Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2026-02-17/News and notes

Since the start of the year, the Wikimedia Foundation is hosting discussions seeking feedback on several themes that will be at the center of the 2026-2027 Annual Plan, which aims to tackle the rapid changes of the Internet and the information ecosystem, increasing scrutiny from governments and regulations, the rise of AI and the recent signs of decline in Wikipedia pageviews.

As part of the WMF's collaborations with the community, various on-wiki and live discussions will be hosted before June 2026. Now, though, interested users can leave their suggestions and ideas on the Annual Plan's talk page: the discussions are centered around several key prompts, including global trends affecting the projects, experimentation, newcomers, users with extended rights, collaboration and reading. You'll have time to join the thread until May 31.

In the last few months, the Wikimedia movie app WikiFlix has caught the attention of several media portals in multiple countries, thanks to its free-to-use approach and its ever-growing catalogue of public domain and open movies. Although users have been quietly enjoying WikiFlix since early 2024, Wikipedia influencer Annie Rauwerda from Depths of Wikipedia recently highlighted the portal on TikTok back in December. This triggered an article by Amanda Silberling for TechCrunch, and then Punto Informatico reporting along with several and others in France and Italy.

An early WikiFlix concept was born from an idea of Belgian-Dutch art historian and Wikipedian Sandra Fauconnier – known as Spinster – who had originally started working on the project as a hobby in November 2019, while attending the Wiki Techstorm in Amsterdam, by creating a mini-portal on Wikimedia Commons, where she had added "a set of Wikidata-driven gallery pages showcasing cinema history". Fauconnier wrote that she was inspired to start the project in order to improve the description and the coverage of public domain films and music hosted on Commons, which she described as "a treasure trove of undiscovered high-quality multimedia". In June 2022, a group of Wikimedians proposed a version of WikiFlix as a separate Wikimedia sister project, but the proposal was declined.

In 2024, German MediaWiki developer Magnus Manske turned WikiFlix into a tool hosted on Toolforge, which now hosts over 4,000 movies from Wikimedia Commons, the Internet Archive, or YouTube that have fallen into the public domain. The tool's interface shares video streaming service design elements which Netflix also adopted, and allows users to browse, search and view movies without any interruption, while also providing information about the casting and other details. The WikiFlix database is updated hourly from Wikidata, but while movies with a lot of sitelinks on their Wikipedia pages are prioritized, the community around the tool maintains a blacklist in order to ban films with explicitly racist or propagandist themes from the main page.

The ever-growing catalogue of Wikiflix hosts movies from 1874 all the way up to 2025, and everybody is free to add new candidates and suggest improvements on the Wikidata page for the project. – O, BR

• Still work to be done for older FAs: WP:URFA/2020, an initiative to review English Wikipedia's oldest featured articles, has published their 2025 year-end report, which states that, since its creation, editors have completed reviews for 20% of the articles on their initial list. The report also outlines how editors can get involved. – Z
• Vote now for Wikimedia Stewards The 2026 election for Wikimedia stewards is open for voting until 27 February. Stewards are trusted and elected volunteers who have advanced global userrights to access the wiki interfaces of all Wikimedia projects. They especially serve the hundreds of Wikimedia projects in minority languages which do not otherwise have established communities or trusted leadership. The Signpost encourages all eligible Wikimedia voters to practice good community governance and citizenship by scrutinizing the candidates and casting ballots to confirm or pass the granting of permissions to these volunteers.
• New administrators: Vacant0's RfA, which we already reported on in the last Signpost issue while the votes were still coming in, eventually passed with 184 votes in favor and just one opposed. As a result, Vacant0 has become the first admin to get their shirt and mop in 2026.

• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Arabic coffee (beginning 16 February). Please be bold in helping improve this article!
• New GAN backlog drive: Get points towards barnstars during the February 2026 backlog drive for good article nominations!