Submissions:2025/Reimagining Wikimedia: Toward a Multimedia-First Platform for Free Knowledge
This submission has been noted and is pending review for WikiConference North America 2025.
Title:
- Reimagining Wikimedia: Toward a Multimedia-First Platform for Free Knowledge
Type of session:
- Edit-a-thons or Workshops (30-120 min)
Session theme(s):
- Missing pieces
Abstract:
What would a truly multimedia-first Wikimedia experience look like—one designed not just for text content with occasional images, but for immersive discovery, visual storytelling, and collaborative creation? While Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, and Wiktionary are patterned as free alternatives to familiar platforms, there is no unified, compelling experience for visual and cultural content across Wikimedia. Instead, efforts across Commons, Wikidata, and third-party tools remain fragmented, limiting our ability to serve contributors, institutions, and audiences seeking richer engagement.
This session invites experienced Wikimedians, toolbuilders, and open culture advocates to explore how we might build a resilient, multimedia-native platform within the Wikimedia ecosystem—one that meets the expectations of a visually literate, participatory world shaped by platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. How might prototypes, experiments, and tools like WikiDocumentaries, Commons Gallery, Crotos, WADE, and Tapestries (a new visual storytelling tool from the Internet Archive and Bob Stein) inform a future with visually rich, interactive experiences for Wikimedia content?
This is especially urgent for GLAM institutions, which increasingly rely on Wikimedia for leadership in making their collections discoverable, reusable, and linked through tools like Structured Data on Commons and Wikidata. Meanwhile, emerging file types such as 3D models with textures and color, and cutting-edge technologies like Gaussian splatting, are redefining how cultural knowledge is captured and shared. Wikimedia must evolve to support these modalities.
This session invites participants to explore what a shared vision might look like for an open, collaborative, multimedia-forward counterpart to platforms like Google Arts & Culture grounded in the Wikimedia movement’s values of equity, openness, and free knowledge for all.
Author name(s):
Wikimedia username(s):
- Fuzheado
Affiliated organization(s):
- Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network
Estimated length of session
- 60 minutes
Will you be presenting remotely?
- I will present in-person
Okay to livestream?
- Livestreaming is okay
Previously presented?
- A variation of this has been proposed for the GLAM Wiki Conf
Special requests:
- Materials for brainstorming (stickies, markers, posterboards, wall space) would be appreciated