The Wikimedia Foundation's legal challenge to the UK's new Online Safety Act rules has been dismissed. The Foundation had asked for a judicial review of regulations which could mean Wikipedia has to verify the identities of its users. This, the Foundation argued, would be burdensome and "could expose users to data breaches, stalking, vexatious lawsuits or even imprisonment by authoritarian regimes".
The news isn't all bad, however. As Techdirt pointed out, there are two ways one can look at the result. They are reflected in different headlines – while the BBC titled its article "Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules", The Guardian went with the rather more optimistic "Wikipedia can challenge Online Safety Act if strictest rules apply to it, says judge".
This was also the view of the Wikimedia Foundation, which said that the ruling "does not provide the immediate legal protections for Wikipedia that we hoped for", but welcomed the court's comments emphasising what it said was "the responsibility of Ofcom and the UK government to ensure Wikipedia is protected".
On its website, the Wikimedia Foundation said:The judge recognized the "significant value" of Wikipedia, its safety for users, as well as the damages that wrongly-assigned OSA categorisations and duties could have on the human rights of Wikipedia's volunteer contributors. The Court stressed that this ruling "does not give Ofcom [the regulator tasked with enforcing the OSA] and the Secretary of State [Labour politician Peter Kyle] a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia's operations", and indicated they could face legal repercussions if they fail to protect Wikipedia and the rights of its users. In order to achieve that outcome, he suggested that Ofcom may need to find a particularly flexible interpretation of the rules in question, or that the rules themselves may need amendment in Parliament.
If the ruling stands, the first categorization decisions from Ofcom are expected this summer. The Foundation will continue to seek solutions to protect Wikipedia and the rights of its users as the OSA continues to be implemented.
The Foundation's post also notes that it was joined as claimant in the lawsuit by UK-based longtime English Wikipedia editor User:Zzuuzz (whose personal identity "remain[s] confidential and protected by the law and the Foundation"). As summarized in the court's judgment,
[Zzuuzz gave] detailed and compelling reasons for wishing to remain anonymous as a Wikipedia user. They provide[d] extensive evidence of threats that are made to Wikipedia administrators, including to [Zzuuzz] personally, on websites that target Wikipedia administrators. [...] None of the evidence of Mr Bradley-Schmieg or [Zzuuzz] was challenged.
Phil Bradley-Schmieg, the Foundation's lead counsel, also provided various updates about the lawsuit on Meta-wiki, as well as further explanations why the OSA's rules "are written so broadly that Wikipedia could be lumped in as a 'Category 1 service'":
We have said [in the lawsuit] that there is a risk that (for instance, but without limitation) the inherent ability to embed images (or other content; maybe even user-generated templates) into Wiki pages may be deemed "forwarding or sharing functionality".
The Foundation's lawsuit, thought to be the first judicial review brought against the OSA regulations, had been described as difficult to win from the beginning (e.g. by a legal expert quoted by the BBC, see previous Signpost coverage).
Many other outlets reported on the matter, among them Reuters, Ars Technica, Courthouse News Service and Forbes. Several mentioned other recent controversies around the Online Safety Act. E.g. Reuters noted that "Free-speech campaigners and content creators have complained its rules had been implemented too broadly, resulting in the censorship of legal content." A Politico article titled "The UK’s new tech law triggers upheaval reported that "Reddit, X, Discord and BlueSky have all [already] implemented age verification checks and other measures to abide by the safety act", while clarifying that the Wikipedia lawsuit "regards a different provision that would require it to identify many of its contributors."
For background, see also the Foundation's Diff post or the more detailed version of the post on Medium; for the risk of imprisonment by authoritarian regimes around the world, see previous Signpost coverage and List of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia. – AK, H
Mayree Clark is the newest member of the WMF Board of Trustees. She is also on the the Board of the Wikimedia Endowment and since 2024 is Chair of its Finance Committee. Since 2018 she's been a member of the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank AG. Her career in finance has included a position as Managing Director of Morgan Stanley, founding her own firm Eachwin Capital, and service as a director of the Stanford University Endowment. She earned an MBA from Stanford in 1981 and has also served on the faculty.
Kevin Bonebrake and Ike Kier were appointed trustees of the Wikimedia Endowment at the July board meeting.
Bonebreak is the Chief Financial Officer at Quaise Energy, which is developing geothermal drilling technology. Previously he was a Managing Director at Lazard, specializing in energy sector finance. He has earned B.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Economics from Duke University, a Master in Engineering from Duke and an MBA from Columbia University.
Kier founded KG Funds Management in 2008 after managing four special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). He earned a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University and a J.D. from George Washington University.
Voting for two community seats on the WMF board will be held from October 8 - 23 . Six candidates give on three-minute video statements here. – AK, S
Comment these items out if something happens.
The Hill reports in Republicans investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias that the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating Wikipedia, looking at "alleged organized efforts to inject bias into Wikipedia entries." Quoting the committee's letter to WMF CEO Maryana Iskander they added that the effort is part of an investigation into "foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion."
The committee wants documentation about Wikipedians who have violated Wikipedia policy, and how Wikipedia enforces the policies, citing a report from the Anti-Defamation League alleging anti-Israel bias and another report from the Atlantic Council alleging pro-Russian editing by what they call the Pravda network (see previous Signpost coverage of the pro-Russian editing network).
Specifically, the committee asked for the following information in its letter dated August 27, 2025:
To assist the Committee’s oversight of this matter, we request the following information, covering the period January 1, 2023 to present, as soon as possible but no later than September 10, 2025:
- Records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination by nation state actors in editing activities on Wikipedia.
- Records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination within academic institutions or other organized efforts to edit or influence content identified as possibly violating Wikipedia policies.
- Records of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) including but not limited to all editor conduct disputes and actions taken against them.
- Records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors subject to actions by ArbCom.
- Documentation of Wikipedia’s editorial policies and protocols including those aimed at ensuring neutrality and addressing bias as well as policies regarding discipline for violations.
- Any analysis conducted or reviewed by the Wikimedia Foundation (or by a third-party acting on its behalf) of patterns of manipulation or bias related to antisemitism and conflicts with the State of Israel.
In a statement quoted by The Hill, a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson said the Foundation had received the request and were reviewing it:
"We welcome the opportunity to respond to the committee's questions and to discuss the importance of safeguarding the integrity of information on our platform"
Common Dreams, a very liberal source, emphasizes that the committee could dox Wikipedia editors in their GOP Investigation Pressures Wikipedia to Reveal Identities of Editors Accused of 'Bias' Against Israel. They highlight a previous attempt to dox Wikipedians by the Heritage Foundation. (See previous Signpost coverage here.)
