On January 1, 2025, a new edition of Public Domain Day took place, bringing in a fresh bunch of free-to-use works that, despite being perhaps less eye-catching and impressive than last year's intake, still provide our community with a lot of opportunities to enrich the ever-growing open access catalogue.

More specifically: works published in 1929, as well as sound recordings from 1924, are now unconditionally in the public domain in the United States (many lesser works were probably already public domain due to not being renewed, but now there's no need to verify the lack of renewal). See wider lists compiled by Duke Law and the Public Domain Review for more information. Among the entries, we have:

• Comic characters like Popeye the Sailor Man, the first Tarzan strips and Tintin – although the latter, quite paradoxically, will not enter the public domain in Belgium, the native country of his creator, until at least 2034.
• Books from the likes of William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury), Ernest Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms), Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own), Ludwig Wittgenstein (Some Remarks on Logical Form) and Mahatma Gandhi (The Story of My Experiments with Truth).
• Films such as The Broadway Melody (the first sound film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture), On with the Show! (the first all-talking, all-color, feature-length movie), The Cocoanuts, The Hollywood Revue, Hallelujah, Blackmail, Woman in the Moon, Un Chien Andalou, the first Silly Symphony cartoons – including The Skeleton Dance – and various Mickey Mouse animations, including his first talking feature in The Karnival Kid.
• Compositions like Maurice Ravel's Boléro, George Gershwin's An American in Paris, "Singin' in the Rain", "What Is This Thing Called Love?" and "Ain't Misbehavin'", as well as recordings by Gershwin, Jelly Roll Morton, Al Jolson, Clara Smith and Louis Armstrong.
• Artworks by Salvador Dalí (The Great Masturbator, The Accommodations of Desire), Wassily Kandinsky (Upward), Edward Hopper (Chop Suey), Kawamura Kiyoo (Founding of the Nation) and – maybe – René Magritte (The Treachery of Images).

In the UK, most European countries and South America, works by people who died in 1954 entered the public domain, as per a copyright term of "life plus 70 years": this definition includes the likes of Lionel Barrymore, Robert Capa, Colette, Enrico Fermi, Frida Kahlo, Henri Matisse and Alan Turing.

Meanwhile, many African and Asian countries (and New Zealand, too!) have welcomed in the public domain works of artists who died in 1974, among whom are Miguel Ángel Asturias, Duke Ellington, Georgette Heyer and Walter Lippmann.

Lukas Mezger wrote on Public Domain Day in Diff, and a recent Atlantic article discussed the exploitation of copyright law by the Doyle estate, which claimed to own Sherlock Holmes even after he'd entered the public domain. Still, taking advantage of new works released into the public domain is not always as straight-forward as it looks: if you feel like contributing to Wikimedia projects, you can follow these handy instructions kindly put together by user SnowFire last year. Keep On Wikin' in the Free World! – O

WikiProject Women in Red recently celebrated a very notable achievement, with volunteers announcing that, in mid-December 2024, women's biographies on the English Wikipedia had reached 20% of all biographies, according to the Humaniki data hub. The milestone was reportedly hit between December 9 and December 16, although it was not possible to determine exactly which biography helped cross the line.

Women in Red was founded by Roger Bamkin and former Signpost author Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight back in July 2015, during their stay at Wikimania in Mexico City, in order to address and reduce the content gender gap on Wikipedia by creating new biographies about women and other gender minorities, including transgender and non-binary people. In the following months, the project's volunteers started hosting their first edit-a-thons, both in-person and online; at the time, it was estimated that just 15,5% of all biographies on the English Wikipedia were about women. Bamkin and Stephenson-Goodknight went on to be awarded as Wikipedians of the Year for their efforts at Wikimania 2016 in Esino Lario.

With a little help from an ever-growing number of editors from all around the world, including the likes of Emily Temple-Wood, Jess Wade and David Eppstein, the Women in Red project managed to record slow but steady progress across the years, until last month's good news. According to volunteers, approximately 200,000 new biographies have been created since the start of the project in 2015, with about half of today's biographies now being less than ten years old; moreover, users also got invested in creating "a significant number of articles about women's works, organizations and initiatives, all of which contribute to increasing a wide understanding of women and their achievements". Finally, parallel projects in over thirty other language versions of Wikipedia have been started, with notable examples being Les sans pagEs, Mujeres and WikiDonne.

As of now, Women in Red hosts at least four different virtual edit-a-thons per month, two of which are run throughout the whole year – the #1day1woman initiative and a macro-thematic task, which will now focus on music – while the others (including Alphabet runs) are held on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. If you wish to help the project go even further, these initiatives should be a good place to start, but first, make sure to visit their main page. – O

On 2 January 2025, the Spanish Wikipedia hit the first article milestone of the new year, reaching 2,000,000 articles, becoming just the eighth edition of the encyclopedia to do so, following the English, Swedish, German, French, Dutch, Cebuano and Russian Wikipedias.

Volunteers reported that the lucky number was hit at 16:23 (UTC) on 2 January, thanks to the article Hieracium lapponicifolium, a species of hawkweed that was first described by Russian botanist Román Schljakov in 1981 and is endemic to the central Ural Mountains, most specifically to the Perm Krai. The page was created by Peruvian user Santi Chuco, who may have published the 1,500,000th article on the same platform, and is generally a well-known name within the Spanish-speaking community. As of now, Chuco ranks second among the users who contributed the highest number of articles to es.wiki, and 19th among the human editors who made the most edits on the site.

In other linguistic news, the Mazandarani Wikipedia reached 50,000 articles on 24 December 2024, right on time to wrap up quite an eventful year for the local communities covering Iranian languages, as the Persian Wikipedia joined the one-million-article club back in April, whereas the Pashto and Gilaki Wikipedias both hit the 20,000 article feat within a few weeks between November and December. – O

• New administrators and a round-up of 2024 RfAs: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Sennecaster, whose RfA was accepted with unanimous support (230 votes) on 25 December 2024, capping off a year that finally showed some promising signs for admins.

A total of 54 RfAs were submitted throughout 2024, with 24 of them being successful: in both cases, they are the highest yearly numbers recorded since 2014. These statistics are very likely influenced by the outcome of the first admin elections trial – in which 11 new admins were elected all at once - this was the main reason why November 2024 had the higher number of new admins in any month since August 2010 – and the overall encouraging results of the RfA reform ― see previous Signpost coverage here and here for more context.

• Active users added to the Main Page: Following the positive outcome of a lengthy discussion, the Main Page of the English Wikipedia now includes the number of active users in the previous 30 days. You can also check out the whole list here.

• The 2025 WikiCup starts off: A new edition of the WikiCup officially began on 1 January 2025, introducing some new judges ― users Guerillero and Lee Vilenski joined in ― and even new rules: signups will now be open throughout the whole year, and the lowest-scoring contestants will not be eliminated between rounds anymore. The top 16 scorers in each round will receive tournament points, which will play role in defining the final rankings. Whether you feel confident to beat the magic trio from last year, or you just want to help improve Wikipedia a little bit, you can sign up here!

• Wikipedia Day (a reminder): First celebrated by common acclamation in 2002, this year's celebrations will be held between January 11 (in Seattle) and February 1 (in Park City, Utah), according to the list compiled by Wikimedia NYC, with other meetups taking place in Minnesota, San Francisco, Chicago, Toronto, London and NYC itself. Be bold: don't bother asking anybody for permission to organize an event, just do it. Kwara State University is running a month-long series of editing events between December 17 through February 21.

• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Pirn (beginning 13 January 2025), followed by Medical prescription (beginning 20 January 2025). Please be bold in helping improve this article!