On May 20, the Wikimedia Foundation provided an update on the Community Wishlist, revealing the decision to disband the team of six staff and replace it with a decentralized program. Community discussions have arisen as a result of the decision, with many commenters bringing up recent attempts to unionize, claiming it to be a key motive behind the decision. An ongoing petition to stand up and take action has gathered over 1000 signatories, including many prominent and respected Wikipedians.

See also this issue's "Community view": "Putting the Wish into the Wishlist"

The Community Wishlist (then named the Community Wishlist Survey) was originally started in 2015 by Danny Horn (aka Toughpigs), the then-new manager of the Community Tech team. The idea was relatively simple: over a two week period, community members could post their ideas for projects that the Wikimedia Foundation could take up and the proposals would then be de-duplicated and sorted into broad categories, at which point the wishes could be voted on by the broader community. The idea was that by the end of the wishlist, there would be a prioritized list of ideas and it would be the Community Tech team's job to investigate how to implement these ideas over the next year. In an op-ed in the Signpost, Danny mentioned that the idea was not originally his, but rather inspired by the parallel Technical Wishes program that Wikimedia Germany had successfully conducted since 2013. That project originated with a survey by volunteer developer User:Raymond, and was carried out through the chapter's own Community Tech team ("Technischer Communitybedarf", or TCB).

The timing is important in its own right. The Community Wishlist started at the end of Lila Trekitov's term, shortly before her resignation as the Executive Director of the Foundation. During this time, the Foundation was under heavy scrutiny from editors for pushing through multiple technical projects in a top-down manner: MediaViewer, the full-screen viewer for images; Flow (now known as Structured Discussions), the doomed talk page system that came before DiscussionTools; and an aborted Visual Editor roll-out. The MediaViewer deployment culminated in the Superprotect controversy, in which the WMF instituted a new protection mode that prohibited anyone other than staff members from editing. It was an attempt to prevent admins in communities like German or English Wikipedia, who were against MediaViewer, from exercising their ability to edit JS and CSS pages to block feature from being shown to readers. As a result, Community Wishlist symbolized an olive branch being extended to the community, allowing them to have some say in what features would be developed by the Foundation going forward.

Over the next few years, the Community Wishlist Survey worked like clockwork (mostly). Every year, WMF staff would setup the Community Wishlist around the holiday season and community members would post their wishes. The Community Tech team would then go through the wishes, decline those that were obviously out of scope, group them into categories, and then open the wishlist up for voting by the community. Once the voting was over, Community Tech would spend the next year investigating the top 10 wishes and trying to implement them. This era led to many fulfilled wishes that have since gone on to become core infrastructure for a lot of Wikipedians.

The first version of the wishlist alone led to the eventual creation of three well-known tools: IABot, which fixes dead links by adding Internet Archive links to pages; CopyPatrol, a tool that surfaces copyright violations in real time; and the PageViews tool. Subsequent iterations of the wishlist have produced, in no particular order: WhoWroteThat, XTools, Global Preferences, LoginNotify, user-right expiration, Editor syntax Highlighting, Pinging users from edit summaries, Watchlist expiry, Template Wizard, SVG Translate, improvements to NPP workflows, Wikimedia OCR (an OCR tool for Wikisource), VideoJS integration (the video interface on Wikimedia sites), Edit recovery, Live Preview, the ability to share QR codes, and Multiblocks. Some of these need no introduction. XTools, for example, is ubiquitous on user contribution pages, as is Syntax Highlighting in the default editor. For editors who joined Wikipedia after 2018, the absence of features such as the ability to mention users in edit summaries, setting expiry dates for user rights, or expiring pages from a watchlist would likely feel alien. Even when the Wishlist and Community Tech did not explicitly implement a wish, it often laid significant groundwork and showed community support for features that would be worked on by other teams or implemented by volunteers, such as the Global Watchlist. The wishlist provided early impetus for the DiscussionTools project and Dark Mode and directly motivated improvements to the Kartographer extension.

Now, this is not to say things worked perfectly. Over time cracks had begun to show. Members of the Community Tech team often talked to technical volunteers about how the wishlist was put together with a bunch of chewing gum and duct tape, resting on a pyramid of carefully crafted templates that, over time, required significant maintenance and became unwieldy to use. There were also problems accurately representing the needs of smaller sister projects whose voices would often get drowned out by the larger English Wikipedia and Commons communities. Concerns were strong enough that, in 2020, the Community Tech team decided to have a special edition of that year's wishlist for focused on wishes from smaller sister projects like Wikisource, Wikivoyage and Wiktionary. Another frequent problem was that sometimes many of the wishes were significantly larger projects than anticipated, leading the Community Tech team to be unable to provide as much attention to the other wishes as they wanted to. As a result, starting in 2021, the team switched away from the promise of doing only the top 10 wishes, instead using a more dynamic system based on factors like overall impact, scope, and number of votes received. The communities served to prioritize wishes that it would work on.

