The Wikimedia Foundation has published its transparency report for the first half of 2025, about "requests we receive to alter or remove content from the projects, and to provide nonpublic information about users."
The section on requests for user information ("such as IP addresses or user agent information") reports that 64 user accounts were "potentially affected" by such requests, but only one "actually affected". Among the 20 government requests received, the largest number (8) came out of India. The Foundation "partially complied" with only one request, out of France, and "fully complied" with 0. This was down from 2 granted requests in the second half of 2024: one from Brazil ("fully complied") and one from India ("partially complied"). The latter had received a great deal of community attention, including an open letter with the largest number of signatures in Wikimedia history (Signpost coverage).
The Foundation proudly points out that "Compared to other companies, we received relatively few requests, and granted relatively low percentages", citing numbers from LinkedIn, Meta and X (formerly Twitter), who during a comparable recent half-year timespan granted 723, 251,028 and 10,581 requests for user information, respectively.
A look at the previous transparency reports from the last half decade (the report for the first half of 2019 seems to have been removed or never published) confirms that such low numbers are the norm for the Wikimedia Foundation - although the second half of 2023 seems to have been an outlier, in that no less than 896 user accounts were "actually affected" by the 5 requests granted:
timespan | Total requests | Requests granted | User accounts potentially affected | User accounts actually affected |
---|---|---|---|---|
July to December 2019 | 35 | 2 | ? | ? |
January to June 2020 | 30 | 1 | 72 | 2 |
July to December 2020 | 32 | 2 | 3,119 | 4 |
January to June 2021 | 30 | 3 | 38 | 5 |
July to December 2021 | 18 | 1 | 33 | 2 |
January to June 2022 | 31 | 0 | 38 | 0 |
July to December 2022 | 29 | 0 | 3,816 | 0 |
January to June 2023 | 41 | 3 | 8,712 | 4 |
July to December 2023 | 32 | 5 | 985 | 896 |
January to June 2024 | 26 | 2 | 186 | 2 |
July to December 2024 | 23 | 2 | 33 | 4 |
January to June 2025 | 30 | 1 | 64 | 1 |
The Foundation's transparency report also provides other kinds of information, e.g. about "Requests for content alteration and takedown", or about "Orders from EU Member States" that it received under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA).
– H
Larry Sanger has been largely inactive as a Wikipedia editor since his departure in 2002 as Wikipedia's "chief organizer" who (as employee of Jimmy Wales) had crafted several of its core policies. On September 29, he updated his user page to announce that
I'm baaaaack! [...] For most of 2025, I have developed Nine Theses on Wikipedia, which is partly an extended criticism and partly a reform proposal. Unlike much of my previous writing and speaking about Wikipedia over the past 20 years or so [cf. Signpost coverage], this is not merely negative. It is a realistic plan to make Wikipedia better. I hope you will take it seriously.
The nine theses, expanded upon in great detail in the document (which "is 37,000 words, something like a 150 page book" according to Sanger), are:
Various Wikipedians have so far commented on the talk page and in a village pump thread.
Sanger also announced his theses in an article at The Free Press (see "In the media" in this issue) and in a thread on Twitter/X, where he added:
Wikipedia could change. It's not impossible.
But only if you make a lot of noise both on social media and on Wikipedia itself. The current narrative is controlled by a few hundred people. What if 1000s (politely) descended on Wikipedia?
These are, in fact, very reasonable, commonsense proposals from anybody's point of view. We can put pressure on Wikipedia at all levels to adopt them. If they do nothing or refuse to change, there will be consequences.
I am Tucker Carlson's interviewee today—we talked about both criticisms and this reform proposal.
The 93 minute interview with Tucker Carlson touched on topics such as Carlson's theory about "Wikipedia’s Dark Alliance With Google" - alleging the existence of "a deal with Google that allows them to be the top search result" (Sanger agreed that "you very well could be right", but offered the alternative theory that Wikipedia might in its early days have benefited from a "feedback loop" with Google's algorithm, by being the first website to cover various topics).
Other parts of the interview caused "MAGA [to] Melt[] Down Over Wikipedia ‘Blacklist’", as summarized by The Daily Beast. These reactions included Elon Musk announcing that at his company xAI, "We are building Grokipedia [..] Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia". Sanger reacted wearily: "Let’s hope it won’t be as biased as Grok itself."(Several weeks earlier, Musk had commented on the All-In podcast about possibly using Grok to "rewrite Wikipedia to remove falsehoods and add missing context". See also earlier Signpost coverage of Musk's grievances: "Op-ed: Elon Musk and the right on Wikipedia", "Wikipedia is an extension of legacy media propaganda, says Elon Musk")
In a 2013 tweet, Sanger had announced that "I am finished with Wikipedia criticism. Quote this back to me if I happen to lapse." Reform, however, was not mentioned. – H
Temporary accounts, formerly known as "IP masking", has been tentatively scheduled for rollout on English Wikipedia on October 7 (see announcement). The feature is already active on several Wikipedias and involves removing IP visibility for people who choose to edit without logging in.
For further reading on the discussions and rationale leading up to this, see previous Signpost coverage from 2020, 2024, and 2025. – B, H
Discuss this story
So, do we switch from "Hello IP!" to "Hello TA!"? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:37, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
At this point, Sanger is reasonably considered an outsider and thus is bringing an outsider's views, which on a basic level I welcome, and we should see more of such. That said, following is my first blush take of Sanger's ideas:
Stefen 𝕋ower's got the power!!1! Gab • Gruntwerk 19:49, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]