Language Onboarding and Development/Annual Plan 2025-26

Summary

The 2025–26 plan focuses on strengthening the progress and early insights on growth and sustainability of new and smaller language communities across the Wikimedia ecosystem. The plan combines experimentation, active development work and ongoing language support. Initial efforts will entail testing approaches that engage native speakers to improve vital content in small-language editions of Wikipedia . Further we will develop a concept and develop new lifecycle dashboard designed to support communities in the new wikis know what they need to get started and makr progress towards becoming a small wiki. In parallel, the work continues to expand language onboarding through internationalization and localization support, ensuring that new and emerging languages can effectively use Wikimedia platforms and tools.

Idea:Engage native speakers to improve vital content in small wiki

The goal is to reach these speakers where they are, starting from the high-traffic wikis as entry points. Followed by taking them through a guided approach with a call to action for micro-contributions for a start. Then we can later explore more ambitious tasks such as expansion of articles as a follow up hypothesis.

Context

Our proposed idea for this year's work stemmed from our 2024-25 work, through the knowledge equity objective, we had an opportunity to support incubating languages through providing modern wiki features that are currently not available in the incubator including, Content Translation, Section Translation, Wikidata etc. We tested several hypothesis as defined in the 2024-24 Annual plan. Learnings from this experiment, highlighted that most of the test Wikipedias that were allowed to ‘graduate’ from the Incubator early and receive full production access were in fact experiencing decreased content editing activity except for Southern Ndebele and Iban. We however, learnt that the decline in edits was not limited to these wikis but also to other wikis that have graduated recently. For example, Angika wikipedia created on 22nd March 2024 and Kusaal Wikipedia created on 24th April 2024 just to mention a few according to Wikimedia Stats. Digging up this further, we actually realised we already have 100+ wikipedias with 20 or less active contributors though some of them are spoken by many millions according to ethnologue. Currently, despite wikis continuing to be onboarded to our platform, there is not yet a recommendation on how they can be sustainable in terms of improving in content. To begin drawing some learnings from these questions in 25/26, we will focus on supporting Wikipedias with a smaller presence on the Wikimedia platform, helping them to improve vital content.

Additionally, learnings from the Language Onboarding experiment. "An additional factor to consider for further research and planning interventions is the size of these communities - which are quite small more often than not, usually 5-10 active editors. The editing activity or content creation may not increase if the community only has the same range of active editors post-graduation, as the editors may not be able to spend significantly more time volunteering than they already did during the incubation period. An alternative way of looking at interventions could be the following: rather than focusing on whether better technical tools will help existing editors do more edits, focusing on interventions (technical and social) that will help bring more new editors into these language communities and retain them. This will likely have a more sustained impact in the long term" This learning is the core inspiration to propose the below intervention.

Step 1: Targeted regional & language outreach through CentralNotice banner on high-traffic Wikipedias in specific targeted regions T399011

Objective; Make more vital knowledge available and well illustrated across languages and topics( goal, objective )

Key result; By the end of Q2, implement 3 interventions that help contributors to improve the state of vital content on their Wikipedia

Description: In Q1 (July to September 2025), deploy a CentralNotice banner on high-traffic Wikipedias in specific regions where we want to increase awareness about smaller Wikipedias. The goal would be to study its use and impact on increasing awareness about small wikis, invite potential contributors to start their journey using growth features and ultimately improving vital content through suggested edits, which might be to add an image, add a link, and improve a section of an article.

The image is a cropped screenshot of one of the CentralNotice banners used for a Wikimedia Foundation work called "Engage native speakers to improve vital content in small language Wikipedias".

Hypothesis statement; If we invite native speakers of small wikis through a CentralNotice banner on a high-traffic Wikipedia in their region to contribute to SuggestedEdits and other Growth features, we can assess whether this approach attracts new native speakers, how they use the tools, whether it improves vital content, and what future solutions could build on it for lasting impact.

This intervention aims to complement the efforts of enabling GrowthExperiments to bring new contributors onboard and encourage them to try out the feature. The banner could include information about account creation guidelines, informational videos about editing in the local context, and an invitation to explore GrowthFeatures and improve a vital article on their wiki either add a link, add an image or add a section of an article. The features will also include encouraging sharing resources, increase accessibility of community events and allow contributors to see their direct impact.

The Yoruba Wikipedia community previously tried a similar approach in the Recruit Readers as Writers initiative with promising results. In January 2022, 1,030 users were reached, 193 Wikipedia accounts were created, and 10 active editors remained after 1 year, with 374 articles created and 1.79M bytes added. Learnings from this initiative will be taken into consideration as we pilot the above idea.

The above mentioned initiative has been executed, you can learn more about the work and outcome on this page.

