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The Wikimedia Foundation has published its transparency report for the first half of 2025, about "requests we receive to alter or remove content from the projects, and to provide nonpublic information about users."
The section on requests for user information ("such as IP addresses or user agent information") reports that 64 user accounts were "potentially affected" by such requests, but only one "actually affected". Among the 20 government requests received, the largest number (8) came out of India. The Foundation "partially complied" with only one request, out of France, and "fully complied" with 0. This was down from 2 granted requests in the second half of 2024: one from Brazil ("fully complied") and one from India ("partially complied"). The latter had received a great deal of community attention, including an open letter with the largest number of signatures in Wikimedia history (Signpost coverage).
The Foundation proudly points out that "Compared to other companies, we received relatively few requests, and granted relatively low percentages", citing numbers from LinkedIn, Meta and X (formerly Twitter), who during a comparable recent half-year timespan granted 723, 251,028 and 10,581 requests for user information, respectively.
A look at the previous transparency reports from the last half decade (the report for the first half of 2019 seems to have been removed or never published) confirms that such low numbers are the norm for the Wikimedia Foundation - although the second half of 2023 seems to have been an outlier, in that no less than 896 user accounts were "actually affected" by the 5 requests granted:
| timespan | Total requests | Requests granted | User accounts potentially affected | User accounts actually affected |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| July to December 2019 | 35 | 2 | ? | ? |
| January to June 2020 | 30 | 1 | 72 | 2 |
| July to December 2020 | 32 | 2 | 3,119 | 4 |
| January to June 2021 | 30 | 3 | 38 | 5 |
| July to December 2021 | 18 | 1 | 33 | 2 |
| January to June 2022 | 31 | 0 | 38 | 0 |
| July to December 2022 | 29 | 0 | 3,816 | 0 |
| January to June 2023 | 41 | 3 | 8,712 | 4 |
| July to December 2023 | 32 | 5 | 985 | 896 |
| January to June 2024 | 26 | 2 | 186 | 2 |
| July to December 2024 | 23 | 2 | 33 | 4 |
| January to June 2025 | 30 | 1 | 64 | 1 |
The Foundation's transparency report also provides other kinds of information, e.g. about "Requests for content alteration and takedown", or about "Orders from EU Member States" that it received under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA).
– H
Larry Sanger has been largely inactive as a Wikipedia editor since his departure in 2002 as Wikipedia's "chief organizer" who (as employee of Jimmy Wales) had crafted several of its core policies. On September 29, he updated his user page to announce that
I'm baaaaack! [...] For most of 2025, I have developed Nine Theses on Wikipedia, which is partly an extended criticism and partly a reform proposal. Unlike much of my previous writing and speaking about Wikipedia over the past 20 years or so [cf. Signpost coverage], this is not merely negative. It is a realistic plan to make Wikipedia better. I hope you will take it seriously.
The nine theses, expanded upon in great detail in the document (which "is 37,000 words, something like a 150 page book" according to Sanger), are:
Various Wikipedians have so far commented on the talk page and in a village pump thread.
Sanger also announced his theses in an article at The Free Press (see "In the media" in this issue) and in a thread on Twitter/X, where he added:
Wikipedia could change. It's not impossible.
But only if you make a lot of noise both on social media and on Wikipedia itself. The current narrative is controlled by a few hundred people. What if 1000s (politely) descended on Wikipedia?
These are, in fact, very reasonable, commonsense proposals from anybody's point of view. We can put pressure on Wikipedia at all levels to adopt them. If they do nothing or refuse to change, there will be consequences.
I am Tucker Carlson's interviewee today—we talked about both criticisms and this reform proposal.
The 93 minute interview with Tucker Carlson touched on topics such as Carlson's theory about "Wikipedia’s Dark Alliance With Google" - alleging the existence of "a deal with Google that allows them to be the top search result" (Sanger agreed that "you very well could be right", but offered the alternative theory that Wikipedia might in its early days have benefited from a "feedback loop" with Google's algorithm, by being the first website to cover various topics).
Other parts of the interview caused "MAGA [to] Melt[] Down Over Wikipedia ‘Blacklist’", as summarized by The Daily Beast. These reactions included Elon Musk announcing that at his company xAI, "We are building Grokipedia [..] Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia". Sanger reacted wearily: "Let’s hope it won’t be as biased as Grok itself."(Several weeks earlier, Musk had commented on the All-In podcast about possibly using Grok to "rewrite Wikipedia to remove falsehoods and add missing context". See also earlier Signpost coverage of Musk's grievances: "Op-ed: Elon Musk and the right on Wikipedia", "Wikipedia is an extension of legacy media propaganda, says Elon Musk")
In a 2013 tweet, Sanger had announced that "I am finished with Wikipedia criticism. Quote this back to me if I happen to lapse." Reform, however, was not mentioned. – H
Temporary accounts, formerly known as "IP masking", has been tentatively scheduled for rollout on English Wikipedia on October 7 (see announcement). The feature is already active on several Wikipedias and involves removing IP visibility for people who choose to edit without logging in.
For further reading on the discussions and rationale leading up to this, see previous Signpost coverage from 2020, 2024, and 2025. – B, H
Robin Berjon in Tech Policy Press tells us How Wikipedia Can Save the Internet With Advertising.
Berjon believes that the entire internet is in trouble, that the current commercialized model of the internet puts the power and money, as well as private personal data into the hands of a "broligarchy" and the advertisers they serve. Authoritarian governments have power as well. But none of these players have an incentive to represent the public interest and the information that the public consumes is distorted.
He starts with the premise that
"There is ample evidence around the world that media organizations, when they choose to, have been able to develop imperfect, occasionally failing, but nevertheless viable institutional arrangements that have shielded newsrooms from advertising money across more decades than we've had digital computers."
It's not just Wikipedia he wants to save, but local, national, and international newspapers, and digital media. The whole internet.
Berjon calculates that advertising on Wikipedia could bring in one billion US dollars per year in revenue. What could we do with a billion dollars each year? This reporter first would stash some in the Wikimedia Endowment and then get a larger and more powerful legal team to protect us from autocratic governments in almost any crisis. Then better software and faster servers. But other Wikipedians will have different priorities. The possibilities are nearly endless. Please share your priorities for a billion dollars per year in the comments section below.
But this is where many of us will get confused by Berjon's argument, or simply disagree with his priorities. Some Wikipedians won't trust the WMF with more money, some won't want the WMF to, even indirectly, subsidize other media outlets, or to get more involved with politics.
Berjon's vision does not offer a detailed roadmap to where he wants us to go. There are implicit subsidies to digital media and not-for-profit organizations, including a "Public Interest Internet Fund". Mostly though, he just wants us to show a significant part of the internet how to use advertising as a non-damaging source of funds:
"The Wikipedia community is in a position to create substantive power for the public interest internet at a time when it is being pushed to the edge of extinction. We will not survive without the funds to take a stand. We will not survive without a principled advertising infrastructure that can sustain usable, viable public interest digital services. Perhaps, if we can stop retreating to self-defeating principles with no grounding in empirical reality, we can try something different: We can choose to win."
– S
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54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their "References" section that points to a page that no longer exists.It's part of a larger phenomenon of link rot on the World Wide Web — over a third of web pages from 2013 are no longer accessible. [3]
Rene Gonzalez, a former Portland, Oregon city councilor and unsuccessful mayoral candidate, sent me several pleasant emails this August, about a year after the story first broke that his city office had paid $6,400 in city funds to a PR firm to help update the Wikipedia article about him.
This case of paid editing on Wikipedia was already one of the best documented I’ve seen. The contract between the oddly named Codename Enterprises and the City of Portland — Office of Portland City Commissioner Rene Gonzalez has an extremely strict nondisclosure clause — before one party can reveal anything about the project or even about the contract itself the other party must agree in writing, unless the disclosure is required by law or by Wikipedia. But public availability of the contract was revealed in the first article in The Oregonian about the project. Codename was contracting with the City of Portland, which is required by state law to provide a copy of any contract they make to anybody who asks the Portland City Auditor's Office (city auditor).
The case has been covered extensively by The Oregonian, Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB), local television broadcasters and other local media. It has also been investigated by the City Auditor's Office in a long two-part report. While the material from the city auditor is available to the public, per Wikipedia rules I won't link to it here since names of Wikipedia editors and their personal details might be disclosed. I will provide the city auditor material to a limited number of administrators on request. Codename's two websites which sell their services, Whitehatwiki.com and Buzzr.com, are open to the public and have been disclosed at User:BC1278 who describes himself as a paid editor named Ed Sussman. Both websites clearly say that they perform public relations services.
The 20 or so emails that Gonzalez and I have exchanged starting this August do add some more detailed information, but mostly we just seem to understand each other better. Gonzalez was excited that he had won his case in court which threw out the $2,400 fine imposed by the City Auditor's Office for the "Wiki affair" (as the court referred to it) and an unrelated fine of about $9,000 involving campaign donations above the city's limits. He'd won the case on procedural grounds; the judge decided that he had been denied due process because no formal adversarial hearing had been allowed before the fines were levied by the city auditor.
The judge made no ruling on the substance of the case, though Gonzalez told me that the lack of due process is reflected in the quality of the evidence. The City Auditor's Office has stated that they followed the city law and procedures then in place.
Gonzalez was so excited he even sent me three articles documenting why the fines had been thrown out.
He did not complain about coverage in The Signpost on the affair, but seemed to request my help in changing the Wikipedia article. Other than a brief review of how to contribute to Wikipedia with a conflict of interest or as a paid editor, I declined to help him edit the Wikipedia article based on my own conflict of interest as a reporter who has covered related stories. Other editors, of course, may decide whether this material belongs in the article.
