Jimmy Wales, in Germany to promote his book The Seven Rules of Trust, answered the same question four times in one minute in a Jung & Naiv video interview hosted by Tilo Jung – before walking out of the interview. The question posed by Jung, known for a faux-naïve interview style inspired by Stephen Colbert, was: "Are you the founder or co-founder of Wikipedia?" Wales's answer was: "It doesn't matter."

The incident attracted press coverage in Germany –

• Berliner Zeitung: "„Dümmste Frage der Welt“: Co-Gründer von Wikipedia verlässt Interview mit Tilo Jung nach Sekunden"
• Der Spiegel: "Wikipedia-Gründer Jimmy Wales nennt Tilo Jungs Fragen »dumm«"

– and further afield, including British tabloids:

• The Daily Mail: "Furious Wikipedia co-founder storms out of interview after refusing to answer basic question"
• The Daily Express: "Moment guest storms out of huge interview and leaves host speechless: 'I'm done''

The Times of India noted that the incident has widely circulated on social media (see e.g. a Reddit thread with over 6,700 comments). – S, AK

An article by The Intelligencer titled "Grokipedia Is a Warning" finds that Elon Musk's "Wikipedia clone is ridiculous" but "also a glimpse of the future":

Grokipedia, and Musk's AI projects in general, invite us to see LLMs as powerful and intrinsically biased ideological tools, which, whatever you make of Grok's example, they always are.

A somewhat similar argument is made in a London School of Economics blog post by Patrick Gildersleve (author of several peer-reviewed research publications about Wikipedia). He argues that Grokipedia has essentially fallen flat, with little Google visibility and dwindling traffic. But Gildersleve notes that Wikipedia is operating in an ever more hostile political environment, and describes Grokipedia as

a warning shot for AI’s real impact on Wikipedia and open knowledge. [...] AI is a threat to Wikipedia, but Grokipedia itself is little more than a politically charged sideshow to the deeper battles underway in the digital knowledge ecosystem.

An article by disinformation scholar Renée DiResta in The Atlantic, titled "The Right-Wing Attack on Wikipedia", states:

The free internet encyclopedia is widely used to train AI. That's why conservatives are trying to dethrone it.

As for the Grokipedia concept, she says:

It's pure algorithmic output with no community, no transparency, no clear process for dispute resolution. The irony is striking: Even as Musk and his friends attack Wikipedia for supposed bias, he is building something far more opaque and unaccountable.

As a concrete example, DiResta highlighted serious issues in the Grokipedia article about herself:

The remarkably thorough article about me contains nonsense that conspiracy theorists entered into congressional proceedings—including claims that my former research team at Stanford Internet Observatory censored 22 million tweets during the 2020 presidential campaign. [...] I reported these issues via the Suggest Edit tool included in Grokipedia’s user interface—so far, to no avail. On Wikipedia, I could appeal to an editor by dropping a note on a Talk page. But Musk’s version misses what gives Wikipedia authority: human consensus.

However, in a post on her Substack several days later, DiResta reported that Grok had resolved these:

Grokipedia also has hallucination issues—a known challenge with AI, but a particularly big one for an encyclopedia. I experienced this firsthand [...] I flagged the errors for the chatbot. Tonight, around two weeks later, just as I was getting ready to publish this post, it finally fixed them.

Journalist and novelist Stephen Harrison discusses Wikipedia and the role of an editor community in a Slate podcast titled "Wikipedia Enters the Culture Wars" (transcript).

– AK, H

"Scandals Erased, Editors Paid: How Big Law Firms Try to Control Their Wikipedia Pages" – that's the headline of a law.com article (published back in September, archive) that told its readers:

A deep analysis by Law.com shows how some law firms pay editors, flout the rules, whether consciously or not, and remove controversies to curate their image on one of the world's most popular websites.

The article looks at the editing history of several law firm articles. It gives examples of firms using PR consultants who openly disclosed their work in line with Wikipedia's rules and quotes a commercial editor who makes undisclosed edits. It also covers the politicisation of law firms:

Law firms with connections to U.S. President Donald Trump or his executive orders often show evidence of this on their Wikipedia pages.

