WikiCredCon 2026

WikiCredCon returned from Friday, April 10 to Sunday April 12 in San Francisco, once again hosted by the Internet Archive and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation.

WikiCredCon returned for its second year this April, bringing 95 Wikipedians, researchers, journalists, and technologists to the Internet Archive in San Francisco to work on one problem: how Wikipedia stays reliable as the information ecosystem around it degrades.

The three days moved between lightning talks, workshops, panels, and an unconference, organized around five themes: media literacy, citation transparency, disinformation, editor tooling, and long-term collaboration with outside disinformation researchers.

Several sessions delivered results, not just ideas. LiAnna Davis of Wiki Education showed how pairing Pangram's AI-detection with editor training cut generative-AI-drafted content reaching live articles from a projected 25% to 5% in a fall 2025 study. Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight presented a structured AI-prompting method that improved Wikipedia's ORES quality rating on 73 of 75 tested biography articles, at under seven minutes of volunteer time each. Netha Hussain demoed two tools attendees could use immediately: a rule-based gender-bias detector (48 patterns, no AI) and a Wikidata explorer for finding notable women missing English Wikipedia articles.

The citation-tooling landscape also came into focus. Cite Unseen, now installed by over 600 editors, was joined on stage by the Internet Archive's new Citation Engine, which matches claims in Wikipedia paragraphs against 40 million academic articles, and by WikiSignals, a new reference-reliability tool. Liam Wyatt's proposal for a shared citations database sparked follow-on work with WMF and WMDE teams that's continued since the conference.

Oscar Costero introduced ClanDi, which trains Latino reproductive-rights activists as Wikipedia editors to close the English/Spanish gap in reproductive-health coverage; a first pilot cohort launched within weeks of the conference. Margarita Trovato brought a Wikimedia Argentina perspective on operationalizing information integrity, and Britta Gustafson walked through detecting deceptive websites used as citations — Gustafson would go on to be named a 2026 Wikimedia Laureate at Wikimania.

Sunday's keynote from disinformation researcher Joan Donovan, "Addressing Reliability in an Era of Information Erosion," placed Wikipedia's credibility work inside the broader fight against platform manipulation. A Friday fireside chat with WMF CEO Bernadette Meehan fed directly into a New York Times feature on Wikipedia published less than three months later.

The unconference closed out the weekend, with attendees surfacing their own breakout topics from ideas raised across the three days.

WikiCred's work continues through monthly online meetups, a planned track at WikiConference North America 2026, and a continued push on shared citation infrastructure.