On 9 April 2025, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) announced a halt to its longstanding "Access to Knowledge" (A2K) program in India, caused by the country's restrictions on foreign funds for nonprofits. As a result of the same regulatory changes, the 2025 edition of WikiConference India – which was set to be held in Kochi next September – had its grant cancelled from the Wikimedia Community Fund on 7 April.

In some ways, CIS is unlike a Wikimedia regional chapter, for reasons including that it is a tech-oriented nonprofit which does programs independently of the Wikimedia movement. In other ways, it performed some of the functions of a Wikimedia chapter, in that its staff coordinated Wikimedia training programs and fulfilled community requests for Wikimedia support throughout India. (Wikimedia India, a separate organization, was approved as an official chapter in 2010, but derecognitioned in 2019.) The A2K program was the Wikimedia program of CIS. With this stopped, the Wikimedia movement no longer has any ongoing major Wikimedia programs in India, although the April 9 announcement mentioned that the "CIS-A2K team is actively exploring possible solutions."

The reason for the halt in the program is that NGOs in India who receive foreign money must regularly renew their certificate of compliance with the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010. CIS recently lost its FCRA certificate, so it cannot receive money from the Wikimedia Foundation.

There is no public information about why CIS' FCRA renewal application was rejected. The Wikipedia article for FCRA lists numerous cases where organizations in India lost their certificate, and were shut off from receiving foreign funds. As the Wikipedia article notes, Western organizations affected by this tend to complain, while India's Ministry of Home Affairs argues that compliance is a reasonable expectation.

The loss of certificate occurs in the context of other Wikimedia conflicts in India, including the November 2024 Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation court case and the February 2025 accusation of disparaging the Hindu king Sambhaji.

While The Signpost only last covered the CIS A2K program 10 years ago, the organizers themselves have continually published numerous reports and newsletters on Meta-wiki. The most recent edition of the "CIS-A2K newsletter", for January 2025, featured a study about how Indian contributors engage with the Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons mobile apps, the "She Leads Bootcamp 2025" (an event for fostering leadership among female Wikimedians in India), and work on developing a Wikisource reader app.

This month's announcement marks the end of an era that began around 2010, when the Wikimedia Foundation was pursuing serious plans to itself open an office in India, as its first presence outside the US (Signpost coverage: "India: Media speculation on country's future 'Wiki-capital'). By early 2011, these plans had been downgraded to the hiring of an India-based consultant. Later that year, the very well-attended first WikiConference India evidenced the country's high levels of enthusiasm for Wikipedia (apart from the various active Wikipedias in Indian languages, India remains the country with the third most active editors on English Wikipedia), but also foreshadowed its current hostile legal environment: As reported in The Signpost at the time, [a] group of about a dozen protestors from the youth wing of the nationalist BJP political party demonstrated against one map on Wikipedia, whose depiction of the contested border regions surrounding Jammu and Kashmir they objected to [...] and planned to file a criminal case against "Jimmy Whales and Wikipedia's India chairman [sic]". (The BJP subsequently took power in 2014 and remains India's ruling party as of today.) – Br, H, O

Until 31 May, the Wikimedia Foundation is seeking community comment on and approval of the 2025-25 annual plan.

Everyone is invited to form their own thoughts on the planned "objectives and key results" (OKRs), but at a glance, they seem to continue the to prioritize Wikipedia over other Wikimedia projects, and seek short-term increases in established programs for editor engagement and retention rather than development of more ambitious multi-year projects and features.

As reported last November, the Wikimedia Foundation's revenue for 2023-24 was US$185 million. The Wikimedia project values user governance and user input as fundamental to the success of the project, so how the next year's nearly $200 million will be spent is to be decided by Wikipedia editors and Signpost readers. Please give the Wikimedia Foundation board your feedback by commenting. For anyone who wants support from the Signpost in rallying attention and funding commitments to your favorite cause, please consider submitting your manifesto, petition, or other call to action in the next issue, so that you can recruit more people to support it. – Br

Wikimedia LGBT+, the Wikimedia user group which supports LGBT+ Wikimedia editors and the development of LGBT+ Wikimedia content, welcomes its first staff members Bisi Alimi as first Executive director and Vic Sfriso as Director of programmes and community engagement.

The development of Wikimedia LGBT+ is of general interest to the Wikimedia community for several reasons. One is that WikiProject LGBT+ studies is among the most popular WikiProjects in English Wikipedia, and it tends to be popular in all Wikimedia language versions where it exists. The rising importance of those issues in national election campaigns for many countries is reflected in high frequency and intensity of editorial LGBT-related wiki conflicts – another reason why everyone should be aware of the health of the wiki LGBT+ community. Examples include discussions of transgender pronouns in biographies and how to report notions of transgender identity. LGBT+ Wikimedians and those editing LGBT+ topics are increasingly the targets of harassment, so this pool of editors is at the forefront of testing and using the Wikimedia platform's social and technical systems for promoting civility and addressing misconduct, such as the Wikimedia Foundation's developing Incident Reporting System. Finally, despite the global nature of Wikipedia, there are few examples truly global collaboration in the Wikimedia Movement. The LGBT+ community is a random subset of the world population, so Wikimedia LGBT+ is a group which attracts individuals from all parts of the world to seek protection and community.