The Verge published an article on Jeffrey Epstein-related Wikipedia editing. The article mentions and indeed quotes from a March 2020 Signpost piece by User:Smallbones. See the current issue's Disinformation report for more. – AK

A recent article in Nonprofit Quarterly, titled "We Stood Up: Organizing at a Feminist Nonprofit", details the author's critique of a 501(c)3 organization whose "founders were so assured in their politics that they placed the word 'feminism' in the organization’s name", but that

over time, and with new leadership, politics were treated more as an impediment than as a part of our mission. For example, developing a material commitment to complement the organization’s Black Lives Matter statement was a challenge, as was sustaining a disability justice praxis, or taking a clear stance against apartheid, genocide, and settler colonialism.

Leaning both on provocation and intention, I began to assert that we ought to rename the organization, replacing "feminism" with "women" to more accurately reflect our focus on the representation of careered, cisgender women. (The organization, not surprisingly, did not budge.)

The name of the organization containing the word "feminism" is not directly provided in the article, but the author's biography on NPQ leaves little doubt which organization it is referring to: "She was terminated from her nonprofit job during a union campaign; she continues to organize with her former coworkers in Art+Feminism Workers United!"

(The Wikipedia article about Art+Feminism currently describes it as "an annual worldwide edit-a-thon to add content to Wikipedia about women artists, which started in 2014." According to the most recent Form 990 for Art Feminism Inc, the nonprofit had a budget of about 0.5 million USD in 2022/23; see also meta:Art+Feminism User Group. Its current grant request for the Wikimedia Foundation's "Wikimedia Community Fund" is for $1.3 million USD over three years, i.e. 2026–28. It mentions that the organization currently has three staff members – two full time and one part time – and that "[t]he biggest change [regarding staffing, from previous years] is sunsetting the Regional Ambassador Program. [...] This also resulted in the layoff of the Program Director role where the majority of the role was managing this program." A separate document details the rationale for this change.)

A more recent post by the aforementioned "Art+Feminism Workers United" follows up on the NPQ piece, clarifying that the organization had indeed justified the NPQ author's firing by "citing a 'lack of work' due to the elimination of the regional ambassador role as the reason", but still attempts to put it into the context of wider threats to open knowledge:

Across open knowledge sectors, the threats to our work are ongoing: whether it's recent threats at the Wiki North America Conference, the far right attacks on Wiki groups like Art+Feminism, or the undemocratic removal of two candidates, including the only woman and the only openly queer candidate, from the Foundation’s Board Election ballot, it can feel intimidating to do this work in a public sphere; but more than ever, the time to ensure A+F is operating in alignment with our values is now.

In an earlier post from around July 2025, the collective – all three of them still employed at A+F at the time – had focused less on external politics and more on internal organizational issues, which they claimed to have caused a concerning decline in the organization's impact:

Since 2019, the number of Art+Feminism events has dropped by 80%, and attendance has declined by 82%. Our global footprint, which once spanned 43 countries, now extends to only 27. Even our core Wikipedia contributions, new articles and edits, have collapsed by more than 94% in just the past year.

