Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Conference Fund/WikiCredCon 2025:Reliable Sources/Final Report

Conference Fund Final Report

Report Status: Under review

Due date: 01 April 2025

Funding program: Conference Fund

Report type: Final

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General information

Title of proposal: WikiCredCon 2025: Reliable Sources
Username of applicant: User:Ocaasi
Name of organization: N/A
Amount awarded: 55250
Amount spent: 55360.76 USD, 55360.76 USD

Part 1: Understanding your work

1. Did your event have any impact that you did not expect, positive or negative?

Craig Newmark’s participation at WikiCredCon helped in many ways.* Newmark, whose philanthropic efforts have long focused on strengthening the reliability of the online information ecosystem, including support for Wikipedia community initiatives and the initial WikiCred grant, did a fireside chat at WikiCredCon 2025. Newmark’s presence indicates the relevance and importance of WikiCredCon, his personal investment in the ongoing WikiCred initiative and of the Wikipedia movement in general. Newmark’s participation also helped attract media coverage and increased additional attendance at our event. It was also a nice, if impromptu way for WikiCredCon to help connect the dots for the Internet Archive, which had been trying to engage with Newmark for some time.

Presence of national and international press highlighted the importance of Wikipedia as a platform and as a reliable source of information.* The organizing team was also encouraged by the interest of U.S. and international media at WikiCredCon, including an investigative reporter from The Verge, Platformer’s Casey Newton and a technology correspondent from German news magazine Die Zeit, who then published an article that discussed the threat to Wikipedia. While there has been regular reporting over the past year about challenges and threats to Wikipedia editors and to the platform itself, we did not expect national and international media to remain for the whole weekend.

Attendance of senior Wikimedia Foundation staff helped build bridges and energize the event.* We did not expect the interest and engagement of such a wide swath of senior WMF from across the leadership, including the WMF general counsel. Their generous commitment of time and energy not only helped attendees refine the current incarnation of the WikiCred initiative, but also was good for strengthening ties with the broader U.S. Wikipedia volunteer community.

We did not expect WMF leadership to prefer round tables over a plenary session with panel discussions.* This preference underlined the care around the changing political and media environment. Unlike in past years, Wikimedia Foundation leadership declined to discuss technical, policy and legal and other topics in an “open” panel discussion format with WikiCredCon participants, which was unexpected. Instead, WMF preferred small round tables that followed Chatham House Rules. This indicates the shifting potential threats that the Foundation and Wikipedia as a platform and as a community all face – the same challenges WikiCredCon is intended to address.

We were surprised by Wikipedia Argentina’s participation, which offered many insights for the English-language community.* The trip from Argentina to the Bay Area is a long one, and there is increasing friction when entering the United States. However, Wikipedia Argentina’s participation provided valuable insights about how the Wikipedia community can keep safe and preserve and protect information credibility.

WikiCredCon 2025 also helped resolve immediate, concrete problems.* The event brought together many people from across Wikimedia communities, each with different, complementary interests and expertise around “reliable sources” to discuss challenges. The Domain-Name Property Proposal in Wikidata that emerged from this conference, is a step forward in mapping source reliability datasets with Wikidata concepts. Due to the grassroots, procedure-based culture of Wikimedia communities, it can be challenging and time-consuming to propose and ultimately change how things work. However, by gathering knowledgeable people together in a room, it was possible for the presenter to explain the problem he wanted to solve, and then move quickly forwards towards a resolution.

We were able to almost immediately start planning a WikiCred track at WikiConference North America following the event.* Finally, organizers were glad to almost immediately receive an invitation by the WikiConference North American User Group to launch a WikiCred track at WikiConference North America (WCNA) 2025, followed by a commitment to plan a yearly WikiCredCon at the Internet Archive starting in 2026. We were uncertain how much interest there might be coming out of WikiCredCon 2025, and the event has demonstrated there is a critical mass of people from across Wikimedia and other communities to participate in this initiative going forward.

2. What do you think will be the long term impact of this conference?

Sustained, focused energy for the WikiCred initiative.* 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.” The first WikiCredCon took place in 2019, but it was time for a more sustained community. Thanks to the interest and enthusiasm of attendees, combined with the planned WikiCred track at WCNA means that there is an opportunity to grow a community of editors and other collaborators and supporters to better tackle issues related to misinformation, disinformation, and missing information on Wikipedia as a platform, and across other Wikimedia communities.

Stronger relationships between the Foundation and the community.* The presence of senior leadership from the Wikimedia Foundation for the entire three days of WikiCredCon provided many opportunities to strengthen the relationship with the grassroots community.

