitter told them, but that misses the point. People aren't just getting fed up with Wikipedia because of a random person on Twitter or "Wikipedia Has Cancer", they're getting fed up with Wikipedia because these match up with their very legitimate impression that Wikipedia is the exact same now as it was 10 years ago. Regardless of whether or not the money that the Wikimedia Foundation is spending has enough impact to justify the costs, users certainly have to believe that it does. Because the foundation has failed to effectively state the breadth and importance of the Wikimedia movement, they're facing backlash, which ironically affects their ability to get donations in the future.

Transparency

A major complaint from the essay was that the foundation isn't sufficiently transparent about how the money they get is spent. Particularly, the author feels that the foundation doesn't do enough to explain what the grants are and why they're given, even though the grants are one of the foundation's largest expenses. However, the foundation publishes their annual plan and a Q&A about their audit every year. Because of its open nature, even small expenses can often be found if you look for them, though it's difficult because of the massive breadth of Wikimedia (should have thought about that before writing this blog post...). To the author's credit, the Wikimedia Foundation could compile some of this information themselves and provide it to the community for better understanding. To the foundation's credit, they already go above and beyond when it comes to transparency by publishing as much financial information as possible and doing Q&A's about their finances. The fact that they allow for the community to actually get involved with the grant approval process is also incredibly unusual and totally solves the author's complaint that the community doesn't have enough say in how the foundation's money is spent.

Part 6: The Other Groups

Besides the foundation proper, there's a whole cottage industry of organizations that are centred around the Wikimedia movement. These groups usually either represent the interests of certain geographic areas (most commonly entire countries) or exist to ensure accurate and exhaustive information about a particular subject (e.g. art). While it's difficult to quantify and research them all, there's many organizations that are officially approved by the Affiliations Committee. Strictly speaking, you don't actually need to be recognized to form a group focused on Wikimedia, but recognition provides you the right to use official trademarks and recieve funding from the foundation. Since these organizations can be considered part of the Wikimedia movement, and virtually all of them have a significant prescene on at least one project, they deserve to be discussed.

User Groups

These are the most basic kind of affiliates. The only requirements to join are to have at least 3 active editors that have an account with more than 500 edits on a Wikimedia project (800 if it's Wikidata), at least 10 members overall, and to agree to the code of conduct. Even these requirements can be waived in the application. Because of its flexible structure, it's the most common type of Wikimedia affiliation. The downside is that they only get to use Wikimedia trademarks and are only eligible for the Community grant.

Chapters

These organizations are dedicated to geographical regions, most commonly entire countries. Not only do they get all the benefits of being a user group, they also get Wikimedia merchandise to hand out, access to the Annual Plan grant, and scholarships to send 2 members to Wikimedia, among other things. The downside is that the requirements are much more stringent. They have to be legally incorporated, show that their motives are in line with the movement's mission, have at least 10 editors with accounts over 6 months old that have 300 edits to a single project, and have already existed for 2 years, preferably as a user group.

Thematic Organizations

These affiliates are very similar to chapters in what they get and what they have to do. However, instead of being focused on a geographical region, these organizations are focused on an overarching thematic purpose. There's only 2 of these affiliates: Amical Wikimedia, which focuses on the Catalan language and culture, and the Wiki Project Med Foundation, which is focused on providing accurate medical information on the Wikimedia projects.

Reporting

Chapters and thematic organizations have to provide annual financial reports, while all 3 types of affiliates are expected to provide annual reports about their operations to make sure that they're still contributing to the Wikimedia mission. As part of Wikimedia's undying commitment to transparency, all of these reports are made available for public viewing. This is the main hub for people who want to learn more about the extended Wikimedia movement and how they interact with the official projects.

What They Do

There's undoubtedly some really cool things that are going on in the affiliated organizations, but I simply can't do a deep dive into all of them. There's almost 200 organizations, and many of them aren't even in English. Instead, I've lightly browsed each and every one of them, looked closer at them if I see anything particularly interesting, and reported it here. As for the ones that I don't mention here, most of what they do is host edit-a-thons, workshops, and sometimes collaborate with educational institutions to have Wikimedia projects used in the classroom.

Wikimedia Sverige

This is the chapter that represents all of Sweden. Despite the many things that they do to foster the Swedish Wikimedia community, I feel like the most interesting thing that they're currently working on is Wikispeech, a text-to-speech MediaWiki plugin. To be frank, it's not that good at the current moment, but once fully developed, it could help many people with literacy problems to access the Wikimedia projects.

