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Wikimania 2026 community lightning talks on volunteers and campaigns: transcript

Several Wikimania 2026 lightning talks cover keeping translation volunteers motivated, an Armenia and Côte d'Ivoire collaboration on articles about women, translating pages for the 72 women proposed for the Eiffel Tower, and how Wiki Loves competition juries judge images. A short audience Q&A follows.

Key points

Chapters

  1. 0:00Retaining and motivating translation volunteers
  2. 3:32Armenia and Côte d'Ivoire women collaboration
  3. 9:44Translating the 72 women of the Eiffel Tower
  4. 16:33How juries judge Wiki Loves campaign images
  5. 25:49Audience questions on translation and quality images

Full transcript

0:00And how we manage to keep them as in retaining them and keeping them motivated because working with volunteers is something common for all the Wikipedia chapters. So I think we could share our story. So when we first wanted to invite people, translators, we reached out to the universities and social media posts, and we had a huge response, like about a thousand people reached out in one day saying we are interested, and then languages like African languages I've never heard before.

0:41So it was really interesting and I was fascinated by it, but then few weeks down the line, they started contributing less. And when we did a survey and asked for them why, what happened, it was not that they lost the interest or it was not that they were like finding the Wikipedia interface difficult. It was just that they felt alone and not belonging or no one to talk to when there's something difficult thing happening. So we introduced the internship program where we let them work for six months with someone experienced like a mentor and also someone from Wikipedia as well as someone who has experience in translation.

1:25So they get to work directly with someone and ask even the serious question. They feel like silly but not. And then we started creating a milestone. So every 5,000 words they get a certificate or a burn star or like an email from one of our teams saying thank you for your work and reaching out and ask how are you doing and how are you feeling like that. So this process of applying the milestone system and also certification and appreciation made a huge, huge difference because now our project has active volunteers over 2000 and we are translating all 72 languages and they are not feeling like they don't belong anymore.

2:16so they reached out even for their when they like get a new job saying hey thank you for letting me translate for your program I now have a job be thanks to the experience I got so like personal stories like that then we have created the community where they feel like they belong somewhere and they have someone to reach out to like the team is not someone from far away but a friend so Bye-bye. I wanted to share that with everyone at the Wikipedia community that I think creating a system where you feel appreciated and also feel like you can be silly even if you want to and still you are welcome.

3:02So I think I hope you can also find systems and share with us so we all can come together and welcome volunteers and make them feel welcomed and motivated so that they can keep contributing. And like our space here where we talk to so many people in so many languages, so even in the online environment, I think we should create that outside the physical environment.

3:32So thank you, my time is up. So thank you, everyone. Thank you, Shintia. The next one is Armenia from Wikimedia Armenia and Wikimedia Switzerland. I need your help.

4:16Thank you. Hi everyone, I'm Armine from Wikimedia Armenia and Wikimedia Switzerland. Today I would like to tell you a story. A story not about technology and not about software, but about what happens when a Wikimedia volunteer wants to write a simple email.

4:49This email connected Wikimedia Armenia and Wikimedia Côte d'Ivoire. two Wikimedia communities separated by more than 6,000 kilometers discovered that distance is much smaller than a shared mission. I would like to start with two words, Balev, Bienvenue, different languages, different culture, different continents, but exactly the same Wikimedia values.

5:23Freedom, collaboration, knowledge. At first glance, Armenia and Cote d'Ivoire seem to have nothing in common, yet Wikipedia gives us a reason to work together. This collaboration didn't begin with a grant, it didn't begin with a conference, it began with curiosity. The collaboration actually started with a simple question. During the Women in Wikipedia campaign, I asked myself, what if instead of working alone, we worked together?

5:54I contacted Wikimedia Cote d'Ivoire and simply asked, what if we wrote about each other's women? That single message became an invitation. We all organized editations, but we wanted something different, not just to translate articles, but to discover each other's history, culture, and remarkable women whose stories deserved to be known far beyond their own countries. How? The process was actually very simple. Exchange ideas, exchange article lists, support each other and celebrate every contribution. These numbers matter but they are not the real success.