New and stronger relationships with like-minded groups and organizations.* The success of 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 includes our host, the Internet Archive, which is doing Herculean work, 24/7 on archiving and preserving critical, accurate information around scientific research, climate change, public health and more. Not only was the event an opportunity to bring relevant representatives from the Wikimedia Foundation together with Internet Archive technologists and leadership to discuss, in depth, current priorities, but also Wikipedia volunteers and subject matter experts from outside of the movement.

A WikiCred track at WCNA 2025.* The success of the event followed subsequent WikiCred online meetups throughout spring and summer 2025, a formal WikiCred track at WCNA 2025, and another WikiCredCon in February 2026 means there is energy, popular support, creativity and focus for preserving, protecting and preserving information reliability across the Wikipedia platform.

3. Would you say that your work improved participants’ ability to apply new skills and knowledge?

Yes

3a. If yes, please describe how and why you think this was successful. Please describe why you think this is the case.

Attendees learned to apply new skills and knowledge during more than twenty presentations, panels, talks and round tables that would encourage and empower them to edit more articles on Wikipedia, and also enhance the reliability of the platform.

For example, the WikiProject:Women's Health workshop provided participants with the knowledge and skills to evaluate the credibility of content on Wikipedia and across Wikimedia related to women’s health, including:

> Creating and translating articles related to women's health misinformation

> Creating redirects for redlinked articles that probably exist in an alternate name (talk included an article list)

> Creating a dynamic list for watching the quality of abortion articles by country (the existing list is static at present) and then updating the list with the corresponding Wikidata item.

> Overlaying the byte count of abortion by country articles on the world map.

> Assessing the importance levels of women's health articles from this list.

> Assessing image credibility on Wikimedia Commons: Are the images given on articles in representative, educational, appropriate, and recent?

> Modeling and uploading maternal mortality ratio on WikiData for countries of the world.

Sessions at WikiCredCon 2025 where attendees gained specific knowledge and skills 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. Attendees came away with knowledge about potential threats to Wikipedians, and best practices for keeping safe.

> 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.

> 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.

> Building civic integrity tools to combat mis- and disinformation. 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.

Finally, In the initial Community Engagement Survey carried out in early fall 2024 in preparation for our event proposal, several respondents highlighted the importance of bringing relevant people together to build on each other's work, combine efforts, and strengthen strategies. This key community objective was achieved during WikiCredCon 2025, which brought together:

> Wikipedians who have been working on credibility issues, or who have been working on adjacent issues and want to get involved

> Outside industry people who work on topics that depend on Wikipedia’s sourcing, notably staff and leadership from our host, the Internet Archive

> Outside researchers who work on the reliability of sources

> Wikimedia Foundation and Enterprise staff

> Craig Newmark, a key supporter of Wikipedia and online information integrity

WikiCredCon attendees, including Wikipedia volunteers and the Wikimedia Foundation, were able to spend several days in close contact with Internet Archive staff, discussing the Archive’s efforts to preserve and improve reliability on the platform and learn about ways to collaborate.

4. Please use this space to upload media and other files that help tell your story and impact. You can also provide links to them.

Field to type in URLs.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCredCon_2025 https://www.wikicred.org/wikicredcon-2025 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/domain_name https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiProject_Women%27s_Health https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Knowledge_gaps_in_women%27s_health/Missing_articles https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCredCon_2025/Schedule/Vic_Sfriso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Advanced_source_searching#Custom_search_engines https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCredCon_2025/Schedule/Jake_Orlowitz_James_Hare_and_Kevin_Payravi https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCredCon_2025/Schedule/Gaute_Kokkvoll https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1s8JTgzjsEWagS5T8w0OAyMZpS9WZdpT7frLVxNLy8a4/edit https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCredCon_2025 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f6evS8bnIHdseSdHAaYpMRX3FOJIB0ZT/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sI1JkPeMo-h4qTc-QBn1NQAkWGbvpuEB/view?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ykg9m4QDnMQvAnYKUH7aQ5cHO6qq04ubxcZ-DDB3bws/edit?usp=sharing

5. To what extent do you agree with the following statements regarding the work carried out with the support of this Fund? You can choose “not applicable” if your work does not relate to these goals.

Our efforts during the Fund period have helped to...
A. Bring in participants from underrepresented groups
B. Create a more inclusive and connected culture in our community	Agree
C. Develop content about underrepresented topics/groups
D. Develop content from underrepresented perspectives	Strongly agree
E. Encourage the retention of editors	Agree
F. Encourage the retention of organizers	Strongly agree

6. Please share resources that would be useful to share with other Wikimedia organizations so that they can learn from, adapt or build upon your work. For instance, guides, training material, presentations, work processes, or any other material the team has created to document and transfer knowledge about your work and can be useful for others. Please share any specific resources that you are creating, adapting/contextualizing in ways that are unique to your context (i.e. training material).