The conservative New York Post makes a telling mistake in its headline Trump admin launches probe into Wikipedia over alleged ‘bad actors’ manipulating opinions about the US. The Trump administration is currently the executive branch of the Federal government, but the committee is part of Congress, the legislative branch. The Post does not mention the efforts of the former acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin who had sent a similar letter to the WMF in May. The controversial and inexperienced Martin could not be confirmed by the Senate for the post. Despite the rules and traditions of the Department of Justice he only embarrassed himself by later asserting that, if he couldn't find that the WMF had broken any laws then he would use his position to embarrass the WMF (see previous coverage).
JNS interviewed Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, who said, "I am glad that Congress is investigating the use of foreign and U.S. government funds to pay for biased editing on Wikipedia." In March Sanger tweeted Elon Musk the accusation that Federal employees were being paid to edit Wikipedia, and later sent the same message directly to President Trump. The Signpost examined this accusation and asked Sanger to provide some evidence. But without input from Sanger, we were able to find only minor cases of Federal employees making edits on Wikipedia. Sanger provides his statement to JNS on his blog "for the use of Congress and the public."
Other media reports include:
The San Francisco Standard reports A mysterious Wikipedia editor is scrubbing Daniel Lurie’s page of controversy in a very good analyses of possibly paid editing. Mayor Lurie, an heir through his step-father to part of the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune, is suspected of using his personal PR consultants to eliminate coverage of his mother's $1 million donation to his mayoral campaign, his Jewish religion, his Republican supporters, and in general "purge Lurie's Wikipedia page of criticism and controversy and highlight his accomplishments as mayor."
Joseph Reagle, an academic who co-edited the book Wikipedia @ 20 was quoted saying "this seems purposeful and intentional" and "probably inappropriate." Former WMF board of trustee's member Dariusz Jemielniak was quoted saying the edits were "trying to find an angle that is more positive than it originally was". Even a Wikipedia spokesperson chimed in.
Expect to see updates on this story. My brief review of the evidence shows that the editor in question is attributed 54.5% of the article's authorship, but have made only two edits. There are blocked editors and sockpuppets among the article's authors, as should be expected in most political articles, but only a small handful. – S
404 Media reports on Jimbo's talk page to see how the community viewed Jimbo's AI related idea that Articles for creation could use some AI to better respond to draft articles on borderline notable topics, specifically to a draft of Howard Ellis Cox, Jr. Over five years the draft was rejected four times using exactly the same words, from the same template. The first rejector was the late DGG, followed by Sulfurboy, Hatchens, and JesusisGreat7. A KCBS podcast (via Audacy) sums up the arguments in 4 minutes. – S
Verge published (archive) a 9,000 word article that covers everything that’s happened politically and in the courts to Wikipedia this year.
In an interesting graphic the headline starts as “Wokipedia is resilient because it is biased” then appears to be edited to “Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring”.
The author, Josh Dzieza, gives a lively telling of all this material, but appears to favor the edited headline. He starts with Elon Musk’s (disputed) Nazi salute and after a short detour to the Erfurt latrine disaster runs through a February meeting in San Francisco where Wikipedians calmly discussed attacks on Wikipedia in the media. After another detour to a 1967 New Yorker article by Hannah Arendt about “an inherent conflict between politics and facts”.
Followed by a February report by Media Research Center “claiming that ‘Wikipedia Effectively Blacklists ALL Right-Leaning Media.’” Followed by controversy over the Reliable sources/Perennial sources page. And then Larry Sanger, Asian News International, A.I. and so on.
The best part is the end where Jimmy Wales appears in unusual attire, talks about a working group to strengthen the rule on neutral point of view, and how we now have an opportunity to improve Wikipedia. Like the last eight months, the article is very interesting but exhausting. – S
Ars Technica reviews User:Grnrchst's article, "The article in the most languages", from the the last issue of The Signpost. Ars Technica deputy editor Nate Anderson wrote the approximately 1200-word story that highlighted both Grnrchst's investigation, and the ideological leanings of the subject of the apparent self-promotion, which included comparing Timothy McVeigh to Jesus Christ, and a deep interest in a South American colony that "that was designed to let German culture flourish away from the influence of European Jews". The Ars piece concludes with a bit of op-ed concerning those who engage in "polluting open or public-facing projects for their own ends". Kudos to Grnrchst! – B
Two websites offer different takes on the advice page Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing.
TechSpot leaves out AI's good and summarizes some of the advice page's points in its short review of the very long page. It doesn't really say much else, so why not skip directly to reading the advice page? It's neither bad nor ugly, unlike AI writing.
Meanwhile, Fast Company's take asks us "Want to disguise your AI writing? Start with Wikipedia’s new list." Perhaps not what the advice page was written to advise about, but hey, death of the author and all that; you're welcome to use it however you want. Just not on-wiki, please.
How paid editors squeeze you dry
31 January 2024
"Wikipedia and the assault on history"
4 December 2023
The "largest con in corporate history"?
20 February 2023
Truth or consequences? A tough month for truth
31 August 2022
The oligarchs' socks
27 March 2022
Fuzzy-headed government editing
30 January 2022
Denial: climate change, mass killings and pornography
29 November 2021
Paid promotional paragraphs in German parliamentary pages
26 September 2021
Enough time left to vote! IP ban
29 August 2021
Paid editing by a former head of state's business enterprise
25 April 2021
The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is now investigating Wikipedia. They want to know how Wikipedia responds to bad actors who try to insert disinformation into Wikipedia articles, in particular to anti-Semitic and anti-Israel edits and "pro-Kremlin and anti-Western" manipulation of articles by "foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion" according to the letter sent to Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) CEO Maryana Iskander. The letter seems to reflect several misunderstandings of Wikipedia, so I offer some basic information on how the Wikipedia community is organized, the limited role of the WMF, and how the English-language Wikipedia deals with disinformation.
This basic information is something the committee should understand before investigating Wikipedia. Any opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Signpost or its staff, the WMF, or any other Wikipedia editor.
Since 2001 Wikipedia has been an international movement with encyclopedias in several languages. Jimmy Wales has expressed our goal as "to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language". The basic unit of content production and governance is the individual language version of the encyclopedia. The community of editors of each version, which includes anybody in the world who can write in that language and follow our rules, decides questions by consensus. They created those rules by themselves, often using the rules created for the English Wikipedia by its users as a model.
The English language community has delegated some functions such as dispute resolution and article deletion to administrators, the Arbitration Committee, and for some specialized functions such as checkusers and bureaucrats. The community generally starts the dispute resolution process on article talk pages or on noticeboards. Admins enforce the community-written policies and guidelines, for example by blocking disruptive editors or limiting the editing of controversial pages to experienced editors. Along the way, they get feedback from the community. If it goes further, ArbCom is almost always the final step in this process. Anybody can give evidence in an ArbCom proceeding. During the entire dispute resolution process, the admins and arbitrators decide based only on editor behavior, not on article content. Individual editors ultimately decide on content based on their consensus.
The WMF raises money for the encyclopedia, provides the computer platform, programming, and the terms of use. It employs legal, accounting and research staff as well and makes grants to editors and affiliate organizations. It rarely interferes with an encyclopedia's governance except for violations of the terms of use, or abuse that affects several encyclopedias, or threatens the safety of editors.
The WMF’s Trust and Safety office rarely comments on its activities in order to give victims and others anonymity. Only when they take action (or are about to take action) such as blocking or banning editors will they make limited information available. They do consult the legal department with the final approval coming from the CEO stating that all their internal procedures have been followed.
I hope that the WMF has a strategy and tools to deal with hidden interference in our content by large state actors. But I do understand that revealing those to the editors and the public would greatly limit their usefulness.
One example of the WMF's hesitancy to get involved in the governance of an encyclopedia was The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia, which involved a neo-Nazi takeover by the administrators of the Croatian Wikipedia. It took over a decade for the WMF to become publicly involved in the matter and then only as administrators from other Wikipedia versions were coming to a solution.
Diversity, equity and inclusion are core values across the movement. How else would the encyclopedia be able to attract enough writers and editors to cover all the needed content in all the needed languages? Doxxing, or exposing an editor's name or workplace and other personal details is against the rules. It would expose editors to harassment by the bad actors, including some of those in governments around the world who would like to censor the encyclopedias.
Maintaining a neutral point of view (NPOV) is also a key value but it has a special meaning and importance to most Wikipedians. It means that editors try to include all widely held points of view about a particular topic that can be documented in reliable sources, but not including extreme minority fringe viewpoints. Editors spend much of their time trying to ensure that our NPOV policy is upheld. This does not mean that if a POV in an article is questioned, then Wikipedia is biased. Every editor has a POV, but just because your POV is different from mine doesn't mean that either your POV or mine is correct. That's simply not what our NPOV policy is about.
Almost all Wikipedians do recognize that there are non-neutral POVs being pushed on Wikipedia, for example by employees of various governments, politicians, and public relations firms and their commercial employers.
All editors and the public at large can participate in Wikipedia’s discussions on disinformation.
Removing disinformation, like most processes on Wikipedia, happens with individual editors acting alone or as a result of talk page discussions. Wikipedia:Conflict of interest noticeboard (WP:COIN) is also an important starting point. Especially controversial cases may be discussed at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard (WP:AN).
Admins might block editors at this point if the community consensus is clear. Quite often though a sockpuppet investigation (WP:SPI) is needed. Sockpuppets are editors who create multiple accounts in order to deceive other editors. An SPI is often needed when disinformation insertion is suspected. The editor who reports suspected socking needs to show through behavioral evidence that at least two accounts are being run by the same person. Checkusers can then check, for example, whether two accounts are editing from the same computer. While the checkusers’ toolset is generally kept secret, they often are able to find dozens of sockpuppets working together.
Almost all governments have large communications departments that try to provide information to the public. For example, the census bureau provides population data and Wikipedia uses it intensively, posting much of it on articles about almost all U.S. states and territories, counties, cities, towns, townships, boroughs, and many census-designated places. Also, Congress conveniently provides short biographies about almost every congressperson since 1790.
Together, just these two government databases provide information that almost any American would be interested in and can easily access on Wikipedia. Thank you!
But that's not what Congress is investigating. They want to know how governments can secretly influence the content of Wikipedia. Political institutions, parties, and movements, as well as individual politicians can also influence content in much the same way. Businesses and individuals try to exercise similar influence in similar ways, often employing commercial firms or paid editors much as governments employ their own operatives.
Many of these efforts have been unmasked and reported in Wikipedia articles, and in The Signpost, Wikipedia's independent newspaper. A short introduction to these records follows. You can find more Signpost articles on similar topics at our archives.
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The Wikipedia article on the Great Firewall gives a good overview Chinese government interference and states that "In May 2015, China indefinitely blocked access to the Chinese-language Wikipedia. … As of May 2019, all language versions of Wikipedia have been blocked by the Chinese government."
Relevant Signpost articles include:
The Russian government has temporarily blocked Wikipedia several times and has fined the WMF multiple times. It's not clear whether the WMF has paid or even been able to pay these fines due to international financial sanctions on Russia.
The Wikipedia page List of Wikipedia pages banned in Russia lists well over 100 Wikipedia articles and over a dozen images from Wikimedia Commons that have been blocked in Russia.
Perhaps the largest Russian effort to restrict Wikipedia has been to fork the real Russian Wikipedia, resulting in an ersatz censored version being published called Ruwiki.
But do the Russian government or its proxies edit the English language Wikipedia? There's no official list, but the Wikipedia article International recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is quite likely to have been written mostly by Russian propaganda efforts. It is ridiculously long and one-sided. Written by 811 editors in 3,729 edits, it is much longer than the Foreign relations of the United States article, but could accurately be condensed into one paragraph saying that only Nicaragua and Venezuela currently recognize the Russian-sponsored break-away regions, and that Syria, Nauru, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu once did. (Disclosure – I've edited the article.)
Most of the article is just trivial, misleading detail. But it has been featured on the main page five times: in "In the news" on August 27, 2008 and in "On this day..." on August 26, 2013, 2016, 2018, and 2021.
A later-convicted unregistered Russian agent, Maria Butina, was widely accused of editing the article about herself.
Some Russian oligarchs appear to have paid for edits in the articles about themselves.
Congress may not be too interested in investigating how the CIA edited Wikipedia, if only because it involves material discovered by WikiScanner. More from this source will be discussed in the next section.
Both the Senate and House of Representatives have a long history of staffers secretly editing Wikipedia. There are two separate encyclopedia articles on this activity.
There is also an internal article, Wikipedia:Congressional staffer edits, to help editors identify further activity. The internal article lists 149 articles that were affected by House staff editing. It also lists 176 IP addresses attributed to the Senate which edited Wikipedia.
More generally, the article List of political editing incidents on Wikipedia gives more than a dozen examples of improper editing of political articles.
The Signpost has extensive coverage of this editing.
Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign chairman, an Acting Attorney General, state officials, a Congressman, city officials, and even a presidential candidate all made, or appeared to make, some contributions.