Wikimedia Deutschland

This chapter, which represents Germany, is unusually political. Whereas many organizations try to maintain an air of neutrality, Wikimedia Deutschland meticulously lists the various ways that it represents the Wikimedia movement at the national and continental level. While I can only go off of what they say, it seems like their intense lobbying efforts have led to real improvements in how the government treats access to knowledge as a human right. Additionally, this chapter is large enough to have their own funding program to foster various initiatives, although I can't tell you anything about the initiatives themselves because all the information is in German. While it can be hard to quantify the impact that a group has, it seems like Wikimedia Deutschland is likely the most powerful organization in the extended Wikimedia movement.

Wikimedia Tunisie

The chapter that represents Tunisia has collaborated with the University of Sfax to create the Data Engineering and Semantics Research Unit, which does research on knowledge graphs like Wikidata.

Wikimedia Turkey

Somebody from the chapter representing Turkey made a 10 video course teaching beginners how to edit Wikipedia. The audio is in Turkish, but it has English subtitles.

Wikimedia Morocco

Besides contributing content, this user group has a project to improve the organization's technological capacities. So far, the main focus has been to develop bots that automate repetitive tasks for Wikis in Moroccan languages.

H-GAPS User Group

Unlike most user groups, these people are chiefly focused on Wikiversity. Their main mission is to make accurate information about psychological science freely accessible through the Wikimedia movement.

Wikimedia France

This organization runs a project called Lingua Libre, which is dedicated to recording and preserving audio of people speaking. The goal is to preserve endangered languages by creating databases that people can study from. That being said, they also welcome audio recordings of people speaking common languages as well.

MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group

Unlike virtually every other user group, the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group isn't active on any of the Wikimedia projects. In fact, it's explicitly for people outside of the WMF and the projects. The mission is to work with developers and users from outside of Wikimedia to guide the development of MediaWiki in a way that doesn't hurt the user experience for non-Wikimedia websites built with the software. They also run a website that tracks every 3rd party website that uses MediaWiki, but it wasn't working at the time of writing this article. Predictably, this user group hosts information about itself on a wiki built with MediaWiki.

Wiki Project Med Foundation

I talked about them briefly before, but this organization is surprisingly complex on its own. They have several different projects and get funding from groups besides the Wikimedia Foundation, such as the World Health Organization. If I were to describe them, I would say that they're a group aspiring to create a version of the Wikimedia movement that's entirely focused on medical knowledge. They're surprisingly obscure for who they are, so I decided to do a deep dive into the work that they do.

MDWiki

MDWiki is the organization's equivalent to Wikipedia. As you probably guessed, this website is heavily focused on medicine and topics adjacent to medicine, like biology and funding. As with Wikipedia, there's also a namespace to handle articles written about the website itself and how it's run. Unlike Wikipedia, or any of the Wikimedia projects, you have to apply for the right to edit pages, presumably to prevent any trolls looking to cause potentially fatal vandalism. The process doesn't seem too intense, but they do reject people from time to time.

NC Commons

This is Wikimedia Medicine's answer to Wikimedia Commons. It's a repository for medical images that are NC or ND licensed instead of being under a truly free license. In other words, NC Commons is how Wikimedia Medicine handles medical images that can't be stored on Wikimedia Commons.

The App

In collaboration with Wikimedia Switzerland, Wikimedia Medicine has a mobile app called Medical Wikipedia to allow offline access to health information from both MDWiki and Wikipedia. This is essentially the same as getting a data dump and viewing it with Kiwix (which is what the app is built on). The app size depends on what language you download and whether or not you want video, but several versions clock in at over 1 GB. The focus of the app is obviously on mobile usage, but there's also mirrors for Windows and Linux, while iOS users have to download the ZIM file and just use Kiwix directly.

Internet-In-A-Box

If you don't have good enough internet access to download the app, Wikimedia Medicine also sells an Internet-in-a-box. This is a small device that serves as a hotspot for people within a 100m radius so that people can access Wikipedia and medical content. You can purchase one from Wikimedia Medicine, but that could take several months to ship. You can also build one, but the instructions are pretty barebones. Better guides can be found online, and the guide does link to them.

VideoWiki

For quite a while, many people in the Wikimedia movement have wanted an equivalent of Wikipedia that used video and audio instead of just text, in no small part to make information available to illiterate users. Enter VideoWiki. While this project was created by a user called Pratik.pks, the project has since been adopted by Wikimedia Medicine, who run it to this day. The project uses Wikipedia as the editing platform and Wikimedia Commons as the source for background visuals, as described in the tutorial. This is still in beta, but it could be fairly big if it's completed.

Research And Outreach

Like the Wikimedia Foundation proper, Wikimedia Medicine conducts research on itself. MDWiki has an entire page on research conducted by members of the organization on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Medicine's ability to democratize knowledge, but ironically, most of these articles are paywalled. Besides conducting research, Wikimedia Medicine also tries to spread information through the educational system as part of WikiEducation. Besides educational material, Wikimedia Medicine has also done important work advising major health organizations about the potential of the Wikimedia movement in medicine.