Gonzalez also included a set of emails, which are publicly available through the City Auditors, about Ed Sussman threatening a libel suit in an email he sent to The Oregonian reporter Shane Kavanaugh on August 8, 2024, the day after the story broke.
I had requested these emails from Gonzalez on October 16, 2024 following a mayoral candidates debate when Kavanaugh had asked Gonzalez “You’re fine with sticking taxpayers with that bill?” referring to $6,400 the city paid to Codename. Gonzalez responded in part that Kavanaugh’s original article in the Oregonian was inaccurate, and that he had to correct it "under the threat of a libel suit from the contractor (Codename)". Kavanaugh disagreed with that characterization and Gonzalez responded that "it's in the email … I'd be happy to share it with (unclear)".
The Oregonian had indeed made a minor correction following a threatened libel suit from Ed Sussman, changing
"The company hired by Gonzalez submitted the proposed changes to Wikipedia on June 25," to "A Gonzalez staffer submitted the proposed changes to Wikipedia on June 25." (emphasis added)
The emails tell the story:
On August 8, 2024 Sussman emailed to Kavanaugh "Your story yesterday has a significant, libelous error. The 'Request Edit' proposal on Wikipedia was submitted by an employee of the commissioner. Your story says that our agency did the submission. We did not." And later "Please issue a correction immediately or I will refer this to my lawyer, who is cc'd here."
Why would this seemingly minor change result in such a drastic legal threat? Sussman was clear "Your error could lead to me being blocked on Wikipedia and even our agency being shut down."
Fortunately, calmer heads prevailed. Kavanaugh responded a few minutes later, citing his source — the chief of staff of Gonzalez's city office (who was copied in the email) — and asking for any clarification. Kavanaugh stated that "Our number one goal in any news story is accuracy & I would love to clear this up ASAP."
The Chief of Staff responded quickly, and did not deny that he had given Kavanaugh the published material. Rather he replied (in full)
I think there was an honest miscommunication between Shane and I here. I thought Shane understood that a staff member from our office had submitted the edits with your advising on process and rules, not that you had submitted the edits yourselves. We appear to have left that conversation without being on the same page on this core point. He has just called and we clarified the misunderstanding. He should be issuing a correction shortly.
The same day Kavanaugh confirmed that the correction had been made and published.
This is not the first libel suit threat made by Sussman against a journalist reporting on a Wikipedia story.
The contract lays out how the project was to be implemented. In brief, Codename would provide training to a person called the "single point of contact" or "designee" in Wikipedia’s editing and disclosure requirements for conflict of interest editors making edit requests. Requirements for paid editors are hardly mentioned. The contact person would gather suggested edits from people in Gonzalez’s office and submit these to Codename. Codename would research Gonzalez and issues about the article and consider the suggested edits. They would then write and submit suggested text to the contact person for reaction and the process could repeat two or three or more times. When general agreement was reached the contact person would submit their wish list to Codename for approval and for a final suggested text. The contact could then submit the final text for the edit request to the article talk page.
If an agreement between Codename and the contact could not be reached, Codename could withdraw from the agreement with the full contracted payment due. The contract emphasizes that the final submission to the Wikipedia talk page was the contact person’s choice. Nevertheless the submitted wording of the requested edits had been written or re-written and approved by Codename and the contact was given a choice between submitting that wording or something close to it or withdrawing from the contract with Codename and making full payment.
The City Auditor's Office interviewed the contact on how this process worked. They report that the contact was uncomfortable with the process and tried to "slow-walk" it. They met several times with other staffers and Gonzalez in Monday morning staff meetings to discuss the project’s progress.
The contact was not an independent editor using their independent judgement. Rather they were constrained by their employment and by the text approved by Codename. They were a paid editor.
Wikipedia's policy on Paid-contribution disclosure very simply defines "Paid contributions on Wikipedia involve editing any page in exchange for compensation, including money or other incentives. Editors who received or expected to receive payment must disclose their employer, client, and affiliation." So the contact was editing the page Talk:Rene Gonzalez (politician) as part of their work in Gonzalez’s office and paid by the City of Portland. Gonzalez was the client and the City was the employer. The contact needed to declare that they were a paid editor, the client, employer, and their affiliation. The definition is "Affiliation: other connections that might be relevant, including, but not limited to, people or businesses who provide text, images, or other media for the paid edit." Codename is an affiliate because they provided text for the paid edit, but also possibly because they provided training, guidance and research for the paid edit.
The contact made an attempt at a disclosure. They declared on their userpage that "I work with Portland Commissioner Rene Gonzalez, and will follow the Wikipedia conflict of interest policy. I will not directly edit his biography page or any other page connected to him." But the conflict of interest guideline is not as strict as the Paid-contribution disclosure policy. The client, employer, and affiliation all needed to be disclosed.
Gonzalez emailed his thoughts on using the paid editing or conflict of interest rules:
“Once the Oregonian article wrongly specified that [Whitehatwiki] had made edits, that triggered disputes as to whether the disclosure was accurate and the right one (paid v. COI), at the same time as a bunch of anonymous trolls made direct edits to the page (very, very frustrating that we were put through ringer [sic] trying to comply with the disclosure rules with the help of folks who knew more, while anonymous trolls were allowed to edit). It is apparent from the talk page that not all Wikipedia editors agree on which disclosure was the right one with the benefit of hindsight, but [the contact] followed the guidelines provided by folks (Whitehatwiki) who knew more about Wikipedia rules than [they] did."
Since the previous Discussion report in August, there have been 1,718 threads across the various noticeboards and Village Pumps; the latter can be found in this issue's Community view, leaving us with 1,339 threads to review here.
| ANI | 530 | AN | 161 | AN3 | 156 | RSN | 146 | BLPN | 109 |
| COIN | 54 | FTN | 43 | NPOVN | 34 | NORN | 19 | ELN | 4 |
| AE | 33 | BN | 11 | ARBN | 10 | DRN | 29 | (pumps) | 379 |
1,339 may seem like a large number – and it is – of those, 1,135 ran longer than one kilobyte. But only 432 ran beyond a nickel, 248 beyond a dime, and 74 beyond a quarter. The caveats and provisos from the previous edition, as well as those of the electric winnower software itself, hold true here.
Perhaps most striking in this period is a large increase in disputes involving large language models; a significant proportion of user conduct disputes at the Administrators' Noticeboard for Incidents feature either the misuse of a LLM or the accusation thereof. While the simple use of a language model is not counter to policy (and in some cases it is explicitly disregarded as an issue), it is nonetheless a powerful tool that can create lots of problems in the hands of an inexperienced (or malicious) editor.
Outside of the main "drama boards", most larger noticeboard discussions focused on everyday questions of neutrality and sourcing, as well as the intricacies of policy and guidelines. However, even in a place like the Reliable Sources Noticeboard, LLMs found a way to be relevant.
Below is the full report.
| Thread | Length | Sigs | Users | Opened | Closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WIRED admitting to publishing stories without fact checking them, knowingly doesn't publish a retraction until outed months after the fact | 77971 | 85 | 44 | 2025-09-04 | 2025-09-23 |
| WIRED is a news magazine with a very long history (about as long a history as an online publication is capable of having). It was here put under suspicion, in a thread opened by ເສລີພາບ, for having published articles without fact-checking: indeed, of having published an entirely fabricated article, with made-up details, by a nonexistent reporter. For nine days this stayed on the website, until they realized it was fugazi and removed it; even then, there was not an official retraction until some months later (when other publications started giving them the business about it).
A list of other shoddy articles was produced, offered as evidence that Wired has fallen off and warranted reëvaluation. One of them, by Taylor Lorenz, concerned the Sixteen Thirty Fund and sparked a good deal of discussion regarding citations in said article. The overall issue was then further discussed at some length. A formal RfC was never opened, and the thread was archived without closure. | |||||
| National Post on Israel/Palestine | 36676 | 58 | 36 | 2025-08-11 | 2025-08-24 |
| This thread, opened by Simonm223, concerned Canadian broadsheet paper National Post's handling of a syndicated report on the death of an Al Jazeera reporter killed in Gaza, which they published from the Jewish News Syndicate. Claims had been made that the reporter was a "Hamas terror cell leader", which was sharply disagreed with by other outlets (including Reuters and the CBC). The Post issued an update to the article – some objected to their lack of a formal retraction. Ultimately, this seemed like a singular incident, and no desire really existed to begin formal determinations on the source. | |||||
| Are Nick Pope books RS? | 35141 | 65 | 19 | 2025-09-11 | 2025-09-17 |
This thread, opened by Chetsford, concerns a source used in a specific article (Georgina Bruni), relevant due to it being erstwhile at its third AfD. Bruni, whose article was deleted, was according to the article a "British businesswoman and a UFO researcher best known for her book on the Rendlesham Forest incident". The reference in question was this:
The discussion mostly centered around disagreements on the exact nature of the relationship between a source's reliability for factual claims and its ability to establish notability. | |||||
| German government sources as self-published? | 26848 | 46 | 15 | 2025-08-24 | 2025-08-28 |
| A disagreement among editors on the article for Socialist Equality Party (a minor Trotskyist party in Germany) led one to claim that literature published by the German government (e.g. the Federal Agency for Civic Education) was self-published, so the question was raised by Frijfuhs at RSN as to whether this was true. This claim was not borne out by consensus (although it was acknowledged that they could count as primary). | |||||
| Thread | Length | Sigs | Users | Opened | Closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| "Supreme state organ of power" and "Supreme executive and administrative organ" | 35686 | 39 | 17 | 2025-08-22 | 2025-09-10 |
| Disclaimer: I commented in this.
An extremely long thread, mostly concerning a dispute between Glide08 and TheUzbek on a couple articles relating to government apparatus in Communist nations. Among many things, there is some discussion of whether Marxist sources may be used to write Wikipedia articles, and whether or not that is what happened with these articles. | |||||
| Overemphasis on shipping in Fire Emblem character articles | 30119 | 54 | 15 | 2025-08-29 | 2025-09-09 |
| This thread, opened by Solaire the knight, alleged that a number of articles concerning video game characters had an inordinate amount of their content devoted to shipping discourse (i.e. discussion of the merits and flaws of conjectured romantic relationships between the characters occurring outside the work itself). Indeed, one article (now a merged redirect) devoted more words to shipping than to the actual description of the character. However, the thread is somewhat difficult to follow, and specific objections are not made particularly clear; it seems to have gradually fizzled out among suggestions to pursue formal dispute resolution. | |||||
| J. K. Rowling#Philanthropy | 28124 | 45 | 35 | 2025-08-25 | 2025-09-09 |
The topic of the famously controversial (and perhaps, more recently, infamously controversial) author's article is raised by Adam Cuerden, who objects to it "mix[ing] her early philanthropy with donations to anti-trans groups, with no distinction made between them". This has been a contentious article for a long time, not in the least because it is a Featured Article from eighteen years ago (albeit one which withstood a Featured Article review in 2022). It's also a biography of a person who's spent the last several years using her worldwide fame to be extremely outspoken on one of the most contentious issues in modern politics. Essentially, this thread is best seen as an eddy of a larger mælstrom. | |||||
| Thread | Length | Sigs | Users | Opened | Closed | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| H. E. B. failing to assume good faith, being uncivil spanning years | 246828 | 479 | 207 | 2025-08-14 | 2025-08-29 | |||||
User conduct thread, with reference to previous threads going back several years. The close is as follows:
| ||||||||||
| I believe that a page is being used as a suspected battleground | 116477 | 177 | 104 | 2025-08-25 | 2025-09-08 | |||||
|
This bizarre thread opens with a link to a (now-unviewable) post at a website called "puppygirls.online", claimed to be off-wiki canvassing. The "puppygirls.online" post was itself claiming that sockpuppets were trying to remove a section of sexual assault allegations from a biography (concerning some person in the role-playing game community), which presumably they wanted to keep in it. The opener of the ANI thread wanted it gone, and had apparently been trying to get it gone for a while. They were accused of a variety of types of misprision in this campaign (e.g. forum-shopping, incompetence, and filing malformed reports at various noticeboards). During this thread, a topic ban was proposed on the filer restricting them from the biography subject, which found consensus and was implemented. Another section was opened to propose a community ban, which did not find consensus, but they were later indefinitely blocked for other reasons. | ||||||||||
| User:W. C. M. and User:4., again | 77621 | 111 | 35 | 2025-09-05 | 2025-09-10 | |||||
| A thread opened by an administrator, concerning a battle between two users centering on {{Russia–United States relations}}. The thread doesn't have a formal closure, but both of them ended up partially blocked from the template. | ||||||||||
| Edit War and excessive deletions from user | 75461 | 112 | 35 | 2025-08-16 | 2025-08-19 | |||||
| A report about an editing dispute concerning pro wrestling that turned into a "boomerang" thread (i.e. one in which the filer is themselves sanctioned, rather than the editor they attempted to report). In this case, it was an indefinite block. | ||||||||||
| Possible hounding and uncivil conduct by User:J. B. | 65020 | 100 | 42 | 2025-07-30 | 2025-08-03 | |||||
| Note: I commented in this one.
The filer complained of hounding, to wit, being repeatedly accused of using large language models to edit Wikipedia. This ended up being true, and although this is not against policy, the filer repeatedly denied it, which most participants considered a major foul. Most of the thread is a discussion about the use of LLMs and the nature of our policies and guidelines regarding same. | ||||||||||
| User:G. S. mass-changing "committed suicide" including in quotes, against consensus | 64835 | 135 | 68 | 2025-08-31 | 2025-09-10 | |||||
| ||||||||||
| User:G. S.'s renewed disruptive editing | 56667 | 120 | 71 | 2025-08-17 | 2025-08-25 | |||||
A dispute between the filer and the filee found no consensus for sanctions.
| ||||||||||
| User:J. W. creating AI-generated mainspace articles | 56399 | 115 | 88 | 2025-08-13 | 2025-08-16 | |||||
| ||||||||||
| S. C. | 52982 | 76 | 57 | 2025-09-02 | 2025-09-09 | |||||
| One editor is accused of improperly archiving talk page sections, and the filer counter-accused of editing without due care. Furthermore, the section was closed, then reopened, then archived without closure (after a considerable volume of argument about the original closure itself). | ||||||||||
| User:L. C. | 48861 | 49 | 21 | 2025-08-13 | 2025-08-19 | |||||
| Content dispute. No administrative or community action taken. | ||||||||||
| User:C. K. W. | 46821 | 48 | 41 | 2025-09-02 | 2025-09-07 | |||||
| The user named in the complaint was accused of disruptively attempting to maintain a list of city council members in a municipality's article, and eventually spent some time blocked for it (initially just from the article, but later given a full block for ten days). In the process of attempting to learn the large volume of Wikipedia policies while being accused of violating them at a noticeboard, they used a large language model to write a response, which earned them the ire of many participants. | ||||||||||
| User:G. R. uncivil behavior and personal attacks | 43659 | 54 | 31 | 2025-08-14 | 2025-08-16 | |||||
| An unpleasant (seemingly pointless and avoidable) argument that ended with the complainee indefinitely blocked (by The Bushranger) after refusing to accept admonishments for civility. | ||||||||||
| Edit warring with personal attacks in edit summaries | 42118 | 93 | 33 | 2025-07-16 | 2025-09-06 | |||||
| While a discussion occurred about whether the complainee should be banned for their conduct, they were indefinitely blocked as a sockpuppet by Asilvering. | ||||||||||
| Disruptive editing by 101. | 41527 | 58 | 27 | 2025-08-13 | 2025-08-23 | |||||
| Content dispute over linguistics. | ||||||||||
| User:S. modifying ISBN formats again, despite years of requests not to do so | 41085 | 77 | 44 | 2025-08-05 | 2025-08-12 | |||||
| ||||||||||
| IP word vandalism | 34872 | 98 | 68 | 2025-07-27 | 2025-08-07 | |||||
A bizarre sort of villainy: a rash of random IP editors each making one or two no-edit-summary edits with small size changes that replace words in articles, often by synonyms, sometimes by total vandalism. Other strange patterns are noticed. Somebody spent a lot of effort coming up with an innovative strategy for doing something mildly annoying and unmemorable. Why even bother? | ||||||||||
| Disruptive editing/ vandalism | 33575 | 42 | 34 | 2025-08-19 | 2025-08-25 | |||||
| Somebody with 28 edits is reverted by someone with 200,000 edits, seemingly for no reason, and uses the word "vandalism" to describe this in their report. For reasons that are unclear, nearly the entire thread thenceforth consists of the complainant being scolded for using the incorrect words, until a couple eagle-eyed respondents began to actually look at the substance of the complaint, at which point the complainee was given some rebukes and urged to put more consideration into their reverts. | ||||||||||
| D. and undisclosed AI use | 32736 | 62 | 34 | 2025-08-29 | 2025-08-31 | |||||
| ||||||||||
| T. B. (again) | 30143 | 37 | 22 | 2025-09-08 | 2025-09-09 | |||||
| Complainee was blocked for one month by Cullen328 for disruptive editing. | ||||||||||
| User:J. | 26887 | 54 | 26 | 2025-08-17 | 2025-08-17 | |||||
| ||||||||||
| Rewriting of leads by LLM | 25743 | 45 | 35 | 2025-09-06 | 2025-09-09 | |||||
| ||||||||||
| Killing of Iryna Zarutska and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Killing of Iryna Zarutska likely canvassing | 24674 | 57 | 49 | 2025-09-08 | 2025-09-09 | |||||
| Mooted by AfD closure. See related Signpost coverage in this issue's In the media. | ||||||||||
| Likely undisclosed AI/LLM use to expand articles by C. | 23205 | 39 | 36 | 2025-08-17 | 2025-08-22 | |||||
| Inconclusive, and lacking a formal closure, but consensus was unanimous for a proposed mass rollback of the user's additions following repeated incidents of direct-to-mainspace slop-hosing. | ||||||||||
| IDHT and OR issues from K. M. | 22990 | 53 | 31 | 2025-08-20 | 2025-08-29 | |||||
| User indefinitely blocked from the pages under dispute by voorts. | ||||||||||
| White Genocide conspiracy theory | 22761 | 59 | 51 | 2025-09-03 | 2025-09-04 | |||||
| ||||||||||
| Weird WP:AIV behavior | 18663 | 45 | 39 | 2025-08-20 | 2025-08-24 | |||||
| Somebody, or somebodies, using a variety of IP addresses, was doing something that was either stupid or malicious. | ||||||||||
| Admin User:E. S. and MOS:DEADNAME at Annunciation Catholic Church shooting | 14161 | 32 | 40 | 2025-08-28 | 2025-08-28 | |||||
| ||||||||||
| Thread | Length | Sigs | Users | Opened | Closed | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RfC closure review request at Talk:Killing of Austin Metcalf#RfC: Should the name of the indicted suspect be included in the article? | 61149 | 8862 | 10 | 2025-09-12 | 2025-09-22 | |||||
| ||||||||||
| Clean start (M.) | 75241 | 103 | 54 | 2025-08-04 | 2025-08-18 | |||||
Unsuccessful ban appeal from editor whose claim I continue to advise clients, strictly off-Wiki, on how to adhere to Wikipedia policieswas met with skepticism.
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| Possible disruptive editing by S. H. | 45656 | 58 | 25 | 2025-08-11 | 2025-08-20 | |||||
| Strange, confusing content dispute, featuring a new editor doing a CLEANSTART in the middle of the thread and then continuing the discussion on the new account after informing all present that it's their clean start. | ||||||||||
| Latin American politics TBAN appeal | 31583 | 32 | 30 | 2025-07-13 | 2025-08-15 | |||||
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| Revoking autopatrolled right from S. for undisclosed LLM-generated articles | 27878 | 26 | 29 | 2025-09-30 | 2025-10-01 | |||||
| A bioinformaticist writes automated tools to fill out species articles about spiders, and one of the tools includes a large language model. Ongoing. | ||||||||||
| RfC closure on Talk:Shubhanshu Shukla | 26777 | 51 | 56 | 2025-08-23 | 2025-08-28 | |||||
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| Ban appeal (T. T. T.) | 25097 | 50 | 58 | 2025-08-16 | 2025-08-23 | |||||
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| W. unblock request | 23293 | 45 | 48 | 2025-07-30 | 2025-08-16 | |||||
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| Thread | Length | Sigs | Users | Opened | Closed | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken burger | 31034 | 13 | 6 | 2025-09-03 | 2025-09-08 | |||||
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| Laos | 28318 | 51 | 12 | 2025-08-05 | 2025-09-01 | |||||
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| Rape in Islamic law | 28036 | 13 | 10 | 2025-09-15 | 2025-09-24 | |||||
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| Parantaka II | 26390 | 30 | 9 | 2025-08-07 | 2025-09-04 | |||||
| Archived without closure. | ||||||||||
| Noticeboard | Thread | Length | Sigs | Users | Opened | Closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biographies of Living Persons | Socialist Party (Ireland) | 65498 | 137 | 19 | 2025-08-03 | 2025-08-10 |
| A dispute among socialists about sourcing issues regarding a political party's schism over alleged sex abuse. This involves a dispute with some group of Trotskyists. Why is there always a group of Trotskyists? | ||||||
| Biographies of Living Persons | Nina Jankowicz | 46660 | 74 | 22 | 2025-09-25 | 2025-10-01 |
| Note: I am actively participating extensively in this discussion, and in 2022 I created the article that is now under dispute.
A thread opened by User:Sangdeboeuf... I can't even bring myself to read this one through, that jackass JPxG is just flapping his gums all over the place. Give me a break!
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| Fringe Theories | Naoki Higashida and Facilitated Communication | 38214 | 78 | 17 | 2025-08-11 | 2025-09-01 |
| Sgerbic opens a thread pointing to a talk page where people discuss the strange practice of facilitated communication as it relates to a BLP. | ||||||
| Original Research | Discussion on whether Huns are Turkic | 28435 | 22 | 14 | 2025-09-06 | 2025-09-11 |
| Questions of ethnic POV-pushing on the subject of Pan-Turkism. | ||||||
As always, these reports don't capture every discussion, nor do they judge importance solely by size. But by cutting down thousands of threads to a few dozen, the winnower offers a workable snapshot of how this encyclopedia talks to itself, argues with itself — sometimes — decides things.
The Village Pumps have been quite active in the last few months, with a mixture of heavy governance debates and ambitious design proposals. Prominent among them are discussions that deal with the pressing questions for an online space in the modern day: navigating the challenges of emerging neural network technology, in the form of adapting our processes and policies to accomodate the ongoing LLM boom, and dodging the slings and arrows of an increasingly censorious WWW as governments seek greater control of speech worldwide.
| Thread | Length | Sigs | Users | Opened | Closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trial: Replacing our CAPTCHA with a new bot detection service | 32026 | 41 | 31 | 2025-09-04 | 2025-09-18 |
| A thread opened by Eric Mill, Kosta Harlan, and Szymon Grabarczuk (all from the WMF) to announce the beginning of a hCaptcha trial. This would replace Wikimedia sites' existing decades-old CAPTCHA system (as seen at Special:CreateAccount) with a bot detection service (details of which can be seen at the announcement and on the MediaWiki wiki. Some rancor was raised over the idea of incorporating non-free software into Wikipedia, but overall reception was positive. | |||||
| Office action: Removals on the article Caesar DePaço | 282591 | 540 | 181 | 2025-08-05 | 2025-09-05 |
| This thread, opened by Joe Sutherland, Lead Trust and Safety Specialist with the Wikimedia Foundation, concerned the WMF's actions at the Caesar DePaço article in August, whose surrounding events were covered by the Signpost at the time. | |||||
| WMF loses legal challenge to UK Online Safety Act (OSA) at High Court | 52544 | 107 | 74 | 2025-08-11 | 2025-09-01 |
| As previously covered by the Signpost, this concerns the United Kingdom's Online Safety Act, which would attempt to impose significant restrictions on UK residents' ability to browse the WWW (including Wikimedia sites). | |||||
| Wikipedia under US House of Reps Oversight Committee | 21856 | 58 | 54 | 2025-08-28 | 2025-09-01 |
| Another event previously covered by the Signpost; this one concerns moves by the United States government to investigate editing activity on Wikipedia. | |||||
| Temporary accounts rollout | 124867 | 195 | 91 | 2025-09-11 | 2025-09-29 |
| The long-awaited (and long-feared) rollout of the Temporary Accounts feature, mostly brought about by vague legal rumblings, is approaching. More information can be found in the announcement post. Subsequent discussion attempted to suss out details of how the resulting system would work (e.g. who among the large group of those with access to private information would be allowed to disclose what information and in what context). | |||||
| Thread | Length | Sigs | Users | Opened | Closed | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RfC: Update messagebox module with new Codex icons | 118383 | 256 | 193 | 2025-08-10 | 2025-09-21 | |||||
| A proposal by Waddie96 sought to update the icons in Wikipedia's message boxes, from the decidedly Web 2.0 icons in use for somewhat over a decade to a new set of flattened and more harmonious icons. Specifically, the icons in use in Wikimedia's Codex Design System. Emotions ran rather high — in a rare instance when WP:IDONTLIKEIT and WP:ILIKEIT were valid arguments. Occasionally, some grumbling about accessibility issues could be heard. Ultimately, no consensus was found to make the change. | ||||||||||
| RFC: Adding featured and good content status to the tagline | 202115 | 359 | 169 | 2025-07-08 | 2025-09-05 | |||||
| A proposal, raised by Dan Leonard, concerning whether the site tagline should include mentions of an article's featured or good status (currently, solid consensus exists for articles to have small graphical topicons, which they do, except not on mobile). | ||||||||||
| Bot to make list-defined references editable with the VisualEditor | 51557 | 94 | 60 | 2025-09-04 | 2025-09-09 | |||||
Pursuant to a previous consensus at Wikipedia talk:Citing sources, Alenoach proposes a bot to reformat articles with list-defined reference sections from {{reflist|refs=...}} to <references>...</references>. The purpose is to make them compatible with the visual editor, which for unclear reasons has never been fixed to work with list-defined references (despite a Phabricator ticket for this bug being open for more than a decade). | ||||||||||
| Propose to deprecate direct linking to non-English Wikipedia in articles | 46677 | 102 | 63 | 2025-08-31 | 2025-09-09 | |||||
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| Change the Village Pump's colour. | 40341 | 59 | 62 | 2025-08-21 | 2025-09-07 | |||||
| A currently-open proposal to change the color of the Village Pump's headers, opened by FaviFake. Presently, the headers use a color scheme known as "ClockworkSoul's Coffee Roll" — the scheme selected to unify design for all talk page headers twenty years ago. For the historically curious, you can see the other submissions (and the selection process) at Wikipedia:Talk page templates/vote. Here in 2025, it remains to be seen whether Wikipedia is capable of being cute. | ||||||||||
| Unsalt of Gaza Holocaust | 33206 | 78 | 69 | 2025-08-25 | 2025-09-05 | |||||
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| Text to Speech for Wikipedia Articles | 32988 | 48 | 50 | 2025-08-17 | 2025-09-01 | |||||
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| Signatures of living people | 30698 | 65 | 32 | 2025-08-01 | 2025-08-09 | |||||
| A very succinct proposal made by 67.1.248.11 to only include a signature in a biography for deceased subjects. This led into a longer discussion of the merit of including signatures in biographies at all, which many people found unnecessary or strange (outside of historically important examples like John Hancock or Babe Ruth). Ultimately, no action was taken. | ||||||||||
| Proposal to clarify WP:AIGI in line with MOS:AIUPSCALE | 22127 | 38 | 40 | 2025-07-20 | 2025-09-05 | |||||
| A proposal by D. Benjamin Miller, seeking to expand and clarify the recently-established WP:AIGI with respect to neural networks used to enhance rather than to wholly synthesize images. | ||||||||||
| Superscript and subscript typography guideline | 15122 | 39 | 42 | 2025-04-20 | 2025-08-25 | |||||
A proposal, made by Beland, to upgrade Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Superscripts and subscripts to a guideline, thus officially recommending HTML over Unicode for superscript and subscript characters (e.g. <sup>2</sup> rather than ²). It was closed as successful by GoldRomean. | ||||||||||
| Should we have an essay or something on "Jew tagging"? | 63144 | 91 | 37 | 2025-09-27 | 2025-10-01 | |||||
| Doug Weller proposed the writing of an essay that "would make it easier to justify blocks for jew tagging"; some discussion ensued, much of it about what precisely this behavior was, and to what extent it was intrinsically problematic. | ||||||||||
| Thread | Length | Sigs | Users | Opened | Closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MOS: prescriptive, descriptive, or both? | 48657 | 45 | 45 | 2025-08-26 | 2025-09-30 |
| RetroCosmos raises a rather weighty question — does the Manual of Style necessarily indicate community consensus on a wider scale? This question comes in the wake of the arbitration case Article titles and capitalisation 2. At hand is the even-broader issue of whether the ultimate authority is vested in ratified policy (in the vein of civil law) or consensus (in the vein of common law). | |||||
| LLM/AI generated proposals? | 172259 | 292 | 91 | 2025-08-12 | 2025-09-20 |
A general discussion, opened by Locke Cole to assess community attitudes towards handling project participation conducted via of large language models. Specifically: "Should HATGPT be expanded to allow for the closure of discussions seeking community input (RFC/VPR/CENT/RFAR/AFD/RM/TFD/RFD/FFD/etc) that are started utilizing content that registers as being majority written by AI?" This ran for quite a long time, and was largely similar to other LLM debates on Wikipedia; a good portion of the discussion consisted of people leaving bolded supports and opposes, although it was not explicitly an RfC, and at times it was unclear what specific action or resolution was being discussed. | |||||
| Reflections on Wikipedia Policies | 29397 | 33 | 26 | 2025-09-04 | 2025-09-06 |
| A very long post, from a very new user (Asocial network), discussing with familiarity vast controversies that occurred well before their account was registered, culminating in their block as a sockpuppet. | |||||
| Are political userboxes now allowed in Templatespace? | 42057 | 82 | 131 | 2025-06-22 | 2025-08-04 |
| Paul_012 attempts to decipher what current policy and practice are regarding userboxen about political affiliations, with reference to the 2006 userbox migration and 2009 MfD that prompted a projectspace index of political boxen to be moved into Ipatrol's userspace (after which, of course, it was eventually moved back). See previous Signpost coverage of the Great Userbox War for more vagaries. At any rate, a discussion arose about whether political userboxen should be totally banned, which seemed to draw a resounding "meh", with most participants saying no change was necessary to existing practice. | |||||
| Citation Needed Epidemic: Tag Bombing Violates Good Faith and Hurts Wikipedia! | 38532 | 59 | 42 | 2025-07-25 | 2025-08-03 |
| Tom94022 presents some numbers and some analysis, drawing a conclusion to the effect that the ubiquity of {{citation needed}} templates in mainspace articles is a product of excessive zeal in tagging, and that they create a vastly asymmetric situation (i.e. that they take mere seconds to apply, but require hours of expert labor to remedy).
It's not totally clear to respondents that this is an imminent problem — if the tags were unnecessary, then the situation would surely be problematic, but Tom doesn't give much in the way of argument for their superfluity. Some discussion was split off to Wikipedia talk:Verifiability. | |||||
| Simple Calculations Re-Definition | 22033 | 36 | 35 | 2025-09-03 | 2025-09-07 |
| Ejkohojkjkohokjh proposes an amendment to WP:CALC (the policy regarding simple calculations being exempt from the prohibition on original research). Their proposal suggests that there's a restriction on "simple calculations" needing to fall at the second-grade level; this prompts some confusion from Pump respondents. Upon further questioning, Ejkohojkjkohokjh cites a conversation they had with another editor, MrOllie, from whom they got the idea that this was the case. Some back-and-forth happens over that.
The thread eventually plays host to some intelligent explanations of how WP:CALC works; Headbomb gives some examples from big-brain physics articles where "simple calculations" (in the consensus of article contributors) include differentials. | |||||
| What is Wikipedia’s official stance on Ai-generated content | 24399 | 43 | 26 | 2025-09-03 | 2025-09-12 |
| Datawikiperson asks a seemingly simple question, and the answer is more complicated than envisioned. Like the other threads, discussion is fairly typical of AI discussions on Wikipedia. | |||||
| Thread | Length | Sigs | Users | Opened | Closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Essay I wrote about avoiding a subject's self-descriptions | 49871 | 62 | 22 | 2025-08-06 | 2025-08-13 |
| Aquillion presents an essay, WP:AVOIDSELF, the core of which is the claim that articles about controversial subjects (people, organizations or entities) should avoid considering the subjects' own desires as to descriptions or labels. This raises some debate, primarily due to the obvious political implications. Colin gives some account of why this could be a bad idea to apply generally. | |||||
| Declined vs rejected at AfC | 48308 | 85 | 51 | 2025-07-26 | 2025-08-11 |
Regarding Articles for Creation, a notoriously labyrinthine process frequently bemoaned by new users, Andy Mabbett seeks clarification on what (if any) the real distinction is between a draft submission being "declined" or "rejected". There is some confusion (oftentimes at the teahouse) since some people say that a draft is "declined, not rejected", implying there's a difference, but other people use the terms interchangeably. A good deal of discussion leads to a RfC being opened at the AfC talk page. Primefac's close note at that RfC says: By a wide margin, the status quo is preferred. Note that there were put forth some good suggestions in the discussion section about how to potentially increase the knowledge of users when they see the terminology the Project uses, so I will leave that section open for further comment. | |||||
| AWC 2025 Edit-a-thon Follow-up & Request for Community Guidance | 19759 | 24 | 46 | 2025-07-30 | 2025-08-06 |
| Dickson Kojo Anane, the Program Officer for Open Foundation West Africa, opens a thread to follow up regarding the Africa Wiki Challenge 2025 editathon. During this event, some issues arose, primarily that several participants were blocked. At a sockpuppet investigation, it had been unclear whether these were the same person operating multiple accounts, or multiple people editing from the same location. There were further issues raised with some of the participants submitting low-quality articles, some of which appearing to be LLM-generated. | |||||
| User:MichaelQSchmidt has died | 8021 | 8 | 93 | 2025-09-08 | 2025-09-10 |
| This thread, opened by BD2412, informs the community of a large number of in-progress sandboxen and draft articles left behind by the unfortunately deceased MichaelQSchmidt. | |||||
| User:Larry Sanger/Nine Theses | 21543 | 37 | 40 | 2025-09-30 | 2025-10-01 |
| The theses themselves are covered elsewhere in this Signpost issue, but this Pump thread is itself filled with a good deal of discussion on their merits (as well as sharp criticism). | |||||
| One comment per day | 21780 | 37 | 24 | 2025-08-14 | 2025-09-12 |
| WhatamIdoing asks about a "one comment per day" restriction, a rare but extant sanction sometimes used to deal with repetitive editors. She conjects that, if this is a formally established type of sanction, it could be productive in dealing with voluminous commentary from users suspected of slopping out large blocks of LLM text. | |||||
| Congratulations to Internet Archive | 22104 | 31 | 27 | 2025-09-22 | 2025-10-01 |
| MGeog2022 congratulates the Internet Archive on the resolution to a long-running item of litigation, and the milestone of their trillionth archived webpage. They take the time to raise the question of how robust the Archive really is, and whether it warrants some attention by Wikipedians (most of whose references and citations depend very heavily on the Archive). Some raise the possibility that it could either die or be captured (as with Freenode), and that it is incumbent upon us to make some arrangements for our future existence in this eventuality. | |||||
| Thread | Length | Sigs | Users | Opened | Closed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AfDs on current event articles | 72223 | 112 | 51 | 2025-09-22 | 2025-09-26 |
| Following a conversation in the smoke-filled oak-paneled rooms of WP:DISCORD, in which I raised the issue of the AfD process (as an attempt to determine the notability of a topic) seeming somewhat unsuited to articles about current breaking-news items, Clovermoss opened a thread at the Village Pump to discuss it further. | |||||
| Require an edit history to propose sanctions (gauging support for such a rule) | 52155 | 76 | 47 | 2025-08-16 | 2025-08-24 |
| Rhododendrites mulls an idea to cut down on disruption from minutes-old parachute accounts and rabble-rousers at noticeboards. | |||||
| Firearm brands and models in articles about mass shooting events | 41040 | 46 | 41 | 2025-09-03 | 2025-09-07 |
| TurboSuperA+ notes that gun sales in the United States increase after widely-reported shootings, and posits that including the specific models used in mass shootings is a form of free advertising. Personally, I have heard this argument before, but I've also heard it the other way around (e.g. that including gun models in articles about murders is necessary to punish and disgrace their manufacturers). Many respondents to the thread expressed concerns that this was a form of instruction creep. | |||||
| AI Moderator proposal | 35328 | 69 | 65 | 2025-09-05 | 2025-09-09 |
| Leaderboard proposes the adoption of a custom from the Redditors: an "AI moderator" that automatically applies specified rules to every post made in a webzone (whether for civility, topic-relevance, censorship, or whatever you please). The thread was initially posted at AN, and quickly moved to the Village Pump Idea Lab; most responses were tepid toward the idea. | |||||
| Rethinking CSD U5 | 82382 | 112 | 52 | 2025-09-23 | 2025-09-30 |
| Tamzin brings up some awkward situations and ambiguities in speedy-deletion criterion U5; this was received fairly well, and resulted in the opening of a RfC at Wikipedia talk:Speedy deletion. | |||||
| Quick straw poll about AFD flooding | 62899 | 77 | 45 | 2025-09-15 | 2025-10-01 |
| WhatamIdoing takes the temperature on precisely what people mean by "flooding" AfD, in terms of what specific quantities are considered usual or excessive. | |||||
| Automatic IP block exemption | 24930 | 43 | 27 | 2025-07-25 | 2025-09-09 |
| Awesome Aasim mulls reform on the subject of IP block exemption, an uncommonly-granted user right that is growing more relevant in the increasingly cellular and VPN-specked landscape of today's WWW. Should it be granted less selectively? | |||||
| Require accounts for live edits, move IP edits to pending | 23538 | 35 | 32 | 2025-08-01 | 2025-08-24 |
| Nswix makes one of the classic bold proposals, with a slight twist that may serve to make it more feasible. Commenters mostly object to the amount of work this would create (e.g. articles with Pending Changes already have, and continually create, a very large backlog). | |||||
| Revisiting WP:INACTIVITY | 239285 | 371 | 129 | 2025-07-16 | 2025-09-08 |
| With seven administrator recall petitions since the process was created, and inactivity being an issue at several, Soni opens an RfC to ask what the community thinks of inactivity standards. While there are a few responses to the actual questions, most of the comments are general discussion about recent recalls and the circumstances which gave rise to the RfC itself. | |||||
| The problem of AI generated deletion nominations | 64743 | 102 | 37 | 2025-08-26 | 2025-09-08 |
| 4meter4 raises the issue of LLM-created text being used to nominate articles for deletion at AfD, a process that tends to generate large amounts of work (since editors must evaluate, comment on, debate, and close each deletion nomination). WP:G15 (speedy deletion of unreviewed LLM text) is proposed as a solution for this issue. A good deal of general discussion occurs as well. | |||||
On one hand, it is concerning to see discussion of so many issues that seem like they have the potential to endanger the survival of the project. But on another, it is heartening to see Wikipedians tackling the issues with diligence and rigor — or, failing that, at least verbosity and perfectionism.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
This study[1] by Alexander A. Kaurov and Naomi Oreskes examines the circulation of a 2000 study on the safety and risk profile of glyphosate[supp 1] (WKM2000), a component of the herbicide Roundup. The authors describe the paper as ghostwritten due to the fact that it "was crafted by Monsanto" (the company that produced Roundup), adding that "the paper has not been retracted and continues to be cited". The authors of WKM2000 indeed disclosed Monsanto funding in the paper, following scientific standards.
Oreskes, a historian of science, is well-known for coauthoring a 2010 book titled Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. In this new paper, she and Kaurov aim to "illustrat[e] how corporate-sponsored science infiltrates public knowledge platforms," by analyzing how WKM2000 is cited on Wikipedia, in governance and policy documents accessible through the Overton database (for context about its uses for evaluating the impact of academic research, see Szomszor and Adie, 2022[supp 2]) and in academic literature. The authors have also published an opinion paper based on the study[supp 3].
We focus here on their analysis of using WKM2000 as a reference on Wikipedia.
First, they identify three articles on English Wikipedia using WKM2000 as a source: "Polyethoxylated Tallow Amine", "Round-up (herbicide)" and "Glyphosate-based Herbicides." They find that on December 1, 2024, all three referred to WKM2000, and that in the past the article about glyphosate did too. Looking at revisions, they highlight that there were multiple attempts to remove this citation or add a cautionary sentence about it being ghostwritten; these changes were generally reverted.
Kaurov and Oreskes offer a succinct history of changes to the inclusion and description of the citation, and summarize why editors chose to keep the citation. They do not link to the specific talk page discussions they draw on in the paper[supp 4], but we did verify that the discussions between Wikipedians they present are similar to current discussions on Glyphosate's talk page, asking why "[t]he article states that there is scientific consensus that glyphosate is not carcinogenic"; as well as to many archived discussions:
Editors argued that according to Wikipedia’s guidelines—particularly WP:MEDRS, which outlines the use of medical sources—removal of the paper would be unwarranted unless secondary reviews had criticized its methodology or findings. They contended that court documents and internal emails, which could be “cherry-picked,” do not necessarily undermine the scientific validity of the study unless reflected in peer-reviewed critiques. Another editor emphasized that the controversy had been reported in reliable secondary sources, including major news outlets like NPR, suggesting that this should be taken into account when assessing the paper’s reliability.
The authors add, at this point, that this is not a critique of editors' work or of Wikipedia's editorial system. But they later use this example to question the process in place to handle scientific papers neutrally on Wikipedia.
The treatment of WKM2000 on Wikipedia also reveals a troubling interpretation of "neutrality" in scientific discourse. Wikipedia editors consistently treated the paper as a valid scientific source, even after its ghost-written nature was revealed, arguing that as long as the paper remained in the literature without formal retraction or refutation, it should be cited without caveat.
The article goes on to discuss corporate entities editing Wikipedia despite their conflict of interests, infringing WP:COI, to situate WKM200 in broader manipulations of Wikipedia by corporate entities. But they miss a far more interesting discussion: at what level of proof should editors set the bar before referring to controversies about a paper that has not been disproved in later reviews and research? With regards to WKM2000, why would we mention the critique leveraged by the authors, but not the European Food Safety Authority's statement about WKM2000? It concluded that "EU experts had access to, and relied primarily on, the findings of the original guideline studies and the underlying raw data to produce their own conclusions" which aligned with those of the paper and that "even if the allegations were confirmed that these review papers were ghostwritten, there would be no impact on the overall EU assessment and conclusions on glyphosate."
Finally, the authors do not consider the ramifications of their critiques of WP:MEDRS. It was developed to protect the integrity of medicine information of Wikipedia; going against it would open the door to adding unfounded controversies on other health topics, a heightened concern at a time where longstanding medical research is called into question by public figures [supp 5].
For instance, WP:MEDRS is used to ensure the reliability of the page on Paracetamol). It prevents the inclusion of studies with undisclosed conflicts of interest. As it happens, Wikipedia editors are currently examining (see Talk:Paracetamol#Baccarelli_2025_review) whether a paper recently cited by the Trump administration to question Paracetamol/Tylenol's safety should be included. Indeed, it was co-authored by Beate Ritz, a well-known public figure critiquing peer-reviewed glyphosate research[supp 6] who... did not disclose her conflicts of interest[supp 7].
In summary, the study fails to fully engage with editors' rationale for not removing WKM2000 and for giving precedence to peer-reviewed academic sources. They did suggest future work could include interviewing Wikipedians.
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced the results of the 2024-25 Research Fund round. Eight proposals (out of 61) were funded, with a total budget of $315,659 USD:
| Title and link to research project page | Applicants | Organization | Budget | Start–end dates |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Extended: Opportunities for Supporting Community-Scale Communication | Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil | Cornell University | $105,000 USD | August 2025 – August 2027 |
| Informing Memory Institutions and Humanities Researchers of the Broader Impact of Open Data Sharing via Wikidata [project page missing] | Hanlin Li, Nicholas Vincent | The University of Texas at Austin | $49,450 USD | July 15, 2025 – July 14, 2026 |
| Lexeme based approach for the development of technical vocabulary for underserved languages: A case Study on Moroccan Darija | Anass Sedrati, Reda Benkhadra, Mounir Afifi, Jan Hoogland | Kiwix | $25,722 USD | July 1, 2025 – June 30, 2026 |
| Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects in the focus of scientific research – a research community-building event in Ukraine | Anton Protsiuk, Mariana Senkiv, Natalia Lastovets | Wikimedia Ukraine | $12,115 USD | July 1, 2025 – March 31, 2026 |
| Between Prompt and Publish: Community Perceptions and Practices Related to AI-Generated Wikipedia Content | Anwesha Chakraborty, Netha Hussain | N/A | $10,000 USD | October 1, 2025 – August 31, 2026 |
| Establishing a Critical Digital Commons Research Network [project page missing] | Zachary McDowell | University of Illinois at Chicago | $14,300 USD | October 2025 – March 2026 |
| The state of science and Wikimedia: Who is doing what, and who is funding it? | Brett Buttliere, Matthew A. Vetter, Lane Rasberry, Iolanda Pensa, Susanna Mkrtchyan, Daniel Mietchen | University of Warsaw | $49,450 USD | August 1, 2025 – July 30, 2026 |
| Developing a wiki-integrated workflow to build a living review on just sustainability transitions | Adélie Ranville, Romain Mekarni, Rémy Gerbet, Arthur Perret, Finn Årup Nielsen, Dariusz Jemielniak | Wikimédia France | $49,622 USD | September 1, 2025 – August 31, 2026 |
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
From the abstract:[2]
"[...] Wikipedia aggregates a large amount of data on chemistry, encompassing well over 20,000 individual Wikipedia pages and serves the general public as well as the chemistry community. Many other chemical databases and services utilize these data [...] We present a comprehensive effort that combines bulk automated data extraction over tens of thousands of pages, semiautomated data extraction over hundreds of pages, and fine-grained manual extraction of individual lists and compounds of interest. We then correlate these data with the existing contents of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Distributed Structure-Searchable Toxicity (DSSTox) database. This was performed with a number of intentions including ensuring as complete a mapping as possible between the Dashboard and Wikipedia so that relevant snippets of the article are loaded for the user to review. Conflicts between Dashboard content and Wikipedia in terms of, for example, identifiers such as chemical registry numbers, names, and InChIs and structure-based collisions such as SMILES were identified and used as the basis of curation of both DSSTox and Wikipedia. [...] This work also led to improved bidirectional linkage of the detailed chemistry and usage information from Wikipedia with expert-curated structure and identifier data from DSSTox for a new list of nearly 20,000 chemicals. All of this work ultimately enhances the data mappings that allow for the display of the introduction of the Wikipedia article in the community-accessible web-based EPA Comptox Chemicals Dashboard, enhancing the user experience for the thousands of users per day accessing the resource."
From the abstract:[3]
"[...] we introduce a framework to evaluate cultural competence of T2I models along two crucial dimensions: cultural awareness and cultural diversity, and present a scalable approach using a combination of structured knowledge bases and large language models to build a large dataset of cultural artifacts to enable this evaluation. In particular, we apply this approach to build CUBE (CUltural BEnchmark for Text-to-Image models), a first-of-its-kind benchmark to evaluate cultural competence of T2I models. CUBE covers cultural artifacts associated with 8 countries across different geo-cultural regions and along 3 concepts: cuisine, landmarks, and art."
From the paper:
"We use WikiData [...] to extract cultural artifacts, as it is the world’s largest publicly available knowledge base, with each entry intended to be supported by authoritative sources of information. We [..] traverse the WikiData dump of April 2024, by first manually identifying root nodes [...], a small seed set of manually selected nodes that represent the concept in question. For example, the node ’dish’ (WikiID: Q746549) is identified as a root node for the concept ’cuisine’. We then look for child nodes that lie along the ’instance of’ (P31) and ’subclass of’ (P279) edges; e.g. ’Biriyani’,(Q271555), a popular dish from India, is a child node of ’dish’ along the ’instance of’ edge. The child nodes that have the ’country-of-origin’ (P495) or the ’country’ (P17) are extracted at the iteration.
From the abstract:[4]
"Cross-modal (image-to-text and text-to-image) retrieval is an established task used in evaluation benchmarks to test the performance of vision-language models (VLMs). [...] we introduce WikiDO (drawn from Wikipedia Diversity Observatory), a novel cross-modal retrieval benchmark to assess the OOD generalization capabilities of pretrained VLMs. This consists of newly scraped 380K image-text pairs from Wikipedia with domain labels, a carefully curated, human-verified a)in-distribution (ID) test set (3K) and b) OOD test set (3K). The image-text pairs are very diverse in topics and geographical locations. [...] Our benchmark is hosted as a competition at https://kaggle.com/competitions/wikido24 with public access to dataset and code.
See also presentation slides from NeurIPS 2024
From a preprint titled "Class Granularity: How richly does your knowledge graph represent the real world?":[5]
"[...] we propose a new metric called Class Granularity, which measures how well a knowledge graph is structured in terms of how finely classes with unique characteristics are defined. Furthermore, this research presents potential impact of Class Granularity in knowledge graph's on downstream tasks."
"Class Granularity is a metric that can measure how detailed the ontology of a knowledge graph is and how well it reflects the actual knowledge graph composed of RDF triples."
"In this study, we provide Class Granularity for Wikidata, DBpedia, YAGO, and Freebase, allowing us to compare the level of granularity in LOD (Linked Open Data) that has not been addressed in previous research."
In lieu of Wikidata itself, the authors, three researchers from Naver, used their own company's "knowledge graph, Raftel, a knowledge graph constructed by consolidating Wikidata’s ontology", with 28,652,479 instances (much fewer than the over 109 million items that Wikidata contains currently). The results indicate that Wikidata or at least its "Raftel" derivative has a lower granularity than Freebase and YAGO, although still higher than the (Wikipedia-derived) DBpedia:
Table 6: Metric comparison of LOD and Raftel Dataset Classes Predicates Instances Triples Avg. predicates per class Granularity DBpedia 472 33,457 6,570,879 60,451,631 599 0.0904 YAGO 111 133 64,611,470 461,321,787 24 0.1708 Freebase 7,425 769,935 115,755,706 961,192,099 278 0.3964 Raftel 287 1,079 28,652,479 298,359,151 132 0.1400
Wikimedians can derive consolation from the authors' caveat that "[h]aving a high Class Granularity doesn’t necessarily imply superiority", although they maintain that "it does provide a way to gauge how well classes possess distinct characteristics beyond just their quantity, which is often hard to evaluate solely based on the number of classes and predicates."
From the abstract:[6]
"[...] not all knowledge represented [in knowledge graphs] is useful or pertaining when considering a new application or specific task. Also, due to their increasing size, handling large KGs in their entirety entails scalability issues. These two aspects asks for efficient methods to extract subgraphs of interest from existing KGs. To this aim, we introduce KGPrune, a Web Application that, given seed entities of interest and properties to traverse, extracts their neighboring subgraphs from Wikidata. To avoid topical drift, KGPrune relies on a frugal pruning algorithm based on analogical reasoning to only keep relevant neighbors while pruning irrelevant ones. The interest of KGPrune is illustrated by two concrete applications, namely, bootstrapping an enterprise KG and extracting knowledge related to looted artworks."
The tool can be accessed online via browser and via an API.
I talk to curious outsiders here and there about the kind of drama that happens on Wikipedia. They always correctly guess that there's drama over contentious topics, like American politics or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. They're generally also not surprised when they hear that interpersonal drama and grudges can happen when opposing personalities just find themselves in the same place at the wrong time. But they're always surprised and amused to find out that we have a storied history of serious drama and conflict over things that are objectively silly, like whether the 'i' in Star Trek Into Darkness is capitalized;[a] precisely which dash to use in a given context; and whether or not various tiny categories for articles should exist.
These discussions and others like them have two things in common: (1) the end result of the conflict means little to nothing to readers, and (2) they have the potential to end wikicareers. These disputes are not worth the trouble they cause. If you see one of these disputes – or worse yet, find yourself falling into one of them – avoid getting sucked in at all costs. (But maybe let an admin know if there aren't enough eyes on a nasty situation.)
I'm not even remotely the first person to notice that Wikipedians have a higher-than-average rate of traits that correlate heavily with mid- to high-functioning autism. This project is a limitless sandbox for correcting other people and indulging your special interest – with a reasonably low barrier to entry and a huge audience – so we really self-select for those traits. Unfortunately, those traits tend to correlate heavily with other traits associated with autism, ones that aren't as good for a collaborative project. People who like making corrections and improvements tend to have a very particular way they think things should be, and sometimes aren't receptive to alternative styles – even very small changes can cause a kind of anguish. We're hardwired more for assessing details than the big picture, so it's no surprise that some editors really care about minutia to the point where it can make collaboration difficult. We're not optimized for assessing unfamiliar social situations or subtext, and being properly considerate of others' feelings can be something we take a little longer to learn. Text also removes a lot of the subtext that we think we're expressing, making miscommunications even easier. Combine that with a model where decisions are made by talking (optimistically speaking), and you wind up with completely insignificant disputes being blown way out of proportion and attracting lots of community interest, to the point where uninvolved, experienced users have to divert their attention towards cleaning it up so that the project can move on.
If these disputes basically only involved single-purpose accounts, that'd be one thing. It'd be a time sink, sure, but it'd mostly be a honeypot for people who wouldn't be productive otherwise. But over the years, Wikipedia has lost incredibly talented and prolific contributors to stupid disputes, either because they got discouraged or because they couldn't behave themselves. No one is irreplaceable – the project fills the void sooner or later – but the loss of a contributor is still a temporary blow at least, especially in undertrafficked niches. These silly disputes do real harm to the community – we lose good editors and good editor-hours trying to settle what can be huge amounts of controversy over a tiny change. If you find yourself in one of these controversies, consider whether this is the best thing you can be doing for the project.
When there's nothing to be gained from arguing or escalating, the best thing you can to is to just drop the stick. I'd encourage this wherever possible. The problem with that advice, though, is that dropping the stick can be really, really hard. These disputes become much harder to defuse when both sides feel like the other's conduct has been hurtful or unfair; walking away can feel like surrendering to a bully. It's a little humiliating, and it leaves that person free to control their fiefdom, intimidating whoever else might challenge them. I get it, I really do.
The best answer I have is eventualism: the project rights itself at some point down the road. Bullies leave, either on good terms or not; the right answer comes through with enough discussion from cooler heads. These things will probably happen with or without your involvement. It might be a short-term loss to walk away, but over time, the track record buildup forces a reckoning – the arc of the project is long, but it bends against unblockables.
Sometimes, though, the opportunity falls right in your lap – a bully is obviously, nakedly breaking conduct policies in front of you, ignoring every warning and off-ramp. If you know someone's betting the bank on a crappy hand, and you know everyone else can see it, calling their bluff can end up doing good for the project. Escalating conflict isn't fun, and it can be very, very risky if you don't know what you're doing. ANI has no shortage of overconfident filers who are in for a nasty surprise.
But escalating doesn't always mean going right to ANI. Asking an admin to take a look is often enough to deal with a bad situation. If they seem sympathetic to you, but aren't able to deëscalate, that's where ANI can be most helpful – ANI watchers appreciate it when someone tries to deëscalate first, and when someone they trust is on your side. If the conduct is egregious enough, ANI can be the first stop. If you're absolutely sure that escalating is the right move and you don't have another way to address that behavioral problem, it can be worth it, but overall, I would really encourage trying to deescalate as much as possible, up to and including just finding something else to do.
Michael Q. Schmidt, an American film and television actor and art model, died on August 20, 2025, at the age of 72. He made over 60,000 edits from 2008 to 2020 and became an admin in 2011. He frequently edited film articles, had 100 "Did you know" features to his name, and proudly saved pages from deletion with the article rescue squadron. To help newer editors, he wrote the page Wikipedia:A primer for newcomers and reworked their draft pages from the incubation process so that they could become fully fledged articles.
Sad to hear the news that Michael Q. Schmidt passed away. ... He was always VERY quick to get fully nude for us and he fit perfectly into our little world. He was kind, friendly and always up for trying something weird with us. A true original!
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Graham Greene (actor) |  |
1,188,117 | 
|
A Canadian First Nations actor who died at the age of 73, and had for the last 35 years been one of the go-to actors for Indigenous characters with an Academy Award nominated performance in Dances With Wolves, though a proof of Greene's talent was the times his roles didn't rely on his ethnicity like in Die Hard with a Vengeance. | |||
| 2 | Lokah Chapter 1: Chandra |  |
1,086,983 | .jpg)
|
The first of five planned Indian superhero films, in Dulquer Salmaan's cinematic universe, was released August 28. It has brought in ₹200 crore at the box office, far surpassing its ₹30 crore budget. | |||
| 3 | Giorgio Armani |  |
1,071,678 | 
|
The Italian founder of Armani, a brand synonymous with luxury fashion, died at 91. Given he had no children, his nephews will probably inherit Armani's massive fortune estimated at $12.1 billion. | |||
| 4 | Naomi Osaka |  |
1,036,373 | 
|
The US Open, the fourth and final Grand Slam of the year, rolled on, and surprisingly the most viewed player wasn't in the finals. The Japanese player, who had won two previous editions, has not done well since the 2021 Australian Open title, struggling with both depression and injuries (along with taking a year off to become a mother). Osaka appears to be recovering this year, winning her first title in 4 years, returning to a major final at the Canadian Open last month, and getting to the US Open semifinal before being downed by a rising player who is right below the one article that doesn't leave (and somehow topped the list prior to this one!). | |||
| 5 | Deaths in 2025 |  |
1,020,558 | 
|
Quoting from #1's best known role:
| |||
| 6 | Amanda Anisimova | |
979,859 | _05_(cropped)_2.jpg)
|
In a meteoric resurgence after taking a sabbatical year, this American tennis player managed to again get to a Grand Slam final, beating #4 in the semifinal after a quarterfinal that was a successful revenge at Iga Swiatek slaughtering Anisimova with a double bagel (6-0, 6-0) in the Wimbledon final. Yet in spite of being in front of her own crowd at Flushing Meadows, again it wouldn't be Anisimova's time to shine — as the same #1 player who she beat in the Wimbledon semifinal (#10) this time prevailed in the decisive game. | |||
| 7 | ChatGPT | |
923,737 | .jpg)
|
OpenAI has been sued by two Californians who saw their son kill himself after spending months talking about suicide with the company's chatbot. | |||
| 8 | Katharine, Duchess of Kent | |
859,040 | .jpg)
|
Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, Katharine was the oldest living member of the British royal family. She was married to Edward, a grandson of King George V, for more than 64 years. Katharine and her husband carried out royal engagements on behalf of the Queen, and Katharine became a familiar figure at Wimbledon for 25 years, presenting the Ladies' Singles Trophy all but 3 times in those years. She also became known for working with music, teaching the subject at a primary school while maintaining a low profile. She died on September 4, aged 92. | |||
| 9 | Wednesday (TV series) | |
760,154 | .jpg)
|
Due to Netflix's system of splitting seasons in two parts, only now came the conclusion to the return of Jenna Ortega as the emotionless girl out of The Addams Family. Surprisingly, the season finale handed over much focus to Thing (pun!). And said episode also set up the already confirmed third season with Wednesday going after her runaway manic roommate who also happens to be a werewolf woman, hopefully not taking almost three years before release again. | |||
| 10 | Aryna Sabalenka | |
712,819 | _03.jpg)
|
Fourth time was the charm this year for WTA's current leader (who will keep on being mentioned here as not being able to have her Belarusian flag in the records, blame Lukashenko, and above all blame Putin), who after losing two Grand Slam finals and one semifinal to Americans, in their own turf she avenged the Wimbledon loss to #6 in the final to successfully defend the US Open title. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Charlie Kirk | |
32,748,884 | _(cropped).jpg)
|
Kirk was an American conservative political activist, author and media personality, who co-founded Turning Point USA (#6 in this list). He was one of the most prominent voices of the MAGA movement and a key ally of US president Donald Trump. Some of Kirk's opinions garnered criticism and controversy, such as his comments on black Americans and Martin Luther King Jr., opposition to abortion and gun control, and promotion of questionable (and sometimes false) culture war ragebait.
On September 10, a 31-year-old Kirk was addressing an audience at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University when he was killed by a single rifle shot to the neck. A 22-year-old suspect was arrested on September 12, having been convinced to turn himself in by his father. The killing triggered widespread bipartisan condemnation and international messages of condolence. Multiple high-ranking officials in the US government vowed to punish people who celebrated Kirk's death or otherwise disparaged his legacy. Matthew Dowd, an analyst for MSNBC, was fired after he commented on-air that Kirk was "one of the most divisive [...] younger figures [...] hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions." |
| 2 | Killing of Charlie Kirk | |
6,013,964 | ||
| 3 | Erika Kirk | |
4,515,914 | .jpg)
|
The widow of Charlie Kirk (#1 in this list) and mother of their two children, she has vowed to continue her husband's work. This highly-viewed article was nominated for deletion; see this issue's In the media. |
| 4 | Killing of Iryna Zarutska | |
3,712,689 | 
|
On August 22, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, who fled to the US with her family in 2022 amidst her country's ongoing war with Russia, boarded a Lynx Blue Line railcar (pictured) in Charlotte, North Carolina. She sat in front of a 34-year-old fare jumper when, four minutes later, he brandished a pocket knife and fatally stabbed Zarutska in the neck. He departed the train a few minutes later at the next stop, was arrested, and charged with first-degree murder. Her killing, which was captured by transit cameras and distributed on social media, sparked public outrage, leading to policy discussions about transit security, fare enforcement, and gaps in the criminal justice and mental health systems, due to the suspect's revealed criminal history. |
| 5 | Groypers | |
1,551,721 | 
|
Cartridge cases found at the site of #2 were found etched with slogans claimed to point to this alt-right, white nationalist and Christian nationalist group led by Nick Fuentes. They have targeted other conservative organizations, like Turning Point USA (#6 in this list) (which they believe is too moderate). |
| 6 | Turning Point USA | |
1,545,063 | 
|
The nonprofit student organization founded by #1 which advocates for conservative politics at high schools, college and university campuses. It runs the Professor Watchlist, a database of academic staff that Turning Point believes discriminates against conservative students. |
| 7 | Carlo Acutis | |
1,323,484 | 
|
Five years after being beatified on behalf of Pope Francis, the canonization of the "first Millennial saint" was originally scheduled for April 27, but delayed due to death of Pope Francis. On September 7, he was canonized alongside Pier Giorgio Frassati, with Pope Leo XIV presiding over the ceremony in Saint Peter's Square. |
| 8 | ChatGPT | |
1,059,660 | .jpg)
|
700 million people use this chatbot, many of whom disapproved the upgrade to GPT-5. It also gets in the news for things like the reveal that a man who asked ChatGPT to get a replacement for salt wound up hospitalized with bromism. |
| 9 | Deaths in 2025 | |
1,051,787 | .jpg)
|
Rick Davies was far from entering this list, but let's honor his passing: So promise not to cause a scene Then heaven help the ones you love There's nowhere 'neath the stars above |
| 10 | 2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators | |
942,162 | 
|
Killing of Charlie Kirk (#2 in this list) has renewed the spotlight on recent cases of political violence in the United States, such as these shootings in Minnesota three months ago that led to the death of Melissa Hortman, the leader of the Minnesota House of Representatives's Democratic Party caucus, and the near-death of John Hoffman, member of the Minnesota Senate. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Robert Redford | |
4,874,496 | 
|
An actor who died at 89, that along with a long filmography that included hits like The Sting, All the President's Men, Out of Africa and Indecent Proposal, took his hand at directing (winning an Oscar for Ordinary People and making another Best Picture nominee, Quiz Show), engaged in political activism, and decided to give more visibility for independent cinema creating the Sundance Film Festival, named after his character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Many young people only knew Redford for a rare villainous role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which he briefly reprised in Avengers: Endgame for what he decided to be his final film appearance (on TV, earlier this year he had a cameo in the season opener of Dark Winds playing chess against George R. R. Martin). |
| 2 | Charlie Kirk | |
4,811,779 | .jpg)
|
Within the week following his death (#7 in this list), Kirk was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Donald Trump and US flags were ordered to be flown at half-mast. At Kirk's public memorial, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn announced that a scholarship has been set up in his name and he and his wife (#5 in this list) will be awarded honorary degrees. |
| 3 | Ricky Hatton | |
1,816,522 | 
|
The "Pride of Hyde" was reportedly found dead in his home on September 14. The Hall of Fame boxer, trainer, and promoter was 46 years old and praised by the boxing world in the weeks following. |
| 4 | D4vd | |
1,604,635 | This American singer-songwriter, born David Anthony Burke, was set to release his latest album on September 19. However, on September 8, decomposed remains of a 15-year-old missing girl were found in an abandoned car registered in his name. The girl was identified on September 15, but the cause of death has yet to be determined, although her body had been dismembered. Evidence has been gathered by the police at Burke's Los Angeles residence. | |
| 5 | Erika Kirk | |
1,476,915 | 
|
Charlie Kirk's (#2 in this list) widow, a former beauty queen who has became the CEO of his organization Turning Point USA. |
| 6 | Terence Crawford | |
1,307,861 | 
|
On September 13, in perhaps the most anticipated boxing match of the year, this American defeated his opponent Canelo Álvarez by unanimous decision to become the undisputed super middleweight champion. The event had over 70,000 in attendance, but it was also streamed live on Netflix, drawing nearly 41.5 million viewers, making it the most-watched championship match of the century. Crawford was then named the best pound-for-pound boxer over Ukraine's Oleksandr Usyk. |
| 7 | Assassination of Charlie Kirk | 1,209,765 | 
|
One week on from this assassination, its effects are still being felt and will likely continue for some time. The crime's only suspect has been charged with murder, with prosecutors seeking the death penalty. A wave of disciplinary actions has also been unleashed on people who made critical comments on Kirk's death, most prominently a U.S. late-night television host, whose show was suspended, prompting bipartisan accusations of intimidation and censorship. | |
| 8 | Stephen Graham | |
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|
At the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards on September 17, this English actor and producer, who was heavily involved in Adolescence, won the Outstanding Writing Award, as well as for Outstanding Limited Series. |
| 9 | Deaths in 2025 | |
1,052,308 | .jpg)
|
It was fun for a while There was no way of knowing Like a dream in the night Who can say where we're going? |
| 10 | ChatGPT | |
1,051,501 | 
|
OpenAI announced both that women overcame men as the primary users (52%) and that some restrictions will be put for users under 18, lest an infamous incident repeat. |
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