Wikimania 2026, the Wikimedia movement’s annual global conference, ran in Paris from 21 to 25 July and I attended as Community Manager for Wikimedia Community Ireland (WCI). Although tickets sold out months in advance, and I was not one of the very lucky few who grabbed an initial ticket about two weeks before my annual leave began in early July, I was offered a place off the waitlist and we grabbed it!
My first task on the day I returned from leave was getting myself and Éinín to Dublin airport, and from there to Paris to meet over 1,200 Wikimedians from across the globe.
Wikimania Day 4 group photo with the Giant Wikipedia Puzzle, Simon Delahaye for the Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
What is Wikimania?
For anyone newer to the Wikimedia community: Wikimania is the movement’s largest annual gathering, bringing together editors, affiliate staff and volunteers, researchers, and partner organisations connected to Wikipedia and its connected projects. The programme runs across several days and includes talks, panels, workshops, lightning talks, and informal meetups. It moves to a different host city each year; Wikimania 2027 will be held in Santiago, Chile.
I majored in French for my BA, with Irish as a minor subject, and it had been 13 years since I graduated, and 10 years since I’d last spoken French, so it caught me off guard how much was still stored in the recesses of my brain, and by the closing ceremony I was able to comprehend proceedings sans interprétation. I’ve also studied some Spanish, and I’m looking forward to building on that ahead of the next Wikimania in Santiago in 2027.
Linguistic diversity as a strength
One thread ran through a lot of what I attended this year: the diversity of languages across Wikimedia projects, and how several speakers framed that diversity as a resource for the wider movement to draw on.
Shahen Araboghlian’s lightning talk, “If It’s Not Online, It’s Invisible,” made the case that for minority and endangered languages, digital presence is no longer just a question of preservation, but of survival in an AI-driven information ecosystem. He used Western Armenian Wikipedia, officially recognised by UNESCO as an endangered language community, as his example: built from a small diaspora initiative into a structured, community-governed platform that now functions as open, machine-readable, freely licensed infrastructure. It was great to catch up with Shahen in Paris, having first connected with him in Prague back in April.
Andriah Laingo presented WikiTeny, a project on linguistic inclusion in Madagascar, and Viacheslav Mamon spoke about bringing Ukrainian students to Wikisource – both sessions I was glad to be in the room for. David (User:Hiperterminal), who I also saw at the Open Knowledge under Attack panel, spoke about his public-domain research in Colombia and his work documenting Catalan-language sources, alongside patterns he’s observed of gender bias, an Anglo-centric point of view, and systematic reversion or deletion of related content.
A workshop on making Indigenous languages ready for Wikifunctions tackled a specific technical question: how to handle grammatical gender and genitive cases within Wikifunctions. The answer, as it stands, involves Abstract Wikipedia and lexeme data to encode that information. For those of you who attended Celtic Knot 2024 in Waterford, you might also remember we discussed lexemes then too!
That last session connected directly to our work: I’ve begun a draft adding Gaeilge to these functions, mapping the language across them, and in the session we opened up a conversation about genitive case, one of the grammatical features Irish has that many other languages don’t. More on this, I hope, in the near future.
The AI roundtable earlier in the week raised a related point, framed by the panel as a question of leverage: smaller languages carry disproportionate weight in AI training data, and the question put to the room was whether the movement chooses to use that position. The panel was also direct on whether AI companies honour ShareAlike and copyright licensing terms: the short answer given was no; the longer answer was that the movement doesn’t believe they do, though the companies themselves may argue otherwise.
Group Picture of WikiWomen+ Summit at Wikimania 2026, Paris, Pierre-Selim Huard, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Global initiatives in the movement
My time at Wikimania started with the WikiWomen+ Summit, a full pre-conference day of sessions on gender equity, empowerment, and closing content gaps across the movement. Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, co-founder of Wiki Women in Red and the WikiWomen*Summit x Wikimania event itself, spoke on the history of that work and where it’s headed. I’ll have more to say about the summit in a dedicated post.
I presented at the Wikimedia LGBT+ meetup on Irish initiatives for LGBTQIA+ content on Wikipedia, covering Wiki Loves Pride photo competitions, the 2024 Aiteachas a Chur ar an Vicipéid Irish-language writing competition, and WCI’s pilot Youth Irish Wikipedia Camp. The slides are on Commons. More to come on that meetup, and the conversations it led to, in a separate post.
Wikimedia LGBT+ User Group at Wikimania 2026 in Paris, PierreSelim, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
There were also threads from the wider programme stood out. A roundtable on AI and the movement’s future asked what levers affiliates and partners have if search engines and open web access give way to closed AI applications. A Wikimedian in Residence lunch meetup brought together WiR practitioners from New Zealand, France, UK, Switzerland, and elsewhere, comparing notes on institutional partnerships and documentation practices. A panel on resilience in knowledge and heritage institutions looked at how GLAM organisations are adapting to funding and political pressure in different countries. And a lightning talk on Afrikaans Wikipedia’s Wiki-Botanist Action Group covered a 60,000-photograph plant collection donated by a single contributor, now being added to Wikipedia and WikiSpecies.
Connections across the movement
Over the week, I connected with affiliate representatives from a long list of countries, including Sweden, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, New Zealand, Malaysia, Korea, the USA, Canada, Brazil, and Chile, who will host next year’s conference in Santiago, among others. I also met familiar faces from across Europe, including Portugal, Norway, the UK, France (bien sûr, as our hosts), the Basque Country, Italy, the Czech Republic, Poland, and many more from the Wikimedia Europe (WMEU) network.
A UK and Ireland meetup gave me a chance to connect more closely with counterparts from Wikimedia UK and other communities across these islands. I ended up having a short conversation in Irish with a Wikimedia UK staff member from Cork, which meant Irish was briefly spoken in the room at Wikimania Paris too.
Two more people worth a mention, both connections I’ve made through the Wikimedia UK community. Ceryl Evans (MumphingSquirrel) presented “The 72 Women of the Eiffel Tower,” a project responding to a January 2026 proposal to add the names of 72 women of science to the tower, alongside the 72 men already engraved there. English Wikipedia’s coverage of those women was patchy at best going in, with 23 having no article at all; by Wikimania, all 72 had a decent English-language page, built through an organised translation effort linked to Wiki Women in Red’s #1day1woman 2026 initiative. And Dr Sara Thomas, Programme Manager at Wikimedia UK, delivered “Alice’s Adventures in Wikiland,” a talk told as a folk tale about falling down a Wiki rabbit hole in her home city of Glasgow, making the case for starting new editors on articles about places they already know and using that familiarity to spot the gaps. I really enjoyed it.
Group Picture of Wikimedia Cuteness Association Main Stage at Wikimania 2026 in Paris, Amy Uí Ríordáin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Some of those conversations tied directly into WCI’s current and future plans. As some of you may be aware, WCI has been developing an early-stage bid to host a future Wikimania in Dublin, and this came up repeatedly in Paris. Within the Northern and Western Europe region especially, there was a lot of excitement and no shortage of questions about our future Wikimania plans, and offers of help. There’s a good deal of interest bubbling up around this from national and international parties, though for now we’re keeping our cards close to our chest. Make sure you’re signed up to our mailing list and attending our community meetings to stay in the loop!
There was real interest from across the attendees I spoke to in what WCI does next, and there’s more from Wikimania Paris still to come, including a closer look at the WM LGBT+ meetup and the really cool tools I have found that I think will be useful for organising editing initiatives in our work. Needless to say I came away with a lot of ideas and proven examples of projects that could very easily work in our context and also a lot of new Wiki friends who are interested in collaborating, so, watch this space!
