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
Since the start of the year, the Wikimedia Foundation is hosting discussions seeking feedback on several themes that will be at the center of the 2026-2027 Annual Plan, which aims to tackle the rapid changes of the Internet and the information ecosystem, increasing scrutiny from governments and regulations, the rise of AI and the recent signs of decline in Wikipedia pageviews.
As part of the WMF's collaborations with the community, various on-wiki and live discussions will be hosted before June 2026. Now, though, interested users can leave their suggestions and ideas on the Annual Plan's talk page: the discussions are centered around several key prompts, including global trends affecting the projects, experimentation, newcomers, users with extended rights, collaboration and reading. You'll have time to join the thread until May 31.
In the last few months, the Wikimedia movie app WikiFlix has caught the attention of several media portals in multiple countries, thanks to its free-to-use approach and its ever-growing catalogue of public domain and open movies. Although users have been quietly enjoying WikiFlix since early 2024, Wikipedia influencer Annie Rauwerda from Depths of Wikipedia recently highlighted the portal on TikTok back in December. This triggered an article by Amanda Silberling for TechCrunch, and then Punto Informatico reporting along with several and others in France and Italy.
An early WikiFlix concept was born from an idea of Belgian-Dutch art historian and Wikipedian Sandra Fauconnier – known as Spinster – who had originally started working on the project as a hobby in November 2019, while attending the Wiki Techstorm in Amsterdam, by creating a mini-portal on Wikimedia Commons, where she had added "a set of Wikidata-driven gallery pages showcasing cinema history". Fauconnier wrote that she was inspired to start the project in order to improve the description and the coverage of public domain films and music hosted on Commons, which she described as "a treasure trove of undiscovered high-quality multimedia". In June 2022, a group of Wikimedians proposed a version of WikiFlix as a separate Wikimedia sister project, but the proposal was declined.
In 2024, German MediaWiki developer Magnus Manske turned WikiFlix into a tool hosted on Toolforge, which now hosts over 4,000 movies from Wikimedia Commons, the Internet Archive, or YouTube that have fallen into the public domain. The tool's interface shares video streaming service design elements which Netflix also adopted, and allows users to browse, search and view movies without any interruption, while also providing information about the casting and other details. The WikiFlix database is updated hourly from Wikidata, but while movies with a lot of sitelinks on their Wikipedia pages are prioritized, the community around the tool maintains a blacklist in order to ban films with explicitly racist or propagandist themes.
The ever-growing catalogue of Wikiflix hosts movies from 1874 all the way up to 2025, and everybody is free to add new candidates and suggest improvements on the Wikidata page for the project. – O, BR
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Unreviewed featured articles/2020 (URFA/2020) is a systematic approach to reviewing older Featured articles (FAs) to ensure they still meet the FA standards. Through 2025, with 4,526 "very old" (from the 2004–2009 period) and "old" (2010–2015) FAs initially needing review:
URFA is working to help maintain FA standards; for some, FAs are restored via FAR. For others, improvements are initiated when talk pages are noticed.
|
There remain almost 4,000 old and very old FAs to be reviewed, and any little bit helps to improve our oldest FAs.
Ideas for how you can help are listed below and at the 2022 Signpost article:
More regular URFA and FAR reviewers will help assure that FAs continue to represent examples of Wikipedia's best work. If you have any questions or feedback, please visit Wikipedia talk:Unreviewed featured articles/2020/2025 report.
Feb 1, 2011 8:29 PM
<>
to Story Cowles
Did you check out what this guy does on the wikipedia site?
The above email was sent from a redacted account, likely Jeffrey Epstein's, to Epstein's male assistant, Story Cowles. What would Epstein, a convicted sex offender, want to know about what "this guy" did on Wikipedia? It might be that Epstein just wanted information on a university professor and his activities, since he was known to use academics to help cleanse his own reputation by sponsoring their research. Or perhaps, he was interested in the reputation management skills of "this guy" and his ability to whitewash the article about Epstein himself. Maybe, he just wanted to mark the article for further reading, like he did with over a hundred other articles. We don't know the answer, but we do have a large amount of data that could help answer this question.
It took an act of Congress, but the DOJ finally released the Epstein files on January 30. The DOJ calls the data dump the "Epstein Library". Jmail offers a slightly more accessible copy is available at Jmail.world. The public may now see 3.5 million computer files that the federal government collected for the Jeffrey Epstein sex abuse cases, whereas another million or more files have not been released, yet.
The release and its handling were botched, with some media observers calling it a "disaster". The reaction of some members of Congress was even more hostile, as experienced by US Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The release includes government documents, photos, and most intriguingly, at least 1.3 million emails to or from Epstein. Jmail lists 1347 files that include the word "Wikipedia", far too many for this reporter to read in any reasonable time period.
It is important to remember that the inclusion of a person's name in these emails does not, by itself, indicate any wrongdoing. Wikipedia editors should understand that the files should not be used directly as reliable sources for reasons such as missing or botched redactions of the names, places or dates associated with the files.