Conclusion

When I decided to make this blog post, I did it assuming that I already knew most of what there was to know about Wikimedia, and all I had to do was write it down. After doing an absurd amount of research and looking into various rabbit holes I had no idea even existed, I realized that I knew nothing and I still know nothing. Even though this blog post is called "A Deep Dive Into Wikimedia", it still feels shallow. There's things that I don't really understand, and because I'm only fluent in English, I can't explore any of the rabbit holes in non-English projects. More than that, I've come to the conclusion that Wikimedia can't ever really be understood by any one person. Sure, Jimmy Wales and a few other highly prominent people probably have a very thorough understanding of what's going on at a high level, but can they tell you all the FOSS software they use, the people who maintain them, or the degree of support that they've received from actual employees? No, they can't. They can't tell you how the many communities that spawn around Wikimedia interact with the projects either, and it seems that nobody really can, considering how many grants the foundation give specifically to fund research on the movement. There's just too many moving parts, so many things that change faster than you can learn them. That's not even getting into the history of Wikimedia, which is surely rich and possible to piece together from the many archived documents scattered around the projects, if you have the time. At well over 10,000 words, I've merely scratched the surface of what there is to know about Wikimedia.

I'll be honest here, when I first came up with the idea to investigate the movement and how it works, I planned for my blog post to be negative about the movement from the outset. I was going to be the cool-guy contrarian that showed off how much he knew by pointing out how much it sucks that Wikipedia has a bureaucracy, that Wikipedia has annoying powerusers, that the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't need as much money as they pretend to. And yeah, those complaints are totally valid. As I learned more about the movement, I found other flaws that I could focus on, like how amazing projects were just straight up abandoned, or how the foundation is too focused on Wikipedia to the point where it's almost a detriment to the rest of the movement. There's a lot that's wrong in the movement, but you know what? I don't care. What I've learned from doing this blog post is that I'm glad that Wikimedia exists. I'm glad that I can get free encyclopedic information without being nickel-and-dimed by a corporation. I'm glad that in a internet taken over by ragebait meant to make people miserable in exchange for engagement, there's a place online where people can peacefully benefit from projects designed for the betterment of mankind. I'm glad that somebody is trying to make an academic journal that doesn't charge readers to see the latest research, even if it seems ill-advised. I'm glad that people are actually trying to improve education in 3rd world countries through the internet instead of snobbishly looking down on non-traditional sources of information. And you know what? I'm glad that I can see parts of the movement that I don't like, because that means the movement is transparent enough that they don't try to hide or sugarcoat their flaws. It's easy to be a hater that talks about how Wikipedia isn't accurate enough or that "Wikipedia has cancer" because you don't like how the foundation spends its money, but it's even better to be a fixer that works to make the movement better today than it was yesterday, and I'm glad that Wikimedia lets me have that opportunity.

When I started this blog post, I said that Wikimedia is an online movement dedicated to making access to knowledge equitable. That's certainly how the movement presents itself, but honestly, I don't think that fully captures what the movement is about. To end this blog post, I want to introduce a new paradigm for understanding and interacting with the movement. Rather than being a place to provide equitable access to information, I want Wikimedia to be seen as a place for people to innovate and create new ways of sharing information. The Wikimedia movement is a sandbox where anybody can experiment with new ways of learning, both as the learner and the teacher. Some experiments will fail, but others will succeed, and people can carefully contribute to the experiments that work until they become mainstream sources of information. Rather than seeing the Wikimedia projects as websites that passively provide us with content, we should see the content as the product of people and organizations actively building and maintaining an entire educational ecosystem. People who contribute to Wikimedia projects shouldn't be seen as volunteers, they should be seen as leaders taking control and ownership of the projects. Researchers should look at the Wikimedia movement as a subculture with its own unique history and form, not as mere set of websites used to learn about things. Last but not least, we should stop looking at Wikimedia as being something totally separate from us. By virtue of its open nature, so many of us have contributed in so many ways to this wonderful, impossibly ambitious movement. Even if you haven't, you've at least used Wikipedia before, and therefore allowed yourself to be influenced by the people who work to provide information to the world. From here on out, I want everybody reading this blog post to stop looking at Wikimedia as something that's static and start looking at it as something that's dynamic. Don't take anything that you see for granted, think deeply about who wrote the content, wrote the code, and hosts the software. Question their motives, but also don't become paranoid and start instinctively distrusting one of the the greatest movements in internet history. Above everything, see Wikimedia as a collection of people doing amazing things, not just pixels on your computer screen.