Upload Documents and Files

Here is an additional field to type in URLs.

N/A

7. Is there anything else you would like to share about how your efforts helped to bring in participants and/or build out content, particularly for underrepresented groups?

Vic Sfriso from Wikimedia Argentina provided a global perspective on challenges and threats to Wikipedians, and how to keep safe. Notably, Sfriso’s perspective centered LGBTQI+ safety considerations when editing Wikipedia.

Presentations by Netha Hussein, Mary Mark Ockerbloom, Jamie Flood, Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight and others also centered the need to ensure women and women’s issues foundational when addressing reliability on Wikipedia and Wikimedia platforms. Notably, there can be a deficit of reliable information around women’s health on Wikipedia. Also, due to systemic and cultural issues within the community of Wikipedia editors, It can also be harder to create, publish, update and preserve articles about notable women. It can also simply be challenging to “be a woman on Wikipedia.” Various workshops, talks and informal discussions throughout the weekend highlighted these issues, and identified concrete steps women and their allies can take to address them.

Part 2: Your main learning

8. Were there any major challenges or things you found difficult that you would like to share? What would you do differently next time?

We needed to consider how open the conference should be.* Our main learning is that we must adjust our typical standard of openness in an era when Wikipedia is under threat – during the planning process, venue security was very carefully considered, and then discussed with our hosts, the Internet Archive. Given the shifting political and media climate, we need to be more careful in future with Q&A’s. The Wikimedia movement as a whole needs to be more careful about community events in North America given the current political context, and including setting up press training for WCNA 2025.

Next time, there needs to be more unstructured time.* While there were comments from attendees that the “one track, one topic” approach “worked well,” and that there was “the perfect number of people, perfect mix of people (Wikimedians vs non Wikimedians) to build a network,” next time we would likely provide more unstructured time over the course of the conference. A common observation among organizers and at least two survey respondents was that there “was a packed schedule with very little break; it’s worth considering having more unstructured parts of the program next time.”

Generally, it would have been better to have had fewer talks and structured workshops, and also to have limited the evening sessions to just one night.* This would allow participants more time to consider all they learned during the conference, and would also help them preserve energy for the Sunday “unconference” part of the schedule.

WikiCred as a group needs to do more, and more often.* An additional challenge with the WikiCred initiative itself is that we must adopt a quicker and more regular cadence of meetups, online and off, and collaborations in order to keep up due to a rapidly changing threat environment for Wikipedia as a platform and as a community. These challenges are both political and technological, and are always evolving.

9. Was there any non-financial support that the Wikimedia Foundation could have provided that would have better supported you in achieving your goals?

Quite happily, the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) indeed provided a great deal of non-financial support that helped this conference be successful. Notably, twelve WMF representatives made time to travel to San Francisco to attend WikiCredCon and spend three days with conference attendees.

The opportunities for relationship building, informally sharing knowledge and considering shared approaches to “reliable sources” was invaluable to conference participants. Notably, WMF reps also participated in two in-camera round tables where they answered detailed questions about Foundation policy and strategy around AI and other topics, as well as plans for the future in the context of information integrity and credibility.

10. What would you recommend on a local and/or regional level as the best next step to leverage your success and momentum?

Increase the cadence of WikiCred activities.* The WikiCred initiative needs to increase the cadence of activities in order to build on the energy and momentum generated by WikiCredCon 2025, and also to keep on top of the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies that rely on Wikipedia as a “reliable source” of training data, that are impacting Wikipedia as a platform, and that are transforming how people access information online. A goal coming out of WikiCredCon 2025 is to host an annual series of hackathons and unconferences, with regular online and in-person meetups throughout the year, likely in conjunction with existing Wikimedia events.

Since 2019 WikiCred has conducted activities, including funding and incubating a series of microgrants, and some activities at the two post-covid WCNA meetups. However, WikiCred as a grassroots community activity was mostly dormant in the year leading up to WikiCredCon 2025 this past February. We are now switching to a higher, more regular cadence of WikiCred online meetups, starting on Wednesday, March 26, 2025. There will be monthly meetups once again convened by Credibility Coalition in spring and summer 2025, with an aim of developing a robust WikiCred track at WCNA 2025 in October.

Following WCNA 2025, WikiCred will return to a monthly online meeting cadence with a goal of continuing to collaborate on and refine WikiCred projects in the lead up to the next WikiCredCon in February 2026.

11. Please add any 3 operational recommendations for future events organizers.

Have conference attendees share lodging during your event.* The organizing team has convened many successful events besides WikiCredCon over the years that have brought people together to form connections, share knowledge, ideate and go on to collaborate and build. One suggestion for future event organizers is to, when feasible, arrange shared accommodations, typically through Airbnb or a similar service. While arranging hotel lodging is simple and efficient for event organizers, shared accommodation creates opportunities for speakers, attendees and presenters to form bonds, share ideas and launch projects following the end of the project.