News stories from reliable sources began to sort out the files almost as soon as they were released and have avalanched over the last week. Some of the best of them so far have concentrated on the smaller stories that can be most easily checked, such as those about Norway's Crown Princess Mette-Marit or lawyer Brad Karp. Broader stories focusing on the big picture and multiple names are included in Associated Press and Wall Street Journal (paywalled) articles. Some of these articles are also discussed in this issue's In the media column.
The Signpost has reported on Jeffrey Epstein and his whitewashing of Wikipedia twice before. In 2020, we reported on how editors who were apparently related to Epstein had conducted a campaign to remove information in the article about the financier's conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution and how this may have prevented MIT from turning down donations from Epstein which were intended to cleanse his reputation. In a second article from last December, we used material from a Congressional release of Epstein emails to show how he recruited SEO and reputation management companies which planned, executed, and gave progress reports on their whitewashing of the article. This investigation shows that the DOJ release confirms and strengthens the conclusions of the two prior Signpost articles. Epstein's emails also show his obsession with Wikipedia: for example, he often sent out one-line emails to his contacts – or to himself – consisting entirely of a Wikipedia article's URL.
Reading the content of the DOJ release may be disturbing to readers and even to journalists who report the content. Amelia Gentleman wrote in an opinion published in The Guardian that she found Epstein's e-mails to be crude and misogynist. Most readers will feel the same.
The Economist reports (limited free access) on the 1.3 million emails that it was able to extract and process with AI to classify them into categories. 442,470 of these emails came from "Emails from top 500 Epstein correspondents, excluding staff". Under the finance category, Ariane de Rothschild sent or responded to 5,532 emails, followed by Jes Staley with 4,566 emails. The academia category included, among others, Boris Nikolić (15,503 emails), Lawrence Krauss (7,593) and Martin Nowak (5,698). Girlfriends/exes included Karyna Shuliak – who was Epstein's girlfriend in 2019 – (41,091) and Ghislaine Maxwell (10,186). Media/entertainment included Peggy Siegal (6,437) and Michael Wolff (4,831). Tech included Joi Ito (8,400). Business included Sultan bin Sulayem (5,194) and Tom Pritzker (5,029). Politics included Peter Mandelson (4,597) and Ehud Barak (4,248). Law included Kathryn Ruemmler (11,265). Real Estate included David Mitchell (7,554). Other included Deepak Chopra (5,348).
The Economist also notes that most of these emails (588,517 of the 653,550 tracked) were everyday matters, scoring 1 on their "disturbing scale", with only 1,474 scoring 10 ("very disturbing"). Of interest to Wikipedians, they report that "a quarter of his top non-staff contacts have a Wikipedia page. He traded emails with at least 18 current or former billionaires."
In order to get through even a portion of these emails, you should remember that Epstein had many email addresses starting with "jee", with "jeevacation" and "jeeproject" probably being the most common ones. Ghislaine Maxwell's emails are generally given as "GMAX", "G Maxwell", or "G Max".
Epstein's executive assistant, Lesley Groff, probably sent him more emails than anyone else. Many of these are of the form "Bob telephoned. Pls return his call". Groff and other staff members, including Darren Indyke (personal lawyer), Richard Kahn (accountant), and Christina Galbraith (publicist), are identified in several reliable sources.
Epstein's obsession with sex is already well-known. He also seemed to be obsessed with the media in general and in telling his own story in his own way, to the point that Steve Bannon offered him "media training". But few people likely knew of his enamoration with Wikipedia. Both he and his contacts often linked to a Wikipedia article seemingly for various reasons, but often with no explanation at all, just a linked URL in both the subject line and the body of the text. There are likely well over 100 total article links in the released emails.
We can only guess the reason for some of these links. For example, coitus reservatus, and female sexual arousal disorder may have been motivated by his sexual obsessions. Credit default swap, special drawing rights, and Grab Holdings may be related to his business interests. Religious views of Abraham Lincoln, and World Day of the Sick may reflect his moral aspirations. Hilbert's problems and Huffman coding likely relate to his academic pretensions. But others just appear random.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin is almost certainly a special case: it is likely that Epstein's then-girl-friend just wanted to go to a classical music concert. But the links to biographies present a special problem on Wikipedia, due to our strong policy on presenting information on living people. For example, one email appears to be a simple draft list of people Epstein wanted to invite to a seminar: it has over 30 names, most of them from academia, and 24 of those are identified with links to the Wikipedia article about them. In another case, Epstein simply asked, "Did you check out what this guy does on the wikipedia site?" Since Epstein tried to recruit many people in academia, or even people he'd never met, to help whitewash his reputation, we will omit naming or linking to many biographies.
