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 CAPS 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 did change User:Darknipples' username to protect their identity.^[4] She goes on to quote Hannah Arendt, "Without the disclosure of the agent in the act, action loses its specific character and becomes one form of achievement among others… Action without a name, a ‘who’ attached to it, is meaningless."

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 15000 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 then never click further. The paper is not yet peer reviewed, and uses some novel analysis of traffic differentials from geographic areas that did and did not have the preview feature turned on, during Google's 2024 rollout. Another tidbit from Search Engine Journal: If Wikipedia were fully monetized, the drop would 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 stated 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 will retitle its article on the lake.^[11] Community discussion on the issue was closed with a one year moratorium on proposals to change the name.
• Italian political editing: Pagella Politica (Political Report Card) reports how an Italian Wikipedia article written about radical right politician and retired army general Roberto Vannacci at 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.

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
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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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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.