This is a week where our report goes all over the place, and this can be attested by how the only article with millions of views is a teenage environmental activist. Otherwise, there's crimes (#2), deaths (#3, #6, #7), economical turmoil (#4) , movies (#5, #8), TV (#10), and Google Doodles (#9).

For the week of September 22 to 28, 2019, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

There are some interesting connections in this week's report. #1 is a popular new film, in which #2 plays #8, who was previously played by #7. #22 is the partner of #2, while #12 is his younger brother, and was a child star who died of a drug overdose, much like #13. That neat mesh of connections covers a good chunk of the week's report, while the remainder comprise a familiar mix of wrestling, Indian movies, Netflix productions, and of course dead celebrities.

For the week of October 6 to 12, 2019, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	About
1	Joker (2019 film)		3,916,575		It's no surprise that this week's list is going to be dominated by Jokers. The latest, and perhaps most controversial, incarnation of the comic book character (item #1) hit cinemas earlier this month. It features #2 as an isolated, lonely and mentally ill would-be comic who slowly finds his villainous side.
2	Joaquin Phoenix		1,766,842
3	War (2019 film)		1,109,505		We always see a lot of movies on this list, but it's not every week that a non-English film makes it quite so high up. This Hindi-language action thriller stars Tiger Shroff as an Indian soldier assigned to hunt down his former mentor, played by Hrithik Roshan.
4	El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie		834,546		It wouldn't be a Top 25 without a Netflix original movie or series. This week's #4 completes the story of Jesse Pinkman, played by Aaron Paul and last seen in the finale of Breaking Bad back in 2013.
5	Hell in a Cell (2019)		792,414		The Top 25 isn't all Netflix, wrestling and death, I promise. But of course the latest big wrestling event always has to make an appearance, and this week it was this one that took place on October 6, 2019 at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento, California.
6	Deaths in 2019		736,002		Death and taxes may be life's only certainties, but taxes never seems to appear on the Top 25 for some reason, so I guess we're all a lot more interested in death.
7	Heath Ledger		610,510		Interest in the latest actor to play the Joker seems to have sparked interest in the character himself, as well as the previous incumbent of the role. At the time, many felt that Heath Ledger's portrayal in The Dark Knight in 2008 could never be matched. Whether that's still true is, and will probably remain, a matter of considerable debate.
8	Joker (comics)		589,608
9	Ginger Baker		540,799		The first of this week's recently-deceased celebrities, Peter 'Ginger' Baker was an English drummer and the co-founder of rock band Cream. He died on 6 October 2019 after a short illness.
10	Samuel Little		537,066		Believed to be America's most prolific serial killer, Little claims to have killed 93 people and appears on this list after making headlines for closing a number of cold cases through the chilling portraits he draws of his victims.

While It Chapter Two didn't have the lasting power of the first on our report, the same can't be said of another monster clown, albeit one more human: Batman's nemesis Joker, whose solo movie has topped the list for three weeks and brought along the main actor (#4). More movies can also be found, on Netflix (#8) and Indian theaters (#9) – the country also produced a Nobel winner (#6). Present as always are the recently deceased (#2, #5, #7, #16), politics (#10), and Google Doodles (#3).