Many businesses secretly create or edit articles about themselves, sometimes using individual employees who just copy from the company's website making for a very bad encyclopedia article. OceanGate who operated the Titan submersible which imploded and killed its five occupants, used this method. They went beyond advertising (which is prohibited on Wikipedia). The information about safety went beyond being misleading, it was disinformation. Wikipedians did a good job removing the advertising and the copyright violations, but it lasted too long in the article. This type of disinformation is one of the smallest challenges we face.
A much more serious type of hidden business editing, is typified by the PR firm Bell Pottinger. In 2011 they were caught on tape by investigative reporters promising to use "dark arts" to edit Wikipedia to people they thought represented a repressive government. Bell Pottinger also had contracts with the U.S. Defense Department – not related to Wikipedia. In 2017 the company got caught working for the Gupta family in South Africa using racial hatred as a PR tool. Bell Pottinger quickly collapsed. One of their contractors on the South African job, an Israeli firm known as Veribo and later as Percepto, showed up in another Signpost investigation involving possible corruption in the Canadian government, as well as editing for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. A list on an internal Wikipedia page shows that a dozen editors connected to them edited at least sixty articles, including some related to governments and businesses, South Africa, Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, at least one Royal, and an investigative journalist. This type of paid editing is more difficult to catch than the simple menthod used by OceanGate.
The work of other commercial editing organizations is shown in these investigations.
A special group of purveyors of disinformation is convicted sex offenders. The two that The Signpost has reported on are Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Nygard. While their motives are very different than those of people described above, their methods were fairly similar to the simplest model. A very few people, perhaps only two or three in Epstein's case, seem to have done the editing.
It does look like Wikipedia has a problem with disinformation. And there are likely hundreds, perhaps thousands, more articles every year that are affected by disinformation. So it’s not surprising that Congress wants to investigate the problem. But please remember that there are over 7 million articles on Wikipedia so that the articles with disinformation are still a very small fraction of the total. Editors here are very experienced at making articles NPOV.
If Congress' investigation of Wikipedia results in a way to decrease disinformation, it will be a victory for everybody. We could definitely use some help countering Chinese and Russian disinformation. Much of the rest the Wikipedia community handles pretty well. But, many different types of people try to insert disinformation, using many different methods. We should try to understand and counter all of them. For example, congresspeople and other politicians can be encouraged by their peers and their constituents to follow our rules. They must not secretly edit articles about themselves. If they hire an editor to help them change an article, those paid editors must declare that they are paid and name their employers and clients. No exceptions!
I doubt that Wikipedia editors are going to change our rule on maintaining a neutral point of view. The government can openly provide documentation for its point of view to the whole community, but editors don’t have to accept that POV as being the whole truth. We want to show all widely held well documented viewpoints.
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
The author of this 2021 study[1] looks at Wikipedia projects in several European minority, regional and endangered (MRE) languages. His main focus is on Low German (Plattdeutsch, a minority language spoken in northern Germany), but he also considers other European languages: Occitan, Piedmontese, Sardinian, Kashubian and Ladin.
The introduction provides an overview of the history of Low German, once lingua franca in Northern Europe, its erosion and loss of popularity until being added to the EU list of Endangered Languages. The author mentions the recent generational divide, the role of new media including the internet and, of course, Wikipedia. He reviews studies looking at the online presence of MRE languages, including a notable 2013 study dividing digital presence of languages into four groups: thriving, vital, heritage and still[supp 1].
The paper then compared the minority languages on Wikipedia: their rank by number of articles, number of administrators and active users. It was noted that the presence of a Wikipedia project is a positive achievement in itself, considering that the rules to creating a new language project are described as fairly complex, and that many of the world’s languages are not represented on Wikipedia. The author also notes that at least as of 2021, dedicated, small groups of speakers/users are mostly responsible for maintaining the languages' presence on Wikipedia.
The author moved on to search for fifty common terms in each language, doing a word count for each entry if applicable (a search for 400 Wikipedia entries in total). This study was carried out between November 2016 and January 2017 with data reexamined in March 2021. The author does not explain in much detail how he chose the 50 common words. This part is somewhat comparable to a recent study by Lewoniewski et al.[2], although in that case the authors explained their choice of words to analyse more transparently, and were looking at quality of articles.
Interestingly, the author notes:
"The brevity of many of the articles and the paucity of information may cause more problems than benefits, such as perceptions that these languages are unrefined, unsophisticated, and second-rate. The voluntary work of the respective Wikipedia crews can, of course, not be faulted for this dilemma. Rather, these numbers underscore the fact that languages with fewer speakers do not have a good or even fair chance of succeeding on Wikipedia, which in turn negatively affects a meaningful online presence. These results, however, must be considered preliminary, and a study larger in scope will be needed to genuinely validate it."
The paper also provides an intriguing case study for changes in Low German Wikipedia:
“Something unexpected happened with the Low German Wikipedia edition in the course of this study. At the beginning of this study, in January 2018, Low German had 27,342 articles, 4 administrators, and fifty-two active users. In terms of total number of entries, it ranked at number one hundred. In March 2021, the Low German Wikipedia had 85,467 entries and had climbed to number seventy-five. It still had four administrators in March 2021 and seventy active users. This means that the number of articles in the Low German Wikipedia edition more than tripled in three years, while the volunteer staff only slightly increased. What are the reasons for this remarkable increase in articles? The answer is baffling, as many of the newly added articles may not have been authored by humans.”
As shown in table 6 of the study, it turned out that over half of the articles in the languages examined, with the exception of Ladin, are bot-generated. This is in contrast to large Wikipedias such as English or German, which use many bots, but less frequently for content creation. White bots can be useful for generating stub articles with basic information, these entries tend to be repetitive and have very few or no references.
The author provides an interesting critique of the digital world achieving or failing to achieve more equality and presence for marginalised groups and minority languages. Beyond digital limitations, the paper reminds its readers that the barriers to the representation of MRE languages can go beyond the domain of linguistics, into the cultural sphere, as many of these languages are “embedded in a profound oral tradition, which often includes the lack of a common orthography. This means that not only Wikipedia but also the Internet in general is not really an adequate medium for communication in these languages.”
After writing this review, I was informed that Book Publisher International (the company which published the volume in which this study is a chapter) is considered a predatory publisher (thank you to the editor who pointed it out!). Considering that the author published in other reputable places on this subject,[3] I think there is still merit in this small yet interesting study. The author himself was careful to underline that the results must be understood as samples and snapshots rather than definite conclusions. Still, the findings raise important questions about the future of minority languages online. It would be interesting to see a follow up study on this, although understandably, as the author points out, that would require more resources and finances. It would be equally intriguing to see a comparison of how the languages have been doing since the study was conducted and published.
This paper[4] makes a case for using Wikidata in botany, highlighting its benefits and multiple application opportunities in this field. The authors are researchers and Wikidata editors, and the publication comes after a workshop and poster presentation during the International Botanical Congress (IBC) in Spain in 2024.
