Bringing WikiCred to WCNA 2025

As governments and, increasingly, tech oligarchs around the world target the Wikipedia movement, February 2025 saw the reboot of WikiCredCon, a three-day “unconference” first launched at WCNA at MIT in 2019, and followed with online WikiCred meetups since then.

WikiCredCon 2025 was hosted by the Internet Archive at their headquarters in San Francisco, with attendees discussing how to enhance information credibility on Wikipedia, combat increasing harassment and attempts to dox editors, and build and incorporate citation tools for Wikipedia’s volunteer community. Ideas and projects coming out of WikiCredCon 2025 will continue to be discussed at WikiConference North America 2025 this October (FYI: the deadline for talk submissions is June 1st).

Nearly seventy people attended the three-day, including Wikipedians, Wikimedia Foundation leadership and much of the Internet Archive’s technology team, plus technology journalists from major publications in the United States and Europe. Craig Newmark, who has long supported the Wikipedia movement, also attended WikiCredCon.

Sessions focused on combating increasing harassment and attempts to dox editors, enhancing efforts and systems that protect against disinformation, and building and incorporating citation tools for Wikipedia’s global network of volunteer contributors. Sessions included:

• Disinformation, democracy, and human rights: WMAR’s work with journalists explored Wikimedia Argentina’s experience and challenges in tackling disinformation, in collaboration with media outlets and journalists, during the recent Argentine elections.
• In Looking Beyond Google Custom Search Engines, attendees learned about using search tools besides Google that return a higher percentage of reliable sources.
• Monitoring Citations at Scale explained efforts to make Wikipedia’s citations smarter, more informative, and more resistant to misinformation, and included a brainstorming session to scale up these efforts.
• A Preserving Government Data and Information lightning talk discussed how to preserve public information at a time when federal agencies are being rapidly reconfigured and collapsed.
• Best practices when using AI for fact-checking.
• Editing Wikipedia is not a crime, which highlighted potential threats to Wikipedia editors and tactics and strategies for taking action to keep safe, and to advocate for freedom of speech online.

A joint talk also discussed coordinated harassment when reporting factually – such as editing on Wikipedia – and tactics for responding to it, and keeping safe. The full list of presentations, workshops and lightning talks can be found on the WikiCredCon Meta-Wiki page. 

One attendee remarked that WikiCredCon 2025 was “the right conference with the right purpose at the right time” based on “what’s happening in the world,” given recent attempts to defund Wikipedia and target editors. WikiCredCon 2025 has also helped build and maintain relationships with partner and allied organizations who also focus their energies on “reliable sources” and bolstering online credibility. This included our host, the Internet Archive, which is currently engaged in an ongoing effort to archive and preserve critical, accurate information around scientific research, climate change, public health and more. 

The presence of leadership from the Wikimedia Foundation for the entire three days of WikiCredCon provided many opportunities to strengthen the relationship with the grassroots community.

Read Bluerasberry’s recent Signpost article about WikiCredCon 2025, which includes video interviews with CredCon 2025 participants. 

June 1st deadline for submitting a WCNA 2025 talk

WikiCredCon participants – and anyone else with ideas about how to improve and enhance credibility and editor safety on Wikipedia – are invited to participate in monthly meetups in preparation for a credibility track at the upcoming Wikiconference North America meetup in NYC in October 2025, followed by a future planned WikiCredCon in early 2026.

The programming committee invites anyone interested to submit proposals in English, French or Spanish by the Sunday, June 1st deadline for the conference particularly on topics related to: 

• Credibility and online safety
• The future of Wikipedia
• Content gaps

Credibility and the themes from WikiCredCon are important to programming for this year’s conference. WikiCred presenters and others are encouraged to submit anything you have on topics we covered during WikiCredCon or that you are working on now that is relevant.