For the week of October 13 to 19, 2019, the 25 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	About
1	Joker (2019 film)		2,163,336		Jared Leto apparently tried to block this movie from being made, given Warner Bros. had promised a solo Joker film for him, only to greenlight this unrelated 1970s throwback instead. And now Joker is almost outgrossing Leto's maligned take in Suicide Squad, with much more positive reviews, to boot.
2	Sulli		1,388,588		Ever since "Gangnam Style", K-pop has broken out in surprising ways, specially for those who write and read this report. And this entry related to South Korean music is a sad one, as singer/actress Choi "Sulli" Jin-ri died from a possible suicide at just 25, following cyberbullying taking its toll.
3	Joseph Plateau		1,076,405		Google celebrated this Belgian physicist whose research on optics led to the phenakistiscope, one of those disks that when spun create the illusion of a moving image.
4	Joaquin Phoenix		1,031,901		For those who remember the I'm Still Here days where Joaquin Phoenix had seemingly gone insane and decided to go from acting to rapping, him becoming the certified insane Joker in our #1 seemed like natural casting.
5	Elijah Cummings		940,273		The big death of the week, a Maryland politician who had over two decades in the House of Representatives and this year took over the Committee on Oversight and Reform.
6	Abhijit Banerjee		905,237		Indians getting big views, no surprise here. Though this one had a global interest reason for it, as Banerjee, alongside his wife Esther Duflo and also Michael Kremer, won the Nobel Prize in Economics for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
7	Deaths in 2019		746,129		Last night the wife said "oh, boy when you're dead, You don't take nothing with you, but your soul, think!"
8	El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie		712,432		The show Honest Trailers described as "so powerful, you binge-watch it on Netflix; so all-consuming, you push it on your friends, even if they don't watch TV; and so addicting, you can't shut up about it. It's basically like drugs." gets a Netflix epilogue centered around Aaron Paul's character Jesse Pinkman, that also served as an epitaph for one of its actors, Robert Forster, who died the exact day of release.
9	War (2019 film)		666,731		This Bollywood action epic starring Hrithik Roshan, Tiger Shroff and Vaani Kapoor is now the highest-grossing Indian movie of the year.
10	Tulsi Gabbard		624,330		Hillary Clinton claimed that Russia was "grooming" a female Democrat to run as a third-party candidate who would help President Trump win reelection via the spoiler effect. Many in the media interpreted that as being Hawaiian Representative Gabbard, who denied running independently if not chosen and had other candidates defending her.

• These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.

On 4 October, Haaretz published "The Fake Nazi Death Camp: Wikipedia's Longest Hoax, Exposed", with later coverage in The Times of Israel, The Week, and at least nine other news sources in several languages.

For fifteen years, the article for Warsaw concentration camp, also known as KL Warschau, contained the misinformation that the camp was an extermination camp with the majority of its victims non-Jewish Poles. Although there were numerous revisions to the article in time, and disputes as to the veracity of the claims to it being an extermination camp, the misinformation persisted from the creation of the article by the now deceased Halibutt in August 2004 until interventions by K.e.coffman on 5 and 6 May 2019 and Icewhiz on 27 and 28 August 2019. The misinformation (called a "hoax" by Icewhiz and Haaretz) largely originated from research by the judge and author Maria Trzcińska, whose obscure hypothesis about the camp being an extermination camp that targeted non-Jewish Poles was officially discredited in 2007 (three years after the date that the Wikipedia article was created). Icewhiz reported to Haaretz that they investigated the claims in the Wikipedia article after they read a May 2019 article by Christian Davies in London Review of Books which mentioned "Wikipedia entries amended". They posted an essay on their user page documenting the existing problems found on Wikipedia, both in the article itself and mentions of Warsaw concentration camp elsewhere on Wikipedia, as well as the state of the article prior to K.e.coffman's edits. User:François Robere approached the Signpost in September with an edited version of Icewhiz's essay prepared for publication, but the Signpost declined to publish.