The paper starts with a narrative about Oxalis psoraleoides (a species of flowering plant), accompanied by a knowledge graph, demonstrating how many elements mentioned in the botanical story (such as collections, species, places, explorers) are interlinked on Wikidata and can be visualised there:
To quote from the paper:
"(...) there is a huge amount of botany-related information that has been published over centuries that contains hidden connections between such entities. Much of this textual information is made available on the internet in a digital format. This information is usually unstructured, and hence is siloed, lacking in context, and not interoperable. In addition, information in different biodiversity databases as well as digital libraries is often not linked. (...)
Publishing information in Wikidata ensures it is findable, able to be accessed, interoperable (the structure follows a documented standard), and obstacle-free with regard to reuse (licensing), thus progressing towards achieving compliance with FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets, [Q29032644], Wilkinson et al., 2016[supp 2])"
This is followed by the basics of Wikidata, and a comprehensive list of various botany-related types of data in Wikidata, with a detailed explanation for each of them – from people, to taxa, publication, institutions, collections, expeditions, and more.
The authors describe several tools relevant to botanists that visualise Wikidata and use Wikidata QIDs in websites or catalogues. The paper is concluded by practical examples of how the botanical community can use Wikidata to its advantage, and a Wikidata call to action closely tied to the Madrid Declaration, "collectively published by the congress participants at the end of the IBC and is aimed at botanists, institutions and citizens to 'strengthen the connection between plants and people, nurture mutual benefits, and enhance planetary health and resilience' (XX International Botanical Congress, 2024)."
The article is accompanied by the original research poster and other interesting graphs. This story is also summarised in an accessible blog post: The power and potential of Wikidata for botany. In my view, it would be really interesting to see similar Wikidata overviews for other disciplines.
The Wikimedia Foundation has published a draft document titled "Guidance for NPOV Research on Wikipedia". Besides general explainers about Neutral Point of View as a core Wikipedia policy, the document also appears to attempt to address some fallacies in prior studies of biases on Wikipedia, e.g. by asking researchers to "Distinguish between bias in sources on Wikipedia vs. bias in sources outside of Wikipedia", and suggesting other ways to "make rigorous assessments of Wikipedia's adherence to NPOV". The Foundation also solicited feedback on its guidelines draft from researchers and community members until August 31.
The document appears to be related to the "Common global standards for NPOV policies" working group launched by the Foundation earlier this year (Signpost coverage: "WMF to explore 'common standards' for NPOV policies; implications for project autonomy remain unclear"), which itself recently published an "Analysis of Neutral Point of View Policies across Wikipedias".
In "The Conversation", researcher Heather Ford raised concerns about the Foundation's "new rules":
[...] instead of supporting open inquiry, the guidelines reveal just how unaware the Wikimedia Foundation is of its own influence.
These new rules tell researchers – some based in universities, some at non-profit organisations or elsewhere – not just how to study Wikipedia’s neutrality, but what they should study and how to interpret their results. That’s a worrying move.
As someone who has researched Wikipedia for more than 15 years – and served on the Wikimedia Foundation’s own Advisory Board before that – I’m concerned these guidelines could discourage truly independent research into one of the world’s most powerful repositories of knowledge.
[...] the Wikimedia Foundation has lots of control over research on Wikipedia. It decides who it will work with, who gets funding, whose work to promote, and who gets access to internal data. That means it can quietly influence which research gets done – and which doesn’t.
Now the foundation is setting the terms for how neutrality should be studied.
Ford is also part of a group of researchers who recently published a manifesto and commentary calling for the "Uniting and reigniting critical Wikimedia research" (see our previous coverage), which suggests to "Examine power relations" as one of several research focus areas.
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.
Translated from the abstract:[5]
Previous studies have mainly positioned Wikipedia as a "meta-media", "reference book" or "social media", which seem unable to explain the reasons behind the continuous expansion of the Wikimedia project. Our research notes that Wikipedia originated from an open-source culture, and its development process can be traced back to the concept of the rights revolution. By evolving from Wikipedia to projects such as Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, as well as holding activities like edit-a-thons, Wikimedia has transformed from an internet encyclopedia to a global social movement. The Wikimedia movement can be regarded as an open-source knowledge movement without boundaries, of which the action process is fully transparent throughout the domain, the action subjects heterogeneous and integrated, and the forms of interaction competitive and cooperative. Viewing Wikipedia as a social movement and an open-source community helps to further understand the logic of global open-source knowledge dissemination.
FYI: One of the co-authors, Gan Lihao (a professor of communication at East China Normal University), has just led his students to finish a book titled Wikipedia Politics and shared a report on the book at Wikimania 2025. Gan was mentioned in a 2019 BBC article. In this compiler’s opinion, BBC had misinterpreted the Chinese scholar’s words, which followed a special way of expression under China’s context.
From the English-language abstract of this Chinese-language paper:[6]
With the increasing globalization of Chinese martial arts, diverse forms and levels of documentation have emerged worldwide. This study examines the collaborative folk writing of Chinese martial arts in English-language contexts by analyzing the development trajectory, contributor demographics, writing practices, and negotiations/competitions observed in the Wikipedia entry "Chinese Martial Arts". The research reveals that the entry's evolution is characterized by continuous growth and refinement, yet remains an ongoing, "unfinished" process. While the writing inherently exhibits distinct international and collective traits, the emergence of core contributor groups and Wikipedia’s editorial protocols dominate the negotiation and competition among diverse perspectives, ultimately shaping the entry's narrative direction and textual representation. Notably, the study identifies a striking absence of Chinese voices in this collaborative writing process. It emphasizes the urgent need to integrate Chinese perspectives and knowledge into the global dissemination of martial arts discourse to bridge this representational gap.
From the abstract:[7]
"Citation Worthiness Detection (CWD) consists in determining which sentences, within an article or collection, should be backed up with a citation to validate the information it provides. This study, introduces ALPET, a framework combining Active Learning (AL) and Pattern-Exploiting Training (PET), to enhance CWD for languages with limited data resources. Applied to Catalan, Basque, and Albanian Wikipedia datasets, ALPET outperforms the existing CCW baseline while reducing the amount of labeled data in some cases above 80%."
