The Times (UK) reports "How Epstein scrubbed 2008 sex crime conviction from the internet" by "hiring a team of hackers"^{[citation needed]} to "remove negative information about him on Wikipedia and Google". It quotes Epstein's PR team telling him:

Wikipedia was an important victory, as it will always be at the top of the search engine results. [...] We have stopped the hacking on your wiki site, and that was a major effort. Your wiki entry now is pretty tame, and bad stuff has been muted, bowlerized [sic], and pused [sic] to the bottom.

The edits described by The Times (examples: link, link, link, link; removal of the sex offender category was reverted by JodyB) were performed by an IP, 71.165.127.242. According to The Times, the work was done by Al Seckel, the husband of Ghislaine Maxwell's sister Isabel.

The Times describes Seckel as "a writer and self-styled expert in optical illusions who co-founded a group called the Southern California Skeptics that investigated science's relationship to the paranormal" and who was found dead "in mysterious circumstances" in 2015.

This "hacking" of Epstein's Wikipedia article appears to have been quite remunerative:

Seckel chased up payment for his work and Epstein complained about the cost. "I was never told never, that there was a 10k fee per month„ you inittaly [sic] said the project would take 20.. then another 10. then another 10" he wrote in one message.

Note that The Times is a little late to the party here – other outlets covered the same story a few months ago, and readers can find a more comprehensive summary of the edit history of Epstein's article in the Disinformation report published in The Signpost's 1 December 2025 issue.

It is not immediately clear why The Times chose to describe people making (later-undone) edits to a publicly editable website as "hacking", seemingly on the basis that said people described themselves as such in their own marketing materials.

For Wikipedia references in the latest set of Epstein files released on 30 January 2026 see this issue's Disinformation report. – AK, J

In an article titled "Epstein jail cell pics and Trump Wikipedia page included in newly released files", The Independent provides a link to the pdf of a hand-marked printout of Trump's Wikipedia article, dated 22 May 2022.

The printout contains many manually underlined passages and a small number of hand-written comments. Some words in the Wikipedia article itself – among them "d'Italia", "Stone's", "D'Souza", "d'affaires", "Lesley", abbreviations like "p.m.", "U.N." and "D.C.", and parts of its reference URLs – are redacted in the pdf and hidden behind black bars. – AK

"BaiduWiki" went live around 9 February, with English and other editions AI-translated from Baidu Baike, the South China Morning Post reports in "China's Baidu unveils AI-driven Wikipedia challenger in bid for international users".

Current usefulness of the site seems rudimentary to non-existent; an English-language search for "Donald Trump", for example, redirects to BaiduWiki's entry Miss Universe Organization, while a search for "Goethe" takes users to BaiduWiki's entry Translated Literary Classics: Faust, on "a book published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in 2013". – AK

Campus Reform claims "A University of California, Berkeley professor tasks students with editing and creating Wikipedia articles about 'queer and trans people of color' instead of taking final exams" and has screenshots of WikiEd dashboards included in their piece. The last issue of Signpost noted reporting from the The Daily Californian' [1] of the coursework in "300,000 edits, 3,000 refs, 96 million views", but more recent reporting also comes from SFist [2], Them [3], The College Fix [4], UC Berkeley News [5], and Queer News Tonight [6]. If you're wondering what the problem is, let's just say Campus Reform took issue with some of the topics the students chose, and maybe the fact that the prof "frames the project as a form of opposition to the Trump administration". – B, BR

Xikipedia is a web-based Simple English Wikipedia reader that presents an environment that many media noticed and called "doomscrolling" or other related terms. Coverage included AV Club, Boing Boing, Engadget, Gizmodo, Ground News, Hacker News, Let's Data Science, and Stuff (South Africa).

We weren't sure what to make of it at The Signpost until the author, Wikipedian Rebane2001, contacted the Signpost team pre-publication. They said the project is "art/commentary on modern social media algorithms", that it's different from the infinite scrolling, but random WikiTok by virtue of having a "feed [that] adjusts based on which 'posts' you like", and pointed us to this GitHub readme for more details. – B

Boing Boing found list of lists of lists – containing entries such as lists of Atlantic hurricanes, lists of Category 5 hurricanes, lists of tornadoes and tornado outbreaks, lists of physics equations, lists of metalloids, lists of celebrities, lists of centenarians, lists of deaths, lists of ethnic groups, and lists of LGBTQ people – is "technically practical but also function[s] as [a] conceptual joke" showing how Wikipedia is "obsessively organized, slightly absurd, and self-aware enough to know it."

In Russell's paradox fashion, the list of lists of lists contains itself, a fact noted by Boing Boing. – B

In Communication Arts, the ad agency kin explains how the "Knowledge is Human" campaign, which they call a docuseries, was developed for Wikimedia Foundation.