The 2021 changes frustrated members of the community. The Community Tech team completed fewer wishes and spent significantly more time managing the wishlist and the prioritization process. Additionally, the wishes receiving the most votes were often not worked on. Instead, smaller, lower-ranked wishes were completed due to resource constraints. This new status quo culminated in a 2023 suggestion to dismantle the wishlist, where members of the community asked the WMF to dismantle the wishlist altogether to prevent the community from wasting their time voting on wishes that were not going to be worked on. This led to a response from the CPTO, Selena Deckelmann and an extended discussion of the role of Community Tech and the Wishlist within the Wikimedia ecosystem.

In 2024, motivated by the discussion the year prior, the WMF launched the Future of the Wishlist project. As a part of this process, the WMF put together a panel of program managers led by a new hire, Jack Wheeler, who sought to rearchitect the wishlist, fixing the problems associated with the old process and creating a wishlist that would encourage more people to contribute, be more efficient at solving problems from the community, and bring in more opportunities for volunteer and WMF collaboration. They spent all of two months talking with motivated volunteers, then recommended a set of changes. One of the most significant changes would be that the wishlist would remain open throughout the year, with wishes being triaged in real time. Another significant change was removing the ability to vote on individual wishes, instead replacing it with the ability to vote on Focus Areas, groups of related wishes created by product managers that corresponded to a set of related work that any team could then work on. The Focus Areas were again inspired by a similar structure used by the Wikimedia Germany's Technical Wishes project that anecdotally had seen higher throughput of wishes as a result of introducing focus areas.

These changes were not popular with the community. Multiple volunteers talked about how the annuality of the event and the ability to vote on wishes was what made the wishlist special and functional. However, these concerns were ignored and the Community Wishlist Survey reopened in July 2024 with the changes applied, with new name, "Community Wishlist", reflecting that it was no longer a yearly survey.

Almost as soon as the new system was deployed, it started showing its rough edges. Participation in the wishlist took an immediate hit. While in 2023 the wishlist saw the participation of 1439 editors, only 439 participated in the new system. What was previously an extremely well attended event became a backlogged process that nobody except the most dedicated volunteers cared about. While the previous version of the wishlist saw participation from volunteer developers and affiliates to complete forgotten wishes, the new version was much more sterile: across the three years this version of the wishlist was operational, only nine wishes were taken up by volunteers and only two by affiliates. Volunteers filed the talk page of the wishlist with complaints, decrying the lack of any form of proper voting or prioritization process for the wishes. Focus Areas took a while to arrive, but even when they did, the community voting process was lukewarm. The Focus Area with the most votes received only 43 across three years. For comparison, the most popular single wish in 2023 received 240 votes. This response led the WMF to announce at last year's Wikimania in Nairobi that they were going to reintroduce per-wish voting later in 2025.

However, the biggest failure of the new system was in its core promise: that more teams would work on wishes. The main thing that Jack had been brought in to solve was the fact that editors were angry that not enough wishes were being addressed. The changes he proposed were hard pills to swallow, but were made palatable by the promise of more wishes that would be delivered by other teams in addition to Community Tech. However, these promises were never actually realized. Most teams avoided the wishlist to focus on their own OKRs (a WMF term to refer to staff members' own priorities with the organization) and only did the bare minimum in terms of small bug fixes surfaced by the wishlist. Across three years, 21 wishes were worked on by some team other than Community Tech, many of which were collaborations, with the Community Tech team doing a significant amount of the implementation and the other team acting as stewards. Only 7 wishes were ever worked on by singular teams on their own volition and most of these were small bug fixes contributed during Wishathons (WMF internal hackathon-like events to fix wishes). The Community Tech team for the most part still shouldered both the burden of maintaining the wishlist and completing whatever it could when it was not maintaining the underlying software.

Over time, resentment against the new system built up. Many volunteers called on the WMF to make changes to the wishlist process that would bring it closer to the old system. Barkeep49 opened a thread detailing the failings of the current system, with 15 other volunteers chiming in to say the same. In the meantime, the architect of the new system, Jack Wheeler, left the Foundation as the Product Manager of Community Tech, and was replaced with another product manager, Mike Eztuinaga. The failing state of the Community Wishlist was discussed by community members both offwiki and onwiki in 2025, and there were signs that the WMF was receptive about making changes to the system to increase the throughput of wishes.