Back in 2020, The Signpost tracked how three editors – who went under the usernames Stgeorge12, Turvill and Ottotiv – attempted to whitewash the articles about Jeffrey Epstein and the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation. The starting point for that investigation was from an article in the New York Times that stated (paywalled) that an editor named Turville (with an "e") was named in Epstein's required annual sex offender registration statement. The Epstein Library has finally shown that document, where Turville is listed twice near the very bottom of the very long lists (6th and 7th from the end) under "Wikipedia".
Similarly, many of the emails in the new release should not surprise anybody. They may have different senders, but the messages are similar: for example, how they intended to whitewash Wikipedia, what is the plan, how long it would take, and how much it would cost.
In an early case, an email sender with a common name and a childish sense of humor wrote:
I see your wikipedia profile is changed. Hooray! Me is happy.
In an even earlier email, a sender wrote about the Wikipedia article about Epstein:
not good news. they've got your wiki page under "lockdown" essentially, any changes can only be approved by one editor and he's not on your side and will scrutinize things vigorously. The only way to get good stuff added to what's there, and to eventually start cleaning up what is already there, is to have some positive things in the mainstream press that we can refer to with citations. Can't really advise you about what, or how, to get stuff in mainstream press, but if you can do this step, then there's a shot with wikipedia...otherwise, all you can really do is ride out this latest storm and when things have been calm for awhile we can attempt some limited cleanup.
In neither of these cases were the apparent whitewashing attempts successful.
On November 12, 2010, Epstein emailed Al Seckel, a reputation manager who was the brother-in-law of Ghislaine Maxwell. The financier wanted to be sure that material in a series of articles written by Daily Beast author Conchita Sarnoff had been used in the Wikipedia article about him. At about this time, Epstein was threatening legal, and possibly other, action against Sarnoff and her editor Tina Brown, according to a new article published by the same website. While these threats to a journalist may not have had a direct impact on the Wikipedia article, they could be expected to have an indirect effect on future edits.
From: Jeffrey Epstein <jeevacationifpgmall.com>
To: AI seckel
Sent: Fri, November 12, 2010 7:11:23 AM
it is important , that I can be certain that the Wikipedia stuff has Conchita Sarnoffs input . how certain are we?
The process of Epstein searching for a reputation management company and taking bids is shown by a series of emails – starting on February 7, 2012 – with IntegrityDefenders.com (currently an expired domain). The results of their services would reportedly "take 6 months to a year. Cost is $2,449." Epstein questioned if that was the monthly cost.
Feb 7, 2012 1:47 PM
Hi a,
In reference to your client's online reputation management plan, we have a process we execute for all of our clients that entails creating volumes of numerous sites, back linking and good content that will rank highly in results, eventually displacing the negative content. The process for you client will take well into 6 months to a year because of the high profile nature of his links. We will need access to the wwwjeffreyepstein.orgin order to move it up the ranks as well. We will recycle information found on his foundation website and also focus on other individuals with the same name in order to diffuse the monopoly of information there is about him.
You can usually see our input within the first few weeks. Please ask him or anyone else not to click on any of the negative links EVER again as that can keep them lingering on the first page. If you have any other questions, feel free to email me. ...
A staffer, or possibly an editor hired by Epstein, sent an email to him in 2013. Again, the long-term effect on the article seemed minimal, but Wikipedia editors must have been tiring from the long siege.
Mar 22, 2013 7:13 AM
Hi Jeffrey, am almost done with the new wikipedia article. My first draft was accepted by them. I have to put in a list of press references to back it. will send to you when approved. am also working on: ...
How long could these Wikibullying attempts go on? Surprisingly, something similar seems to have happened last September, according to The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), in Epstein details scrubbed from Mandelson's Wikipedia page by shady paid editor. TBIJ has an impressive record of reporting on paid editing on Wikipedia, having broken stories on Portland Communications and Bell Pottinger. They recently reported that the Wikipedia article on Peter Mandelson, the now former UK ambassador to the US and Epstein's self described "best pal", was edited contentiously by an editor later banned for undeclared paid editing, BeansS77. A second editor was similarly banned.
Of course, there's no indication that Epstein's old network is still at work whitewashing, or even that The Lord Mandelson had any connection with BeansS77's effort. What is of concern is that Wikipedia is still open to interference from well-connected paid editors.
Even without the mishandling of the Epstein files by the DOJ or the current political brouhaha in the United States, the Epstein story would continue to drag on. The huge number of the released files, and likely a few trials will make new information available, perhaps for several years. Our readers may have their own takes or done their own investigations into the matter. Feel free to add your take in the comments section below, but please be careful to follow Wikipedia's rules about biographies of living people and outing. Or you may contact this reporter through the Wikipedia email system.
TL;DR summary – Wikidata has had a crisis since 2015, and in hindsight I wish we had talked about it sooner. More generally, I think that our Wikimedia Movement has a systemic problem of failing to identify and address our challenges. Comment below if you recognize missteps here in other Wikimedia systems.
