Practically anyone can edit Wikidata, but openness at this scale will sooner or later bring challenges: ontological inconsistencies, duplicate entities, non-notable items, unsourced statements and other data quality issues.
This is where WikiProjects truly shine. The well-structured areas of the world’s largest knowledge graph often have their own WikiProject community, hard at work behind the scenes making sense of the data. They help shape data models, build maintenance workflows, organise focus areas and establish guidelines and documentation.
What are Wikidata:WikiProjects?
Whether a few passionate individuals or large groups of motivated contributors, WikiProject communities often work in parallel, each tending their own garden of the Wikidata project. Sometimes they work with different tools, pursue new approaches and learn valuable lessons from solving niche data-modelling problems, but they rarely have a chance to share these findings with the wider Wikidata world.
The first iteration of the WikiProjects Days event was designed for exactly that. Held online over three days from June 19-21, 2026, WikiProject contributors were invited to come together to share their experiences, voice their challenges, discuss best practices, and hopefully learn something new that they can take with them.
WikiProjects Days 2026, a Wikidata ‘X Days’ event
Although it was the first event of its kind, the event welcomed over 80 participants and featured more than 20 speakers covering a remarkable range of topics — looted heritage, government directories, marine taxonomists, italian monument and art provenance, Philippine historical plaques — a snapshot of the broad variety of communities that shape Wikidata. Let’s delve into some of the moments that stood out.
Highlights
- Session: How do you find what needs fixing in your WikiProject? — by Raisha (WSC)
Maintenance tasks constitute a large proportion of the activities WikiProject communities work on. Although they can be unglamorous, they’re essential to keeping the project efficient. But before contributors can actually fix things, they must first identify what’s broken or wrong. Raisha led a candid conversation on how WikiProjects currently identify and prioritise cleanup tasks, on their experience with building Broomstick (a tool designed to automate some of these processes), and she also raised a bigger question: can this approach scale across different WikiProject domains, where many differing definitions of “broken” exist?
- Session: Modelling, crosswalking and creating documentation for natural history holotype specimen items – by Ambrosia10
User:Ambrosia10, Wikimedian in Residence at the New Zealand Bioeconomy Science Institute, took attendees through the project’s natural history specimen data model, a collaboration with the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Developing a complete ontology, using different tools, creating and publishing documentation and working alongside GLAM institutions — all these are great examples of the impressive range of topics and tasks an active and healthy WikiProject has to tackle.
- Session: State of the art of tools for WikiProjects: What do we have; what is missing? — by Peter F. Patel-Schneider and Lydia Pintscher
What happens when a newly onboarded participant incorrectly models a new item? How can such a mistake even be found, to say nothing of getting it flagged for revision? What tools are already available to WikiProjects, and what’s missing?
Peter brought attendees to look at WikiProject Ships — a comprehensive, well-maintained community that has existed for well over a decade. In that time, ontologies have been developed, processes iterated, tools developed, and knowledge passed through generations of participants. But as Peter showed, even mature WikiProjects encounter mistakes. The trick is catching errors before they have a chance to spread.
Using WikiProject Ships as a case study, Peter surveyed the tool landscape currently being used to monitor progress and check for issues. He weighed up their relative strengths and weaknesses and identified the gaps where tools are needed. In the second half of the session, Lydia opened the discussion to allow participants to share what tools they personally use, and exchange ideas on how tools that would fill the gaps might work, what would be needed to implement them, and who could develop them.
Takeaways / learnings
- There is interest in forming a user group on data organisation and quality
- Efforts are underway to clean up the Tool Directory, and make tools helpful to WikiProjects more visible.
- As seen in Raisha’s session “How do you find what needs fixing in your WikiProject?”, the WikiCollab’s team is prototyping a tool to surface things to improve in WikiProjects. Try it now!
- Many attendees asked for the ability to ping WikiProjects. This idea had been proposed (and declined) in the past due to its potential for abuse. The development team will revisit the topic to see what options are available to address the need. See the talk page for a brief history of the topic and to add your comments or support.
Event Media
If you’d like to watch these or other session recordings, you can find them in these places:
Would you like to receive updates when session recordings become available from this or any future Wikidata X days events? Please subscribe to the Wikidata mailing list or sign up your User Talk page to receive a weekly summary of Wikidata-related news.
Next Steps for Wikidata Events
The Wikidata X Days will return. The next event is in planning for sometime in Q4, 2026.
Looking further ahead, preliminary planning for WikidataCon 2027 has already begun. Next year will signal our return to a hybrid event, with both on-site and online activities.
WikidataCon 2027 is currently looking for a regional partner to host the physical, on-the-ground conference. WMDE will host the online conference and offer technical support.
Interested? Follow the Call for expressions of interest to host for application details.
Organising Team
This event only came to fruition thanks to the time and efforts donated by the sessions’ speakers, and the interest and attention of the audience attendees. WikiProjects Days 2026 was organised by Wikimedia Deutschland, with essential help provided by Léa Lacroix (User:Auregann)
- Alan Ang – Partnerships Manager
- Arian Bezorg – Product Manager
- Danny Benjafield – Community Communications Manager
- Deepesha Burse – Developer Advocate
- Lydia Pintscher – Portfolio Lead Product Manager
- Mohammed Sadat Abdulai – Community Communications Manager
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