As Wikipedia Comes Under Threat, Help Strengthen Reliability at WikiCredCon 2025, Feb 14–16

As Meta ends its fact-checking program in the United States while promising to promote more political content, and LLM-powered search results could have a profound effect on our “fundamental shared reality,” Wikipedia – the only one of the 10 most-visited websites in the world run by a non-profit – is still regarded as one of the most reliable repositories of information on the internet. The reliability of Wikipedia helps improve information elsewhere on the internet, and has provided critical data for search engines, voice assistants, and Large Language Models (LLMs). And, thanks to its community of volunteer contributors, editors and other Wikimedians, Wikipedia is regarded as a first line of defense for information integrity.

However, at the start of 2025, Wikipedia is also under threat. Besides Elon Musk’s regular vows to take over or defund the platform, there now appears to be a coordinated campaign to identify, target and dox Wikipedia editors in order to influence and change editorial practices.

WikiCredCon 2025 will address these and other challenges over three days of talks, workshops and an unconference-style hackathon hosted by the Internet Archive at their headquarters in San Francisco from February 14th to 16th, 2025. The event will be attended by Wikipedians, Wikimedia Foundation representatives, misinformation researchers, policy specialists, technologists, and journalists who report on platforms.

WikiCredCon 2025’s theme is “Reliable Sources,” and will focus on themes including combating harassment and increasing attempts to dox editors, enhancing efforts and systems that protect against disinformation, and building and incorporating citation tools for Wikipedia’s global network of volunteer contributors.

WikiCredCon 2025 is aimed at:

• Wikipedians who focus on credibility issues and want to join WikiCred’s structured approach to collaboration and tool-building
• Platforms, researchers, organizations and others that depend on the reliability of Wikipedia sources
• Technology policy specialists
• Journalists who cover technology, policy, and disinformation

WikiCredCon 2025 incorporates feedback from a survey conducted with the Wikipedia community in fall 2024. Responding to the survey, Wikipedians said there needs to be clear, actional steps that tackle issues related to misinformation, disinformation, and missing information within the Wiki community, especially in the context of the 2024 U.S. elections, and ongoing issues in science, medicine, and vaccines.

Conference talks, workshops, and activities are arranged around the following themes:

• Improving Media Literacy: Develop educational resources and training materials that help both editors and readers critically evaluate sources and content.
• Enhancing Citation Transparency: Explore ways to make Wikipedia’s references clearer and more transparent—whether through better citation notices or tools to independently verify sources.
• Tackling Disinformation: Create and refine algorithms, bots, and dashboards that will help flag unreliable sources, correct misinformation, and automatically verify citation quality.
• Empowering Editors: Build tools to help editors access and use high-quality sources, integrate databases, and streamline citation processes, including more accurate metadata and citation bot improvements.
• Long-Term Collaboration: Work with experts in disinformation to update Wikipedia’s guidelines and best practices, particularly for contentious or highly edited topics that are vulnerable to manipulation.

This year’s conference is a follow-up to the WikiCredCon 2019, which was convened at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA as part of WikiConference North America. At least 350 Wikimedians, librarians, data scientists, academics and cultural professionals from across the continent attended WikiCredCon were joined by representatives from organizations and companies such as the Internet Archive, the Wikimedia Foundation, Wiki Education Foundation, Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft.

WikiCredCon 2019 launched the WikiCred project, which provides microgrants that support research, software projects, convenings, and more so that the Wikimedia community can play a role in improving information literacy and credibility on the internet and beyond. Cite Unseen, a tool for visualizing the nature of Wikipedia citations, grew out of WikiCredCon and an earlier credibility conference that took place in November 2018 in Austin TX.

The Internet Archive has a long history of collaborating with Wikipedia communities to solve problems such as fixing broken links, as well as helping to improve and enhance the reliability of the platform by making print citations easier to verify. 

Register for WikiCredCon 2025

Check back on the program ideas page as new sessions are added to the conference program. And please do sign up to attend WikiCredCon 2025: