Wikipedia is in peril, "under threat from MAGA, A.I. and foreign autocrats," according to The New York Times. Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan "will not say Wikipedia is at war — not after she spent much of 2007 in Iraq, in an actual war zone ... [b]ut she accepts that the site is in a metaphorical battle for its very existence." The WMF is reacting by posting advertisements in Times Square and increasing its human rights team to protect volunteers. (See Global Advocacy for continuing developments.) The Times even tells us why Meehan wears a Timex watch. "Wikipedians aren’t flashy, but they are tough... Ms. Meehan fits in."

The Times lines up some of Wikipedia's critics, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, Ted Cruz, David Sacks, and even Larry Sanger. You can almost hear them quaking in their Gucci loafers as the the Times reads out Meehan's qualifications. But more seriously, Meehan directly states that Wikipedia is at an inflection point and asks the important question. "How do we keep this project alive?" The Signpost is glad that Bernadette gets to answer that question. Readers are encouraged to give their answers in the comments section below. – S

See related content on the ban itself at this issue's News and notes

The New York Post said on June 22 that Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger was "indefinitely blocked from editing"; he was actually community banned, which is more severe – see story in this issue's News and notes. Coverage also provided by 404 Media, iHeartRadio, Newsmax, Gizmodo, The Times of India, The New York Times, and Fox Business (video). The New York Post followed up with a June 23 piece signed by their editorial board titled "Oust the commissars from control of Wikipedia", referring to the action as evidence that "[f]actions of fanatic editors – possibly state-sponsored – have assumed control of the process, especially concerning Israel and its war against Hamas", and part of a broader societal "knowledge economy [takeover] where extremists define their positions on gender, racism, climate change and so on as scientifically true, and thus undebatable".

The Free Press published a front page editorial from Sanger on June 26. Washington Examiner ran another op-ed by Sanger on July 8. Most of the piece is paywalled, but we can read the introduction in which he refers to administrators as "an anonymous mob with practically unlimited power".

Jake Orlowitz, a contributor to Wikipedia @ 20, posted on Medium the essay "Not Here to Build an Encyclopedia: Larry Sanger, Jimmy Wales, and the twenty-five-year fight over who founded Wikipedia". Orlowitz's essay has this to say:

He [Sanger] was also uneasy with what he had made, almost from the start. By the middle of 2001 he was calling the growing community overrun by trolls and by what he named "anarchist types", people who rejected the idea that anyone should hold authority others didn't. While Wikipedia was just raw material for Nupedia, this hadn't bothered him...

He clashed with editors who resented his attempts to organize and direct them [on Wikipedia]...

Sanger believed an encyclopedia needed experts and authority at its center. The community he had gathered believed the opposite, that the wiki's radical equality was the point and that no credential earned anyone the last word. Both convictions could not win. The community's did, partly by outlasting him.

— Jake Orlowitz, Medium

– B

Jewish News [1] and The Forward [2] (later reprinted in Haaretz [3](paywalled)) state that the Wikipedia article on French World Cup referee Francois Letexier falsely identified the ref as being Jewish for up to eight hours. Two of his calls during the Argentine-Egypt round of 16 game were considered very controversial and may have affected the outcome of the game. The game ended 3-2 in favor of Argentina after they were down 0-2. The Forward identifies this edit as the start of the problem in the Wikipedia article.

A preliminary investigation by The Signpost reveals that an incident did in fact occur on Wikipedia over an extended period and that at least one editor did get a red card for a flagrant dangerous tackle. No VAR needed for this one. – S

• Wiki Spy: Neal Agarwal, of Spend Bill Gates' Money fame, created a fun new web-based diversion called Wiki Spy. It creates a collage of items related to a base topic. Cut-out images are created from files on Wikimedia Commons and arranged in a collage. A link to a relevant Wikipedia article appears if the user clicks the button, or clicking an image takes the user to a new collage related to that image. We learned about it from Boing Boing. As of now we don't know what the special sauce is for determining object relatedness for constrution of a collage. – B
• Who won?: Jewish News Syndicate says "A footnote from the reference" at 2026 Iran War "links to news articles that fail to confirm the claim" that Islamic Republic of Iran prevailed in the conflict, despite that being the outcome stated by the article. The JNS article specifically referrs to the use of this article from The Indian Express, which states: "So, who actually won? / The answer depends entirely on who is being asked." The text in the Wikipedia article is as follows:

[update before release] The Indian Express writes that the outcome depends on who is being asked: for Trump, a decisive victory; for Iran, a defeat of Washington because it survived. The article continues: "Independent analysts are similarly divided, and many conclude that nearly everyone lost something."

It is possible that a previous revision did conclude Iranian victory from this source in a previous revision, which got removed in a later edit. The current text was originally added on June 24. (see prior Signpost coverage) – B

• Dwile flonking, the ancient pub dance from 1966: Boing Boing describes the Wikipedia article on Dwile flonking, an English dance that requires a person to fling a beer-soaked cloth at circling dancers. It was once claimed that the dance goes back to 1585, but that was just a hoax. A quick check by the Signpost shows that the Wikipedia article (which goes back to 2006) got the history right thanks to User:Caeciliusinhorto who ran into the article in this condition. "The article then was woolly about whether dwile flonking was a genuine medieval pastime. I started digging and the more I looked... I ended up rewriting the whole thing a few days later." Let's drink (not flonk) a beer to all those editors who take their subjects seriously. – S
• Been flonked? Need some new clothes?: See 25th anniversary clothing collaboration (Hypebeast)
• Blocks, not bans: "What 20 million bans [sic] reveal about the strain on Wikipedia's volunteers" (The Conversation) – researchers describe how tersity or boilerplate reasons for blocks, and increasing block durations, could be a reflection of unsustainable workloads for a decreasing administrator cadre, "increasingly prioritizing prevention, efficiency and content quality over efforts to rehabilitate new users". See prior coverage on the shrinking admins topic, latest in ongoing Signpost coverage. – B
• Beyond fake news, or: Kremlin loves Mediawiki?: "The Kremlin Creates Wikipedia Clones in Foreign Languages to Teach Neural Networks to Spread Its Propaganda", describing Russian information operations of the Агентство Социального Проектирования (Agentsvo Sotsialnogo Proektirovania, or Agency for Social Design), including data poisoning aimed at large-language model training datasets (Nasha Niva, Belarus, in English) – S, B
• Reduce, recycle, re-wiki: How-To Geek shows how to turn an old Kindle into an offline Wikipedia reader [4]. It's a bit like using Kiwix for offline web browsing, but by transferring ebook files cleverly prepared from a Wikipedia vital articles stream.
• A swift reversion: "Taylor Swift's surname on Wikipedia changes swiftly after Kelce wedding mix-up": It's still "Swift" even if Daily Mail says otherwise (The Oregonian) – B

• DW asks: "How reliable are German Wikipedia articles?" (Deutsche Welle, video in English). German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung found errors in almost half of 1,000 randomly chosen articles in a study announced a year ago (see prior Signpost coverage). DW then speculates that a new (paid) model is needed to meet the reality of falling numbers of volunteer editors, a solution apparently ruled out last year. – S, B

This page is a draft for the next issue of the Signpost. Below is some helpful code that will help you write and format a Signpost draft. If it's blank, you can fill out a template by copy-pasting this in and pressing 'publish changes': {{subst:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Story-preload}}

Images and Galleries

Sidebar images To put an image in your article, use the following template (link): I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler image-v2 |size = 300px |fullwidth = no |alt = TKTK |caption = |image = }} This will create the file on the right. Keep the 300px in most cases. If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes. Inline images Placing {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Inline image |size = 300px |align = center |alt = TKTK |caption = |image = }} (link) will instead create an inline image like below The significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth. Galleries To create a gallery, use the following <gallery style="float:right;" mode=packed | heights=200px> |TKTK |TKTK </gallery> Each line inside the tags should be formatted like File:Whatever.jpg|Caption). This creates: Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners. It wants to have nothing further to do with the object as such, and believes that it can exist in and for itself. If you want it centered, remove tstyle="float:right;" from the first line.

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler quote-v2
 |author    = 
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{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Quote
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{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/block quote
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{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler frame-v2
 |1         = Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
 |caption   = A caption
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}}

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{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-start-v2|fullwidth=yes}}

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Article series

To add a series of 'related articles' your article, use the following code Related articles Visual Editor Five, ten, and fifteen years ago 1 January 2023 VisualEditor, endowment, science, and news in brief 5 August 2015 HTTPS-only rollout completed, proposal to enable VisualEditor for new accounts 17 June 2015 VisualEditor and MediaWiki updates 29 April 2015 Security issue fixed; VisualEditor changes 4 February 2015 More articles Draft namespace, VisualEditor meetings 25 December 2013 Sockpuppet investigations, VisualEditor, Wikidata's birthday, and more 6 November 2013 Last call for Wiki Loves Monuments; Community–WMF tension over VisualEditor 25 September 2013 Making Wikipedia more accessible 4 September 2013 Gallery improvements launch on Wikipedia 28 August 2013 The VisualEditor Beta and the path to change 31 July 2013 Defining consensus; VisualEditor default state; expert and layperson terms in article titles 31 July 2013 VisualEditor in midst of game-changing deployment series 3 July 2013 VisualEditor will "change world history" 12 June 2013 VisualEditor, elections, bots, and more 12 June 2013 The Visual Editor: Where are we now, and where are we headed? 25 March 2013 Visual Editor "on schedule" for July rollout 18 March 2013 Looking ahead to 2013 7 January 2013 The new Visual Editor gets a bit more visual 10 December 2012 Second Visual Editor prototype launches 25 June 2012 Visual editor demo launched, hailed as "most important change to our user experience ... ever"; but elsewhere over-hasty deployments criticised 19 December 2011 Full steam ahead on Visual Editor, the avoidance of lock-breaking and 1.18b1 release 7 November 2011 {{Signpost series |type = sidebar-v2 |tag = VisualEditor |seriestitle = Visual Editor |fullwidth = no }} or {{Signpost series |type = sidebar-v2 |tag = VisualEditor |seriestitle = Visual Editor |fullwidth = yes }} will create the sidebar on the right. If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes. A partial list of valid |tag= parameters can be found at here and will decide the list of articles presented. |seriestitle= is the title that will appear below 'Related articles' in the box. Alternatively, you can use {{Signpost series |type = inline |tag = VisualEditor |tag_name = visual editor |tag_pretext = the }} at the end of an article to create For more Signpost coverage on the visual editor see our visual editor series. If you think a topic would make a good series, but you don't see a tag for it, or that all the articles in a series seem 'old', ask for help at the WT:NEWSROOM. Many more tags exist, but they haven't been documented yet.