See prior Signpost coverage of the 25th anniversary, including some bits about the Foundation's own promotion. – B

Politics

• Middle East conflict: The Algemeiner Journal (New York) republishes an HonestReporting article on "Wikipedia, Qatar, and the Future of Knowledge".
• News from Uganda: "Ugandan Wikimedians urge government action against misinformation, cultural erasure" (New Vision, Uganda) – requesting open access to public data and other reforms in the control of the government.
• Ambassador can't fly under the radar: "Peter Mandelson's Wikipedia page was edited repeatedly by an anonymous user who was later banned for making paid edits". Mandelson is a former British ambassador to the United States whose Wikipedia biography contains a section titled "Jeffrey Epstein scandal and dismissal". (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, "Epstein details scrubbed from Mandelson's Wikipedia page by shady paid editor")

Policy

• Simple Summaries controversy revisited: "At Age 25, Wikipedia Refuses to Evolve – The digital commons champion faces a crisis of its own making", says Wikipedian and academic Dariusz Jemielniak in IEEE Spectrum.
• Section 230 turns 30: The Electronic Frontier Foundation published an interview with Jacob Rogers from the Wikimedia Foundation's legal team about the importance of Section 230 for Wikipedia, titled "The Internet Still Works: Wikipedia Defends Its Editors". In response to the question "If you had to describe to a Wikipedia user what Section 230 does, how would you explain it to them?", Rogers stated: "If there was nothing—no legal protection at all—I think we would not be able to run the website. There would be too many legal claims, and the potential damages of those claims could bankrupt the company. Section 230 protects the Wikimedia Foundation, and it allows us to defer to community editorial processes. We can let the user community make those editorial decisions, and figure things out as a group—like how to write biographies of living persons, and what sources are reliable. Wikipedia wouldn’t work if it had centralized decision making." The interview appears to have been published on occasion of the law's 30th anniversary earlier this month, but also comes at a time where activists have raised alarm about serious efforts going on to repeal or "sunset" it, via bipartisan legislation in the US Congress.

Technology

• Don't worry about that weird feeling, it's just data extraction: "where creativity may be heading next" needs to be shaped by an upside for trust-based platforms like Wikipedia and revenue-sharing models like YouTube's – but faces problems with "an [AI] extraction layer that absorbs creative work without preserving its lineage or sharing in the value it creates". (Muse by Clios, "What AI Can Learn from YouTube and Wikipedia").
• Slopping Stopping the slop-generator: Wikipedians building works in languages other than English are "both populating and fighting the world's regional language AI engines" (Rest of World, "The volunteer Wikipedia army protecting against AI slop").
• Love it or hate it?: A debate over the continued suitability of archive.today was reviewed by Ars Technica. The focus of the story is Wikipedians' reactions to a claim that archive.today's operator used the site to launch a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack from its users' browsers.
• Why do you assume you're the smartest in the room, Grok?: Whereas Columbia Journalism Review says Wikipedia's text comes from "an army of humans [who] provide clarification and updates, in dialogue with one another", a media researcher at University of Massachusetts Amherst calls challenger Grokipedia "a vertically integrated, centrally controlled knowledge production system" and its "decision-making dialogue [is] with itself".
• Human-Centered AI and Wikimedia Enterprise: A Wikimedia Enterprise executive spoke at a Stanford University Human-Centered AI (HAI)/data science conference. (The Stanford Daily, "Wikimedia explains combating AI in HAI seminar")

Society

• News from Spain: Wikimedia España partnered with Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias for a February 13 edit-a-thon for women in science – astronomy and astrophysics specifically. More coverage here (in Spanish) and here (in English).
• Time zones are a thing, and so are fake images: Confusion over time zones used in India and UTC used in Wikipedia edit history fueled a conspiracy theory around the death of Indian politician Ajit Pawar, who died in a 28 January aviation accident. Or maybe it was a faked screenshot including "20666" as the year of the incident. We need to get Snopes on this ... (WIO News, "Viral screenshot shows Ajit Pawar's death was updated on Wikipedia hours before Baramati crash")
• Don't say Hah-vuhd...or do: Harvard Business Review interviewed Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. The prestigious magazine is known for interviews with business and thought leaders.
• Quoted out of context?: An article published by the Jewish News Syndicate says Kenneth L. Marcus of the Brandeis Center feels that Wikipedia quotes him out of context in the entry weaponization of antisemitism.

Fun

• Another film "like a Wikipedia entry": That's what The Telegraph calls a boy band docu. Say, it feels like we've been here before. Oh! because we were. And...
• ...so soon again? Lazy films like Wikipedia entries: Here's a shot at biopics like Wikipedia pages, this time with a stinging "lazy" thrown in by The Times of India.
• In the future, will people still be reading this featured list?: Timeline of the far future is interesting to Boing Boing, as it was to other media in past years (see prior Signpost coverage (2016) and more prior Signpost coverage (2025)). People are just interested in the year 10¹⁰⁶, apparently.