6:50Together, we worked across Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikicode. Seven Armenian editors created 26 articles about women from Côte d'Ivoire, and Hawaiian editors created 29 articles about women in Armenia. Images were uploaded, data improved, thousands of readers came to read those articles. These numbers may look small compared to Wikipedia as whole, but every single article represents someone whose story became visible. What we really achieved, as I told you, not numbers, curiosity, trust, friendship. That's it. That was the relationships. Behind every article were conversation, WhatsApp messages, telegram chats, weekly discussions, emails, Zoom meetings. We solved problems together. We encouraged each other. By the end of the

7:50campaign, we were not just partner communities anymore. We became just friends. Before this collaboration, Kod Bivak was simply a country on a map for every Armenian editor and Armenia was a simple country on a map for them as Today we know each other's stories, we know each other's volunteers. I would like to leave with one thought. Wikipedia connects people before it connects knowledge.

8:21When volunteers trust each other, knowledge grows naturally. This collaboration reflects this year's Wikimedia theme. Freedom, because knowledge crossed borders. Equality, because together we amplified women's voices. And reliability, because collaboration made our articles stronger. I would like to leave you with one invitation. If your community is planning its next campaign, don't ask only what should we write, ask what could we write, with whom we could write it with. Because our collaboration shows that Wikipedia becomes stronger when communities work together. Every partnership helps to reduce the gender gap. Every shared article builds trust.

9:12and sometimes one simple email is enough to start something bigger than you ever imagined. Thank you. Thank you, Armenia. I believe the next presentation is about women and Eiffel Tower. Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

9:44Hello, it seems a bit embarrassing to be talking about the Eiffel Tower in English, not French, but this was a translation project to get everything into English. So, my name's Keryl, it's a weird pronunciation, I'll answer to variations, and I started off this project back in February. Did you know that when the Eiffel Tower was built, the names of 72 men of science were inscribed on it, chosen by Gustav Wiefel. It was to celebrate the 100 years of the French Revolution, so they had to be living since 1789.

10:18Now, at that time, gender parity wasn't really on the cards, so basically, despite the fact it was nicknamed La Dame d'Affaires, the Lady of Iron, there isn't a single woman's name on there, not even that of Sophie Germain, who is a mathematician whose work into the elasticity of metals actually underpins the engineering for building the tower itself now in 1913 someone actually noticed that maybe she should have been named and called out the misogyny then which is kind of quite early um however moving on swiftly until 2021 when a tour guide working at the tour d'ifel uh was asked by a tourist where's Marie Curie.

10:59And he looked at the names, looked them up and realised there were no women included. Now, I'm going to cut a very long story short because I don't have much time. But basically, it led to quite a lot of research, projects and collaboration within France. There was a new story in January 2026 when Amidalgo, the mayor of Paris, announced the potential names that had been proposed. 72 amazing women, quite a few of whom you've probably never heard of. I tripped over the story in early February, and a friend sent me a link to one of the papers and said, this sounds up your street. And I thought, oh, brilliant, I'll just go and add this citation onto their English Wikipedia pages.

11:39At that point, 23 of the women didn't have an English Wikipedia page at all. Quite a few of the English pages were really quite bad, and I discovered, looking at the French pages, quite a few of the women hadn't had a page even in French until the announcement was made. So, I went, right, a challenge, and I started to translate pages, and then very, very soon realised, after doing Alice Solier, fascinating woman, look her up, there was absolutely no way I was going to be able to cope with doing all that work myself, so it needed a collaborative approach.

12:10And I got in touch with Wikimedia UK. I'm a volunteer trainer for them. And the marvellous Lucy Hiney, who's in the audience here, and RuPaul Carrier, helped me pull together a bit of an approach within the English Wikipedia movement in Britain. Helped me set up an event page. We set up a target of 500 edits. We've kind of gone a bit over that at the moment. And we also set up a dashboard. Ignore the scribble on the end of the purple. I can't work out how to get rid of comments uploads that aren't relevant to the project. And we started to edit. So if you'd like to carry on and join in, there's still plenty of work to be done, although we have now got pages in English, and pretty good pages actually, for all 72 women.

12:54And Women in Red became a key part of this. Hi Rosie. And really helped to kind of kick this into process. Do join in, and if you can translate into any other languages as well, that would be brilliant. One of the amazing things that came out of this is that when I put this proposal through to Wikimania, I got an email from René Pigier, who's in the audience today, waving there nicely, and his mother is actually one of the women who are proposed to have their names on there.

