TLDR: WMF has to make hard choices, but we as a community, of which WMF is only one part, do not have to make false choices - we can try to do a lot of things.
On Wed, Jul 8, 2026 at 1:41 AM Dimitar Zagorski < [email protected]> wrote: > It seems to me that we have to make a few uncomfortable choices before we > start solving this. > > Do we accept that our audience will shrink permanently and there is no way > around it? Then we could embrace the role of a top source for LLMs and > "ground truth". We would stop obsessing about the trends and focus on how > to maintain a healthy community and funding. > > Or do we want to fight against shrinking audiences? Then, in my mind, we > would need to be very aggressive and start using some tools and > technologies that we have always been very sceptical of. This, I guess, > would include things like content optimisation, an AI chat, major > investment in versatile social media channels and various new apps that > deliver content under our brands to specific audiences. > WMF, with large but finite resources, reputational concerns, etc etc will need to make hard choices. Maybe not exactly these hard choices, but some sort of hard choices. **We as a broad movement with many members do not have to make this choice. We, the movement, can do both.** We can work to become a trusted source of ground truth; and work with new sources of traffic (like TikTok or YT or GLAMs or arxiv or all of the above) to drive traffic. Most of the "choices" ahead of us can be handled this way - we're tens of thousands of people, dozens of peer movement organizations, and thousands of knowledge-oriented fellow travelers. When someone says "we can only do one or the other" we should, as much as possible, reject that false binary and instead seek to find more resources, run more experiments, do more. This will be easy, because open means we, the community, can just do stuff! we, the community, don’t have to ask permission! We can experiment, build, talk to each other as peers, expanding what works and dropping what doesn't. And we now have tooling that lets our best and most creative move faster than ever before. And at the same time it will be hard. Frankly, we have let that open/BOLD habit atrophy, so we will need changes in practice and attitude. Changes will have to include: (generalizations ahead, there are counter-examples to everything I say below but they are exceptions): - community members need to stop thinking “step 0 is get funding from WMF” for every single activity. We need to get back to our roots as a scrappy, grassroots movement, which means both creativity in getting funding (wikicheese!) and creativity in building without funding. (I am keenly aware that this has equity impacts, and we need to be as thoughtful as possible about that, but we can't let that stop us from reinvigorating volunteering.) - WMF needs to actively tell potential partners “open knowledge is in an all-hands-on-deck moment—so don’t treat WMF as the sole player”. Too many potential funders and partners look at WMF and think “We fund Wikimedia by funding WMF”/“WMF is the only way to partner with Wikipedia”. (I don’t think this is WMF’s fault, to be clear; it’s a natural pattern for funders to fall into.) But WMF needs to move from passively letting that happen, and towards actively disabusing funders and partners of that habit. All those partners need to get more comfortable partnering with chapters, individuals, or even doing things themselves. - We need a culture of BOLD experimentation. The choice you’re saying we need to make, Dimi, would take a year or more and never really be settled. (It’s taking months just for the WMF to grapple with this internally, much less the movement as a whole.) So we need to as much as possible do “all of the above”, and build back our muscles of sharing experiments and learnings - including failing without fear, and sharing what failed. (I sincerely think one of the best things someone could do right now is become the Molly of AI+wiki, doing steady, consistent news-gathering and synthesis on what is working and what isn’t.) - Scale of impact is important, but it isn’t everything. Sometimes we’ll have to build things without knowing if they’ll scale, or even perhaps knowing that they won’t scale (eg Depths of Wikipedia is one of the best community-builders we have even though it has “only” a few million followers). “That’s good but it won’t scale to enwiki” can never be allowed to be a blocker for anyone. If the experiment is actually great, then we’ll figure out a way to get it onto enwiki. Or not! That shouldn’t stop people. I’m sure there are others, and like I said, there are plenty of counterexamples to each of these. But they’re big patterns I see after a decade on the sidelines, and we need to unlearn them. >
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