Annual Report 2025/Story: Metabase is growing and knowledge about the work of the Wikimedia movement becomes more structured
In this story, we describe how in 2025, Wikimedia Sverige continued to develop Metabase, a platform for gathering and structuring information about resources, activities, and actors in and around the Wikimedia movement. This work has both strengthened our own expertise in Wikibase and demonstrated how structured data can be used.
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.
Through Metabase, we are testing what becomes possible when information about the Wikimedia movement's activities is made more structured and interconnected. Our focus is on building up the content, the underlying data structures, and, not least, the documentation. Metabase is indeed run by Wikimedia Sverige, and it is our staff who have done most of the editing, but the long-term goal is for the movement to accept the project as "theirs". At the beginning of 2026, Metabase contained more than 20,000 items, mainly created through various thematic efforts that the Wikimedia Sverige staff had been experimenting with. Some examples of such thematic collections are conferences within the Wikimedia movement, such as Wikimania and the GLAM Wiki Conference, the "This Month in GLAM" newsletter, and the volunteer-run podcast Wikipediapodden.
In 2025, 16,562 new items were created on Metabase. Of these, 3.72% were created by users outside WMSE.
Our work on Metabase has also helped us prepare for a larger future need: being able to spread knowledge about Wikibase - a technical platform for developing your own web-based databases - to more actors, for example smaller GLAM organizations. For such organizations, it can be difficult to find effective, user-friendly, and reasonably priced ways of publishing, structuring, and reusing data in a way that is both open and sustainable over time. By working hands-on with a Wikibase instance ourselves, we have gained a great deal of practical experience. We are learning what difficulties can arise when modelling different types of data, what barriers new users encounter, what documentation is needed, and what technical limitations must be managed. That knowledge will be important if, in the future, we are to offer credible support, training, or methodological development for small and medium-sized organisations in the cultural sector, or in other sectors.
One example of how Wikimedia Sverige's work with data has created ripple effects is the dialogue with Capacity Exchange (CapX) - a project where Wikimedians who want to exchange knowledge and skills can find one another. The developers of CapX have benefited from Metabase as a backend where structured information about different capacities - the skills their users want to share - is available. At the same time, these conversations have benefited us, as they have given us insight into how our platform is perceived and how it can be improved to become easier to use. It became clear that Metabase serves as a concrete example of what is possible when Wikimedians approach the same problem - collecting and exchanging information - from different angles. The collaboration with CapX has the potential to become long-term and more extensive. In early 2026, we will sign a Memorandum of Understanding.
All of this shows that we are at the beginning of an exciting journey that will take both us and like-minded others to new destinations in the remarkable world of structured, linked data.
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