Please welcome Wikimedia LGBT+'s staff, and do what you can to support them in contributing to the Wikimedia Movement's global multicultural infrastructure. It is in everyone's interest that the international Wikimedia community have multiple channels and networks in place to convene global conversations on making Wikipedia a high quality universal reference source. – Br

After a recent Requests for Comment, Administrator Elections has become a permanent process. The first trial election in October 2024 was considered successful, and had 11 out of 32 candidates getting the mop. Future elections are expected to be held every 5 months, with the next one sometime mid-2025. Discussion and coordination for it is currently underway at Wikipedia talk:Administrator elections. The elections and related RFCs were last covered by The Signpost in the 27 Feb issue. – S

After a selection process earlier last year, the Affiliations Committee (AffCom) announced the incoming members on wikimedia-l mailing list. Notably, Affcom added just two Voting members, Aleksey Chalabyan and Lucas Teles, both with prior Affcom experience. The committee also confirmed 7 advisory members for a one year term, ending in 2026. Affcom as a whole advises the Board of Trustees on Wikimedia affliates, chapters, and user groups.

The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) has started a vote with proposed changes to the U4C Charter and UCoC Enforcement Guidelines. (See Village pump notification for local discussions). Editors may vote on these changes until 1 May 2025.

The changes are bundled as 5 distinct proposals and involve minor changes to wording, changes to U4C policies for recusal and quorum, and the overall process. More notable changes include appointing up to 4 non-voting members and removal of the "homewiki requirement". Currently, only 2 members with any project as their "homewiki" can sit on the U4C, making 0xDeadbeef and Barkeep49 the only members from the English Wikipedia until their terms end. If passed, other enwiki editors will be eligible for sitting in future elections.

The U4C is generally responsible for enforcement of Universal Code of Conduct, as well as resolving local conflicts in smaller projects or systemic project bias. Since it was seated mid-2024, the U4C has heard case requests for de.wiktionary, zhwiki and Commons; resulting in at least one global ban and desysopping.

The Committee was last covered by The Signpost in the 27 Feb 25 and 24 Dec 24 issues. – S

TODO - Flesh out - Anything major from meta:Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin/2025/6 and meta:Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin/2025/7 not already covered.

• New administrators: UPDATE BEFORE PUBLICATION As The Signpost is going to press, two RfAs for users Rusalkii and EggRoll97 are still underway; a bureaucrat chat is currently taking place on EggRoll97's request, which closed with just 66% of support after the user chose to run for admin for the second time – having previously failed to get elected in October 2024.
• New recall petition: Wikipedia:Administrator recall/Gimmetrow was initiated, marking this the fourth ever recall petition. The petition reached the required 25 signatures in less than a day. Gimmetrow (talk · contribs) can start an WP:RRfA within 30 days to retain their mop.
• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects reached milestones in March and April 2025:
  • 1,000 articles: Ewe Wikipedia
  • 2,000 articles: Dagaare Wikipedia
  • 10,000 articles: Shilha Wikipedia
  • 20,000 articles: Ossetian Wikipedia, Saraiki Wikipedia
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Honshu (beginning 14 April 2025), followed by Stuffed toy (beginning 21 April 2025), followed by Internet research (beginning 28 April). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
• Tariffs keep on bouncing around: To no one's surprise, daily readership of the Tariff article shot up from less than 5,000 a day to over 60,000 on 3 April, in the aftermath of the introduction of new tariffs by the Trump administration and the subsequent 2025 stock market decline – this takeoff in daily views followed a year of even crazier bouncing around. Full data is available here, even if it's still not directly available on Wiki via template:Annual readership.
• Katy Perry takes off, too: Daily pageviews on Katy Perry increased from the mid four figures in early April to 120,000 on April 14, the flight date of Blue Origin NS-31. Oddly, the page about the space mission only reached shy of 26,000 pageviews.
• Death Race for WikiLove: On April 20, user Panamitsu uploaded on Commons a short animated clip that shows the evolution of the Top 20 list of Wikipedians by total number of edits from 2002 to 2025. You can find more details about the methods adopted by Panamitsu for retrieving data in the video's description.

• Herbal collaborations: Ongoing or upcoming editing collaborations include WikiProject Cannabis's 420 Collaboration through the end of April, and WikiProject Plants's Philodendron Garden Party, through the end of May.
• Challenges: WikiProject Europe's European Destubathon is active through the end of April. Other ongoing challenges can be viewed here.