Annual Report 2025/Story: UN collaborations create unexpected opportunities
In this story, we focus on what our collaborations with intergovernmental organisations and UN agencies led to during the year, including one of our greatest recognitions to date.
At the beginning of the year, we received confirmation: Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan had selected our collaboration with FAO and Wikimedia UK as one of the best examples in the world of projects that can help "solve global challenges"!
This meant that the "WikiProject for a United Nations of Knowledge" was promoted to the millions of people who visited the World Expo while it was open. Rarely have Wikipedia, the Wikimedia movement, and our collaborations with UN agencies been placed in such an honorable context.
The award is one example, but more broadly, 2025 was a year marked by our international collaborations opening new doors and bearing new fruit.
Alongside the Expo recognition, we worked on a new memorandum of understanding with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), in order to formalize and deepen our collaboration. This partnership has, of course, also been strengthened by the fact that John Cummings has worked for both organizations at the same time.
We also resumed discussions on a new partnership agreement with UNESCO, and after Wikimania in Nairobi we held discussions with the UN peacekeeping forces about how we might work together both to spread more free knowledge and to proactively help counter disinformation and misinformation.
Many of these opportunities came together in connection with our participation in the PIAM event in Frankfurt, the annual meeting for publishers and communicators from UN agencies and other intergovernmental organisations. The meeting is a unique opportunity to meet different UN organisations in person, as well as other international organisations such as the OECD and the Nordic Council. We are now exploring opportunities for collaboration with the latter two as well.
In summary, 2025 brought major opportunities to deepen collaboration with UN agencies and to help ensure that this type of partnership, over time, becomes as natural to the Wikimedia movement as GLAM partnerships. This is similar to a conclusion we had already reached three years ago; see Fail fest: Too much to handle – UN agencies are keen to share knowledge from 2022.
The work with the UN and other intergovernmental organisations is an integrated part of the thematic Content Partnerships Hub, and we will continue to explore joint activities between the Wikimedia movement and the UN in the coming year.
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