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Belarusian Wikipedia sysop and sole bureaucrat Maksim Lepushenka was arrested last month, becoming the latest Wikipedian arrested in Belarus, as reported by Wikinews with reference to Nasha Niva and other sources.
With his arrest, granting sysop rights in Belarusian Wikipedia became impossible without stewards' intervention. Lepushenka's account is currently globally locked as a compromised account.
Additionally another sysop, Olga Sitnik, was arrested in April. Sitnik's account is also similarly globally locked, leaving the project with only eight sysops to work on administrative tasks.
The arrests follow detentions and disappearances of other Belarusian community members since late 2024, and similar persecutions in 2022 (see Signpost coverage: "The Russian Wikipedia edit that resulted in arrest and jail time", "Second case of persecution of Wikipedians in Belarus"). – RS, H
On May 28, 2025, 02:26 UTC, English Wikipedia reached another milestone, having seven million articles. There were several articles created about the same time, so after a discussion, Operators and Things created by User:Therapyisgood was selected to represent this milestone. Among some of the articles created about the same time were 1955 Yuba–Sutter floods, British American Hospital, Khorastava rural council, Nikolay Alyokhin, and Taraxacum angustisectum. – RS
Signpost coverage of preceding milestones:
The Wikimedia Foundation requested the attention of Wikimedia reviewers regarding a DMCA media takedown demand which Tesla, Inc. made to Wikimedia. As is usual for the Wikimedia Foundation, they are sharing the demand letter and inviting community conversation at the Wikimedia Foundation office action discussion board on Wikimedia Commons.
While DMCA takedown demands are serious, they are also routine. For years, many Wikimedia community volunteers have regularly enjoyed processing these orders. As with all Wikimedia community processes, everyone is invited to join and engage, and everyone is invited to visit and observe the review process.
This is a standard DMCA request, but it might be seen as different to outsiders due to the political climate surrounding Elon Musk. Current popular thought connects Tesla as a corporation, its CEO Elon Musk, and the so-called United States Department of Government Efficiency where Musk was director. Along with that, Musk has been criticizing Wikipedia, as The Signpost previously reported in January and February. A United States attorney (no longer in office) has expressed intent to remove Wikipedia's nonprofit status as previously reported in May, the same month that United States National Agricultural Library Wikimedian in Residence Jamie Flood reported that DOGE ended their role.
The logos to be removed are
The conventional Wikimedia reviewer consensus of these images till now is that they are not eligible for copyright and are instead in the public domain due to being simple geometric shapes which are below the threshold of originality which makes a work eligible to gain copyright protection. The text rationales which the Wikipedia community uses to explain this are in Commons:Template:TOO-US and Commons:Template:PD-textlogo.
Of the four files above, the shield logo was deleted by the Foundation upon further review as the uploader had provided inaccurate information about the shield logo and it was the exact file registered with the copyright office.
– BR
Following the April 9 announcement by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) that it was halting its longstanding "Access to Knowledge" (A2K) program in India after losing its "Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act" certificate (Signpost coverage: "India cuts off the Wikimedia Foundation's funding of the 'Access to Knowledge' program"), a May 27 posting on the Wikimediaindia mailing list (signup required) informed the Indian community that
As part of a strategic integration, Access to Knowledge (A2K) has become part of IIIT-Hyderabad's Raj Reddy Centre for Technology and Society and will continue its work as the Open Knowledge Initiatives team https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IIITH-OKI. Most members of A2K have joined the Open Knowledge Initiatives team at IIIT-Hyderabad, alongside a few colleagues already working on Open Knowledge and Wikimedia within the institute.
[...] While the team’s structure has evolved, our dedication to collaborating with Indic Wikimedia and Open Knowledge communities remains unchanged.
The announcement was greeted with relief and excitement by various community members (including some WMF staff) on the mailing list and on Meta-wiki. The newly created IIITH-OKI page on Meta-wiki doesn't yet provide information about the initiative's funding, but describes its mission as centre[d] around two interconnected goals: Advancing language diversity and Expanding equitable access to knowledge to support and augment the open knowledge and technology ecosystem across the Indic languages
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– H
On 2 June 2025, the Web Team introduced an upcoming trial in which AI generated summaries of articles would be placed on the top of the articles. The community responded, criticising inaccuracies in the sample generated summary that was used in the mockup. Linus Media Group's Luke Lafreniere remarked in a podcast on June 13 that article leads written by humans are good and are what drive him to desire more information. The proposed trial faced a large amount of backlash from the community and after 11 days of discussions, the team decided to put the project on hold.
A limited experiment held between 4 and 17 December 2024 was later uncovered. The experiment was conducted to readers who had installed a browser extension that served Content Discovery experiments. It generated over 10,000 impressions and had 825 clicks to open the generated summaries. The experiment measures the reaction of the participants with a question, "Was this useful?" and received approximately 75 out 101 'yes'. Checks on the summaries by editors had revealed a number of issues ranging from phrasing issues (including promotional writing) to inaccuracies.
Further discussion on the use of large language models on Wikipedia and other matters are currently ongoing at the original thread (though partially archived) and at a RfC on a community position on WMF AI development at the time of publication/writing. – RS
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