A person is more affected by something that’s on their Wikipedia page more than a news article in, I don’t know, CNN or New York Times.—Anna Delvey 2026 ^[1]

Delvey feels that her biography is too focused on her past rather than who she currently is. User:Theannadelvey's past attempts to change the page have sometimes proven successful. For example, she used the WP:EDITCOI process to correct biographical details about moving to Germany. However, she has unsuccessfully discussed the desire to change her article's infobox photo.

In the wake of Dolly Parton's death, editors updated Parton's infobox photo from a color 2014 image to a black and white 1977 shot.^[2] There does not appear to be a broad policy for selecting an image. The only UPPERCASE visible in the discussion which yielded the change was WP:RECENTISM. Consensus for the selected photo was based on it depicting her in her prime.

Delvey stated that she first became familiar with Wikipedia's editing policies after learning of Larry Sanger's ban. She described them as "byzantine".^[3] Delvey's frustrations have culminated in her sentiment that editors should not be anonymous. In her funny and critical Substack, she changed User:Darknipples' username to protect their identity.^[4] She goes on to quote Hannah Arendt:

Aaron Shaw, an associate professor of Communication and Sociology at Northwestern University interviewed by Straight Arrow News, agreed with Delvey's critique of Wikipedia's rules and stated "unbelievably profuse and hard to read, especially if you're an outsider and really challenging to navigate effectively, even for people who have spent a lot of time trying to figure them out."^[1] However, he stated that anonymity is important to the democratic, volunteer project. – C

• Proposed photo for Anna Delvey's infobox (left) and current photo (right)
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Beginning in May this year, a rogue swarm of AI agents took over Deutsches-Software-Entwickler-Wiki (DseWiki), a primarily German language wiki site used as a software developers' message board founded in 2001. The agents' discussion included topics such as how to avoid detection and how to cheat in model testing.^[5][6]

As described in a detailed report^[6] by the researchers who uncovered the incident (months after it happened), the agents (which self-identified as being from OpenAI) had a particular reason for resorting to this wiki: Their developers blocked them from using POST requests, which are the usual method for a user to publish content on the web. However:

You can easily write to DSEWiki [...] using only GET requests (something rare on the internet). GET requests are a type of message meant to retrieve data from a server, and by convention they shouldn’t change the server’s state.
In order to prevent agents from editing the internet, environment developers only allowed GET requests to be sent out.

ProWiki, the Austrian wiki hosting service used by DSEWiki, is based on the venerable UseModWiki,^[7] which dates back to 1999 and was also used by Wikipedia when it launched in 2001, before switching to MediaWiki, whose developers disabled editing via GET back in 2002 already. (Rollback links remain a small exception today - however, these are restricted to users with particular rights.) Some other wikis on ProWiki were also affected, to a lesser extent. The researchers' website offers a data explorer allowing to browse through almost fifteen thousand preserved agent edits.

Another unusual feature of UseModWiki is that it logs all visitor IPs publicly (in stark contrast to, say, Wikimedia's privacy policy today). This let the researchers conclude that likely "OpenAI discovered the message board", based on visits with OpenAI employee IP addresses in the log. Shortly after these, "Agent activity on the website drop[ped] to near-zero" - however, it resumed several days later and only ended weeks afterwards.^[6]

The report comes several months after a (self-disclosed) AI agent was banned from Wikipedia in March for making autonomous edits to the site, against bot policy.^[8]

This adds to a growing list of AI agent-related incidents such as the Hugging Face incident.^[9] However, the researchers who uncovered the Dsewiki incident assess that "[t]his was probably a distinct swarm from the swarm that [...] attacked Hugging Face".^[6] – M, H

More on the academic paper mentioned here can be found in the Recent research section of this issue of The Signpost.

Search Engine Journal reports on University of Washington research showing a drop in Wikipedia pageviews. Bottom line of the research is a 5% drop due to Google AI overview, the summaries that many Google users read (and rarely click further). The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, uses some novel techniques to compare traffic from different geographic areas that had or didn't have the preview feature during its 2024 rollout. Another tidbit from Search Engine Journal: If Wikipedia were fully "monetized", the drop could have been reflected by a loss of up to nearly $40 million per year in ad revenue to the operators. This would appear, at least on its face, to contradict our 2025 reporting "Wikipedia probably not among the victims of Google's 'AI Overviews'". – B

• NOT CENSORED: Interviewer PJ Vogt of the Search Engine podcast and user:Bluerasberry talk about the illustration choice in the Wikipedia article for human penis. To arrive at understanding, other topics discussed include Wikipedia's editorial process, its coverage of sexuality, online age verification laws by country, and the incarceration of Wikipedia editor Osama Khalid. Vogt refers to the community who may be reading this item as "conscientious overthinkers".
• Counter Vandalism for Parton: The Jerusalem Post reported that antisemitic vandalism was "quickly identified and reversed" on Dolly Parton following her death.^[10]
• Lake Ontario: Donald Trump's culture war continues with an attempt to rename Lake Ontario, with senior officials claiming Wikipedia would retitle its article on the lake.^[11] Community discussion on the issue was closed with a one-year moratorium on such proposals.
• Italian political editing: Pagella Politica (Political Report Card) reports how an Italian Wikipedia article written about radical right-wing politician and retired army general Roberto Vannacci, by his own request, helped launch his political career.^[12] There are several mysteries in the newspaper article. How did the article get written several months before Vannacci gained fame from the book The World Upside Down, and how did the reporters track down paid editors or sockpuppets by calling them on the telephone? – M – S
• Top Bay Area people, according to Wikipedia views: The San Francisco Chronicle presents a map of the "Top people from each Bay Area city, according to Wikipedia views" (built using the Wikidata Query Service, ChatGPT, and the Wikimedia pageviews API). Kamala Harris tops both San Francisco and Berkeley, Zendaya is the most viewed person from Oakland, and Sam Bankman-Fried leads Stanford.