Wikimedia Foundation 2025
Wikimedia Foundation 2026
For Wikipedia’s 25th birthday, Happily wrote, directed, and produced Wikimedia Foundation’s most-watched livestream ever. Previous milestone events had been warm and staff-organized, but dry. Our solution was a live variety-format broadcast that treated Wikipedia’s community and culture as entertainment material. We built the show around humor, musicality, trivia, archival storytelling, dramatic readings, editor participation, a symbolic CEO cake handoff, and meticulous citation of every image, fact, and credit.
The Experience
The Show Concept
Wikipedia is the world’s largest and most-read reference work, and navigating endless rabbit holes to uncover the most human, surprising, and performable gems within it was very challenging. Interviews with community historians and superfans, a focus on places within the site where a username would appear, and extensive data analysis helped us arrive at our destination.Â
Instead of producing a polished but generic tribute, we built a live variety special shaped by the platform’s actual values and quirks: openness, citations, collaboration, volunteer passion, talk-page debate, remix culture, and deeply internet-native humor. The broadcast moved between comedy, performance, community ritual, live trivia, archival montage, multilingual participation, and meta-jokes about sourcing and credits. Editors became cast. Talk pages became dramatic material. Credits became part of the creative. Even the show’s transparency became a creative device, culminating in the final program being uploaded to Commons under an open license for reuse and remix.
The final rundown of the show also included:
A tribute to the Wikipedia talk page from the TED stage in a poetic reading between two Wikipedia users
A multigenerational Wiki user hangout with Wikipedians of different generations (age 25, 50, and 100) interviewing each other about their respective involvements, and dancing!
An Open Reel Ensemble feature combining Wikipedia music definitions with a creative visual performance
Games hosted by game designer Azmath Syeda of Factorday, which used Wiki data; winners won Wikipedia Birthday merchÂ
A dramatic reading from the Wikipedia talk page of an orange
A cake handoff between the outgoing CEO Maryana Iskander and new CEO Bernadette Meehan
The Birthday Cake song featuring the Wiki choir, which has gotten almost 100k views on YouTube
And celebrity features from Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, director Daniel Kwan, Jim Sonefeld from Hootie & The Blowfish, and more!
The Production
Our opening film, “Hello World,” simulated 79k+ data points to visualize the 25-year growth of Wikipedia’s 343 language editions, integrating over 45 alphabets into the motion design. Every image was sourced from Wikimedia Commons and every fact credited.Â
We ran six livestream videos at once, on YouTube with live dubbed translation in Arabic, English, Chinese, French, Spanish and Portuguese as well as in 9:16 for Instagram Live. We also custom-coded a chat player which synchronized all the community discussion in one place to create a truly global broadcast in real-time.Â
The Results
The work strengthened Wikipedia’s brand by adding delight to trust. The anniversary livestream show currently has 10,000 views and over 900 enthusiastic comments about Wikipedia. The Birthday Cake song has over 90,000 views to date. Internally, the livestream exceeded the Foundation’s expectations and broke previous viewership records for this kind of celebration. The show demonstrated that Wikipedia can evolve its storytelling without losing credibility: contemporary, entertaining, and still unmistakably human.
