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Description of package
WikiCite 2025 is returning this August 29-31 to bring together the global community working with open citations, bibliographic data, and the Wikidata/Wikibase ecosystem. This hybrid Wikimedia event is designed to reconnect communities, institutions, and individuals passionate about the future of open knowledge. It is not widely known in the public discourse that reliable citations and bibliographic data form the main structure of knowledge sharing. WikiCite addresses major challenges in how humans and machines organize, access, and build upon human knowledge. Federated ontologies, Wikibase federation, and the coordination needed to make scholarly knowledge truly open and accessible are only some of the discussion topics of the event. Whether you’re a Wikimedian, librarian, developer, researcher, or simply someone who believes in the power of open knowledge, WikiCite 2025 is the ideal opportunity to shape the future of how we organize and share information.
Group photo - WikiCite 2018. Photo by Satdeep Gill, CC BY-SA 4.0.
WikiCite 2025 Agenda and Info:
You can sign up on the WikiCite 2025 participants page to stay updated about the details of the event. While Friday’s in-person session in Bern is primarily for participants from Switzerland and neighboring countries, the online Saturday and Sunday sessions welcome global participation.
The main event page at meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiCite_2025 contains all the details, and the call for proposals (talks, workshops) will be announced there. Here is how the agenda will look like:
- Day 1 (Friday, August 29): In-person sessions in Bern, Switzerland at the Swiss National Library, featuring institutional presentations by librarians, digital humanities scholars, and Wikimedia technical staff;
- Day 2 (Saturday, August 30): Fully online technical discussions, community talks, and cross-timezone engagement;
- Day 3 (Sunday, August 31): Online community-driven interactive workshops and lighting talks.
Doing our Part in Supporting the Online Sessions
We are happy to share that our team will be providing BigBlueButton managed hosting for the online sessions of WikiCite 2025. We want to thank the Wikimedia CH team for choosing our team to support this important community event with our services. The project is very close to our mission to support small and medium organizations that value open knowledge with the technical infrastructure they need to connect and collaborate effectively.
This is not the first time we have done this. We’ve had the opportunity to support several online events that align with open knowledge values. We provided BigBlueButton managed hosting for Open Belgium 2021, a month-long online event featuring 58 speakers across 24 sessions with 710 attendees. We also supported FlashForward 2022 by the Shuttleworth Foundation and did the same with Open Publishing Fest. We’re particularly pleased to see that more Wikimedia-related projects and communities are increasingly choosing open source solutions for their digital infrastructure needs. It simply makes sense when your mission is to promote open knowledge and open data, using proprietary software creates an unnecessary contradiction. The Wikimedia community has always championed the idea that knowledge should be free and accessible to everyone. By choosing open source tools like BigBlueButton for online collaboration, these events demonstrate that the medium truly supports the message.
We’re looking forward to the end of August and the opportunity to use our know-how to facilitate these conversations about the future of open citations and bibliographic data. If you’re interested in open knowledge, consider joining the community at the following link:
