An apparent suicide attempt involving a revolver occurred at WikiConference North America just before 10:30 a.m. local time Friday, October 17, in New York. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. NBC News' headline reads "Armed man wearing 'non-offending pedophile' sign storms stage at NYC Wikipedia conference", and adds "The man pointed a gun at the ceiling and threatened to kill himself before being tackled by conference organizers, according to police."

The New York Times ("Wikipedia Volunteers Avert Tragedy by Taking Down Gunman at Conference") highlighted the actions of two Wikipedians that it said are on the event's "trust and safety team": Richard Knipel (User:Pharos), who "grabbed the gunman from behind", and Andrew Lih (User:Fuzheado), who charged forward and pried the loaded gun from the man's hand. While cautioning that the gunman's motivations remained "murky", the NYT reports that "he was wearing a sign around his neck that said 'anti-contact non-offending pedophile' and he told the audience he was going to die by suicide to protest what he called Wikipedia’s 'don't ask, don't tell' policy on pedophiles," possibly referring to "a rule that editors 'who identify themselves as pedophiles will be blocked and banned indefinitely.'"

The Wikimedia Foundation issued the following statement to The Signpost:

Earlier today, a conference attendee entered the WikiConference North America event with a gun and approached the stage, announcing an apparent suicide attempt. They were detained quickly and taken into custody by law enforcement.

Participants at WikiConference North America are safe, and we appreciate the conference organizers and attendees who stepped in to help during the opening ceremony. The rest of today's program is cancelled, and there will be additional security as well as law enforcement onsite for the remainder of the event.

We are grateful to the event organizers and local law enforcement for their support.

Two years ago, the 2023 edition of WCNA in Toronto had been interrupted by a bomb threat (see prior Signpost coverage). – S, B, H

Following Larry Sanger's publication of a long document calling for reforms of Wikipedia (Signpost coverage: "Larry Sanger is 'baaaaack!' with 'Nine Theses on Wikipedia'"), several media covered accusations of "left wing bias" on Wikipedia by Sanger and other critics. It appears to have culminated for now in a letter from the chairman of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation to the Wikimedia CEO demanding information, following which more media sources reported on the issuance of the letter, and the committee's investigation.

• Why Conservatives Are Attacking 'Wokepedia' in The Wall Street Journal gives an overall balanced view of why conservatives don't like this encyclopedia, or at least names some of those who don't like it the most: Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and Larry Sanger. It then puts the current anti-Wikipedia campaign into the context that "the nation’s most august institutions are under pressure for the messages they put into the world." Jimmy Wales then gives the arguments in favor of Wikipedia.
• Conservatives Slam Wikipedia as 'Woke' And Its Own Co-Founder Agrees: 'It's Been Hijacked by the Left' in the International Business Times cites the WSJ article and then veers in a more conservative direction.
• The speech wars come for Wikipedia in Politico concentrates on free speech issues and even cites a Village pump discussion.
• Cruz presses Wikipedia on bias amid growing conservative criticism in The Hill Sen. Ted Cruz had questions about the WP:RSPS list, in a letter to Maryana Iskander
• Ted Cruz picks a fight with Wikipedia, accusing platform of left-wing bias in Ars Technica explains what the U.S. Senate committee headed by Ted Cruz is looking for and followed with a second article titled "Ted Cruz doesn’t seem to understand Wikipedia, lawyer for Wikimedia says" featuring WMF's associate general counsel Jacob Rogers, who says "a lot of what's in this [Sen. Cruz] letter is actually misunderstandings". Rogers (who, as noted by Ars, had himself worked on the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations before joining WMF in 2014), explained that "There’s no formal authority behind this letter. It’s just a letter from a person in the legislative branch who cares about the topic, so there is nothing compelling us to give him anything. I think we are probably going to answer the letter, but there’s no sort of legal requirement to actually fully provide everything that answers every question."
• "Wikipedia editors claim that Trump's 'actions against civil society were described by hundreds of legal experts and political scientists as authoritarian.' ... Wikipedia provides just three sources to back up this sweeping claim." Fox News, via AOL confirmed in current revision as of writing -ed.
• Western Journal noted its own blacklisting, blackballing, listing as generally unreliable, or whatever you call it (it was "blackball" in their headline) (paywalled)

Other media that reported or commented on this issue included JNS and The Washington Examiner.

On October 10, the Wikimedia Foundation reacted to "growing media and other attention around Wikipedia and how it works" by publishing an explainer on topics such as the NPOV policy and (the English Wikipedia's) perennial sources list ("This is not a comprehensive list of Wikipedia’s sources, nor is it a comparison or evaluation of reliability between sources").