Icewhiz was involved in several content disputes about antisemitism and misinformation related to Poland in World War II, and is subject to sanctions per Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Antisemitism in Poland. They have now been banned indefinitely for off-wiki harassment pertaining to the Antisemitism in Poland content dispute, see Arbitration report. Icewhiz states that they brought the story to Haaretz as an attempt to generate reliable coverage of the facts regarding KL Warschau which could then support their arguments on Wikipedia. Both Icewhiz and Haaretz writer Omer Benjakob claim that this case was just one out of many instances of intentional misinformation added by Polish nationalist editors. Benjakob writes that there "seems to be a systematic effort by Polish nationalists to whitewash hundreds of Wikipedia articles relating to Poland and the Holocaust." Benjakob links this effort on the English Wikipedia with current Polish nationalist political efforts, which he accuses of promoting Holocaust distortion and attempting to minimize the documented complicity of Poles in the Holocaust and promoting Poles as equal or worse victims of the Holocaust. The historian and Haaretz contributor Daniel Blatman countered in a 17 October 2019 opinion piece that the false claims in the article persisted through several Polish governments, including those which acknowledge the complicity of Poles in the Holocaust, and thus cannot accurately be described as an attempt by Poland to falsify Holocaust narrative. The blame for the faulty article lies, Blatman argues, entirely with Wikipedia. User:Poeticbent, who was the most prolific Wikipedia editor of Polish-related articles, including those about Jewish-Polish history, until he retired from Wikipedia in May 2018, is named by Icewhiz as one of the Polish editors intentionally spreading misinformation on Wikipedia. He responded to the accusations with an essay posted on his user page. User:Piotrus, another prolific editor of Polish content, is also named in the article, and was interviewed by Haaretz for the piece. However, Piotrus states that the interview was never authorized for publication, and so they posted a response on the Polish Wikipedia. In this response, Piotrus says there are inaccuracies and false statements from Icewhiz that were not corrected by Haaretz.

As a remedy in the Antisemitism in Poland arbitration case, all articles pertaining to Poland in World War II (1933-1945), including those pertaining to the Holocaust, are subject to the guidance applied to the Collaboration in German-occupied Poland article: "Only high quality sources may be used, specifically peer-reviewed scholarly journals, academically focused books by reputable publishers, and/or articles published by reputable institutions. English-language sources are preferred over non-English ones when available and of equal quality and relevance. Editors repeatedly failing to meet this standard may be topic-banned as an arbitration enforcement action."
- 3family6

The Swedish government's gender equality foreign policy is shown by WikiGap edit-a-thons held in Swedish embassies in Japan and Pakistan this month. Previously about 60 other WikiGap events have been held. (32 events are shown here).

• In Japan: Around 40 editors concentrated on writing articles on Japanese women writers and athletes, as well as translating English-language articles about women into Japanese. An agricultural writer created an article on Eri Otsu, an award winning woman farmer.
• In Pakistan: Another 40 editors created about 50 articles, including one in English about Rafia Qaseem Baig, the first Pakistani woman to enroll in a bomb disposal unit and another on Jalila Haider, a human rights activist and attorney in Belochistan.
• In Jordan: a WikiGap edit-a-thon was held in May . An October edit-a-thon focusing on Jordanian cultural heritage was hosted by the Photo Archive at the American Center of Oriental Research, Wikimedia Levant and the Jordan Open Source Association.
• At University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: the Daily Tar Heel reports that Sloan Art Library wants your help in its Wikipedia editing workshops.
• At Penn State: Onward State reports that Penn State’s Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity to Host October Events For LGBTQ+ History Month including an edit-a-thon.
• In Scotland: Black History Month highlights role of David Livingstone aides an edit-a-thon coordinated by the David Livingstone Birthplace Project quadrupled the size of the article on James Chuma and Abdullah Susi and almost doubled the size of Jacob Wainwright's article. Articles on Edward Steere and Joseph Thomson were also improved.
• Ada Lovelace Day was celebrated at Cornell University and the University of Texas at Austin with edit-a-thons.
• Meet the women working to fix the massive gender imbalance in Wikipedia's articles on Mashable Originals shows a video featuring Rosie Stephenson-Goodnight, Emily Temple-Wood, and Siko Bouterse. "Wikipedia is what happens when anarchy begets bureaucracy," according to Temple-Wood.

• Ronan Farrow writes about Wikipedia whitewashing: in his new bestseller Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. Further coverage is provided by the Washington Post, Newsweek, The Signpost, and many others.
• Wikipedia Exposes Porn Performers to Stalking, Harassment—And Visits From CPS writes Jezebel referring to Child Protective Services. Dozens of actresses in pornographic films have been exposed to harassment and unwanted attention due to their legal names being published on Wikipedia alongside their stage names. IMDb may have published many more. A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation told Jezebel that concerns about the publishing of legal names can be emailed to info-en-q@wikimedia.org.
• Campaigns and Groups Ignore Wikipedia at their Peril in Campaigns & Elections. Brian Young, a "media planner" for the marketing agency ACRONYM, suggests that candidates for public office should closely follow the Wikipedia pages about them so they can ensure that the people who read them come away with a favorable impression.
• NRA employees edit articles: A Brief History of NRA Employees Editing Wikipedia for Fun and Possibly Profit in Splinter News identifies 155 edits in the last decade made using the National Rifle Association's documented IP address at the NRA headquarters building. Not all the edits are about the NRA, guns, or related topics. Many were made before the current prohibition on undeclared paid edits came into effect in June 2014. But, according to a count by The Signpost, 23 of the edits were about NRA-related topics after June 2014.
• More potential plagiarism?: The Daily Beast reports that sections of American political writer Peter Schweizer's new book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends, bear striking similarities to several Wikipedia articles, namely the one on Patrick R. Daley. Schweizer's spokesperson denied any impropriety.
• Armenia MPs being photographed for Wikipedia: The Hraparak Daily seemed surprised that Wikipedians were not demanding money for the photo shoots. The MPs were enthusiastic about the photos, though some asked to come back the following day when they were better groomed.
• Spread the word: the Iraqis translating the internet into Arabic: According to The Guardian "just 0.6% of internet content is available in Arabic, despite it being the fourth most common language among internet users." Ideas Beyond Borders helps Iraqis translate Wikipedia, academic articles, and the classic works of science, literature, and philosophy.
• They used to say 'don't read it', now they teach you how to edit: Macleans reports that several Canadian universities, including University of Windsor, University of Toronto, and Concordia University have hired Wikipedians-in-Residence.
• Stocking up on books: Neowin takes notice of the Internet Archive's announcement on its blog page of an initiative to link citations on Wikipedia articles to the books' pages in their online library. The archive hopes to "connect readers with books by weaving books into the fabric of the web itself, starting with Wikipedia."
• Wikipedia has only granted one takedown request. Here it is: Mashable citing a report from Comparitech writes that a 2014 visa photo with personal information appeared in the English Wikipedia article Visa policy of Myanmar. It was the only non-DMCA related takedown granted by the WMF in the six years since the WMF began reporting these data in 2013, according to Comparitech.
• Why Amazon’s One Million Dollar Donation To Wikipedia Is a Lesson For Us All: Justin Bariso of Thrive Global praises Amazon's decision to donate 1 million USD to the WMF. He asserts that this is not only a positive thing for Wikipedia, but that it's just good business as well on the part of the multinational technology company.
• Jimbo on the news: Jimmy Wales and Orit Kopel published The Internet Broke the News Industry—and Can Fix It, Too in Foreign Policy about how the internet has made it "easier for political players to manipulate public opinion and to do so while denigrating established news brands." His solutions to this problem include using social media to allow communities to participate in journalism, and to use a wiki model of collaborative editing, and small donations to fund more news sources. While it's not mentioned in the article, Jimmy's WikiTribune is moving to a social media format, concentrating on news and will continue to be funded through small donations.

• Vatican edits: The conservative Catholic website LifeSiteNews reports that somebody within the Vatican City, possibly in the Secretary of State office, has vandalized the article on Taylor Marshall, author of Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within.
• And for the sequel? Larry Sanger wrote an encyclopedia article about his left thumb on Everipedia, the encyclopedia that promises to pay for your writing with digital wooden nickels. Sanger has now returned his wooden nickels and resigned from his position as Everipedia's CIO without writing an article about his right digitus medius. Sanger's next project looks thumb-what more promising, a decentralized encyclosphere supported by the Knowledge Standards Foundation. Not only can anyone edit, but anyone can create their own encyclopedia, with articles on a topic being rated across encyclopedias. Of course anyone can rate the encyclopedia articles.
• Clueless: Wikipedia “Could Spell the End of Clueless Arguments in Pubs”: However unlikely that seems, it was published on the UK satire site NewsBiscuit.
• Moscow Times reported on October 9 that the Great Russian Encyclopedia will be repurposed as the Russian analogue of Wikipedia and will be designed for 15 million users per day. Russian technology site RBC.ru reported that the state budget will fund the new site for about $31 million. The Russian broadcaster RT, which usually has a political or ideological agenda, reported that the website will be "free of any political or ideological agenda." Last month The Signpost reported that Belsat, which has a different political or ideological agenda, gave the same information. The Signpost predicts that the GRE will not replace Wikipedia in Russia, but that it will have a political or ideological agenda.

This Wikipedia essay was originally posted by Mangoe on April 13, 2007 - S

This page in a nutshell: Your activity here has real consequences, because Wikipedia is in the real world.

Wikipedia is highly visible on the Internet; any Google or other search engine search on a subject for which Wikipedia has an article is likely to display that article on the first page of results, and quite likely is the first or second result returned. If you edit that article, then anyone who is interested in the subject is going to be able to see what you wrote. They will also be able to track your activity across the site, in project and user pages as well as in articles. So anything you say here and anything you do here can have real world consequences. Consider carefully what you write (or delete); keep in mind that you (and other people) can get hurt and experience real-life consequences, such as legal, employment or security issues.

It is tempting to view Wikipedia as something of a private club, but it is really much more like Hyde Park. In fact, since every keystroke on WP is logged and time and date-stamped with your identity, an even more apt comparison would be talking on a megaphone in a public park while TV news cameras are recording and transmitting your statements to the world.

Anyone who abides by the rules is welcome to edit; anyone with a web browser is welcome to read. Therefore, you should consider that you have about as much privacy as you would if you got on a soapbox in the town square and used a megaphone. The whole world can hear you, including your wife/husband/significant other, your children, your boss, your neighbors, spy agencies, the police, investigative reporters, Rush Limbaugh, Stephen Colbert, The New York Times, and the pope. If you don't want them to read what you're saying, you shouldn't post or edit it here.

Those outside readers, organizations and individuals will also read your words in the context of generally understood meanings, not Wikipedia-specific definitions. Appeal to Wikipedia rules and processes will not save you from misunderstandings or real-world consequences.

Editors in Wikipedia are (hopefully) writing about real-world subjects, not creating a fantasy world. Editors are not characters in a game; they are real people. You should not be here to gain experience points, create your own reality, play mind games with others, or engage in satisfying your taste for single combat. If you say something malicious about someone, you're saying it about a real person, and that real person may well get angry with you. Don't visualize your discussion opponents as NPCs in EditQuest or World of Wikicraft or Jimbo's Call; visualize them as someone sitting across the table from you. After all, the Golden Rule isn't just a rule; it's a good idea.

Although the true identity of Wikipedia editors is not normally revealed within the site, and efforts to "out" editors are frowned upon, it is impossible to prevent attempts at unmasking editors. From time to time editors have been the subject of such attempts. Wikipedia cannot forestall the consequences of being identified, so the best course may be to edit defensively:

• Don't edit articles on yourself, your company, or any other subject which puts you in the position of having the appearance of a conflict of interest. If you feel you must edit those articles, you should bend over backwards to prevent the appearance of bias.
• If your employer, law enforcement, academic institution, or parent forbids you from editing, the safest course is to obey them. Wikipedia cannot prevent you from being fired, arrested, expelled, or grounded (respectively) with cause.
• Don't draw attention to yourself. Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point. No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man. You cannot turn back the Streisand effect.

Administrators and long standing members of the community, having developed a high profile, can expect inverse surveillance. If passers-by and other editors mistake the recipient of your acts for a punching bag, they'll want to know why you're doing it. And to know why, they'll want to know who you are, even if the Wikipedia culture values privacy.