On May 20, 2026, Sai Suman Cherukuwada, the Deputy Chief Product and Technology Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation posted the following as an update on the Community Wishlist page,

Hello all, my name is Suman and I'm the Deputy Chief Product & Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm writing to share with all of you that we've decided to do some internal restructuring about how WMF responds to and supports wishes. After noticing that having a centralized team was leading to frequent bottlenecks and delays as CommTech staff coordinated with other teams, we've decided to shift Community Tech into a program that multiple teams are officially responsible for supporting. This is a model that has proven success already, but it will involve disbanding the Community Tech team and the roles of five engineers and one manager. We still have dedicated staff managing the wishlist intake and triage process and will continue the same financial support for this work, just under a different structure.
— m:Community Wishlist#May 20, 2026: Community Tech becomes a program

The Wikimedia Foundation leadership had decided to disband Community Tech, the one team that had held the wishlist together for the last decade and instead dive head first into having other teams work on wishes, a strategy that had for the last two years been performing poorly. The announcement touted this strategy as a "model that has proven success" and noted that even though the Community Tech team was going away, the Wishlist itself would not and there would still be dedicated staff associated with the wishlist to triage the wishes as they came in. The dedicated staff in this context was a single person, Mike Eztuinaga, the former Program Manager of the Community Wishlist. This change was done with zero community consultation such that the community at large and even the concerned employees, five engineers and one manager were blindsided by this decision despite leadership having made the decision all the way back in September 2025.

In response to this decision, a thread on VPWMF was created by Novem Linguae which grew to over 0.5MB. Editors discussed the decision and related topics in depth, leading to it being moved to its own Wikipedia namespace page, COMMTECHGATE. The discussion has since gotten coverage outside Wikipedia from The Verge and The Register.

See also this issue's opinion article: "Wikimedia Foundation staff develop union and Wikimedia user community reacts"

On February 6, two weeks after Bernadette Meehan took the reins as new Wikimedia Foundation CEO, longtime WMF employee Bryan Davis announced on Mastodon that he and several other staff had begun an effort to unionize:

Five years ago I made a Twitter post calling for employees of @wikimediafoundation to organize a union. Yesterday a group of us came out publicly to all other staff as being actively engaged in that effort. I'm proud of everyone who has helped get us to this new milestone and I look forward to being part of a recognized bargaining unit in the future.
— [1]

This labor union, named "Wiki Workers United", also has its own web presence at https://wikiworkersunited.org/ (apparently set up the same month as the announcement).

Following Suman's May 20 announcement of the disbanding of the Community Tech team, Tamzin connected this to the unionization efforts, asserting that "This is blatant union-busting" (although later acknowledging that instead of union busting, it could instead by explained by the WMF's institutional hostility toward dissenters, freethinkers, and valuable members of the community). Tamzin and others pointed out that members of the Community Tech team had participated in the union formation process, and also noted that one of the more prominent members of this union was Brooke Vibber. Brooke was the first full-time employee ever to be hired by the Foundation in 2003, serving as CTO from 2005 to 2010, and then joining ArchCom/TechCom, a committee that decided the technical direction of MediaWiki development, until 2020. She was most recently employed as Staff Software Architect at the Foundation. On 13 May 2026, a week before the incident, her permissions were removed and she was let go from the Foundation. (On the other hand, Davis, who had first publicized the unionization effort back in February, still appears to be employed as principal engineer of the Developer Experience team.)

This, alongside other rumors of engineers being afraid to speak up and cross management, led the community to start a solidarity petition pledging to support the union in case it decided to call a strike in response to the Community Tech incident.

We, the undersigned, stand in solidarity with Wiki Workers United and affirm our willingness to engage in collective action if called upon by WWU, up to and including staging an editorial strike. Editors participating in the collective action would be able to use normal Wikipedia consensus-building methods to establish the action's terms and, if desired, to establish further demands of our own in addition to WWU's demands.
— Wiki Workers United solidarity

The solidarity response is at over 1,000 signatories, one of the largest petitions on the project ever, and one of the few times over 300 editors agreed on something. As per their statistics, at time of this article's publication, the list includes 55 of the project's 817 administrators, as well as several oversighters, CheckUsers, Stewards, interface administrators, and arbitrators, and other prominent and trusted Wikipedians. The only petition to have received more support was the 2024 open letter to the Wikimedia Foundation, in response to the WMF considering disclosing personally identifiable information to the Delhi High Court during the legal proceedings of Asian News International v. Wikimedia Foundation. Similarly on Meta-wiki, over 1,000 editors have also expressed solidarity with the union more generally, with many editors having signed both.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Lead Counsel Stephen Laporte, new CEO Bernadette Meehan, and the Deputy CPTO Suman Cherukuwada have made statements denying that the disbanding of Community Tech had anything to do with the formation of the union. On May 23, Wiki Workers United published a statement on their website, acknowledging that they do not know the Foundation's motive behind disbanding the tech team, while stating that the union is necessary for the long-term viability of the project. (On May 29, WWU followed on its Mastodon presence to announce that we'll aim to put up a few clarifying posts shortly, while cautioning that this might take some time.)

