Ilario Valdelli

Ilario Valdelli started editing Wikipedia in 2005 and co-founded first Wikimedia Italia and then Wikimedia CH. Since then his work has moved between community, strategy and infrastructure. Today he is Innovation Programme Lead at Wikimedia CH, where he works on AI, digital sovereignty and academic partnerships, and where he also runs the IT systems of the organisation. For him the question of who controls the infrastructure is a practical one, not only a theoretical one.

In 2026 he co-authored with Alek Tarkowski (Open Future) the white paper Wikimedia, the commons, and the new AI knowledge loop: A mission for 2030, launched at Wikimania 2026. The starting point is a problem the free software community knows well: openness can enable extraction instead of equity when the power asymmetry is extreme. The paper argues that closing access is not the answer, and that passive openness is not enough either. Stewards of the commons need an active stance: building public AI alternatives aligned with commons values, and shaping the AI ecosystem so that the commons are respected and sustained.

He was born in Italy and holds Swiss and Italian citizenship. He lives in Graubünden and works across five languages, which in Switzerland is less a skill than a daily necessity.

BOFs at SFSCON

• Edition 2026
  Where does the knowledge come from? The metrics we don’t have for AI supply chains

  Provenance, attribution and return paths: what is actually implementable