All your contributions to Wikipedia, including comments in talk pages, edits to articles, comments in article for deletion discussions, etc., are kept forever by the wiki software unless suppressed. Anything that you say that has not been deleted by an administrator or via oversight will be available to anyone for research via your contributions page. The aggregation of all these contributions represents your public identity to others and can be used to make an assessment of your personal viewpoints, personality, edit patterns, and motivations.

An editor can request administrators to delete certain content the editor now regrets; an offensive speech on a controversial topic or a personal photo on their user page, or their real name. However, even if an admin deletes this content on Wikipedia, the content may remain on mirror websites that re-use WP content under license. As well, third parties who monitor Wikipedia and who have access to cached "snapshots" of the encyclopedia at various points in time may notice that some content has been deleted by admins. This attempt to suppress this content may in turn stimulate interest in this content, the so-called Streisand effect.

If you don't like controversy, you should stay away from editing controversial topics. And if you don't like being tagged with a position on a controversial topic, you should be very wary of editing articles on it. It's not like The Wizard of Id; if you write "The king is a fink!" here, everyone will see you doing it.

Wikipedia's visibility makes it a natural haunt of viewpoint pushers on political and social controversies. Even if you try to be scrupulously careful about avoiding POV edits, other editors working on the same topic may assume that you are a party to the dispute and assign you to one of the various camps. If this offends, annoys, or troubles you, you should consider staying out of the fray. And if being identified with one of the parties to the dispute would be difficult for you in real life, you should consider well the consequences of being identified, and refrain if you feel the stakes are too high.

Take responsibility for your actions here, and you will be less likely to be surprised by any undesirable consequences of what you say and do. Use the preview button, and think before pressing "Save page". You can always self-revert, but what you said may remain.

Essays

• Advice for parents
• Don't overlook legal threats
• Don't spite your face
• Honesty
• Guidance for younger editors
• On privacy, confidentiality and discretion
• Personal security practices

Articles

• Criticism of Wikipedia
• Wikipedia biography controversy

Policies and guidelines

• Wikimedia Foundation privacy policy

External videos
Wikipedia Wars?, BBC, 24:30[1]

The British Broadcasting Corporation dropped a bombshell on mainland China in its October 5 Click television program.^[1] The segment reported by Carl Miller called Wikipedia Wars? strongly suggests that the Communist government of China is directly editing Wikipedia and perhaps even doxing or harassing editors in Taiwan. Widespread edit warring was also reported. However, as Miller notes in an interview in The Signpost "We cannot be sure who were behind the edits that we found, or why they were done ... there was nothing that directly tied these edits back to the Chinese government."

As reported by Click, Wikimedia Taiwan board member Jamie Lin said that many incidents are not merely good faith differences of opinion, but instead "control by the [Chinese] Government". According to Lin, editors — not just content — are under pressure, "some [editors] have told us that their personal information has been sprayed [released], because they have different thoughts." On a Wikimedia Telegram channel, according to Lin, a person told a Taiwanese editor that "the policemen will enjoy your mother's forensic report".

Hong Kong resident 1233 confirmed to The Signpost that Hong Kong editors have had similar experiences. "Direct attacks on well-known editors who do not align with a single point of view and shutting down resistance through off-site harassment. This is what some members of the Mainland Chinese working group are doing. The Wikimedia Foundation is ineffective in dealing with off-site harassment – the WMF really can't do anything. The working group manipulates on-site rules to silence whistleblowers and completely ruin how the project runs. This method is so effective that some working group editors practice it without even knowing that it violates civility at its root."^[2]

An editor from mainland China, who did not wish to be identified, told The Signpost that "the BBC's coverage is biased and was backed by Wikimedia Taiwan, the anti-China chapter. The coverage just makes accusations, instead of trying to help solve the problem."^[2] The opinions of this editor are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Signpost. He continued "Carl Miller interviewed Wikimedia Taiwan, anti-China scholars, but not Chinese Wikimedians themselves."^[2]

When questioned by Click about possible Chinese government editing of Wikipedia, Heather Ford, Senior Lecturer in Media at the University of New South Wales, said, "I'm surprised it's taken this long actually [...] [Wikipedia] is a prioritised source of facts and knowledge about the world."