– H

• Mammoth mummy sex-change: 404 Media reported on a paper just published in the journal Cell, "Ancient RNA expression profiles from the extinct woolly mammoth". The main result of the paper was that 39,000 year old RNA can now be examined by scientists. An interesting sidebar is that the mummified woolly mammoth Yuka has been reclassified from female to male. 404 mentioned that this news is so new that even Wikipedia hadn't reported it yet. This oversight has now been corrected. – S
• Praise for pictures and photographers: Some favorite wildlife photos of the Wikimedia Commons Pictures of the Year contest were shared by AOL and Bored Panda [1].
• Stop scraping me, bro: Wikimedia would like AI companies to use its paid API product and properly attribute scraped content. A recent Wikimedia blog post to that effect sparked coverage in TechCrunch as well as an article by CNET.
• "How to save Wikipedia from AI": An article in the Chicago Tribune (widely syndicated) takes another Wikimedia recent blog post that reported a reduction in human pageviews, attributed to AI use, as its point of departure (cf. Signpost coverage: "Wikimedia Foundation reports 8% traffic drop since last year due to 'the impact of generative AI and social media'"). It argues that students need to be taught to click through to sources: "Education is at its best – more magical than an LLM ever will be – when it moves us from being passive recipients of knowledge to active explorers who reason about what we see. The challenge we face is to move from being passive users of AI to engaged citizens who can verify AI responses that, as a common expression goes, are 'frequently wrong but never in doubt.'"
• Q: Where do babies come from? A: Nazis.: "Priest horrified to learn he is Himmler's grandson after recognising Nazi's mistress on Wikipedia" (The Independent)
• Annual rankings start coming in: Visual Capitalist gives us "Ranked: The Most Viewed Wikipedia Pages of 2025 (so far)".
• ... and in reverse: 20 Great Articles and Essays about Artificial Intelligence at The Electric Typewriter includes "Wikipedia's Moment of Truth" which appeared in July in The New York Times.

• No theories on Jesus' sexuality, please: Christian magazine Charisma questions the article Sexuality of Jesus, whose lede says it covers "alternative and fringe theories" on Jesus's sexuality. Charisma objects, saying the Wikipedia community "allow[s] activist contributors to insert unorthodox views under the guise of academic balance".
• Saintly Wikimedia donors: Canadian news satire site The Beaverton pokes fun at Wikimedia's ongoing banner campaign, imagining a reader who achieves sainthood by responding "not with apathy, but with a one-time contribution of the minimum listed amount ($2.75)". But with fame comes scrutiny, and a fictitious journalist calls her "a fake and a phony! ... My sources have shared that she didn't even mean to donate to Wikipedia, she just accidentally clicked on 'Payment Method' and her Google Chrome extension already had the credit card info filled out. And it wasn't even her credit card, it was her dad's!"
• "Wikipedia's Antisemitism": An article published by Orthodox Jewish outreach group Aish HaTorah welcomed Jimmy Wales' call to action regarding the Gaza genocide article, and said additional bias, antisemitism, and falsehoods could be found in the articles Jewish Supremacy, Well poisoning, Palestinian genocide accusation, Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion, and Jews.
  • See above: Ashley Rindsberg in Spiked also highlights Israel, complaining of "The hostile takeover of Wikipedia". Deborah Lipstadt tells the Jewish News Syndicate she has "lost faith" in Wikipedia's neutrality on Israel, adding: "It is pretty close to, but not yet identical with, the BBC."
• American History X, but from a Nazi's AI's point of view: "Grokipedia cites the neo-Nazi website Stormfront as a source 42 times", NBC News reports based on Cornell University research that analyzed 883,000 articles. The Stormfront-love ironically included its citation six times in Grok's rewrite of the American History X overview. The NBC writers noted "Wikipedia and Grokipedia rely on some of the same sources, with 57 internet domains showing up in the top 100 source lists for both encyclopedias. But the two sites often diverge, especially when it comes to sources Wikipedia editors consider unreliable or even blacklist", another example being conspiracy theory site Infowars.
• Wales gets Forked: The New York Times's Lulu Garcia-Navarro interviewed Jimmy Wales in the NYT podcast Hard Fork, titled "How Wikipedia Is Responding to the Culture Wars" (part of the book tour, see last issue). The podcast runs almost an hour long, with no walkouts as far as we could tell.
• Superpowered, and lawsuit-proof: "Wikipedia's army of volunteers is its superpower", says The Chronicle of Philanthropy. The distributed volunteer base makes it "hard to sue even as it has been drawn into partisan political wars" (though we admit we aren't gods).

• Ketchupy kudos: Congratulations to the editors of the Wikipedia article Ketchup, which plays a part in the plot of the Keanu Reeves film Good Fortune, noted in reviews appearing in The Independent and The Wall Street Journal (also syndicated by Hindustan Times).^[1]