On 20 January 2026, the Wikimedia Foundation finalized the split of Wikidata into two collections of data, or "graphs". This Wikidata Graph Split affects the hundreds of regular contributors and thousands of regular tool users in the WikiCite community, who see value in curating a Wikimedia citation database. Since 2015, WikiCite's popularity exceeded the limits of Wikidata, or broke Wikidata, and consequently Wikidata has turned away new users, institutional partnerships, financial investments, and major content contribution projects due to our infrastructure lacking capacity to accept the contemporary standard of small data upload projects. All of us Wikipedia editors understand technical limitations throughout the Wikimedia projects, and to me Wikipedia's commitment to free and open-source software is endearing.
But in the case of Wikidata's limits, the problematic part was that since 2015, we tolerated uncertainty about if and when Wikidata's capacity would increase. We turned away users and projects for 10 years, and failed to signal a crisis and emergency. While I can understand Wikimedia governance planning fixes on a schedule in the context of our scarce resources, I want confidence that we have shared understanding of our challenges, and to reduce long-term uncertainty about if and when our tools will function as expected. If we had a major problem with a Wikimedia platform, then do we have the community infrastructure to talk about it?
My feeling is that our Wikidata challenge was not technical, but rather was about interpersonal relationships. For the future, I want confidence and trust that when we Wikimedia editors have major challenges, then we have a community governance system to recognize and discuss them. Look here with me at the circumstances which have slowed Wikidata growth for some years, and be hopeful with me about the success plan to fix things by summer 2027 when the Wikimedia Foundation will migrate Wikidata's backend to a new SPARQL engine.
WikiCite is important for the Wikimedia community because it has been among the most popular Wikidata projects in terms of user count, content produced, investment attracted, university partnerships, active discussions, count of non-editor users, and stirring of passion. Universities are in the business of doing research, but lack an easy way to list their own researchers and own research publications. Only some universities can afford subscriptions to scholarly profiling services such as Web of Science or Scopus, but the WikiCite community seeks to provide this for free, to everyone, by using Wikidata to match citation metadata to researchers, institutions, and topics. The WikiCite project attracts contributors because it is easy to imagine a Wikipedia-aligned scholarly profiling service becoming fundamental to global research infrastructure.
WikiCite is the project to curate scholarly metadata in Wikidata. It includes the editing project, the community of editors and conferences, and outreach efforts through which institutions contribute their data, such as the WikiProject Program for Cooperative Cataloging project which recruited 50 universities to index their research in Wikidata. There are a handful of projects in the Wikimedia Movement which have 100s of editors and a portfolio of institutional partnerships. Although there are multiple reasons why editors come to WikiCite, a unique connection that the project has is that universities index their faculty and research publications in Wikidata both for Wikimedia community curation, and also because that indexing is a good investment as it surfaces the university's research output as linked open data in all other Internet services and AI which index research.
Scholia is a friendly web interface for accessing WikiCite collections. It is friendly in the sense that it has more than 400 scholarly queries already formatted, for example, list of a researcher's publications, list of people and research at a university, or profile of research on a topic. This sort of service is "scholarly profiling", and to sort this data, one needs the "scholarly graph of metadata" as Linked Open Data connecting topics to scholarly articles to authors to their institutions, co-authors, software, datasets, grants, and everything else. Scholia and WikiCite are the Wikimedia projects for scholarly profiling, and alternatives to services including Google Scholar, Web of Science, or OpenAlex. I am part of the Scholia team, and I am biased to favor it, but I think the WikiCite approach to connecting Wikimedia projects to a global scholarly database is one of the best and most popular project ideas that the Wikimedia Movement has developed. The WikiCite community includes a base of power users who also find value in this approach, as communicated in our 2025 survey of Scholia.
In May 2024, The Signpost shared my story that "Wikidata would soon split as the sheer volume of information overloads the infrastructure". Disclosure, again: I am a Wikimedian in Residence who develops Wikidata content as a university researcher, so please note that I have an employer conflict of interest in this op-ed and in Wikidata's perpetual growth.
The split divided WikiCite content, which was 1/3 of the content of Wikidata, from everything else in Wikidata. The Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia community actually did discuss this, a lot. I really appreciate the Wikimedia Foundation staff who did many favors for me to give me many meetings monthly since 2024 by video, email, at conferences, and through referrals. Copied from the 2024 Signpost article, here again are the major discussion reports. The insight to gain from these reports is long term recognition of a major challenge, when all the while Wikidata is at reduced growth with no planned year in which we would increase capacity. No one did anything incorrectly, and delaying the decision always made sense at the time.
I see parts of the Wikimedia Movement that invest heavily in growing the editor community, and other parts of the Wikimedia community where I feel that technical challenges are incompatible with editor recruitment. In my view, Wikidata has been closed and in limbo for 10 years, but no community group ever organized to make a leadership statement of when Wikidata might update, and how we should make multi-year plans. There were thousands of hours of user time spent talking about the problem. We were unable to establish a governance plan to evaluate the cost of delay versus the scheduling of a decision. The worst part of this to me was that each year, there was the misunderstanding that someone was about to fix the problem, and that Wikidata service would expand. If this is a one-off in the Wikimedia Movement, then that might be tolerable, but I expect that if we had more robust community governance, then we might have a public ranked list of Wikimedia greatest challenges, and some estimate of the costs of decisions to address those challenges or delay.
