The official data provider crashed back in January, so all of these lists were compiled through another tool by yours truly, who also put up the tables and wrote the analysis on why these articles attracted reader attention.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	About
1	Kobe Bryant		22.840.307		Kobe Bryant had a victorious basketball career that broke many records. And he also managed a landmark on Wikipedia, breaking the top week caused by Prince's death and also managing 20+ million views in 7 days, given people couldn't believe that the Black Mamba died at just 41 in a helicopter crash.
2	Coronavirus		5.230.882		From one tragedy to another, the group of viruses that has a new instance (#10) currently causing panic in China (#4).
3	Kobe Bryant sexual assault case		3.926.069		As people remembered our #1, the blemish in his life also emerged, a 2003 incident where a Colorado woman accused Kobe of rape. Prosecutors dropped the case.
4	2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak		2.982.102		The Chinese city of Wuhan was struck with a new kind of pneumonia which had neither a clear cause or an effective vaccine. It originated from a new kind (#10) of coronavirus (#2). Tens of thousands of cases have emerged so far, mostly in China, with 725 of them fatal, and all sorts of preventive measures have ensued.
5	Billie Eilish		2.215.950		The Grammies were swept by the "Princess of Anti-Pop", becoming one of the youngest winners and also the first to take the big four categories (Album, Song, and Record of the Year, and also Best New Artist) since Christopher Cross went sailing for this feat in 1981.
6	Royal Rumble (2020)		1.951.351		Houston hosted this WWE pantomime, featuring male and female versions of the title fight with 30 wrestlers, won by Drew McIntyre and Charlotte Flair (pictured), respectively.
7	Sikorsky S-76		1.491.193		Related to our #1, the helicopter which crashed (in fact, the article at #9 is now 2020 Calabasas helicopter crash); the whole incident that took the lives of Kobe, his teenage daughter Gianna, two of her teammates and their parents, a basketball coach, and the pilot; and his father, fellow basketball player "Jellybean" Joe Bryant (the nickname is why Kobe's middle name was Bean), who only lost one NBA Final while his son won five, and was coaching in Italy when he heard of the tragedy.
8	Joe Bryant		1.457.866
9	Death of Kobe Bryant		1.413.482
10	Novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV)		955.824		The possibly bat-originated virus (#2) that is causing chaos in China (#4).

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	About
1	Shakira		3,691,879		This here writer has known the Colombian co-headliner of the Super Bowl LIV halftime show ever since she was a brunette teen who sung only in Spanish, instead of the twerking blonde bombshell who lit up the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami. And the strength of her performance can also be seen in how Shakira beat Whenever, Wherever was in the actual game...
2	Patrick Mahomes		3,054,444		...such as the quarterback of the Kansas City Chiefs, who led a comeback in the final quarter that earned both the title and being chosen as Most Valuable Player of the game.
3	Kirk Douglas		2,557,820		One of the last surviving stars of the film industry's Golden Age – among other things, He was Spartacus! – Issur Danielovitch lived up to the age of 103, having many successes to his name and also a few descendants also in the acting business, most notably his oldest son Michael Douglas.
4	Jennifer Lopez		2,257,538		Along with our #1, the Super Bowl halftime had another Latin singer with impressive vigour and physicality for their age (J. Lo's 50, and Shakira is only 7 years younger!) and a performance heavy on sex appeal. Moral guardians complained.
5	2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak		2,230,933		The Chinese city of Wuhan was struck with a new kind of pneumonia without clear cause or effective vaccines, which was discovered as originating from a new kind of coronavirus (#8). Tens of thousands of cases have emerged so far, mostly in China, with 1,527 of them fatal, and all sorts of preventive measures have ensued.
6	Pete Buttigieg		1,668,177		The first openly gay presidential candidate in the US, the former sailor and mayor of South Bend, Indiana has won the first of many primaries (#9) – or at least tied with Bernie Sanders – to pick the Democractic candidate.
7	Andy Reid		1,493,503		For a long time, this American football coach was unable to win the big one. The Super Bowl victory has finally redeemed him.
8	Coronavirus		1,410,124		A type of virus (so called because in a microscope, they appear to be surrounded by a stellar corona) that encompasses many disease bringers, including the one currently causing panic with #5.
9	Iowa caucuses		1,248,434		The United States presidential primary season started with this Midwestern state known for its corn and other agricultural products.
10	Kobe Bryant		1,224,313		The impact of the "Black Mamba"'s tragic death, which made huge men cry, is still being felt.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	About
1	Parasite (2019 film)		5,196,541		February 9 was a particularly busy night for Sharon Choi, an aspiring filmmaker who acted during the Academy Awards as the translator for the crew of Parasite, a Korean dark comedy about class warfare that made history by becoming the first Best Picture winner not in English, while also gathering prizes for Director, Adapted Screenplay and International Film. The only thing missing from their night was Park So-dam stepping up to the microphone to sing this.
2	92nd Academy Awards		2,211,751		Speaking of the Oscars, which along with again being without a host this time also felt without direction – including Eminem performing "Lose Yourself" 17 years late – there were three awards for 1917 (one of them not very deserving), two for Ford v Ferrari, and prizes for Elton John, Toy Story 4, and the costumes of Little Women, while The Irishman got shut out in a bad night for Netflix (and director Martin Scorsese, caught napping during the aforementioned performance).
3	2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak		1,769,680		China is doing all it can to contain this disease, which with 1,775 deaths out of over 70 thousand cases, has already killed more people than SARS back in 2003–04.
4	Joaquin Phoenix		1,602,528		What do you get when you cross an actor nominated for playing Emperor Commodus, Johnny Cash and a man who fell in love with his phone with the role of a psycho that already provided an Oscar to one of his friends? He gets what he fucking deserves! And while thanking for his Best Actor prize, Phoenix had a heartfelt if a bit scattershot speech (apparently the cancel culture is as bad as the dairy industry...).
5	Renée Zellweger		1,300,910		In the 16 years after winning Best Supporting Actress for a hammy, rooster-killing and hilarious role in Cold Mountain, the once and future Bridget Jones had a very uneven career. But by playing Judy Garland in Judy, Zellweger got her second Oscar, this time for Best Actress.
6	XFL (2020)		1,175,197		February 8 marked the return of Vince McMahon's attempt to fill in the American football offseason with a league of his own. And go figure why this time he only chose one city without an NFL team, which received the St. Louis BattleHawks.
7	Caroline Flack		1,155,548		A British television and radio host who killed herself at the age of 40, a month prior to a scheduled trial hearing for allegedly assaulting her boyfriend.
8	Valentine's Day		1,105,343		The annual greeting-card and chocolate consumption holiday had never fallen out of the top 5 even in its worst years. But the entries pushed by our #2 proved too much.
9	Coronavirus		1,104,459		A type of viruses that cause respiratory infections, ranging from the common cold to the one causing panic in China (#3).
10	Birds of Prey (2020 film)		1,084,302		While she attended #2 given Bombshell got her a nomination, Margot Robbie was also starring in the top-grossing movie in the country, her return to the role of Harley Quinn in the entertaining and well-received by critics and fans Birds of Prey. Even if said box office intake has been sluggish, which can be attributed to high content ratings, #3 closing theaters in Asia, and the last Harley Quinn flick making viewers wary.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	About
1	Michael Bloomberg		1.865.322		A record $500 million was spent by the former Mayor of New York City in his presidential campaign, and yet his first debate appearance in Nevada was less than stellar.
2	Caroline Flack		1.774.503		This British television and radio host had a rough couple of months. In December 2019 she was charged with assaulting her boyfriend, tennis player Lewis Burton, and released on bail with the conditions that she would not contact Burton and would stand trial in March. Less than a month before the trial, Flack killed herself.
3	Parasite (2019 film)		1.560.205		Donald Trump might have complained about the Academy Awards recognizing a Korean movie and bragging about not having seen it, but many Americans thought otherwise and have decided to overcome their laziness for subtitled movies and give Bong Joon-Ho's movie a chance, resulting in Parasite entering the box office top 10 as a result.
4	Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo		1.249.835		Narcos: Mexico has returned, and thus again readers seek more on the Guadalajara Cartel founder played by Diego Luna.
5	Pop Smoke		1.163.293		One more name to the list of murdered hip hop musicians, as Bashar Barakah Jackson died at just 20 during a home invasion.
6	Tyson Fury		795.113		This awesomely named boxer finally had a rematch for a 2018 fight that ended in a controversial split draw, and this time had a technical knockout on adversary Deontay Wilder.
7	Sonic the Hedgehog (film)		765.770		After a badly received trailer that even forced a delayed release so the visual effects could be reworked, the live-action adaptation of Sega's mascot who has been a gaming icon since 1991 hit theaters... and instead of being yet another disastrous video game adaptation, surprised many by being simply fun (helped by having Jim Carrey in full manic mode as the hedgehog's nemesis Doctor Robotnik), and followed two movies in receiving mostly positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, while also taking the top of the box office from Birds of Prey and staying there for a second week (beating another movie of a man dealing with a computer-generated animal, The Call of the Wild).
8	Deaths in 2020		763.794		"Yeah, you better seek out another road 'Cause this one has ended abrupt, oh-oh Say Hello 2 Heaven, heaven, heaven..."
9	Ken Miles		727.814		Ford v Ferrari won two Oscars, so more people decided to give the movie a chance, and also research on the British driver portrayed by Christian Bale.
10	Billie Eilish		694.074		Already a big deal enough to sing at the Academy Awards (though she wasn't pleased by her performance; still, we're forever grateful for this reaction to unfunny banter), the young singer proved the power of her ASMR- like music with her theme song for the next James Bond movie, "No Time to Die", having hit #1 in the UK Charts.

• 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.

In most months, media reporting about Wikipedia fits into a theme. Reporters fixate on one topic whether it is disinformation, politics, or paid editing. It's all really one big story with each reporter giving their own variation on the theme. That's the way the media often works. No reporter wants to be left behind on the big story. This month nobody could agree on the big story. So much the better, we got some real news this month.

Wikipedian Michael Mandiberg makes the maps and explains their mysteries in "Mapping Wikipedia: An unprecedented data set shows where the encyclopedia's editors are, where they aren't, and why" in The Atlantic. The beautiful maps pack in the percentage of IP or anonymous editors out of the total households in every U.S. county. The overall pattern shows low editing in the Great Plains, the Deep South and Appalachia. Mandiberg convincingly relates this pattern to other geographical patterns relating to religion, population density, education, income, politics and race. Reading this article will help you learn about both Wikipedia and America.

"The Smithsonian Institution has released 2.8 million images" according to The Verge and Smithsonian Magazine. Another 200,000 images will be released this year, and the releases are expected to continue. For how long? Smithsonian Magazine coyly mentions that the museum's collections total 155 million objects.

The images released include both 2D and 3D files. Some of the flat images were uploaded to Commons long ago, but the newly released images are likely better quality, with jpg images of about 20 MB and larger TIFF images released for each image I checked. They are licensed CC-0. Wikipedians may be most enchanted with 2-D images of 3-D objects, images that are not otherwise easily found in freely licensed formats. The photo of Charlie Parker's alto sax is one example.

The material comes from all 19 of the Smithsonian museums, 9 research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo. Smithsonian Open Access is here. Wikimedia DC is working on a coordinated upload strategy.

"Did the Early Internet Activists Blow It?" by Mike Godwin, the WMF's general counsel from 2007–2010. Godwin covers a wide range of legal issues related to the internet in its early days. He has changed his mind a bit on some issues. For example he states "I no longer think that tolerance of disruptive speech is invariably the best answer, although, even now, I believe it’s typically the best first response."

The most important issue he covers is about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 generally gives internet platforms like Wikipedia immunity against liability for material added by its users. It also states that if a platform removes some material posted by users, it does not lose its immunity if it fails to remove similar material.

As Godwin states, the Supreme Court "voted unanimously to strike down most of the CDA, which was aimed at banning 'indecent' but otherwise legal pornography from the internet. Our victory left in place only the act's Section 230, which was designed to empower internet companies to remove offensive, disturbing, or otherwise subscriber-alienating content without being liable for whatever else their users posted. The idea was that companies might be afraid to censor anything because in doing so, they would take on responsibility for everything."

Section 230 is now a matter of political debate. Critics claim that it allows "too much free speech" such as disinformation and other forms of fake news. Former U.S. vice president and current presidential candidate Joe Biden is a well known critic of Section 230.

While Godwin now better understands some of the motivations of those who oppose Section 230, he still believes it is the best way to protect free speech on the internet and can even help protect us from disinformation.

"On Wikipedia, a fight is raging over coronavirus disinformation": Omer Benjakob writes in Wired about how Wikipedia's articles on the 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak began and have changed and interviews Doc James about the outbreak.

There are at least six articles about the outbreak. Over the 3 weeks ending February 6, there were over 18 million pageviews of these articles. To update Benjakob's numbers through February 26, add another 8 million.

While the surge in pageviews began about January 17, the 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak article was started on January 5. On the 9th the Novel coronavirus article was created. Other articles soon followed. The main article was edited 6,500 times by over 1,200 editors, according to Benjacob (as published on February 9).

Rumor and disinformation were a problem. Doc James told Benjakob that "the editing community often concentrates on breaking news events, [and therefore] that content rapidly develops. The recent outbreak of novel coronavirus has been no exception." Conflicts between medical and media reports were common and the main article now has a section on coronavirus-related disinformation.

• "Automated system can rewrite outdated sentences in Wikipedia articles" (MIT News). Can computers automatically update Wikipedia articles with natural-sounding language? This paper may be a large step toward that goal. To read the press release and several of the resulting news stories, however, such updating might be expected soon. Don't expect too much, too soon.
• "The World's Second Largest Wikipedia Is Written Almost Entirely by One Bot" (Vice): written by a Wikipedia admin about the Cebuano Wikipedia which has 99.12% of its articles written by Lsjbot.

• Unreliable in India? The Tribune reports that this year's Economic Survey of India, conducted by the Ministry of Finance, has collected data from Wikipedia as well as from more traditional sources such as the World Bank. Also reported by The Economic Times, who said Wikipedia is "not considered [a] reliable source of information" for a government report.
• The Indian Express reports that the Indian Central government intends to implement an Internet-wide filter system which requires large websites to rapidly comply with government takedown requests. Such a system would be incompatible with Wikipedia's accessibility in India.

Three very complimentary articles appeared this month. It's great that some people who are not aware of Wikipedia will have such a nice introduction. The articles may also help improve morale among editors. But something is missing. Perhaps it is some recognition that Wikipedia is a dynamic, evolving platform. Perhaps it's the complete lack of criticism. Perhaps it's just me, but the thrill is gone.

• "Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet": Wired presents a history of the public's view of Wikipedia which has gone from making it the punchline of bad jokes all the way to "muted criticism". The author, Richard Cooke, states on Twitter that this story is a love letter to Wikipedia. He covers his beloved from Nupedia all the way through to Wikidata concentrating on the cultural and emotional side of editing. His judgement on Wikipedians is generally sound and positive, with the only misstep being his admiration of our humor. He even tells several Wikipedia jokes. None deserve more than a muted chuckle.
• "How Wikimedia controls the chaos of constant contributions to create Wikipedia": from Digital Trends sends its own love letter to Wikipedia, with an emphasis on technology rather than humor.
• "The Good Internet Lives On" in Wikipedia according to Rachel Riederer in the The New Republic. She finds our hoaxes and vandalism to be endearing, at least in comparison to the slick hidden fake news of other sites on the internet. Wikipedia has "managed to remain fun and strange—a reminder of a time when the internet was quirkier, before (the internet's) captains were regularly hauled before Congress."

• Quora has a new collection, "Weird Wikipedia", about Wikipedia articles that its contributors consider to be unusual. Departing from the normal question and answer format, Quorans simply post a link to the article with a very brief description. The articles chosen are a mixed bag of nuts, including Antipodes, Boltzmann brain, Death by coconut, Toilet paper orientation, and Smoot. About 123,000 Quorans follow this collection.
• Mike Vago's long-running "Wiki Wormhole" on The A.V. Club is far superior in its selection of articles, writing style, and in making connection between articles. See e.g. "Adolphe Sax just couldn’t stop inventing instruments and naming them after himself".
• Not to be outdone, The Signpost has had its own series, WikiWorld, running from 2006–2008, with its take on Wilhelm scream being reprised in this issue's Humor column.

• Taking the Dot-Org takeover seriously: Sale of .org domain registry delayed by California attorney general (Mashable)
• "Turks are flocking back to Wikipedia" (Haaretz)
• Another blind spot: Grist, an environmentalist magazine, reports that Wikipedia is flooded with information — but it has a blind spot, specifically floods in the Global South. More specifically, the 2018 floods in Sudan. (Wikipedia does cover the 2018 East Africa floods and at least 13 other floods in 2018, but none in Sudan). Grist also provides more general coverage of the study Uneven Coverage of Natural Disasters in Wikipedia: the Case of Floods
• Black History Month:
  • Wikipedia Hip-Hop Edit-a-thon addresses lack of diversity in content and editors (qcitymetro.com)
  • Wikipedia 'edit-a-thon' at U of T helps fill online gaps in Canada's Black history (University of Toronto News)
• Other community building
  • Houston Matters (Houston Public Media), interviews Dr. Melissa Weininger of Rice University on women editing Wikipedia. Audio at 11:00-20:15
  • "Meet the Kiwis educating the world one Wikipedia page at a time" (stuff.co.nz)
  • "Israeli Librarians Win Global Wikipedia Competition" (Algemeiner Journal)
  • Ideas Beyond Borders pays 120 translators in the Mideast to translate Wikipedia articles to Arabic, reported by The Christian Science Monitor. (Project list)

• Dale Steyn doesn't know how Wikipedia works: India Today reported that South African cricketer Steyn tweeted "Can anyone from @google help me change the information of me on your Wikipedia? A pretty serious point of information is FALSE and I’d love to have it changed." . Following the tweet, 35 edits by 24 users over about 8 hours resulted in no change in the article, which was then semi-protected. Ok Dale, this is how it works: go to WP:BLPN and leave a message there saying who you are, what you'd like removed, and why. If you don't want that on the public record, write an email via "Contact us" giving them the same information, but any result will likely take longer. BTW, Google doesn't own Wikipedia and can't remove our content. That's ok, though Dale. I don't know how cricket works.
• MasterChef John Torode claims he had to use his Wikipedia page to help get a British passport (Metro): Australian Torode, who has lived in the UK since 1991 and appeared on UK television as a celebrity chef starting in 1996, says that he had to "provide all my tax receipts and everything’ to show who he was, yet he was recognised by fans at the Passport Office and ‘everyone wanted selfies".

I wrote this a year ago as a reflective essay. Rereading it a year on, it seemed worth sharing. –G

Just over a year ago, I was an inexperienced editor with a few hundred gnomish edits to my account. Although I didn’t realise it, I was about to plunge deep into the rich and varied ecosystem of Wikipedia.

In terms of personal experience I was not daunted. My experience had included hiring and firing people, going through a life changing illness, holding people while they died. I had lain alone on a rain-swept hillside wondering whether hypothermia or the rescue helicopter would arrive first. All of this turned out to be inadequate psychological preparation for being a Wikipedia editor.

I look back and wonder at my luck; there are so many ways to be deterred as a new Wikipedia editor, but somehow my enthusiasm fell upon fertile ground. My gnomish inclinations led me to GOCE, where no matter how inept I was it was almost impossible for me not to improve any tagged article I chose to work on. Being both ignorant and arrogant, the first ten articles I chose to work on included two FAC candidates. Possibly alarmed by this, GOCE assigned a mentor to me; almost endlessly patient and apparently omniscient on things Wikipedian. I cannot think of a better way to pick up an outline of the WP:MoS, Wiki-etiquette and how to communicate than to have a GOCE coordinator as a personal tutor.

This was just as well. As far as I have been able to determine, there is no basic guide to Wikipedia. After a couple of thousand edits, I worked out how to ping and reply correctly to pings. Until last month I didn't know that I could ping several editors simultaneously. I fumbled on, no doubt taking the long way around with many edits. While writing this I'm wondering what I will look back on and shake my head over next year. Ah well.

I then had the inexplicable good fortune to fall in with the Wikipedia Military History Project. I made a high proportion of the standard newbie errors and a couple of novel ones. I demonstrated a lack of awareness of myriad policies, guidelines and essays – not to mention a failure to realise that there was any difference between these three – and a pedantic tendency to take those I was aware of at their word. For example: if someone, at some stage, had assessed an article as meeting B1 then fine, it met B1; no need to waste time looking any further at the referencing. And so on, ad nauseum. This would probably have dropped me in deep trouble at many projects, and so have terminated my interest in Wikipedia. But the MilHist coordinators, bless them all, made huge assumptions of good faith.

Which brings me back to psychological preparedness. I was not accustomed to being the new member of an established group and the slow kid at the back of the class at the same time. Relying on the charity of others to metaphorically tie my shoelaces. It grated. This was entirely my own, fairly reasonable (I think), issue. Nor was I prepared for the casual offhandedness which is fairly common. Recently I suffered a mass revert with the edit summary "Learn some intellectual property law". This bluntness rankled. It was my issue rather than the reverting editor's, but that didn't help reduce the rankle. Since discovering MilHist I have stumbled around in this small corner of Wikipedia, occasionally bumping into helpful tools which I endeavour to clutch close.

The near complete lack of usable guides – IMO – to the basics is heavily compensated by the, usually, enormous willingness of complete strangers to spend time and effort correcting my idiocies, reducing my ignorance and remembering that they too were newbies once. Members of the Military History Project have collegially made the project a comfortable place to work in such a natural, even graceful, way that what they have achieved seems normal.

So here I am, 13 months on (not, note, rounded to "a year"; Wikipedia has taught me the joy of precision), a pillar, as it were, of the Wikipedia community: 16,000 edits, 45 good articles, 35 did you knows, 4 A class articles and even a featured article to my account; more barnstars than one could shake a reasonable-sized ego at; editors of a dozen years’ standing, and better writers than I shall ever be, stating "Gog the Mild recently copyedited it" in their FAC nominations. How come, if I am actually this good, I still don't know how to archive a web reference? Or even understand the instructions as to how to? Or can't get my Wikipedia email to work? Or understand the difference between an WP:RfC, an RfA, an RFD and an AfD? Or have just read the instructions for applying to be a new pages patroller for at least the fifth time without understanding anything after, and including, the second flow chart. Or can't even remember where Wikipedia prefers hyphens as opposed to where it requires them? (I don’t like hyphens, but strangely a gang of brownies follow my articles around, inserting them where necessary.) Trust me, none of these are even a little bit exaggerated for effect. Yet I have little doubt that on reading this several people I have never met, and never will, are going to send me instructions as to how to resolve each of these conundrums. Some of which, if the syllables per word count is low enough, I may even understand.