From the abstract:[8]
"Despite [Wikipedia's] widespread use, significant disparities persist among language publications, including variations in the number of articles, the spectrum of topics covered, and even the number of contributing community editors. In this paper, we aim to alleviate this gap in the coverage of low-resource languages. Although previous work has focused on multilingual interoperability efforts, the potential of hyperlinks has not been fully realized. Therefore, this study introduces a novel approach focused on hyperlinks, specifically emphasizing hyperlink types derived from Wikidata. We extract and analyze patterns related to these hyperlink types across different languages, using them as recommended solutions to connect the topics of various languages, particularly low-resource languages"
By "hyperlink type", the authors refer to the Wikidata topic that a Wikipedia article is an "instance of", via Wikidata property P31. From the paper:
[...] our research is carried out in a case study involving the English (en), Japanese (ja), and Vietnamese (vi) [Wikipedia] languages [...]
[... W]e notice a significant preference for topics such as film, automobile models, music groups, singles, and video games in English editors. In Japanese articles, hyperlinks emphasize various aspects of Japan, including city, town, chōchō, municipality, railway station, and manga series. In contrast, the Vietnamese context focuses primarily on topics such as world war, sovereign state, chemical compound, and organization.
From the abstract:[9]
"[Wikipedia] content in low-resource languages [is] frequently outdated or incomplete. Recent research has sought to improve cross-language synchronization of Wikipedia tables using rule-based methods. These approaches can be effective, but they struggle with complexity and generalization.This paper explores large language models (LLMs) for multilingual information synchronization, using zero-shot prompting as a scalable solution. We introduce the Information Updation dataset, simulating the real-world process of updating outdated Wikipedia tables, and evaluate LLM performance. [...] Our proposed method outperforms existing baselines, particularly in Information Updation (1.79%) and Information Addition (20.58%)"
(freely accessible version)
_liftback_(19403966725).jpg){kind=small}
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link)
The Wikisource reader app is now available for reading Wikisource books through mobile devices. Android users may get the app through the Google Play app store. For a book to be accessible through the app, it must comply with the data model at Wikidata:WikiProject Books, and have a Wikidata item which uses the Wikidata property Wikisource index page URL (P1957) to link a Wikisource book which the editorial community has certified as passing the proofreading and validation process. Currently the app supports 22 languages, Assamese, Bangla, Catalan, Czech, Danish, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Javanese, Marathi, Malay, Polish, Punjabi, Spanish, Sundanese, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Wikisource editing has been especially popular in Bangla language and throughout India.
The lead developer of the app is Sai Phanindra, user:Saiphani02. Sai edits Wikimedia projects in English and Telugu, and their interests include sharing photos of village life and public transportation in India and developing scripts and bots for Wikimedia editors. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is presenting the app, but the Wikimedia community and other open-source volunteers are now maintaining and managing it. As The Signpost previously reported, in April 2025 the government of India removed governmental permission for that organization to receive funding from foreign organizations such as the Wikimedia Foundation. While Wikimedia programs everywhere routinely have high participation from volunteer community members, it was helpful to have CIS develop the app. From this point, anyone interested in contributing to the app's development may do so through the GitHub repo. Documentation for the app is available at the meta page and the website for the app is cis-india.github.io/wikisource-reader-app/.
As with all things Wikimedia, there are a few technical developers for the platforms, but an endless invitation for everyone else to edit the content which appears in those platforms. Anyone who would like to present books with open copyright in any language version of Wikisource is invited to join Wikisource. Further information is in the announcement at the Wikisource-l mailing list message.
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community: 2025 #34, #35, #36, and #37. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available on Meta.
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weapons (2025 film) |  |
2,054,712 | .jpg)
|
Jordan Peele tried to bring to his production company the work of another comedian turned horror director, Zach Cregger, but lost to New Line Cinema the newest one from the Barbarian auteur. One night all but one of the children in a class vanish, and it's up to their teacher, her ex who is a cop, and one of their parents, to discover where they wound up, facing some scares along the way. Intriguing trailers built up hype, and the end result had both critics and audiences embracing how Weapons alternates between a creepy atmosphere and shocking moments, to the point it took the top of this list and will also do so at the box office, in spite of competition that includes #5 (where the teacher, Julia Garner, also appears), #8, and the belated sequel Freakier Friday. |
| 2 | SummerSlam (2025) | |
1,398,404 | .jpg)
|
The second night of this WWE event saw more division title matches than the first one, leading up to a street fight (mostly within MetLife Stadium) for the WWE Championship between Cody Rhodes and the retiring John Cena. Rhodes won the match and the belt, which Cena handed to him, then left Cena in the ring to thank the audience. Brock Lesnar (pictured) appeared, reminding everyone of their rivalry since 2003, and seemingly sent a message to Cena that his retirement won't be an easy one. |
| 3 | Loni Anderson | |
1,383,463 | .jpg)
|
This American actress, best known for her not-so-dumb blonde role as Jennifer Marlowe on WKRP in Cincinnati, died on August 3, just days before she would turn 80. She was nominated twice in the role for an Emmy Award, and her career lasted until 2023. She was also married for six years to Burt Reynolds. |
| 4 | Sydney Sweeney |  |
1,276,131 | 
|
The controversy over this actress's American Eagle Outfitters ad, manufactured or not, drew support for Sweeney from US president Donald Trump and vice president JD Vance. |
| 5 | The Fantastic Four: First Steps |  |
1,117,443 | .jpg)
|
Released theatrically on July 25, this Marvel Comics film has doubled its $200+ million budget at the box office. It's the first film of the superheroes team to surpass the 2005 FF film monetarily. A sequel is in development, as it also the first film in the MCU's Phase Six – whose next theatrical releases in 2026 are Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Avengers: Doomsday (featuring the Four's archenemy in the comics). |
| 6 | Deaths in 2025 |  |
1,088,503 | 
|
Beware of Darkness Watch out now, take care Beware of the thoughts that linger Winding up inside your head... |
| 7 | ChatGPT | |
948,580 | .jpg)
|
An update to the popular chatbot happened during the week with the release of GPT-5. |
| 8 | Superman (2025 film) | |
910,101 | .jpg)
|
The launch of the DC Universe is the most sucessful superhero movie of the year, bound to make box office close to $600 million. Yet its digital download release is set for August 15, after little over a month in theaters! |
| 9 | Wednesday (TV series) | |
832,911 | 
|