13:27So this is to honour Michelle Schatzmann, who was an amazing mathematician and a wiki editor herself as well. So it just kind of keeps coming around in circles. It's been brilliant. So, this was fun. So, now, there are pages, decent ones for all the women. They are also in French, German, sudden rush of Arabic translations last week, which is fantastic, and a few new pages in Igbo as well, which is the main language in Nigeria. There's a template and category linking the 72 women. They're also on their birth and death dates and surname and first name pages. Most have images. One or two we're still struggling with. If you can help, please, please do.

14:04And 12 editors ultimately registered. Quite a few other people dipped in and out. I did a lot of work, but in particular, I pick up Victula's Fismatlov, who's a brand new editor who got involved because of this project, and Rayhan, who's really good on the maths, which is frankly the bit I don't get, and really clarifying and qualifying the quality of the representation of that on the pages. As of this morning, and it may well have gone up, 2,274 edits, but, yeah, still plenty to do. new languages to come. So if you were to try and do something again yourself, this is a quick idea what you could have a look at, what you might need to do. I'm not going to run through it, I'm running out of time, but basically collaboration is the key, really.

14:44You can't do it on your own. So idiot's guide here on basically, you know, how to go about it and do it. There's a poster upstairs if you want to go and have a look. And thank you very much. And I've included my very favourite Wikipedia page I've ever worked on there, Madame Sacchi, who in her 60s was still tightrobing around Paris in the 1850s. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. So, unfortunately, we have two presenters who didn't come here for different reasons. And if you have questions, I will be happy that our wonderful presenters can answer them. Sorry, we have a new presenter, new speaker. Est-ce qu'il peut utiliser son ordinateur pour les slides?

16:33They said no, okay. Hello everyone, good afternoon. So I want to talk to you about how we judge and building the trust in Wikimedia campaign evaluation.

17:12So you might be aware of lots of WikiloveSax campaigns. Every year there are lots of campaigns and lots of photographs, videos are uploaded to Commons. But I want to talk to you about the thought process behind the jury who judges the best images, best media in the Wikimedia Commons. that are also very popular in Wikimedia space and also outside the Wikimedia space news articles, sites, newspaper agencies, blogs and even the Wikimedia Foundation blogs I want you all to look at this image and think about this image what you like good what didn't you like good so if anyone knows what it is Yeah, I have wrote what it is. So it's an image which has got the first prize in Wikiloft's monument in 2025. There were nine juries for this evaluation and I was also one of them. This image was of Direk Gachin. It's in Iran. It's a monument and it was captured by Hussain Porek Behrian.

18:30so it's a wonderful shot you can see and no wonder why it is the very first and it won't so Wikilove's monuments is an international competition and it's one of the largest photography competition in the world Guinness World Record also lists it as a largest photography competition and it's also like a featured Wikilove sex campaign in Commons there are lots of other competitions like wiki loves monuments wiki loves folklore wiki science competition wiki loves birds forts etc and there are lots of images coming like thousands of lakhs of images and every image is being judged by few sites of juries like they might be from one nation or from different part of the globe so My name is Dev Jadia and I am from India and I was the jury for a few of the competitions like Wikilove's Folklore 2026 International and Wikilove's Monuments 2025 and Wikilove's Birds in the Philippines, Wikilove's Folklore in India Edition and Wikilove's Science Competition where I was the jury coordinator, non-voting.

19:48so the image you have just seen before the slides there was a feedback from the community you might have been aware of the quality images or featured images these are some of the community criteria which ranks of the images like according to some guidelines like is the quality is good or is it only the noble images in particular category so few months back that particular image is decline for a quality image process you might be wondering like it's a one like number one image and it also got the price for Wikileaks monuments but why it got a decline for quality image so this is why I am here I want to talk you about why there are two processes in this movement like the same volunteers force that is judging the image as a jury and the same volunteering force that is judging the quality images but there are

20:51Different criteria. So you can see, this was the comment. You can also look at the comment in the quality image. The blurred bush in the foreground spoils it very much. So the moment I ask you to like just see this image and have a thought process in your mind, like what did you like it about and what did you not like about this image. So there is a bush in the foreground. I also didn't like the bush personally. and i also oppose this bush but because of my opposition it got ranked number one because i was outvoted there were nine juries and i do not want to say like they were wrong but i am just saying this is how our system works i said the same thing other juries told it like it's a depth it is creating more depth and it is giving a depth effect because bush is there and

21:51And the monument is behind it. So there were different opinions of different people. Then it's on the Google Meet, there was a voting and I was outvoted. And it let this image to be number one. This is the same thing. Now quality image is having some different guidelines to nominate the image. Like it checks the technical quality. Like whether the image is having the two megapixel of quality or not. Is it blurry, is it noisy, is it having the right saturation, shadows, highlights, everything.