Editing Wikipedia can sometimes feel like a high octane version of real life, albeit with less risk of physical harm (although arguably more risk of the psychological variety); which in turn reminds me of Spider Robinson’s advice as to how to deal with life: "Just do the next thing". And so I shall, surrounded by a crowd of invisible strangers whose self-imposed task is to prevent me from stumbling, or to support me if I do. It is a strange and frequently frustrating journey, but I have learnt over the past year that I travel in good company.

Gog the Mild's newbie experience challenges many of the stereotypes about newbie experiences on Wikipedia. Perhaps he is atypical. Or perhaps there is no typical experience for newbies. Please let us know about your newbie experience in the comments section below.

Wikipedia's Alexa ranking has fallen from the 5th most popular website in early August to 13th most popular last week. The newly more popular websites are based in China as can be seen in our List of most popular websites (June 2019) and the current version of the article. Wikipedia's ranking in individual countries is holding steady – in the U.S. (7), the U.K. (7), Australia (8), India (6), and many other countries – but it does not appear in the top 50 in China, where access to Wikipedia is blocked.

Wikimedia Space is being shut down with its blog to be moved. The space was started in June with the big goals of becoming a news and discussion space for the entire Wikimedia movement. It was designed to encourage participation by being open to all languages, friendly, and safe. It was run and moderated by WMF Community Relations.

In practice it served mostly as an English language discussion site with a small number of participants, who were more diverse by nationality than you'd see on a single language Wikipedia. A blog space, which will be continued after a move, was a bit more successful.

The announcement of the closure is here.

An RfC that followed from last month's From the editor column asked the Wikimedia Foundation to enforce the Terms of Use against new violations by Status Labs. In 2013, the company - then known as Wiki-PR - was banned by the community, along with 250 sockpuppet accounts, in what was then the the largest paid editing scandal in Wikipedia history. The recent RfC was closed after four days with 100 editors supporting to 2 editors opposing.

On January 26, users in several geographical regions reported outages when trying to access Wikipedia. The official Wikipedia Twitter account announced later that day that "engineers have addressed the problems some readers had when accessing Wikipedia in the last day" without giving further details, but on her personal Twitter feed, WMF Executive Director Katherine Maher confirmed a user's assumption that the situation was caused by a DDOS (distributed denial of services) situation: "we are mitigating the current DDOS using a service from Cloudflare. We have been working on new DDOS resiliency but it isn't up and running yet."

As reported previously, back in September, a deliberate DDOS attack had prompted the Wikimedia Foundation to use a then-novel service by Cloudflare, which is apparently side-stepping some of the privacy concerns that have been associated with the company's traditional DDOS protection mechanism. No official information about the new setup has been posted yet and the September attack hasn't yet received the customary incident report, although in October, the WMF Communications team expressed "hope to have something for you in the next few weeks." In her January 26 Twitter conversation, Maher explained that "we decided against posting further information as doing so shares information that could increase exposure for a similar attack. We have been evaluating third party DDOS support services since the last outage, but weren’t going to share more until they go into deployment."

That said, at least the causes of January 26 incident were subsequently documented in an incident report posted two weeks later, explaining that "at 19:47 UTC [on January 26], the news of Kobe Bryant's death was announced. This caused a surge in both edits and page views, causing a stampede of [server] requests and a general slowdown". In 2009, the death of Michael Jackson had similarly caused technical issues (cf. Signpost coverage).

• The Affiliations Committee announced that Mehman Ibragimov has been newly appointed to the committee. Four current committee members were reappointed: Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, Sami Mlouhi, Olaniyan Shola and Émna Mizouni.
• New administrator: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Money emoji.
• Requests for bureaucratship: Three RfBs are currently running – Jo-Jo Eumerus (result due March 6), WereSpielChequers and SilkTork (results due March 3).

Last month, The Signpost marked its 15th anniversary by republishing Gamaliel's "A decade of The Signpost" written for the 10th anniversary of The Signpost. This month we extend that history by five years.

