Following the closure of the nomination process for candidates, online ballots for the December 2025 ArbCom elections have opened on November 18, with the Arbitration Committee looking to seat nine members for the upcoming term. Eligible voters can cast their vote through the SecurePoll system until December 1 – see the October 20 and 10 November 10 issues for more.

In other election news, the call for candidates in the December 2025 admin elections will take place (November 25–December 1), before moving to the discussion phase (December 4–8) and, finally, the voting phase (December 9–15). – O

Users Bobby Shabangu and Michał Buczyński have been elected to the WMF Board of Trustees as part of the 2025 elections. Shabangu was elected in the second round of the STV ranked vote, having collected 2,258 preferences, whereas Buczyński, who had originally won 1,298 votes, was elected in the fifth round. The two new Trustees will be appointed at the next Board meeting in December 2025.

The latest BoT elections went ahead as expected despite a recent controversy involving former candidates Ravan Al-Taie and Lane Rasberry, who the Board had both removed from the slate for the elections before the start of the community voting period. The BoT faced criticism for their unprecedented decision, with Board member Victoria Doronina later announcing that she had suspended herself from most of her activities until the end of the year.

See both the Special report and Interview sections from our October issue for further context on the elections and the controversy surrounding them. – O, B

The Wikimedia Foundation has published its audit report (in US dollars) covering the period from July 2024 to June 2025. Highlights include record revenue, investments in product and technology, funding advocacy and awareness for Wikimedia projects, limited internal expense growth, and improved revenue diversification.

Key stats (rounded) from page 6 of the report:

• Total operating support and revenue: $209m (up from $185m)
• Total operating expenses: $191m (up from $178m)
• Net assets at end of year: $297m (up from $272m)

For frequently asked questions see the FAQ on Meta-Wiki. Additional questions can be asked on the FAQ's talk page. See also the Wikimedia Foundation's blog post.

Reporting on Wikimedia Enterprise is included in the audit report, but there is also a separate report for Wikimedia Enterprise, which states: "We are pleased to share that not only does this report show the first complete year of profitability, but even more importantly, that earned revenue has now fully repaid the initial investment in the project from previous fiscal years."

The Wikimedia Endowment became its own standalone 501(c)(3) in September 2023 and now files its own audit report, which will become available in a few months' time. – AK

Back in June, the Community Affairs Committee (CAC) of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees (BoT) had assigned the Sister Projects Task Force (SPTF) to "update and implement a procedure for assessing the lifecycle" both of a proposed Wikimedia sister project, meta:Wikispore, and an existing project, Wikinews. Two separate public consultations followed, with discussions continuing until August 15.

On November 25, BoT Chair-elected member Lorenzo Losa published the results of the consultations and the Task Force's consequent recommendations to the Board, which you can read in full on the Meta page. In summary, the Board was advised to keep the current technical setup of Wikispore, and consider options to integrate the project in the Wikimedia Incubator.

No immediate changes should be made to Wikispore's current technical setup. The current setup is functioning and supports ongoing experimentation, and bringing Wikispore into the WMF technical setup at this point of time would add necessary technical constraints that would not well support Wikispore's evolution.

Exploring options to more closely align Wikispore with the Wikimedia Incubator is encouraged, potentially as a dedicated subdomain or pilot project for a fixed period (e.g., two years). This would simplify processes and allow lessons learned in Incubator to inform Wikispore's trajectory, if this can be done while not restricting Wikispore's growth.

Initially proposed by user Pharos in 2019, Wikispore is a project that is intended as an extension of the already existing meta:Wikimedia Incubator, in order to develop and test in a "safe space" any of the other proposed sister Wikis that are consistent with the copyright and NPOV principles of the WMF.

On the other hand, the Task Force proposed to cease the activity of Wikinews permanently, while encouraging "exploration of new paradigms for Wikimedia news content" with the help of community of new members.

Archive all editions of Wikinews, preserving their content.