I am lacking insight, but now that Wikidata is split into two graphs, I am unaware of the existence of individual or institutional users of the scholarly graph which was supposed to be a solution to sustain Wikimedia community access to this content.
To clarify, Wikidata has two familiar parts: Wikibase, where users edit Wikidata; and Blazegraph, which hosts the query service. Wikibase is the data-oriented variation of MediaWiki; it is what most people think of when they are familiar with Wikidata, as it is the wiki for editing data. Wikidata's Wikibase is not split. The other part of Wikidata is its query engine, and that is split.
One of the splits is the Wikidata Query Service, now minus scholarly articles after the split.
After the graph split, now there is the scholarly graph, which is an endpoint containing only citation metadata.
This is jumping ahead a bit, but the Scholia team found the scholarly graph unusable, and migrated the full graph to a Qlever query engine. Anyone wanting to query a single graph can do so at
While WikiCite is a major Wikidata project, Wikidata is such a large platform that most Wikidata users do not curate citations, and will not notice the Wikidata Graph Split. For those who do want citation data through the Wikidata Query Service, then the Wikimedia platform solution is that they have to write a two-part query in which they seek some data from the Wikidata main graph, then get citation data from the Wikidata scholarly graph. In practice, this is too difficult. If there is a user community for the Wikimedia hosted scholarly split graph, then I have not yet seen their projects, and please someone link to them in the comments section of this article.
The Scholia team hosts virtual hackathons where anyone can put issues or problems in queue for the volunteer developer team to address in the next round. The April, November, and December events from 2025 all have documentation on what volunteers had to organize to prepare for the January 2026 graph split. There is a list of affected tools, some of which have updates. The Scholia team created Wikidata Query Service graph split documentation to describe how anyone should respond to the Wikidata graph split. This is both extraordinary that volunteers put these events and labor together, but also common across Wikimedia projects that volunteers organize responses and adaptations to keep tools functional in response to Wikimedia Foundation platform changes.
The thing that everyone should know about Wikidata and Blazegraph is that Amazon acqui-hired everyone at the Blazegraph nonprofit organization, so it has not had a major update since 2015. Wikidata has been in trouble since that time in 2015.
Wikidata was established in 2012 as the linked data complement to Wikipedia's prose, and was part of our strategy to keep Wikimedia projects technologically advanced. The software backend of Wikidata is the scrappy Blazegraph, which is free and open-source software. At the time of Wikidata adopting it, it already had its own independence, development team, and funding to sustain it. While no one can buy or close open-source software, companies can hire every developer and expert on the software. Amazon acquired the Blazegraph team soon after Wikidata had committed to Blazegraph as its SPARQL engine for queries. Amazon Neptune is based on Blazegraph open software, but proprietary software. Consequently, Wikidata's SPARQL engine backend has not had a significant update since Wikidata established its SPARQL endpoint in 2015.
While the Wikidata graph split relieves the Wikimedia Foundation servers of the intense computation required of a larger dataset, the graph split is not intended as a solution, but just a way to delay the crash by 2 years, assuming that we also keep restrictions on data imports and deterring expected use. Blazegraph is now abandoned technology and inferior to alternatives. The planned solution to ready Wikidata for next generation editing is to migrate Wikidata's SPARQL engine to another database by summer 2027.
In September 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation announced a schedule for a Wikidata Query Service backend update. It is good news for Wikidata editors that there is a newly appointed Wikidata Platform WMF staff team doing these changes. Everyone should support them and wish them all success. They are available to meet during scheduled office hours.
Another major change which is timely now is that when Wikidata migrates to a new SPARQL engine, we could update to standard SPARQL 1.1. The Wikidata Query Service has been using a customized, older version of SPARQL only for Wikidata. The Wikidata version of SPARQL is easy to use especially for managing multiple languages, but using customized SPARQL also has drawbacks. One drawback is that if we migrate to another system, then either we need to redesign the customization, or require that every single Wikidata tool and query be updated to standard SPARQL. The previously mentioned list of tools affected by the graph split may be small in comparison to the changes needed if we migrate to standard SPARQL.
We in the Scholia team migrated to an option which uses standard SPARQL by modifying about 400 queries.
There is an exciting competition happening right now to decide the next SPARQL engine for Wikidata. The Wikimedia Foundation has selected two candidates: Qlever and Virtuoso. If all goes well, we should have a revived Wikidata by mid 2027 with greatly expanded capability for processing data and inviting institutional partnerships. Both of these options have 10–100× the capacity of Blazegraph, and are viable alternatives. Other candidates have already been disqualified after earlier testing.