*snap, snap* 3 years after taking Netflix by storm, the latest take on The Addams Family had half of its second season released, where Wednesday Addams sees more murders and mysteries threatening her school for outcasts. |
| 10 | War of the Worlds (2025 film) | |
776,139 | .jpg)
|
The War of the Worlds has been repeatedly adapted, with Hollywood's most famous versions from 1953 and 2005 updating the book's Victorian setting to a contemporary one. During the pandemic, there was an attempt to do it again in screenlife form, allowing its cast of Ice Cube, Clark Gregg and others to just film from their homes, and the fact that after filming it took 5 years for the movie to come out is not a good sign. Hence as this War of the Worlds got added to Amazon Prime Video's catalogue, critics lambasted the movie (with product placement for Amazon being a particularly mocked element!) and whatever audiences decided to check it out didn't approve of it either. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Weapons (2025 film) | |
2,046,636 | .jpg)
|
This year, Julia Garner already saw her husband fall into lycanthropy in Wolf Man, and she's being scared again playing a formerly alcoholic teacher who one day has all but one child in her class vanish into the night, forcing her to investigate. Weapons was considered one of the best horror movies of the year and opened with $43 million domestically – already covering its budget – the sixth straight Warner Bros. movie opening over $40 million (after A Minecraft Movie, Sinners, Final Destination Bloodlines, F1 and #8), a streak they might extend next month with The Conjuring: Last Rites. A prequel to Weapons, possibly focused on the movie's villain, is in the works. |
| 2 | Coolie (2025 film) | |
1,983,725 | 
|
On the heels of Saiyaara at the Indian box office, this Tamil action thriller, written by Lokesh Kanagaraj, has received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics and audiences, respectively; mainly equally divided between its two halves: praise for the first half, and criticism for the second. |
| 3 | War 2 (film) | |
1,436,072 | .jpg)
|
War was one of Bollywood's biggest hits in 2019, 2023's Pathaan would estabilish it as part of the YRF Spy Universe, so now a proper sequel has hit Indian theaters, again with Hrithik Roshan wreaking havoc. |
| 4 | Deaths in 2025 | |
1,048,572 | 
|
Release your mind Fast forward to the secrets of your code Your life's on overload Delete or save... |
| 5 | ChatGPT | |
1,021,576 | ||
| 6 | Alien: Earth | |
947,563 | .jpg)
|
The long-standing horror sci-fi franchise gets its first television foray, where two years before the original Alien a spaceship carrying that horrifying thing also known as the Xenomorph crashes on an island. |
| 7 | Wednesday (TV series) | |
794,982 | 
|
The first half of the second season, following the morbidly macabre at her school, released on August 6, guaranteeing its return (and possible permanence) on this list through its second-half release in three weeks. |
| 8 | Superman (2025 film) | |
782,958 | 
|
The two biggest superhero movies of the year, even if with box office earnings not as massive as the genre's heyday. DC launched its new shared cinematic universe with its landmark character, and in spite of getting close to $600 million worldwide Superman is already on video-on-demand, apparently because director James Gunn wanted it available as lead-up to the next project that will hit HBO Max this week. Marvel did the first universally well-received adaptation of its "first family" (also featuring #1's star Julia Garner as Shalla-Bal the Silver Surfer), that will end with earnings around $500 million, and its cast is set to return in Avengers: Doomsday, featuring the F4's archenemy in the comics. |
| 9 | The Fantastic Four: First Steps | |
565,179 | _(51574129285).jpg)
| |
| 10 | Danielle Spencer (American actress) | |
551,398 | .JPG)
|
This actress was best known for her role as the sassy sister on What's Happening!! in the late-1970s and its sequel. She then went on to be a veterinarian. In 2014, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and died from stomach cancer at age 60 on August 11. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Coolie (2025 film) | |
2,165,583 |
|
Rising from #2 last week, this Tamil action thriller, written and directed by Lokesh Kanagaraj, received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics and audiences, respectively; mainly equally divided with its two halves: praise for the first half, and criticism for the second. It's also the highest-grossing Kollywood film of year and fourth of all-time, as well as ranking third among 2025's Indian films, right above Mahavatar Narsimha and... |
| 2 | War 2 (film) | |
1,483,831 |
|
Say it again, y'all... War, huh, good god! From Kollywood to Bollywood, in the sequel to a 2019 blockbuster that has yet to cover its hefty ₹300–400 crore budget. |
| 3 | Terence Stamp | |
1,210,396 | 
|
And now, Hollywood. This British actor broke out in the 60s, even getting an Academy Award nomination for Billy Budd, became known worldwide playing General Zod in Superman and Superman II, and had quite a varied career, with his most unusual role probably being a transsexual drag queen in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert! Having not worked since playing a hostile policeman in 2021's Last Night in Soho, Stamp died at the age of 87. |
| 4 | Frank Caprio | |
1,103,025 | 
|
From 1985 to 2023, Caprio served as the chief judge of the municipal court of Providence, Rhode Island. Some of his judicial work was filmed and televised on the show Caught in Providence. Clips from the show went viral in 2017, with Caprio receiving attention for his empathy and light humor in court. He died on August 20, aged 88. |
| 5 | Deaths in 2025 | |
1,053,548 | .jpg)
|
But we're never gonna survive unless We get a little crazy... |
| 6 | ChatGPT | |
969,461 |
|
GPT-5 came out earlier this month, but it still cannot write this report. |
| 7 | Weapons (2025 film) | |
952,404 |
|
After two weeks at #1 on this report, this thriller film starring Julia Garner sinks to #7. |
| 8 | Superman (2025 film) | |
813,631 | 
|
This superhero film however, holds steady for another week at #8. |
| 9 | Amanda Knox | |
716,579 | 
|
Knox is an American woman who in 2007 became implicated in the murder of Meredith Kercher, her British roommate, while both of them were on a student exchange program in Perugia, Italy. After a few days of questioning by police without lawyers present, Knox and her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were arrested and charged with Kercher's murder. A third person, Rudy Guede, was separately arrested in the same year and convicted of Kercher's sexual assault and murder in 2008, based on fingerprints identified at the crime scene. Knox and Sollecito's trial began in 2009, but even before its beginning, local Italian media portrayed Knox in a negative light, which was repeated by worldwide media. They were convicted and sentenced to 26 years and 25 years in prison respectively, causing international controversy. An appeal in 2011 found Knox and Sollecito not guilty, and both were released, with Knox returning to the US. A retrial was held in 2014, which found Knox and Sollecito guilty, but in 2015, Italy's highest court, the Supreme Court of Cassation, definitively exonerated them of murder. After her return to the US, Knox graduated, and worked as a journalist and writer, as well as getting involved with activism for the wrongfully accused. The latest dramatization of Knox's true story, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, premiered on Hulu on August 20. |
| 10 | Alien: Earth | |
663,095 | _09.jpg)
|
FX (plus Hulu and Disney+ on streaming) is airing the first show based on the long-standing horror sci-fi franchise, featuring a spaceship carrying that horrifying extraterrestrial also known as the Xenomorph crashing on Earth, robots with uploaded human consciousnesses, and fans questioning how the events of this can still maintain continuity when it's set shortly before the first Alien. |