The implementation (including the timeline, archival method, etc) are the responsibility of the Product & Technology department, but the process should be sensitive to local project contexts and follow inclusive, transparent processes.

The Wikimedia Foundation should support and provide resources to groups exploring new paradigms for Wikimedia news content, such as the proposed "Wikinews Pulse" centralised multilingual headline portal. It should set a fixed timetable (e.g., one year) for these pilot initiatives to demonstrate progress, after which results should be publicly reviewed and further recommendations made.

Wikinews is an official Wikimedia project based on news reporting and citizen journalism that was first launched in November 2004, following an online vote on Meta: Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales intended the project as a way to write each story "as a news story, as opposed to an encyclopedia article". However, Wikinews has always struggled to gain momentum in comparison to other WMF projects throughout the years: at the time of this issue's publication, the platform is active in 31 languages, with just over 700 active editors across the board. – O

In a post on the Wikimedia Foundation's tech blog, titled "Unifying our mobile and desktop domains", WMF engineer Timo Tijhof describes the recently completed work to remove the separate mobile domains for Wikimedia projects (e.g. en.m.wikipedia.org). Among other benefits, this "led to a 20% improvement in mobile response times" for readers who access Wikipedia and its sister sites coming from Google (i.e. a major part of readers overall).

The post recaps how the separate mobile domains had been introduced back in 2008 when this was a common practice among major websites like the BBC, IMDb or Facebook, which however has long become outdated. What triggered current conversion, though, was that "above all, we had reason to believe Google stopped supporting separate mobile domains." This was found to have caused huge slowdown for many Wikipedia readers (which apparently had gone undetected for over a year):

Google introduced a new crawler in 2016, and gradually re-indexed the Internet with it.[...] This new “mobile-first” crawler acts like a mobile device rather than a desktop device, and removes the ability to advertise a separate mobile or desktop link. It’s now one link for everyone! Wikipedia.org was among the last sites Google switched, with May 2024 as the apparent change window.[...] This meant the 60% of incoming pageviews referred by Google, now had to wait for the same redirect that the other 40% of referrals have experienced since 2011. [...]

Unifying our domains eliminated the redirect and led to a 20% improvement in mobile response times.[...] This improvement is both a recovery and a net-improvement because it applies to everyone! It recovers the regression that Google-referred traffic started to experience last year, but also improves response times for all other traffic by the same amount.

As part of the conversion work, WMF engineers also fixed two major SEO failures involving Commons that likewise appear to have flown under the radar for a while:

1. In response to two Community Wishlist proposals (one by User:TheDJ and another by User:Prototyperspective),

Tim Starling found in June that only half of the 140 million pages on Commons were known to Google. [phab:T400022] And of these known pages, 20 million were also delisted due to the mobile redirect. This had been growing by one million delisted pages every month. [...] Tim and myself [Timo] disabled the mobile redirect for “Googlebot on Commons” through an emergency intervention on June 23rd. Referrals then began to come back, and kept rising for eleven weeks in a row, until reaching a 100% increase in Google-referrals. [...] The index had likely been shrinking for two years already.

2. In addition, it was found that videos on Commons had been almost entirely absent from Google:

"We also found that less than 0.1% of videos on Commons were recognised by Google as video watch pages (for the Google Search “Videos” tab). I [Timo] raised this in a partnership meeting with Google Search, and it may’ve been a bug on their end. Commons started showing up in Google Videos a week later.

– H

• The Wiki Science Competition gears up worldwide: The 2025 edition of the Wiki Science Competition, a global photography competition for students, researchers and other volunteers that aims to expand the catalogue of science-related media to Wikimedia Commons, has officially begun on November 1. The WSC will be hosted internationally, but several national contests are taking place across the globe: see this page to look at all of the contests available and get involved.
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects have reached milestones in October and November 2025:

• 1,000 articles: Rakhine/Arakanese Wikipedia
• 20,000 articles: Assamese Wikipedia, Oriya Wikipedia

• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Emergency management, which will be followed by Computer algebra system (beginning 1 December). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!