Wishathon is a new initiative that encourages collaboration across the Wikimedia community to develop solutions for wishes collected through the Community Wishlist Survey. The inaugural community edition will take place from March 15th to 17th, 2024. You can learn more and sign up here.

Community Wishlist Survey

As an open source movement, Wikimedia has always relied on collaboration between volunteer developers, Wikimedia affiliates, and Wikimedia Foundation staff to build and maintain our features and tools. One way we do this is through the annual Community Wishlist Survey, which since 2015 has empowered contributors to the Wikimedia projects to suggest and vote on improvements or new features for tools and platforms. Throughout the year, the Community Tech team works closely with volunteers and affiliates, as well as dozens of teams across the Wikimedia Foundation, to grant community wishes, with an overall completion of 30 projects (67%) out of the 45 prioritized since 2015. In 2024, we’re building on this shared work with a new way to address more wishes: a community Wishathon. 

Wishathon

To promote collaboration on wishes within the product & technology teams, since May 2022, the Community Tech team has organized five Wishathons internal to Foundation staff to bring greater technical capacity to address open wishes. Since the inception of the Wishathon, Foundation staff have helped Community Tech complete work on 10 wishes that were otherwise stalling or incomplete. As a next step in these efforts, this next edition of the Wishathon extends to Wikimedia contributors.

Using the Wishathon, volunteers can directly shape the tools they depend on and require to provide their contributions more effectively. In times of rising dis- and misinformation, making the tools we contribute with work even more accurate and safe has become even more critical. Being able to prevent hate speeches and racism in our content with our tools is something we truly hope for. Moreover, volunteers often know best what improvements will make the greatest impact on their workflow, and how to design solutions to meet that need. Therefore, we warmly welcome interested volunteers to join our first community Wishathon in March 2024. While looking through the 2023 results pages, what are wishes you could contribute to, are a specialist for, or missing a piece of the puzzle? It might be great to work in a Wishathon together with us!

How do I participate in the Wishathon?

This edition of the Community Wishathon will focus on bringing together people who already contribute to technical aspects of the Wikimedia projects, who know how to find their way on the technical ecosystem, and who are able to work or collaborate on projects rather autonomously. In general, if you are interested in a project proposal as a user, developer, designer, or product lead, you are welcome to join the event! 

If you wish to take part in the Wishathon, you can register for the event on this wiki page:  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event:WishathonMarch2024. Organizers will send a message to your talk page with more details about the event in January 2024 and post updates on this page.