ESEAP’s Reflections on the Wikimedia Futures Lab – Diff

It was the last weekend of January 2026. While many people in Jakarta were still in holiday mode after the long New Year, I was packing for Frankfurt. As the ESEAP Hub representative, I joined more than 100 participants, including the organizers, from across the Wikimedia movement, including affiliate representatives, volunteer contributors, and external experts, at the WikimediaFutures Lab, an in-person convening organized by Wikimedia Deutschland in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation, held January 30 to February 1, 2026.

I had known about this event for a while. The application process opened up until the beginning of September 2025, and the concept had already been discussed at Wikimania 2025 through a session specifically designed to gather community perspectives before the Frankfurt convening. So by the time I boarded the plane, I had a rough idea of what was waiting, but Frankfurt had its own surprises.

Getting There

The journey from Jakarta to Frankfurt is never short. By the time I arrived at the venue, jet lag was already doing its thing. But the moment I walked into the room and started meeting people, the tiredness became background noise. There is something particular about the energy of a room full of Wikimedians. Most of us have been talking online for years, often in edit summaries or on talk pages, in online gatherings, and then suddenly you are sitting across a table from someone whose username you recognize, a bunch of familiar faces from the years were appearing in front of you.

Beside me, the ESEAP region had four other participants at the Wikimedia Futures Lab. Yongjin Ko represented Wikimedia Korea, Ahmad Ali Karim from Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia (MYS), Curtis Lui from Wikimedia Community User Group Hong Kong (WMHKG), and Jeromi Mikhael from Indonesian Wikipedia. In Jeromi’s own words, it was the first time he was “the sole carrier of Indonesia’s flag in a conference”; besides me, who is also an Indonesian but represented the ESEAP Hub (Read Jeromi’s full report here). That is a lot of weight to carry, and I think it says something about how underrepresented our region still is in spaces like this, which is exactly why the ESEAP Hub being present matters.

Day One: Learning About the World Around Us

The first day was framed around one big question: how is the world changing, and what does it mean for Wikimedia? A series of expert presentations and panel discussions set the scene, covering three interconnected areas: how people consume knowledge today, how people contribute to knowledge, and how the broader knowledge infrastructure is shifting.

The picture that emerged was not particularly comfortable. People, especially younger generations, are increasingly turning to social media, short-form video, and AI-powered tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude as their first stop for information. Wikipedia traffic remains substantial, but the pathways to it are changing, and the attribution chain is blurring. When an AI chatbot answers a question using Wikipedia-derived data, does the user ever know? Often, sadly, a big no.

“I want you to remember that [the future] is uncertain and that those who are telling you things with certainty, are the ones that you want to be the most careful and sceptical about.” Malka Older, Executive Director of Global Voices and science-fiction author

One phrase that stayed with me came from the opening session from Malka, rather than offering predictions or a roadmap, she invited participants to sit with uncertainty and to be sceptical of those who don’t. It is a deceptively simple idea, but it reframes everything. Jeromi also highlighted this in his report, the sense that we are not preparing for a crisis that is coming. The shift is already happening now, and the future is the present.

On the contribution side, the conversation was equally honest. The classic Wikipedia editing pathway, find an article, click edit, and become a contributor, is no longer appealing or interesting to many people. Younger users express their knowledge contributions through TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and other online platforms. The MediaWiki web interface can feel rule-heavy, overwhelming, and intimidating. These are not just “Western Wikipedia” problems. In the ESEAP region, we feel them too, sometimes more acutely, and sometimes differently.

Day Two: The Knowledge Infrastructure Question

If the first day was about the user experience, the second day dug into the structural picture. Wikipedia celebrated its 25th birthday on February 15, two weeks after our final day, which provided an interesting backdrop for the entire event. Almost a quarter-century of free knowledge. And yet there is a real and growing concern about extractive use of that knowledge: AI companies training their models on Wikimedia content without meaningful attribution or contribution back, regulatory frameworks that were designed to constrain Big Tech but are also creating unintended friction for nonprofits, and a general shift toward closed, commercial information environments.

Yongjin Ko, in his reflection on the event, focused on the broader movement question: what will the future of Wikimedia projects look like over the next 25 years? (Read Yongjin’s full report here) It is a question that takes on different meanings depending on where you are from. For the ESEAP region, home to some of the world’s largest internet populations, enormous linguistic diversity, and communities with very different relationships to digital infrastructure, “staying relevant” is not one problem but many.

One thing I kept thinking about during this day was the open cultural data conversation I have been having in Indonesia for years. Worked long with Wikimedia Indonesia and also several important partners, including several Indonesian Government entities, Creative Commons Indonesia, and the Goethe-Institut, which have been working to discuss open cultural collections, yet the awareness gap, the copyright confusion, and the institutional protectiveness that slow things down are exactly the same dynamics discussed here on a global scale. What is local is also global. The ESEAP Hub’s role is partly to ensure those local stories are heard in rooms like this one.