One reason the community reacted particularly strongly to the disbanding of the Community Tech team was because many of the engineers on the former team had significant community-facing roles through involvement with the wishlist and thus had, over the years, accumulated a significant amount of goodwill with community members and had developed a deep understanding of the community. On top of that, a significant portion of the team consisted of long-term, well respected members of the community. Two of the engineers were former stewards and other members of the team were well respected members of the technical community who regularly mentor new users and solve tech problems in their volunteer capacity. As a result, multiple members of the community had developed relationships with members of this community-facing team over time.

The WMF decision to disband the team led to these five engineers and one engineering manager going from being some of the most productive and community-aligned engineers in the organization to being faced with the threat of being fired in two weeks if they did not interview for and get hired into a different team. Over the course of the two weeks the community lobbied for the Wikimedia Foundation to reverse its decision, the Foundation refused, stating that the decision was made based on local law considerations. Suman, the Deputy CPTO, called for editors to respect the privacy of the engineers who had been put in jeopardy of losing their jobs. On Friday, June 5th, three of employees from the team, two engineers and one engineering manager, had their accounts disabled and were marked as former employees. The other three engineers were able to interview for alternative positions within the Foundation and were hired to the ModTools team, led by Sam Walton, and the MediaWiki Engineering Group, led by Birgit Mueller.

At this time the Wikimedia Foundation appears unlikely/unwilling to reinstate the Community Tech team. As a result of the intense community discussion, Selena Deckelmann mentioned in the first week that she was in "listening mode". A metawiki discussion by Femke asking for changes to the structure of the wishlist (returning to the old annual format and encouraging community prioritization) garnered 30 votes in favor. In response, Selena decided to remove focus areas and committed to returning to an annual cadence. The critical infrastructure that Community Tech used to maintain is still up for grabs, with Suman's last message on the matter simply listing all the tools and promising that they will eventually be assigned to new teams to continue maintenance. Nine wishes were actively being worked on by the Community Tech team when they were disbanded. Of these, two, "Watchlist labels" and "Hide templates", will continue to be worked on by the former members of the team who still have a job. The future of the rest of the wishes is still nebulous, with Suman assuring us that the wishes have been incorporated into the existing roadmaps of other teams who will subsequently reach out to volunteers. Despite a week passing after the announcement, there has not been any significant movement on the tasks associated with the other wishes.

On June 11, multiple members of the Wikimedia Foundation met with volunteers to discuss concerns regarding the wishlist. After the meeting, Marshall Miller, the Senior Director of Product (who leads almost all contributor facing teams within the Foundation) announced that they would be forming a panel of WMF product managers consisting of Sonja Perry (group product manger in charge of the Growth team, the Moderator Tools team, the Languages team, the Connection team and the Editing team), Mike Eztuinaga (the aforementioned Program Manager of the wishlist), and himself to discuss with the community a more sustainable and long-term way of continuing the wishlist. The initial conversations will occur on the unofficial Wikimedia Discord and will subsequently move to Meta-wiki and will be closely followed by leadership like Selena herself. Marshall has since posted a plan for the future of the wishlist and invited comment on the meta talk page.

In the meantime, it appears that some Wikimedians are thinking about ways to support work on the wishlist without relying on WMF developers. On June 16, James Heilman (former WMF Board member and current chair of the Wiki Project Med Foundation) announced in the Wikipedia Weekly Facebook group that [w]e at Wiki Project Med are looking at putting resources into solving some Community Wishes, asking for votes and comments on the existing 461 open wishes. (Wiki Project Med has already funded other technical work in recent years, such as a calculator gadget and a gadget to interactively display graphs from the "Our World In Data" website in Wikipedia articles.)

Relatedly, Brooke Vibber announced on June 19 that she had taken on a part-time role on Wiki Project Med's community tech team, which will be taking on some of the tasks from Wikimedia's Community Wishlist that don't get grabbed by WMF teams. According to WPMEDF's website, this group of funded and volunteer programmers also includes Bawolff (likewise a former WMF developer, who had implemented the aforementioned gadgets as contractor for WPMEDF), and longtime MediaWiki developer Yaron Koren.

The Editing team is in the process of developing and documenting a JavaScript API that will allow community members to write their own Edit Checks. This means that community members can create userscripts to run complex checks inside of Visual Editor that encode community guidelines. For example, community members can create a custom check to allow members to check how complex every sentence in a article is and warn users when a particularly long or complex sentence is being written.