The Scholia team has already made a commitment to Qlever. To avoid federated queries, there is a single Wikidata graph containing everything at https://qlever.scholia.wiki/ , and hosted by the Qlever team at the University of Freiburg. Virtuoso is a great candidate also and both should be tested; I am just sharing how things turned out.
Wikimedian Peter F. Patel-Schneider has been benchmarking various engines with 7 different competition benchmarking query sets, each of which is a large dataset designed to stress the systems with queries. In mid-February 2026 the Wikidata Platform team posted their WDQS Triple Store Evaluation using 3 of the simpler of those 7 datasets, and published their own benchmarking results. Communication between the Wikimedia communities and the new Wikidata Platform team is starting and ongoing. Wikimedia Switzerland has been supporting Wikimedia community engagement in the transition process, including by sponsoring research in this report and by hosting WikiCite 2025.
The solution that I want for the graph split, and for many other existing Wikimedia Movement challenges, is simply to be able to see that there is some group of Wikimedians somewhere who have active communication about our challenges. I want to get public communication from leadership who acknowledges challenges and who has the social standing to publicly discuss possible solutions. I want to see that someone is piloting the ship upon which we all sail, and which no one would replace if it ever failed and sunk. For lots of issues at the intersection of technical development and social controversy – data management, software development, response to AI, adapting to changes in political technology regulation – I would like to see Wikimedia user leadership in development, and instead I get anxious for all the communication disfluency that we experience. Ten thousand of us or so participated in the 2018–2020 Wikimedia Movement Strategy, which had the goal of improving our governance infrastructure such that if we ever had a major problem, then we would quickly identify it and discuss it without fear. The Wikidata Graph Split is not the story here. The story here is that so much in the Wikimedia Movement is fragile, and that when we have major challenges then networks like WikiCite are unable to create chains of decision making to address them.
I appreciate all the effort that Wikimedia Foundation staff put into collaborating with the WikiCite community for the transition. The Wikimedia community is extraordinary for community participation in all levels of governance. The challenges we have are normal for Internet tech platform development anywhere, and is the way that user communities experience software updates.
Participate in on-wiki conversations to make decisions.
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Catherine O'Hara |  |
5,921,550 | .jpg) |
A Canadian actress and comedian best known for playing the mother in Home Alone, Beetlejuice and Schitt's Creek (the last one giving her an Emmy), but who outside that had a varied array of roles over 50 years such as being a regular in Christopher Guest's mockumentaries and providing the voice of Sally in The Nightmare Before Christmas. On January 30 she was taken to a hospital in serious condition, and was later declared dead at 71. |
| 2 | Ajit Pawar | |
3,759,893 |  |
Maharashtra's longest-serving deputy chief minister, a position Pawar had held since 2010, died on January 28 at age 66. |
| 3 | Killing of Alex Pretti | |
2,084,659 | .jpg) |
On January 24 in Minneapolis, Pretti, a nurse with the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, was shot and killed while protesting ICE. The incidents in the city have divided US politicians on ICE's presence there, known as Operation Metro Surge. |
| 4 | Border 2 |  |
1,806,493 |  |
This sequel to the 1997 film Border, co-written and directed by Anurag Singh, was released last week coinciding with the Indian Republic Day. The film depicts the India–Pakistan war of 1971 which led to the creation of Bangladesh. The film has received positive reviews from critics and has so far grossed ₹404 crore (US$48 million) against a budget of ₹275 crore (US$33 million). A sequel titled Border 3 is currently in development. (and in other news regarding India and Bangladesh, the latter were kicked out of the T20 Cricket World Cup to be held in India for refusing to play there) |
| 5 | Royal Rumble (2026) | |
1,781,802 |  |
In the first-ever Royal Rumble not held in the U.S. (this one in Riyadh), 60 WWE wrestlers battled each other, with the victors earning a championship match at WrestleMania 42 in April. Roman Reigns won the men's match, and Liv Morgan was the last woman standing, respectively. Singles matches were also held. With his 28-year career on the line, AJ Styles lost via submission to Gunther. |
| 6 | Elena Rybakina |  |
1,282,113 | .jpg) |
Four years after her first Grand Slam title in Wimbledon, this Kazakhstani (but born in Russia) tennis player managed to add another winning the Australian Open, adequately three years after losing that exact tournament to the same Aryna Sabalenka who was defeated by Rybakina in Melbourne (not to mention in the 2025 WTA Finals two months ago). |
| 7 | Gregory Bovino |  |
1,236,819 | _Enforcement_and_Removal_Operations%27_(ERO)_(cropped).jpg) |