Lokman Tsui, Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told Click that the battle over Wikipedia content comes at a time when China is showing an increasing desire to fix perceived misconceptions about it abroad, "'Telling China's story' is a concept that has gained huge traction over the past couple of years [...] They think that a lot of the perceptions people have of China abroad are really misunderstandings."

Editor 1233 told The Signpost "The idea of a unique "Chinese view" or "Chinese story" on Wikipedia would be as disastrous as making the Foundation a for-profit entity. It would ruin the reputation of the project."^[2]

Two papers cited by Click show that the Chinese government might be interested in altering content on Wikipedia to show itself in a more favorable light. In 2016, Jie Ding, an official at the China International Publishing Group, a global media corporation overseen by the Communist Party of China, published the paper "Analysis of the Feasibility of Using Wikipedia to Carry out the Dissemination of Chinese Political Discourse" in International Communications. Ding posits that "there is a lack of systematic ordering and maintenance of contents about China's major political discourse on Wikipedia" and says that it needs to "reflect our voices and opinions in the entry, so as to objectively and truly reflect the influence of Chinese path and Chinese thoughts on other countries and history".

This line of thought is shared by at least two Chinese academics. This year, Li-hao Gan and Bin-Ting Weng published "Opportunities And Challenges Of China's Foreign Communication in the Wikipedia" in the Journal of Social Sciences. They write that "due to the influence by foreign media, Wikipedia entries have a large number of prejudiced words against the Chinese government". To rectify this, they say the Chinese "must develop a targeted external communication strategy, which includes [...] cultivating influential editors on the wiki platform." They conclude with "China urgently needs to encourage and train Chinese netizens to become Wikipedia platform opinion leaders and administrators… [who] can adhere to socialist values and form some core editorial teams."

The unnamed mainland editor quoted above says that "just two academic papers can't represent what China's propaganda department wants. Countless academic papers in China are aimed at foreign media, including the newswires, Twitter, and Wikipedia, with over 20 so far in October."^[2]

The Signpost checked a case of edit warring cited by Click. At 14:20 on September 11 User:Xiaolifeidaohank changed the lead sentence of the Taiwan article from "Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a state in East Asia" to "Taiwan [...] is a province in People's Republic of China." No explanation was provided in the edit summary. User:Kusma reverted the change five minutes later. Xiaolifeidaohank quickly implemented the change again, and then subsequently removed mention of "Republic of China" from the sentence, without an edit summary. Kusma reverted this, and the exchange happened once more before the article's lead was left in its original form, 11 minutes after the edit war started. The BBC characterized this as an "an editorial tug of war that – as far as the encyclopedia was concerned – caused the state of Taiwan to constantly blink in and out of existence over the course of a single day."

According to Click, this single-day event is part of a larger conflict over the politicization of Chinese content across both English and Chinese Wikipedias. This conflict includes a change to the Senkaku Islands article on Chinese Wikipedia to say that they are "China's inherent territory". The territorial status of the islands is currently disputed by Taiwan, the People's Republic of China, and Japan. The Chinese article for 1989 Tiananmen Square protests was altered to describe the event as "the June 4th incident" to "quell the counter-revolutionary riots". Meanwhile, the article for the 2019 Hong Kong protests has seen intense debate over whether to characterize the participants as protesters or rioters. Click identified "almost 1,600 tendentious edits across 22 politically sensitive articles" without specifying the Wikipedia language versions.

Click skipped very quickly over two of the fundamental conditions that the Chinese Wikipedia operates under. Editor 1233 told The Signpost that a "systematic "firewall" against the free flow of information has created a direct and effective blocking of voices from inside the wall. I cannot say for sure that the pro-China voices coming from inside China are cherry-picked. However, the firewall is so effective that most, other than those who are considered 'top dissidents', already have their voices shut out of the outside world."^[2]

Some Wikipedia language versions have been blocked in China starting as early as 2004, but the Chinese Wikipedia was most affected. By April 2019, all Wikipedia versions were reported to be blocked. Mainland Chinese editors who wish to edit any version of Wikipedia can try to edit through proxies.