The Congressional inquiry and Larry Sanger's interview by The Daily Signal (which we are prohibited from linking) are subjects of reflection by Jimmy Wales in his interview with The New York Times (see below). – B, H

As already reported in our previous issue, on September 30 Elon Musk announced that at his company xAI, "We are building Grokipedia [..] Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia", following up on earlier comments about possibly using the company's Grok chatbot to "rewrite Wikipedia to remove falsehoods and add missing context".

• Livemint stressed that the Grok chatbot has had a few problems:
  "Grok AI had answered a user's question on 'Who are the 3 people doing most harm to America right now?' by naming Musk along with U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
  Meanwhile, the chatbot had also gone into a Hitler-praising spree on X shortly after it received the Grok 4 update. It also went on to cite Hitler as its surname in response to questions by multiple users."
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk says Wikipedia’s AI rival Grokipedia will launch in 2 weeks: Here’s what to expect The Times of India relies on posts on X (formerly known as Twitter) that seem to tell Musk what the posters expect from Grokipedia. Clear official statements from Musk or his subordinates are rare. One poster writes that Grokipedia "will cut through the BS" and that it "will use first principals and physics as a basis to identify facts and counter distortion. This would mean moving beyond surface-level edits to provide complete and accurate explanations."
• Elon Musk announces 'Grokipedia' challenge to Wikipedia on UPI followed livemint is emphasizing some of the problems with the Grok chatbot. It also stated that David O. Sacks had suggested the new encyclopedia to Musk.
• Elon Musk announces 'Grokipedia' challenge to Wikipedia in The Hill stresses that Musk and Sacks want to create Grokipedia due to the purported deficiencies of Wikipedia.
• Elon Musk Plans to Take on Wikipedia With 'Grokipedia' in PC Magazine focuses on Musk's antipathy to Wikipedia. A second PC Mag story says "xAI posted a job listing for a 'Member of Technical Staff, Grokipedia – Search/Retrieval.' The job posting suggests Grokipedia will leverage AI to pull information from Grok’s training database to create the encyclopedia entries."

On October 18, Musk followed up by announcing that a

"Buggy beta version of Grokipedia V0.1 will be released on Monday [October 20].
Even this very early release is better on average than Wikipedia imo."

Echoing an earlier focus on male genitalia in his criticism of Wikipedia, Musk added: "And we will offer you the opportunity to donate $5 to send a Grok dick pic to Jimmy Wales."

• Uphill battle against incumbent: A piece by the Northeastern University Communications Team features Joseph Reagle, a professor in the field of communications, noting that Wikipedia is "the last of the early generation websites that still serves the users instead of extracting value from them via advertising and algorithmic manipulation". Reagle is the author of a 2010 book about Wikipedia (Good Faith Collaboration) and the co-editor of Wikipedia @ 20.
• Does it really fix the issue?: "Elon Musk is right that Wikipedia is biased, but his AI alternative will be the same at best", according to an article in The Conversation by Taha Yasseri, a professor at Trinity College Dublin, Director of a TCD-TU Dublin joint centre for Sociology of Humans and Machines, and author of various research publications about Wikipedia. He concludes "In an age increasingly shaped by misinformation, transparency, diversity and open debate are still our best tools for approaching truth."

Musk is not the first to explore using Al for generating Wikipedia-like articles.

• A small website called WikiGen.ai (one developer's side project) already offers "automatically create[d] comprehensive articles on any topic you can imagine. Unlike traditional wikis that require human editors, our Al instantly generates well-structured, informative content tailored to your preferred reading level".
• "Botipedia", a project by INSEAD professor Philip M. Parker (which has been under development since at least 2021 and moved to a LLM-based approach more recently), reacted to Musk's September announcement by asserting that it had already launched version 0.5 of its "truth-seeking Al with 400B+ articles, 6,000x bigger than Wikipedia" (although a later tweet clarified it will only be "Open to all in 2026. For now, limited to edu/org/corp emails while we scale"). Larry Sanger praised it as "one of the most interesting new competitors of Wikipedia". A promotional video portrays Botipedia as being superior to Wikipedia due to its inclusionism and language diversity: "No subject, event, language or geography is too obscure to merit an article, meaning that no language gets left behind."
• The task of using LLMs to write Wikipedia-like articles has been the object of numerous academic research efforts for years (see e.g. our 2024 coverage of "STORM", a particularly notable project out of Stanford University that has also seen considerable real-life usage).
• Lastly, like Wikipedia itself, Grokipedia could also be seen as competing with ChatGPT Deep Research and similar offerings by OpenAl's competitors (like Gemini Deep Research) that generate cited reports on a user-specified topic.