Timeline

July

Selection criteria and measurement plan
Prepare for communications support for both existing and new contributors
Development of banner designs
Collaborate with CentralNotice banner admins to launch banner in respective regions
Sync with marketing team to promote campaign in respective regions

August

Launch Growth features to existing contributors
Launch Banner on High traffic wiki to bring new native speakers

September

Providing Communications Support
Monitor and support to use Growth features

Step 2: Surface contribution opportunities to engage native speakers in small wikis via Wikipedia Mainpage T405298

Description: Q1 experiment showed that targeted regional and language outreach can successfully draw native speakers to smaller wikis. In Q2, we plan to build on Q1 learnings and brainstorm approaches to surface contribution opportunities and tailor onboarding experiences for native speakers that engage them in expanding articles with the use of contribution tools such as content translation. Our plan is to gathering topics of interest, community needs, and vital articles from small language communities, followed by designing a 3-week onboarding plan, coordinating discussions around weekly activities on talk pages and provide ongoing contributor support and recognizing contributors with the highest impact by featuring them in a Wikipedia blog post celebrating their work.

In Q3, we plan to start implementing tailored, guided onboarding approach with a prioritized list of vital articles and calls to action across multiple contribution tools to measure impact on small wiki communities.

In Q4, we plan to finalise implementation and evaluate and measure whether this approach increased in contributions to prioritized vital articles on small wikis via guided onboarding using the Content and Section Translation tools.

Draft Hypothesis statement; If we surface content gap contribution opportunities to native speakers via Wikipedia Mainpage and engage them in expanding articles using contribution tools (e.g., Content Translation / Section Translation), a higher proportion of contributors on smaller wikis will contribute to vital articles

Timeline

November 2025 : Design a Central Notice (CN) banner and onboarding modules. Get approval from CN admins. Gather vital article lists from communities.
December 2025: Communities begin translating onboarding materials and set up event pages. *Work paused as December was a quiet period for communities
February 2026: Experiment redesign to focus on Wikipedia Mainpage instead of Central Notice Banner
Mid March 2026 - Mid April 2026: Campaign runs for Weeks 1, 2, and 3
Mid April 2026 -End April 2026 : Evaluate the campaign and gather feedback from community members.

Idea: Starter kit; enable new wikis to get started and make progress

Wikipedia projects evolve through distinct lifecycle stages , incubating, new, small, medium, and large. Each of the Language Lifecycle stages presents unique challenges that require tailored approaches. Once a wiki becomes newly launched, they required to establish basic governance, onboarding new contributors, and ensuring essential technical configurations and documentation are in place.

Currently, there isn't a stage specific intervention that guides a new wikipedia to quickly identify what they need to get started and make progress towards becoming a small wikipedia. Most communities end up discovering resources on their own and sometimes receive ad hoc guidance from experienced contributors. A proposed approach is Starter kit (T410699) , a Lifecycle Dashboard for the New → Small Wikipedia stage that will focus on helping new wikis communities establish the essential foundations of a sustainable wiki. At this stage, projects are usually newly approved Wikipedias transitioning from incubation, with small contributor communities and limited governance structures. The dashboard therefore will act as a guided operational toolkit for administrators, advanced editors, and technical contributors, combining key metrics with prioritized actions that help stabilize and grow the project.

The dashboard will emphasize foundational tasks that new Wikipedia are recommended complete. These tasks are anticipated to guide administrators and experienced contributors in building the core systems that support long-term sustainability. For example, the dashboard may highlight tasks such as establishing basic governance policies, creating a main page and key navigation pages, translating vital articles, ensuring interface localization, and setting up maintenance workflows. By surfacing these actions directly in the dashboard, the system reduces the need for manual guidanceallowing communities to follow a clear, structured pathway toward maturity.

Timeline

October–December 2025

Early exploration: talking to people, gathering initial insights.

January 2026

Develop a concept note for what the starter kit may focus on or look like in the future.

February 2026

Refine and develop mockups for the landing page/dashboard and main page customization feature sketched at the offsite.
Share and brainstorm early designs at the Language Community Meeting and with the Language Diversity Hub team.

March 2026

Develop the main page customization feature.
Gather input from relevant stakeholders (e.g., Language Diversity Hub mentors) on choosing essential tasks and tools for the starter kit.

April 2026

Develop the dashboard: essential tasks, activity & growth and community and collaboration features.
Test early designs (including possibly the main page customization feature) with ~5–7 new and smaller wikis; gather feedback and evaluate the initial version.

May 2026

Continue with Essential tasks development
Instrumentation set up
Starter kit Dashboard demo for next Language community meeting
Dashboard Deployment

June 2026

Testing & Optimization
Testing with Wikipedia Administrators, technical contributors and advanced editors

Language Onboarding (i8n & L10 Support)

This area entails supporting communities particularly new & smaller ones are supported with internationalization and localisation workflows and features to help them move towards their goals.

In nutshell, we will continue to work closely with language communities primarily smaller and newly formed wikis, where timely interventions and engagements are needed to support internationalization and localisation workflows and products to help these communities to keep them moving to achieve their goals. We will work closely with the Wikimedia communities about language- and region-specific needs within the products intended for multilingual use.

Key Result: Resolve at least 10 internationalisation and localisation requests per quarter through timely interventions and engagements to support Language communities

Deliverables

Provide support for new and existing languages on wikimedia projects through responding to language related requests
Explore meaningful x collaboration and engagement opportunities for Wikimedia Language communities