| Rank | Article | Class | Views | Image | Notes/about |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Deaths in 2025 | |
1,029,739 | 
|
...so, we finally reached the slowest week ever in 12 years and get this on the top position? And in a week without major departures, to boot (although out of the Anglosphere, this here writer saw the death of his favorite author). |
| 2 | Coolie (2025 film) | |
941,741 | 
|
After 2.0 and Jailer, Coolie is Rajinikanth's third film to enter the 500 crore club. |
| 3 | ChatGPT | |
935,750 | 
|
Recently, an incident was revealed where one ChatGPT co-creator tried to quit Meta and return to OpenAI but got an offer for a higher position and did not leave. |
| 4 | Taylor Swift |  |
875,756 | 
|
"Baby just say yes!" On Tuesday, the biggest singer in the world right now and the NFL star she's been dating for two years announced their engagement with a joint post on Instagram. That post has since shot up to tenth in the list of most-liked Instagram posts and had more than a million reposts. Even Trump, who declared that he "hates" her and that she is "no longer hot", congratulated the happy couple. On Friday, they made their first public appearance since the announcement, attending a college football match between Kelce's college team, the Cincinnati Bearcats, and the Nebraska Cornhuskers. |
| 5 | Travis Kelce | |
742,569 | .jpg)
| |
| 6 | KPop Demon Hunters | |
677,641 | 
|
Records keep on piling for the animation following a girl group fighting the supernatural: it's Netflix's most watched original film ever, the platform's first box office #1 through a sing-along theatrical release, and the soundtrack is the first since Saturday Night Fever with three songs in the Hot 100 top 5, including chart-topper "Golden". Netflix is already in talks with Sony Pictures Animation to make a sequel. |
| 7 | Amanda Knox | |
630,330 | 
|
The "twisted tale" documenting her wrongful murder conviction last decade has begun on Hulu, and she released a second memoir this year about her ordeal. She is also making her rounds on TV talk shows to talk about both. |
| 8 | War 2 (film) | |
612,969 |
|
Released theatrically on August 14, this Indian action thriller has yet to break-even with its budget. It's also the lowest-grossing entry in the YRF Spy Universe that began in 2012. |
| 9 | 2025–26 UEFA Champions League | |
575,872 | 
|
The league phase draw for the 34th season took place on August 26. 36 teams from 16 national associations were selected, with teams from England holding six spots. Competition will begin on September 16 and run through May 30. |
| 10 | Weapons (2025 film) | |
564,459 | 
|
After the one weekend run of #6 in theaters, the top spot returned to the acclaimed horror movie about missing children and supernatural mind control, already worth more than $230 million. And showing how weak the overall box office is, second place was another thriller... from 50 years ago, a re-release of the iconic Jaws. |
For the July 25 – August 25 period, per this database report.
| Title | Revisions | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Deaths in 2025 | 2520 | Among the deceased not above were Jim Lovell, Ryne Sandberg, James Dobson, and Kelley Mack. |
| Brazil at the 2025 Junior Pan American Games | 1726 | The best young athletes of the Americas – ages 17 to 22 – competed in Paraguay, and South America's biggest country led the medal count with 175, 70 of them golden. Should be a good sign for the regular 2027 Pan American Games in Lima, and maybe future Olympics! |
| 2025 Pacific typhoon season | 1564 | After tropical depressions starting as early as February, the first storm happened in May, and five typhoons have followed since. |
| Japanese conjugation | 1385 | Mostly one user Turning Japanese with this long (over 600 kB!) page on the nipponic language. |
| Legalism (Chinese philosophy) | 1290 | And one editor has been Turning Chinese over this since 2010, with most of their 49,000+ edits dedicated to this page! |
| Weapons (2025 film) | 1175 | One of The Whitest Kids U' Know, Zach Cregger, showed he had horror credentials in Barbarian and extended them with this movie, that Cregger said to have drawn inspiration from the death of his comedic partner Trevor Moore, with whom he shared a shameful directorial debut in Miss March. |
| The Life of a Showgirl | 911 | Where does Taylor Swift get her energy? Having concluded her record-breaking Eras Tour in December last year, Swift announced on August 13 that her 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, will be released on October 3. Produced with the Swedish hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback, the album was conceived and recorded during the tour's European leg. Swift said the album is inspired by the events behind the scenes on the tour, which she described as "exuberant and electric and vibrant". At twelve songs and with "infectious" melodies promised, The Life of a Showgirl could not be more different to its predecessor The Tortured Poets Department, the 31-track double album dominated by introspective lyrics and minimalist production. |
| Bash (Unix shell) | 812 | Another one user crusade, regarding the "Bourne Again SHell" commonly used to login into various Linux distributions. |
| 2025 Kamchatka Peninsula earthquake | 806 | The most powerful earthquake recorded worldwide since the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake hit the Russian Far East, but with minimal damage considering the distant and barely populated area, and even the subsequent tsunamis were weaker than expected. |
| 2025 Cincinnati Open – Women's singles | 787 | Iga Świątek followed her Grand Slam title at Wimbledon winning the last WTA 1000 prior to the U.S. Open – where she got to the final of the mixed doubles tournament partnering Casper Ruud, so another deep Grand Slam run is to be expected? |
| Timeline of the Gaza war (16 May 2025 – present) | 779 | This article is now Timeline of the Gaza war (16 May 2025 – 19 August 2025), showing how the suffering in the Middle East just doesn't end nearly 2 years later. |
| War 2 (film) | 771 | A Bollywood sequel to a succintly titled 2019 film, that has underperformed at the box office but still ranks among India's highest-grossing of the year. |
| James Cook | 767 | The Good Article nomination on the page about this seafarer passed, so it's now a Featured Article candidate. |
| 2025 Cincinnati Open – Men's singles | 728 | On the ATP side of the tournament above, like the French Open and Wimbledon it all went down to Carlos Alcaraz vs. Jannik Sinner, and the former won due to his Italian rival retiring after less than half an hour feeling unwell. |
| Coolie (2025 film) | 717 | War 2 beat this Kollywood production on its opening weekend. |
 | This is an essay on the Ignore all rules policy. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
On Wikipedia, a great deal of virtual ink is spent debating if various policies, guidelines, and essays apply to specific situations or not, or debating secondary questions about whether or not they have sufficient consensus to apply. When you find yourself in that situation, take a step back, ignore all rules, and ask yourself the one question:
| Yes | → | Do it, support the policy, keep the article, unblock, etc. |
| No | → | Don't do it, oppose the policy, delete the article, block, etc. |
Answer that question first, then pick whatever policy, guideline, essay, or argument supports the answer. Don't flip the order. If you look at a policy page first, then decide that something is good/bad because that's the conclusion of the policy, you forgot to ask yourself the one question. And you could very well end up supporting an outcome which does not make Wikipedia better.
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