– S, B, H

404 Media ("Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors"), Livemint ("Wikipedia loses 8% of human traffic as generative AI and social platforms change user habits") and others highlight a concerning statement from a recent Wikimedia Foundation post titled "New User Trends on Wikipedia."

In it, the WMF's Marshall Miller discusses a bug (phab:T395934, discovered in June and fixed earlier this month) regarding the failure of the Foundation's web analytics systems to detect a large amount of bot traffic, starting around May 2025. (Among other disruptions, including rendering pageview tools unreliable that are used by many editors, this also meant that the Foundation's own monthly Movement Metrics reports had to pause their regular analysis of readership trends, starting with the May 2025 issue.) With the data corrections now applied and backfilled, a drop in human pageviews (even when accounting for yearly seasonality) became apparent:

Revising our data in this way means we have to interpret it with care, as our bot detection systems apply different rules at different points in time. But after making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024. We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.

This will not come a surprise to many Wikipedians and other observers who have been wondering about the impact of the current AI boom on Wikipedia ever since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. Still, the Foundation's post doesn't provide any detail on how it was able to causally attribute the decline to these two factors (GenAI and social media), or how much each them contributed to the measured 8%. Several academic research publications – including one co-authored by a Nobel prize winner – have already tried to detect and quantify a ChatGPT-caused drop in Wikipedia traffic for earlier timespans, with varying results, see e.g. our overview in the March 22 Signpost issue: "So again, what has the impact of ChatGPT really been?". Hopefully WMF will likewise release the statistical analysis underlying its new answer to one of the most pressing questions about Wikipedia and AI. – H

• "Wikimedia Foundation removes anti-Israel board hopeful from ballot" (Jewish News Syndicate [JNS])
• Inside Wikipedia’s Board Elections Stephen Harrison interviews a former candidate.
• A banned user published a full write-up of the situation around the slate of candidates in Breitbart News, which is also a blacklisted site on English Wikipedia. The Breitbart write-up also mentions internal Signpost discussions, making it difficult for us to report on for multiple reasons.

– B

• Cory Doctorow explains why Wikipedia works: Cory Doctorow devoted a recent issue of his "Pluralistic" blog to explaining a recent "Why Wikipedia works", covering various historical aspects as well as reviewing recent media, notably "Josh Dzieza's lengthy, magisterial essay on the past, present and future of Wikipedia for The Verge," and Wikipedian Molly White who "shows you how to go to the library, find a cool book, and use the facts you find therein to make Wikipedia a better, more complete source of knowledge".
• Not a mystery person anymore: "Meet the mystery editor behind most of the Wikipedia pages on Korea" (Philippine Daily Inquirer)
• Digitize or Disappear: Akwa Ibom State deserves a place in Wikipedia, writes News Ghana.
• Who am I, anyway?: Aftonbladet reports that former Swedish national hockey coach Rikard Grönborg appeared uncertain about his future with Sweden's Tre Kronor team, joking that he had "actually checked Wikipedia" to see what his current title was. The comment came amid speculation about his position following recent coaching changes.
• Flattery will get you everywhere: An opinion piece (paywalled) in WAtoday says "[It's] the best thing that has happened to humanity since penicillin...In a world of online junk, Wikipedia is a source of hope."
• Are you motivated by all that sweet, sweet AI attribution?: A piece at IBM's "Think" blog says that WMF did the Wikimedia Enterprise model (see prior Signpost coverage 1, 2) because "Attribution is a key motivator for [Wikipedia] editors, and the [Wikimedia] Foundation sees proper sourcing as essential to its mission. Making sure LLMs credit Wikipedia for their information is an essential step."
• Jimbo to speak at UN...: No, Jimmy Wales will not address the General Assembly, but he will speak at the Goals Lounge in the UN Headquarters about his new book "The Seven Rules of Trust" at 1 p.m. Wednesday October 29.
• ...and spoke to The New York Times: Read the interview here or view the video on YouTube (43 minutes). This is classic Jimbo, speaking about current challenges, in detail and at length. Among other topics, he was asked about Elon Musk's attacks on Wikipedia, and also revealed that "we've had various conversations over the years. He texts me sometimes, I text him sometimes. He's much more respectful and quiet in private, but that you would expect. He's got a big public persona." Pressed by the interviewer about the possibility of Musk "draining support for Wikipedia", Wales replied that "I don't think he has the power he thinks he has – or that a lot of people think he has – to damage Wikipedia. I mean, we'll be here in a hundred years and he won't."
• Slop tells feted: Grant St. Clair writes "Wikipedia publishes list of AI writing tells" in BoingBoing (a regrettable omission from August when this was published – but we did cover another take on AI slop in our earlier October edition).