Annual Report 2025/Fail Fest: Metabase: vision meets technical limitations
In this fail fest, we describe what we have learned as Metabase has continued to grow, while it has still been difficult to turn curiosity and interest into long-term participation. During 2025, it has become increasingly clear that both the vision and the user value need to be made more explicit if the platform is to take the next step.
Wikimedia Sverige has been working with Metabase for several years. As early as 2024, we noted that the platform was growing quickly, but that few people apart from our own staff were contributing on a regular basis. That analysis still holds true. We see that people become curious when we talk about the platform, and they often agree that there is a real need for better structured information about the work of the Wikimedia movement. But it has been much harder to turn that interest into active, regular participation.
Metabase is an experimental initiative, and we have devoted considerable resources to modelling different types of data and entering smaller amounts of data to illustrate what processes might look like. Much of that foundational work is now complete, and there is a solid base to build on. The broad experimentation and wide-ranging focus were a natural way to begin the work. They were also important for developing the association's understanding of Wikibase. At the same time, that breadth has made it harder to demonstrate concrete opportunities and value.
This is unfortunate, because Metabase is being developed to solve a problem that many people recognise. Information about the Wikimedia movement's activities is currently scattered across many different places: on Meta-Wiki, on Wikimedia organisations' own wikis, in documents, blogs, and other platforms. The ambition behind Metabase has been to gather and structure this kind of knowledge so that it becomes easier to find, understand, and reuse.
It has become clear that an ambitious vision is not enough to create a vibrant user community. In the summer of 2025, we took a closer look at the development of Metabase and concluded that the number of external editors was still small, and that most of them were not contributing regularly. Our main challenge is to involve more active users, but that is difficult without a clear and concrete vision for what Metabase should be.
Metabase - what could it become? A database of the movement's activities? A support tool for content partnerships? A digital library of resources? A way of making experiences visible? We have had the opportunity to experiment with different approaches, test different types of content, and imagine different use cases. But communicating all of this is not as easy. We are honest with ourselves in viewing Metabase as a project under development, where we are still exploring what roles the platform might play in the future, but that brings with it the difficulty of giving outsiders a clear picture of it. It also makes it difficult to articulate concrete benefits for different target groups.
We have put a great deal of work into building up core data, structure, supporting data, and documentation, all of which has been necessary to give new users the opportunity to understand how the platform works and to build on what is already there. But that does not mean that Metabase is yet mature enough to present its use cases in a clear way. It is not obvious to newcomers what the data can already be used for in practice, or why it is worth contributing themselves. Added to this are the platform's technical limitations. Because Metabase uses Wikibase Cloud, we have limited control over how it functions. The platform can sometimes be slow or unavailable. It is not possible to install the gadgets and scripts that many Wikimedians are used to from Wikidata. This raises the threshold for getting involved even further. And because Metabase is not part of the Wikimedia ecosystem, it does not feel as natural to start contributing there.
Because of this, we want to invest in Metabase from several different angles in 2026. A first step is to define a clear and achievable goal for the year. Based on that, we can develop concrete examples of how data can be used in different tools and workflows. Third, we need to build a better structure for meeting and supporting users, including documentation in different formats, different channels for meeting both us and other users, and programmes that make it clear to leaders within the movement how Metabase can be useful in their local communities. Fourth, we need clearer communication about our purpose and expectations. Fifth, we need to look at further developing tools that can lower the barriers for new users on the platform. Sixth, we need to formalise collaborations with other parts of the Wikimedia movement so that they, too, begin actively investing time in the platform.
One thing we keep in mind is that it is possible to engage a large user community in complex database projects. The existence of Wikidata, with its thousands of users who willingly and enthusiastically spend hours creating and editing items, finding errors, and writing SPARQL queries, is living proof of that, and a vision for us to work towards.
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