Day Three: Experimenting Our Way Forward

The third day had a different energy. After two days of listening and discussing, we were asked to propose an experiment. It can be a small or big, testable or untestable, “safe-to-try” or experimentalist idea, basically many different kinds of ideas, whether it is possible to do in the near future, or in the future, maybe it is not realistic yet, but there is a possibility, which could be taken back to communities and projects.

The format was creative, sticky notes on glass walls (Jeromi remembers it as “a very wide glass”), merging and refocusing ideas with other participants, then forming small teams around shared experiments. According to Jeromi’s count, participants proposed at least 50 different experiments, 23 of which were published on Meta, spanning a wide range of challenges. He joined forces with Daniel Sigge and Ruby D-Brown to develop a concept for a tool that identifies popular but stale articles in urgent need of updating, a practical, community-useful idea that emerged directly from the conversations over the previous two days.

My own experiment came from a question that has been sitting with me for a long time, long before Frankfurt: what happens to the knowledge that has never been written down?

---

WikiVoice — My Experiment from the Futures Lab

What is it? WikiVoice is a proposed digital language archive designed for oral knowledge: the kind that lives in spoken stories, community recordings, and Indigenous languages with far more speakers than writers.

The core idea: Together with Wikimedians from Nigeria, Tochi Precious, and India, Subhashish Panigrahi, I co-created a conceptual model for WikiVoice during the Lab. The experiment proposes a Wikimedia-native infrastructure where archivists and community members can host audio and video media, digitise it using speech-to-text, captioning, and translation tools, and generate citable, time-coded references that can actually be used across Wikimedia projects: Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and beyond.

Why does this matter? Most of the world’s knowledge does not exist in text. Oral traditions, Indigenous languages, community histories, these are passed down through speech, through elders, through practice. Wikipedia’s current citation infrastructure is built almost entirely around written sources. That means entire bodies of knowledge are structurally excluded from the most-read reference work in human history.

WikiVoice is an attempt to change that. We hope that the experiment could be built based on the FAIR-CARE principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability), and the CARE principles (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics), which are particularly important when working with Indigenous and community knowledge that has historically been extracted and misrepresented.

What comes next? WikiVoice is now registered as one of the Wikimedia Futures Lab experiments. The next steps involve co-designing the experimentation roadmap to bring this idea to life and determining how we can further it into the real project.

You can follow the experiment here: WikiVoice – Wikimedia Futures Lab Experiment Tracker

---

For me, WikiVoice is where the Futures Lab conversations became personal. Everything we discussed over the first two days, the communities excluded from digital knowledge production, the ESEAP region’s underrepresentation, the gap between what Wikipedia covers and what the world actually knows, those abstract challenges have a very concrete shape when you think about Indigenous peoples in our region who hold irreplaceable knowledge about their land, their language, and their community’s history, and whose voice will never appear in a Wikipedia citation under the current system.

This is also why the ESEAP Hub’s presence at events like this matters beyond just having a seat at the table. It matters because the ideas that come out of those rooms need to be shaped by the people they are meant to serve.

The event was also notable for the presence of leaders at the leadership level. Bernadette Meehan, the newly appointed CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, was there. She participated throughout the event not as a keynote presence but as a listener and discussant. During our short exchange, when I asked about her new role, she reflected on how vibrant the Wikimedia community is and how very welcoming our movement is. That is the culture we are trying to protect and strengthen, and, with experiments like WikiVoice, trying to extend to communities that have never had the chance to contribute.

What I Am Bringing Back

The Wikimedia Futures Lab is not a three-day-and-done event. It is designed as part of an ongoing process, and the Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland have made clear that the conversations will continue throughout 2026, feeding into annual planning and broader movement strategy.

For the ESEAP Hub, I think the biggest takeaway is about visibility and voice. Five people from our region was not nothing, but it was also not enough to fully represent the diversity of what ESEAP means: the multilingual Wikimedia projects across Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and East Asia; the GLAM communities working to digitize heritage collections in countries with significant access gaps; the language communities working to bring underrepresented scripts and languages into digital spaces; the volunteer networks doing extraordinary work with limited resources.

Jeromi put it well when he described the experience of being in a room with people who “would shake many worlds with the right willpower and implementations.” That is genuinely what it felt like. The Wikimedia Futures Lab brought together a remarkable concentration of experience and commitment. The question, the same one we ask in every hackathon, every editathon, every open data conversation, is how we translate that energy into something that lasts.

For now, the sticky notes are off the glass wall. The experiments officially have begun. Fingers crossed for the best future!

---

Other reports from ESEAP participants:

Related