Knowledge is human: Our commitment to the Wiki communities

The German-language Wikipedia is the largest of the more than 340 language versions, second only to the English version. On March 25, 2025, at exactly 8:27 a.m., we had a special reason to celebrate: that was the moment the German-language Wikipedia surpassed three million articles.

An average of about 37,000 volunteers work each month on the German-language Wikipedia, 5,000 of whom are especially active. Again in 2025, funding, supporting and growing this community was a central focus in Wikimedia Deutschland’s work.

In total, we supported 321 projects and events through our community funding — an increase of 8.5 percent over the previous year. With more than 2,300 participants, events such as WikiCon, FemNetzCon, and AdminCon were particularly well received. We also supported volunteers by covering 1,032 services, such as travel expenses and literature grants. That number has also increased compared to the previous year.

Each year, the volunteer support barometer records how satisfied volunteers are with Wikimedia Deutschland’s funding opportunities and volunteer support. In 2025, it once again showed a top score: 9.6 out of 10 points, measuring overall satisfaction with our support. According to a community survey, 46% of respondents are now aware of Wikimedia Deutschland’s funding and volunteer support opportunities, up from 30 percent in 2023.

In order to continue enabling so many people to participate in Wikimedia projects and to create capacities for this volunteer work, we are continuously improving our funding and volunteer support. In 2025, with the help of a group of volunteer editors, we revised our support guidelines and implemented several changes to make funding and volunteer support even more accessible to a wider range of target groups. The new support guidelines are now also available in plain language to make what we offer even more accessible to even more people.

One of the most important venues for community exchange is the annual WikiCon. In 2025, it took place in Potsdam. With 397 participants on-site and online, it was the largest conference in its history.

One especially encouraging fact: 91% of all participants rated WikiCon as helpful for their volunteering, and just as many felt motivated to remain active. Also, the proportion of participants under 30 rose to 14% (up from 10% in 2024) — an important step for the next generation of volunteers promoting Free Knowledge.

GLAM events also received a strong response in 2025. As early as 2010, Wikimedia Deutschland started connecting cultural heritage institutions with the Wikipedia community. Art collections, libraries, archives and museums now make their collections, historical documents, and images freely accessible through Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikidata.

In 2025, the GLAM Digital series celebrated its 50th edition. Several events, such as the collaboration with the German Resistance Memorial Center, took place in keeping with the theme “Wiki Loves Democracy”.

To ensure that Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects remain strong in the future, it is crucial to recruit new volunteers. Only with many active contributors from different age groups and walks of life can our project continue to grow, enabling us to safeguard reliable knowledge and to overcome current challenges.

In 2025, Wikimedia Deutschland continued to actively support the recruitment of newcomers — primarily through meetings and networking opportunities, including Die Jungwikipedianer*innen and the initiative “Mit Wikipedia unterwegs”. At various gatherings, young and new Wikipedians got to know the community and found inspiration to get involved.

Wikimedia also promotes international networking within the community. In 2025, this included 14 scholarships that we awarded for participating in Wikimania, the global gathering of the Wikimedia Movement, in Nairobi. For many volunteers, this was an important way to broaden their horizons, as their testimonials show:

Yet another of our goals is to strengthen diversity and equitable participation within the community. Mapping the world’s knowledge means incorporating all perspectives. That is why we are committed to ensuring that more people from marginalized groups can contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia. An important component in this context is the re·shape funding program, which contributes to greater knowledge equity. In 2025, the program went into its third round, supporting an additional ten projects that research and document marginalized knowledge and publish their results under free licenses.

In addition, in 2025 we launched the workshop series “Your Knowledge Counts!”. In cooperation with migrant initiatives and organizations, participants in five places learned how to conduct research and edit articles, with a focus on topics and perspectives that have been underrepresented in Wikipedia to date.

It is also part of our mission to foster an atmosphere where everyone feels welcome. After all, respectful collaboration is the foundation for sustained active engagement. That is why Wikimedia Deutschland has a Support and Advisory Team that organized nine events in 2025, covering topics such as nonviolent communication and how to address anti-feminism. Over 100 volunteers participated in these events. In addition, the advisory center provides communities with a confidential space to discuss conflicts, stress, or difficult situations in their work as volunteers on a one-to-one basis.

Feedback from these events shows that volunteers feel heard, understood, and respected. They particularly emphasized the emotional relief provided by counseling, as well as the practical applicability of insights from the workshops in their own work as volunteers.

Above all, current developments in artificial intelligence are fundamentally changing the way people search for and find information — often at the expense of reliability. 2025 has once again demonstrated just how crucial free and independent knowledge projects like Wikipedia are in times like these, projects that are sustained by the dedication of many.

With ongoing broad support from civil society, we will continue to promote and protect free access to knowledge — along with our more than 116,000 members and hundreds of thousands of donors.

For even in times of rapid technological change, one thing remains true: reliable knowledge is not created by machines, but by humans.