Wikimania 2026 brought the Wikimedia movement together in Paris this summer, and the Content Partnerships Hub (CPH) was there in full force. It was a fantastic opportunity for us not only to speak to the whole Wikimedia movement about our achievements and activities, but also to spend time together and have valuable discussions about the future of our project in person. Spread across several countries and time zones, from Chile to Sweden, we do not get this opportunity often!
Over the course of the conference, CPH members ran a number of sessions focusing on different aspects of our work as well as a physical helpdesk. They were all well-attended and we were excited to hear your thought-provoking questions and input. In this post, we re-cap what we did – if you find it interesting, make sure to look at the recordings.
Taking GLAM collections online at any scale
Cultural heritage collections remain inaccessible in the digital realm for myriad reasons, this workshop addressed at least two common obstacles with practical solutions: how to digitize both 2D and 3D collections, and how to do so with limited resources. The workshop introduced a toolkit — now available on Meta-Wiki in multiple languages, with more translations welcome — that walks through the entire process from start to finish. To illustrate the workflow in practice, we digitized a collection of antique French postcards that had been gathered in Portugal.
We invite you to explore the toolkit, and to help us bring it to even more languages through translation!
The Helpdesk booth
We wanted the CPH to be a presence at Wikimania, not just as sessions that people would have to seek out. That’s why we used the opportunity to have a stand at the conference, which we held on Thursday and Friday. The focus of the stand was our Helpdesk initiative – one of the most important parts of the Hub. The Helpdesk provides hands-on support to Wikimedians who want to form a content partnership, especially for local groups in the underserved and underrepresented communities. And is there a better way of advertising it to the community than inviting them to a physical helpdesk?
If you were there, our table was hard to miss, located conveniently where everyone passed several times a day. And it definitely got a lot of foot traffic. We had great conversations with people, some of whom learned about the CPH for the first time, others who had heard of it before and had concrete ideas for projects we could work on together. This physical Helpdesk resulted in over 20 requests that we are now prioritizing and following up on.
UN workshop
The UN system has spent more than 75 years building up a vast body of knowledge: tens of thousands of publications and hundreds of thousands of images, videos, and audio recordings, much of it multilingual, high-quality, and increasingly released under Creative Commons licenses. UN agencies and Wikimedia have many of the same goals and compliment each other’s work.
The workshop provided participants with practical examples of work that has been done, thoughts from UN staff and a time for participants to reflect on how they could work with the UN. John Cummings shared examples of the kinds of projects that have been done with UN agencies, from sharing text images and data to collaborations on social media, exhibitions, editathons and working together to collate data.
Suzanne Lapstun from The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations who has worked on Wikimedia projects for several years shared her experiences and thoughts on working with Wikimedia and the benefits and challenges.
John then took participants through a guided reflection to create a plan for working with the United Nations or other organisations in their context. Participants explored what they wanted to achieve in the short, medium and long term, their current situation and resources, their skills, knowledge and connections and what they plan to do to make a start.
Metabase workshop
Metabase is a platform built to collect and connect information about Wikimedia movement activities and resources, developed as part of CPH’s work to strengthen the capacity of the global community. At Wikimania, Connor Benedict and Alicia Fagerving ran a hands-on workshop introducing the project to a room full of participants.
As always when running a practical workshop, we were worried that it would be boring or too hard, but our fears did not come true in the slightest! At no point was there awkward silence. Several participants registered user accounts on Metabase and dove straight into editing. We discussed several issues, from concrete technical questions to more broad ones about the future and scope of the Metabase project. We also demonstrated MEOW, a recently launched browsing interface for Metabase, which allows users to explore the data without writing a single SPARQL query. Truth to be told, it was nerve-wracking because MEOW is so new – but thankfully, it did not break down during the demonstration!
By the end of the workshop, participants had a sense of what Metabase is and how to contribute to it, but the session provided a lot of insight for us as well. The questions about the future of the project were thought-provoking and at the same time filled us with hope, because they show that people care about Metabase and would like it to develop into a strong and sustainable project.
Would you like to learn more about Metabase? Watch the recording of the session on Wikimedia Commons and start exploring it today!
Lunch meetup
A great thing about being at Wikimania is that not everything needs to be super formal, quite the opposite, less structured activities are great for brainstorming and exchanging experiences. That’s why we arranged a lunch meetup for everyone with an interest in developing and contributing to the culture and heritage community across the Wikimedia movement. The meetup was designed as a space to mix people from different corners of the movement. It was great to see new connections being made as well as lots of reconnecting with colleagues and peers.
Looking ahead
We returned from Paris full of new ideas as well as, which is even more important, a sense that the community is excited about the different initiatives that are part of the Content Partnerships Hub. Hopefully we’ll see each other next year in Santiago as well! Until then, have a look at the CPH portal on Meta.
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