22:30then after the volunteers check the image and they give the tag of quality image but wiki loves monuments and other wiki loves x competition we not only check the quality we check the originality we check the usefulness and we check like is it novel or is it usable in the encyclopedia or not because we are in working for the encyclopedia so both were right and you can imagine one image that won the wikiloft monuments international prize could also be declined by a quality image nomination so this could only be possible so what is the quality like this is the same image same process then how we are measuring the quality The comments wrote down why. We didn't. There is one sentence that is available in quality image, but we are reasoning on Google Meet and we are not writing how we are defining a quality image or how we are judging the best quality image.

23:41The winner of this photograph can read like why he lost but he cannot determine like why he won this. So the conflict is not the problem, not the people, not the systems but we forgot. Like we didn't document the things, we didn't, there is no standard way of defining in Wikilove's X competitions like how we are measuring the things because lots, every time there are set of experience juries and new site of newcomers so there is no calibration between them.

24:21So I am not asking to develop new tools, to develop new policies or to assign new site of permissions to anyone. I am asking like publish your criteria, document your shortlist and calibrate before you score. so these are the simple three tasks which Wikiloft X campaigns needs to focus on Calibration, medicine, and grant review. So, even when you are boarding the flight, you might have coming from the flight.

24:54So, Aerosmith will say that. Like, please listen to the instructions very carefully, even if you are a frequent flyer. So, every jury is an experienced jury. So, the calibration is what it is needed. Because one jury or some set of juries might conclude some of the extremes like they might give positive votes to all the images or the negative votes but these images is what portray our Wikimedia Commons and our image in the global outside ecosystem like what is the benchmark we are like our volunteers are giving to the encyclopedia so does the bush helps or does it hurts you can find my email and if you have any suggestions or you want to build something, I am available here for the whole week.

25:49Thank you. Thank you, Dev. Thank you. So, no time for questions, so if you have any questions for all these speakers, our wonderful speakers. Hi, I had a quick question about the… Two-country project between Armenia and Cote d'Ivory. What language did articles get written in and how did the translation process work? So, as I told, two communities collaborated. It was online collaboration.

26:23The Armenian editors wrote articles in Armenian about the women from Cote d'Ivory and Ivorian editors created articles about Armenian women in French. Most of the sources, I assume, were the opposite language? They used the sources they found in the translating articles. Extra sources for them were difficult to find.

26:54They used only the sources they found in Wikipedia because it was like not creating process but only translating. That's why they used the sources they have in the original language. thanks thank you another question My question is about the quality image tag. So my understanding is that like an image isn't just selected as like a quality image. There's like a tag applied to it. It's a quality image specifically because it has a good example of proportion or it's selected a quality image because it's a good example of exposure or you know all of these different tags.

27:50So the bush may disqualify it from one category, but couldn't it still be considered a quality image for other reasons? Yeah, it could be. That's what I was saying. There are two systems. The quality image is also being reviewed by some volunteers, and the jury is being also done by some site of volunteers. There are two systems, but one system is saying this should be number one, and one volunteer is saying the bushes spoiling the things so that's what i am saying like we should need to finalize like and recalibrate once again for this because we are also consuming lots of data with thousands of likes of images and administrators are also fed up with the images like people are uploading a same set of images in these competitions to win the prizes.

28:44So, but the quality image, the review that was written, it's only by a single volunteer, and it isn't achieved right now. So, if anyone else likes the image, so they can just review it, and they can just promote that image. So, it might be a quality image. So, are you saying, like, I could decide that it is a quality image? Yes. You can also decide it. But if you are wrong, you will be... Yeah, your comment is challenged.

29:17So there are not one single volunteer. There are lots of quality image reviewers. So every comment is challenged. If a newcomer is saying a bad image is a good image, so other will challenge like this is not a good image. Thank you. Thank you. OK, I don't see any questions. So thank you for being here and enjoy Wikimania. Thank you.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania 2026 – Community Lightning talk series I.webm by Fulani215, Anna Canatan, Armineaghayan, Ceryl Evans / MumphingSquirrel, Dev Jadiya, Chinthi Dissanayake (2026-07-22), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.