In a series events revolving around #3, the commander of the ICE forces was relieved of duty in Minneapolis, though the Department of Homeland Security denied Bovino had also been ousted from his role as commander-at-large of the United States Border Patrol. |
| 8 | Alex Honnold | |
1,036,852 | .jpg) |
On January 25, this American climber scaled the 508 m (1,667 ft), 101-story Taipei 101 without the use of ropes. The event was broadcast live (well, with a slight delay, just in case something went wrong) on Netflix. |
| 9 | Deaths in 2026 |  |
1,031,431 |  |
I know I was born and I know that I'll die The in between is mine I Am Mine..." |
| 10 | Sam Darnold | |
873,918 |  |
The Seattle Seahawks quarterback led his team to victory against the Los Angeles Rams in the conference final, setting up a confrontation against the New England Patriots at Super Bowl LX on February 8. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jeffrey Epstein | |
6,239,253 | 
|
On January 30, the Trump Administration finally (after much delay) released a more complete version of the Epstein files. This rendition included very disturbing content and featured more prominent figures (such as former British Ambassador to the United States Peter Mandelson, Noam Chomsky, Bill Gates, rappers Pusha T and Jay-Z, and many others). |
| 2 | Epstein files | |
5,054,020 | 
| |
| 3 | Savannah Guthrie | |
2,471,363 | _(cropped).jpg)
|
One of the hosts of the American morning news program Today Show was in the news after her mother Nancy Guthrie disappeared. Helping the investigation even forced her to step out of co-hosting NBC's coverage of a big event... |
| 4 | 2026 Winter Olympics | |
1,698,190 | 
|
Four years after a quite weird edition (along with being in a city that barely sees snow in China, everything was hindered by the goddamned pandemic), the biggest winter sports event returns in the Italian cities of Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo. Five medal events happened on the Saturday after the opening ceremony, with the United States being shut out, and in speed skating Canada getting bronze and the host's first gold, courtesy of Francesca Lollobrigida, whose great-aunt was a famed actress. And hockey fans are happy that a deal was made with the NHL to allow the sport's best players to go (even if the arena built for the tournament is still not finished). |
| 5 | Ghislaine Maxwell | |
1,487,889 | .jpg)
|
After the death of her father, British media mogul Robert Maxwell (who coincidentally died in mysterious circumstances like Epstein), this socialite became #1's friend and (literal) partner-in-crime, and she has been in prison since 2020 for it. |
| 6 | Iron Lung (film) | |
1,377,263 | .png)
|
A lack of oxygen, from my life support, My Iron Lung... Sorry. Popular YouTuber Markiplier made a name for himself with Let's Plays of horror games, including 2022's Iron Lung, where a submarine pilot explores an ocean of blood on a desolate moon, with the developer retributing with a cheat code replacing many textures with Markiplier's face, and then hiring him to adapt Iron Lung into a film. Filmed back in 2023 and featuring Markiplier as writer, director, editor and lead actor, the film was self-distributed into theaters, overcoming the same mixed reviews most game adaptations get to make back its modest $3 million budget many times over with just the $17.8 million opening weekend (where it was second to Send Help). |
| 7 | Bad Bunny | |
1,333,512 | 
|
Before his performance as the Super Bowl halftime performer, the Puerto Rican rapper won three Grammys, including the first Spanish language Album of the Year for Debí Tirar Más Fotos. |
| 8 | Catherine O'Hara | |
1,324,894 | .jpg)
|
One year and a half after Beetlejuice Beetlejuice had Delia Deetz comically dying discovering the snakes she ordered were not defanged, her actress passed away for real, leading to many tributes. O'Hara's last filmed appearances last year were on The Studio and season 2 of The Last of Us, along with documentary John Candy: I Like Me, about her co-star in Home Alone. |
| 9 | 68th Annual Grammy Awards | |
1,302,728 | .jpg)
|
Back to the Grammys, the most awarded artist was the one to the left, Kendrick Lamar, taking Record of the Year for the SZA collaboration "Luther" and eight other trophies, including all the rap categories. Other winners included Billie Eilish getting Song of the Year for "Wildflower"; Olivia Dean as Best New Artist; Lady Gaga, Lola Young and Tame Impala in the pop categories; The Cure, Turnstile, one of the covers from the Ozzy Osbourne farewell concert and Nine Inch Nails in the rock ones, the last one being one of three Grammys for film songs (along with their "As Alive as You Need Me to Be" from Tron: Ares , there was "Defying Gravity" from Wicked, and "Bad as I Used to Be" from F1 the Movie); Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters to elevate their Oscar prospects; and in a more unusual page, the Dalai Lama of all people got Best Spoken Word Album , and Steven Spielberg completed the EGOT for a documentary on his favorite composer John Williams. |
| 10 | Dhurandhar | |
1,071,904 | _(cropped).jpg)
|
Thanks to Netflix, audiences worldwide are checking on the most successful Indian film of 2025. Sequel Dhurandhar: The Revenge comes out in March and will definitely take a hold of our Report. |
For the January 9 - February 9 period, per this database report.