The use of proxies has had an effect on Click's coverage according to the unnamed mainland editor. It "seems to target the Chinese government, but anyone who reads it would apply these false statements to ordinary mainland Chinese Wikimedians in general and conclude that all mainland Chinese contributors are sent by the Chinese government."^[2]

References

For related coverage, see: Interview and Community view

Two long-term members of the community have departed as a result of Arbitration Committee actions this month.

Eric Corbett, a Wikipedian since 2006, was indefinitely blocked by the Arbitration Committee on September 2. ArbCom member KrakatoaKatie, writing for the committee, and announcing closure of an 18 August 2019 request for an Arbcom case, stated "The Arbitration Committee has been made aware of and has independently confirmed that Eric Corbett, since his public retirement, has been abusively misusing multiple accounts and disruptively editing while logged out. Eric Corbett's accounts are hereby indefinitely blocked by the Arbitration Committee."

Apparently following banning policy, ten minutes after ArbCom's decision was posted, English Wikipedia administrator Joe Roe made an edit to Corbett's userpage that would notify the community of the block. Several edits by others ensued, both administrators and non-administrators. First blanking the page, several more additions and removals of the templates and one final addition. After this, on October 9, administrator Floquenbeam removed the templates with the edit summary "busybodies",^[1] and protected the userpage from editing. Floquenbeam told The Signpost: "That was a controversial tagging, which was edit warred over last month. It had died down and was quiet for quite a while [...] But now no more drive by shit stirring can happen."

Corbett's name appears frequently in The Signpost's archives including October 28, 2015 Arbitration report and December 30, 2015 Arbitration report; the latter detailing an administrator's privileges being removed by the Arbitration Committee due to actions related to Corbett. Our December 10, 2014 In the media report quoted an author in Slate who had described Corbett as one of "'The Unblockables', a class of abrasive editors who can get away with murder because they have enough of a fan club within Wikipedia, so any complaint made against them would be met with hostility and opprobrium."

On 1 October, Icewhiz was indefinitely site banned. According to the Arbitration Committee, they have "engaged in off-wiki harassment of multiple editors". Responding to criticism of methods and jurisdiction, Mkdw stated

“

Off-wiki harassment falls within our jurisdiction. While I am sure the world of professional forensic analysis has varying degrees of sophistication, we do not adhere or require those same standards here on the English Wikipedia. Comparing behavioural evidence is a common practice on the English Wikipedia with respect to editors abusively using multiple accounts or reviewing evidence with respect to harassment. I am sure there are many advantages to a more comprehensive system that relies on professionals to handle harassment and conduct related issues affecting our community, but that same community has made it clear that local governance from within our volunteer community is an essential priority for the project. Wikipedia at its very core is volunteer built and we won't be departing from that culture anytime soon. (23:40 1 October)

”

This case is further complicated by reports in Haaretz and other news sources that Icewhiz was responsible for the exposure of a 15 year old hoax on Wikipedia about a fake Nazi extermination camp. For further coverage on these reports see In the Media.

On October 20, former Arbitration Committee member DeltaQuad, aka Amanda, retired from English Wikipedia, was desysoped at her own request (resigned as administrator), and had her other advanced permissions including oversighter removed at her own request. She was recently acting as an ArbCom clerk. DeltaQuad declined to further explain any reason for the resignation to The Signpost.^[2]

As of issue deadline, 36 accounts on English Wikipedia have oversight rights. It is one of the most tightly held system controls issued only to the founder, Arbitration Committee members, and a handful of others, and can expunge information from view even by "ordinary" administrators.

• Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Palestine-Israel articles 4/Evidence closed October 18 with input from six editors. According to the admin who raised protection on the article Airbnb under the Israel–Palestine sanctions, "There was an edit-warring concerning one of their Palestinian locations..." The case had been suspended and began on 6 October.