Day 1 of Wikimania in Nairobi, Kenya
Wikimania is the annual conference that brings together the global community of volunteers who build and maintain Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. This year it takes place from 6–9 August 2025 in Gigiri, Nairobi, Kenya.
I met a volunteer from Ghana who asked me for support for his Fante language group that wanted to use Wikidata and I think I was able to connect him to the right person.
In a short chat with Mathias I was given the gist of his most excellent talk he gave later that day: “Undeclared AI-generated text in Wikipedia: A tale of caution”. Mathias wrote an ISBN parser and let it run on the dump of the whole Wikipedia. He expected wrongly entered ISBN that could be corrected, but instead he found (in the reference section of articles) several cases of made up ISBN for books that don’t exist – “at least not in this universe”, he added. He wanted to find incorrect ISBN checksums and by accident he had written a detection program for AI slop.
I randomly ran into a friend from Nambia who I last saw in 2018 when Wikimania was in Cape Town, South Africa and used our reunion to briefly introduce him to Wikifunctions.
Later on, I gave a talk together with Friederike von Franqué and Jonathan Fraine. I talked about questions of knowledge equity, justice, and access in AI, and Jonathan presented the current work we do with getting Wikidata ready to be a repository for Machine Learning, before Friedericke gave an insight into the policy work that often means demanding a seat at the table for civil society organizations when UN and EU discuss the hype de jour of AI. With remarkable success: Wikipedia has officially been recognized as a digital public good (DPG) by the Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA), a multistakeholder initiative that maintains a Registry of Digital Public Goods: open source-software, data, AI models, standards, and content created for the public interest. The DPGA is endorsed by the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General in support of open source technologies that contribute to the advancement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Thanks, UN, for recognizing Wikipedia!
The weather in Kenya – it’s currently winter here – is a bit of a surprise with it’s temperatures between 14 and 20°C. Apart from that, it’s a delight to be in Africa again. This concludes my first blog postcard from Nairobi. Tomorrow it’ll be the second day.