| Title | Revisions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Deaths in 2026 | 2586 | Besides the aforementioned Catherine O'Hara and Ajit Pawar, departures as the year begun included Bob Weir, Scott Adams, Rob Hirst, and Sal Buscema. |
| Killing of Alex Pretti | 1784 | As mentioned above, a nurse was killed by ICE agents in Minnesota, sparking widespread outrage and scandal. |
| 2025–2026 Iranian protests | 1638 | Beginning on 28 December, demonstrations erupted across multiple cities in Iran amid nationwide unrest and a deepening economic crisis. The government is doing its best to repress the resistance, cutting the internet and responding with force, having already killed thousands. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei blamed Trump and Israel for the massacres. |
| Greenland crisis | 1309 | While theaters are showing Greenland 2: Migration, where people who survived a comet impact in the first movie hiding in a bunker in the eponymous North Atlantic island discover things got worse outside, reality seems to also have tensions and bad moments regarding Greenland. Long story short, Trump has wanted to annex the 2.1 million km2 island since his first term. At last check, he has ruled out the idea of a military takeover and abandoned tariff threats. |
| 2025 Bondi Beach shooting | 1079 | The deadliest terrorist attack in Australian history is still having repercussions. |
| Ligas Distritales del Peru | 1051 | One editor is repeatedly fiddling with the lowest level of Peru's football pyramid. |
| Nile | 1042 | As a pun goes, "Denial Is a River", the longest in the world, in fact. It is also the latest Vital Article worked on by Noleander, who already made three of those become Featured. |
| 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election | 1040 | Some editors are fiddling a lot this article in expectation of the by-election for one of the United Kingdom parliamentary constituency in the Greater Manchester, set for February 26. |
| Royal Rumble (2026) | 1000 | A temporary stadium in Saudi Arabia's capital Riyadh received the latest WWE extravaganza. |
| 2026 Australian Open – Men's singles | 981 | The female 2023 Australian Open final was a reminder of the then-recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, given it involved a Russian who plays for Kazakhstan being beaten by a player from one of Putin's biggest allies Belarus. 3 years later and with the war still raging, the decision was again up to those two players, and the Belarusian who rose to the top of the WTA Rankings (Sabalenka won 10 other titles since that championship, including a repeat in Melbourne and two U.S. Opens) and became the first player since Martina Hingis in 2000 to reach fourth straight Australian Open finals could not get on top this time around in a hard fought match. |
| 2025–26 NFL playoffs | 906 | The NFL continues to have only the same teams contending for the Super Bowl, with the four Conference Finalists this year having 10 appearances and 6 titles in the decisive game since 2014. Eventually, the two teams at Super Bowl LX were the same of 2015, except this time around the Seattle Seahawks won. |
| Operation Metro Surge | 893 | ICE sent agents to Minnesota with the stated purpose of apprehending undocumented immigrants and deporting them. After two American citizens were killed (the above mentioned Alex Pretti, and the woman below), leading to protests and overall societal disruption, the troops started being withdrawn. |
| Killing of Renee Good | 878 | Renee Good, a writer living in Minneapolis with her wife and six-year-old child, was shot during a confrontation with ICE agents, causing wide public outcry; a large number of protests followed. |
| January 2026 North American winter storm | 836 | From January 23 to January 27, Storm Fern (as nicknamed by The Weather Channel) covered large swathes of the United States and Canada in snow, along with bringing strong storms and winds to Mexico. |
| 2026 Australian Open – Women's singles | 793 | Carlos Alcaraz continued to show why he's atop the ATP rankings (even if in our most viewed of 2025 it was his rival Jannik Sinner who made it in), completing the career Grand Slam with the Australian Open title over tennis living legend Novak Djokovic, the youngest man to do so given he's a few months short of 23. |
I wrote a poem about my love for Wikipedia.
First, they came for the politicians
And I did not speak out
Because I do not belong to a party
Then they came for disabled journalists
And I did not speak out
Because my disability is invisible
Then they came for the teachers
And I did not speak out
Because I was not smart enough
Then they came for the white women
And I did not speak out
Because newsrooms would notice
Then they came for Wikipedia
And I yelled out
Because Wikimedians are my people
Then they tried to come for me
And there was no one left to recruit
To come for my community
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| 1 | A well-constructed article is this | XXXXXXX |
| 5 | You can get one every day by embedding a template on your userpage | XXX |
| 6 | What screens are comprised of, and a concern of MOS:IMG | XXXXX |
| 8 | This might be a concern of WP:GS/CRYPTO | XXXXX |
| 9 | The thing it is when there's no more of whatever thing it was | XXX |
| 11 | It happened to Presidency of Donald Trump | XXXXXXX |
Down | ||
| 1 | One who works for the Foundation, or a Senator, for example | XXXXXXX |
| 2 | Punk subgenre, and policy regarding DIY piccys | XX |
| 3 | MOS:CAPS concern | XXXXX |
| 4 | What happens to many articles after debate | XXXXXXX |
| 7 | How some Wikipedians may prefer to be called, according to WP:EDPRONOUNS | XXXXX |
| 10 | Either an edit that doesn't change the text, or the Cornhusker State | XX |
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