Catering is fundamental to the success of your event.* A second recommendation is to carefully consider event catering. A key goal of convening an event is to build energy, enthusiasm and excitement, and eating good food is a key part of this process. Too often conference food is boring and bland, and oftentimes there isn’t enough of it. Poor catering detracts from the overall experience and memorability of an event, and can actually demotivate participants to continue to collaborate afterwards.

Choose your venue for impact, not just for logistics.* Finally, choosing the right venue is an obvious recommendation, but it should be carefully considered using different lenses besides venue cost and geographic location. In this case, we were lucky to be hosted by the Internet Archive in San Francisco. While the Archive’s space is compelling as a setting, convening WikiCredCon in their San Francisco headquarters allowed conference participants to closely interact over several days with Internet Archive staff. Enjoying the Internet Archive as a venue also meant we were also able to attract key technologists, researchers, thinkers and leaders to WikiCredCon, including members of the Wikimedia Foundation but also supporters such as Craig Newmark.

This gathering of like-minded people from different communities and initiatives meant opportunities for not only cross-pollination and potential shared projects, but also the chance to build a real sense of community and shared purpose as we all work to address credibility and information reliability online.

Part 3: Metrics

12. Open Metrics reporting

In your application, you defined some open metrics and targets (goals). You will see a table like the one below with your metric in the title and the target you set in your proposal automatically filled in.

Open Metrics Summary
Open Metrics	Description	Target	Results	Comments	Methodology
Community Focus	Total Attendees plus Total Event Satisfaction Score regarding Importance and Focus of the Convening	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Foundation Support	Separate private survey of Foundation staff to see if this convening impacted their strategic goals or annual planning after 6 months.	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Political Bias	Number of critical mailing list emails, news articles, or social media posts critiquing the event as 'leftist'	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Next Steps	Number of participants who started or continued work related to credibility and misinformation after the convening within 6 months (survey).	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
Deeper collaboration	Increased attendance at CredCo and WD:CRAP meetings, increased signups to MisInfoCon list, survey results showing increased identification with someone who prioritizes the importance of the topics covered at the convening.	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

13. Were there any metrics in your proposal that you could not collect or that you had to change?

No

13a. If you have any difficulties collecting data to measure your results, please describe and add any recommendations on how to address them in the future. Also mention why you felt you had to change some metrics.

N/A

14. Please indicate if you applied any of the following survey and registration tools. Please select all that apply.

1. Standard Registration Form, 2. Post-event participant survey

14a. Please share the result(s) with us, provide the link(s) or summarize the main result(s) and insight(s) from them.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f6evS8bnIHdseSdHAaYpMRX3FOJIB0ZT/view

14b. If you used other forms, please share them with us, as these forms might be useful for others to use.

Part 4: Financial reporting and compliance

15. & 16. Please state the total amount spent in your local currency.

55360.76 USD

17. Please state the total amount spent in USD.

55360.76 USD

18. Please report the funds received and spending in the currency of your fund.

Upload a financial report file.

Please provide a link to your financial reporting document.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17VlkATMDVJLOtyu6Mf52Yt_3dixAhsfhem0KuTB3QZY/edit?usp=sharing

As required in the fund agreement, please report any deviations from your fund proposal here. Note that, among other things, any changes must be consistent with our WMF mission, must be for charitable purposes as defined in the grant agreement, and must otherwise comply with the grant agreement.

19. If you have not already done so in your budget report, please provide information on changes in the budget in relation to your original proposal.

Our largest expenses were travel and catering, and staff costs for administration (planning and convening WikiCredCon) and communications. While travel costs remained the same as projected, we moved some funds to catering and to admin and communications.

20. Do you have any unspent funds from the Fund?

No

20a. Please list the amount and currency you did not use and explain why.

N/A

20b. What are you planning to do with the underspent funds?

N/A

20c. Please provide details of hope to spend these funds.

N/A

21. Are you in compliance with the terms outlined in the fund agreement?

Yes

22. Are you in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations as outlined in the grant agreement?

Yes

23. Are you in compliance with provisions of the United States Internal Revenue Code (“Code”), and with relevant tax laws and regulations restricting the use of the Funds as outlined in the grant agreement? In summary, this is to confirm that the funds were used in alignment with the WMF mission and for charitable/nonprofit/educational purposes.

Yes

24. If you have additional recommendations or reflections that don’t fit into the above sections, please write them here.

As discussed, we have not included "metrics" in this report as metrics were not included as part of our application. Please let us know if you require any details, though!