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News and notes

Discussions open for the next WMF Annual Plan

Will the new Annual Plan bring us towards new horizons?

Discussions about the WMF Annual Plan 2026-2027 are now open

Since the start of the year, the Wikimedia Foundation is hosting discussions seeking feedback on several themes that will be at the center of the 2026-2027 Annual Plan, which aims to tackle the rapid changes of the Internet and the information ecosystem, increasing scrutiny from governments and regulations, the rise of AI and the recent signs of decline in Wikipedia pageviews.

As part of the WMF's collaborations with the community, various on-wiki and live discussions will be hosted before June 2026. Now, though, interested users can leave their suggestions and ideas on the Annual Plan's talk page: the discussions are centered around several key prompts, including global trends affecting the projects, experimentation, newcomers, users with extended rights, collaboration and reading. You'll have time to join the thread until May 31.

Is WikiFlix becoming a sleeper hit?

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Wikiflix's main page

In the last few months, the Wikimedia movie app WikiFlix has caught the attention of several media portals in multiple countries, thanks to its free-to-use approach and its ever-growing catalogue of public domain and open movies. Although users have been quietly enjoying WikiFlix since early 2024, Wikipedia influencer Annie Rauwerda from Depths of Wikipedia recently highlighted the portal on TikTok back in December. This triggered an article by Amanda Silberling for TechCrunch, and then Punto Informatico reporting along with several and others in France and Italy.

An early WikiFlix concept was born from an idea of Belgian-Dutch art historian and Wikipedian Sandra Fauconnier – known as Spinster – who had originally started working on the project as a hobby in November 2019, while attending the Wiki Techstorm in Amsterdam, by creating a mini-portal on Wikimedia Commons, where she had added "a set of Wikidata-driven gallery pages showcasing cinema history". Fauconnier wrote that she was inspired to start the project in order to improve the description and the coverage of public domain films and music hosted on Commons, which she described as "a treasure trove of undiscovered high-quality multimedia". In June 2022, a group of Wikimedians proposed a version of WikiFlix as a separate Wikimedia sister project, but the proposal was declined.

In 2024, German MediaWiki developer Magnus Manske turned WikiFlix into a tool hosted on Toolforge, which now hosts over 4,000 movies from Wikimedia Commons, the Internet Archive, or YouTube that have fallen into the public domain. The tool's interface shares video streaming service design elements which Netflix also adopted, and allows users to browse, search and view movies without any interruption, while also providing information about the casting and other details. The WikiFlix database is updated hourly from Wikidata, but while movies with a lot of sitelinks on their Wikipedia pages are prioritized, the community around the tool maintains a blacklist in order to ban films with explicitly racist or propagandist themes.

The ever-growing catalogue of Wikiflix hosts movies from 1874 all the way up to 2025, and everybody is free to add new candidates and suggest improvements on the Wikidata page for the project. – O, BR

Brief notes

Arabic coffee is enjoyed by many people.
  • Still work to be done for older FAs: WP:URFA/2020, an initiative to review English Wikipedia's oldest featured articles, has published their 2025 year-end report, which states that, since its creation, editors have completed reviews for 20% of the articles on their initial list. The report also outlines how editors can get involved. – Z
  • Vote now for Wikimedia Stewards The 2026 election for Wikimedia stewards is open for voting until 27 February. Stewards are trusted and elected volunteers who have advanced global userrights to access the wiki interfaces of all Wikimedia projects. They especially serve the hundreds of Wikimedia projects in minority languages which do not otherwise have established communities or trusted leadership. The Signpost encourages all eligible Wikimedia voters to practice good community governance and citizenship by scrutinizing the candidates and casting ballots to confirm or pass the granting of permissions to these volunteers.
  • New administrators: Vacant0's RfA, which we already reported on in the last Signpost issue while the votes were still coming in, eventually passed with 184 votes in favor and just one opposed. As a result, Vacant0 has become the first admin to get their shirt and mop in 2026.
Arabic coffee being served during Nowruz
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  • seeking feedback on several themes that will be at the center of the 2026-2027 Annual Plan Addressing most of these involves – usually mainly – extensive technical development. See "The problem that underlies most issues and challenges noted here and elsewhere" there: hopefully the bottleneck that inhibits the resolution of many mostly long-standing problems, new challenges, and potential for innovation will be changed. Better to take a step back and look at underlying factors too, not just individual problems or problem areas such as display & functionality on mobile.
In the last few months, the Wikimedia movie app WikiFlix has caught the attention of several media portals in multiple countries TechCrunch quite correctly described it in its article title as "WikiFlix shows us what Netflix would have been like 100 years ago". I hope that by this people here can recognize how limited the project currently is with little potential to get used a lot by many people. There's a few newer films too such as 2 documentaries from 2018 and some short films but for the most part the title is about correct (most films are 70 years old or older). However, if you'd like to be able to use this to also conveniently distraction-free browse and watch films available on YouTube for free that aren't free licensed, then please check out this proposal (incl technical request for devs): WikiFlix for finding & watching free films on YouTube(+ free media libraries). I think if this gets implemented there would be an influx of users learning about Wikidata because they like watching free documentaries, short films, and films online. Basically a semi-killer app that makes Wikidata actually used and known to people who aren't on Wikipedia. YouTube is not suited for browsing just free films since it also shows lots of nonfilm videos everywhere, has lots of distraction, and one can't see videos by film genre etc. Additionally, streaming platforms only have few short films and since many if not most short films are freely available, this could become the go-to place for watching short films. Free full films in media libraries from public broadcasters could also be included if the data on the documentaries etc on there gets imported to Wikidata items (note: if they can't be embedded right away one could just link to them so one only has to click on play). There could be a toggle button that switches the platform from free-licensed items only to free-licensed and free-of-cost or back. See also c:Category:Videos of films by year on Commons where many films initially came from. in France and Italy I think there was much more reporting in Germany. by creating a mini-portal on Wikimedia Commons These can be found here c:WikidataGalleries/WikiFlix/Documentary films (not just documentaries but that genre probably has the most recent files; see the navbar at the top).
--Prototyperspective (talk) 15:35, 17 February 2026 (UTC)[reply]

















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