In January Gamaliel wrote his history of The Signpost. In the process he gave a short history of Wikipedia as well. Gamaliel and Go Phightins! were about to become co-editors-in-chief of The Signpost.

The year was soon dominated by articles on paid editing. Doc James wrote in February "Is Wikipedia for sale?" about paid editors and their customers connecting via the website Elance. These editors used disposable Wikipedia accounts, abandoning them after just one or two customers. Another advertiser stated that he was an admin.

The Wifione arbcom case resulted in a ban for the administrator who was a paid editor for a fake Indian university.

In March The ed17 interviewed a paid editor who was banned for pushing e-cigarettes. Piotrus followed with an op-ed "We are drowning in promotional artspam". Then the news broke that "Sony emails reveal corporate practices and undisclosed advocacy editing". Doc James's story was told by The Atlantic in August. The Orangemoody paid editing scandal followed with more than 400 accounts blocked.

Three new of members of the Board of Trustees were elected in June, Dariusz Jemielniak (Pundit), James Heilman (Doc James), and Denny Vrandečić (Denny) setting the stage for the events of late 2015 - early 2016.

"The English Wikipedia's misogynist infopolitics and the hegemony of the asshole consensus" was published in August. The op-ed looked at Wikipedia through the lens of sexual violence and states "Nothing makes Wikipedians more angry than a discussion of gender and feminism on Wikipedia."

There was good news in November when the Wikipedia community was awarded Erasmus Prize.

In the last week of December 2015 James Heilman was removed from the WMF's Board of Trustees by a vote of 8-2 of the trustees. No reason or cause was immediately announced.

The first Signpost issues of 2016 were dominated by reports on the "WMF's age of discontent". The removal of James Heilman from the WMF board, his complaints about a lack of transparency around the Knowledge Engine project, community objections to the appointment of Arnnon Geshuri to the WMF board, and plummeting WMF staff morale were prominent topics.

In early February, The Signpost established that the Knight Foundation had no objection to publication of the Knowledge Engine grant agreement – a document the WMF had withheld from the community citing donor privacy. The WMF published the grant agreement the next day; both it and additional leaked documents published by The Signpost were at odds with statements made by Executive Director Lila Tretikov. The fall-out made Lila Tretikov's position untenable. She resigned on February 25, and was soon succeeded by Chief Communications Officer Katherine Maher, initially named interim executive director. An interview with Maher was published in the next issue.

The Signpost ran into trouble in April 2016, when it published some April tomfoolery poking fun at Jimmy Wales and Donald Trump, resulting in an arbitration case and the eventual resignation of Editor-in-chief Gamaliel from both ArbCom and The Signpost.

In July 2016 we reported that the Board unanimously appoints Katherine Maher as new WMF executive director. In the same story, The Signpost announced a fortnightly publishing schedule. We managed two issues each month except for the single issues in October and December.

The rest of the year was uneventful in comparison, although in December The Signpost reported on the implosion of the German Wikipedia's ArbCom following the revelation that one of its members was a member of Alternative for Germany, a far-right political party.

In February we reported that "WMF Legal and ArbCom weigh in on tension between disclosure requirements and user privacy". WMF legal advised in regards to undisclosed paid editing that "if someone is editing for a company and fails to disclose it, an admin properly posting that person's company where it is relevant to an investigation is part of their job to help bring the account into compliance with those requirements". Eleven members of ArbCom countered that "being doxxed and treated in ways the community has defined as harassment is not a reasonable consequence of noncompliance with a website's terms of use".

The same issue reported on the Banc de Binary paid editing scandal in "Wolves nip at Wikipedia's heels".

There were no Signpost issues in March, April, and May as Editor-in-chief Pete Forsyth suddenly left his post. Evad37 stepped in as editor-in-chief and a total of 12 issues were published for the year. Following the June issue, single issues appeared every month except for September, when there were two. Readers stuck with The Signpost, however, with one article in the June issue on "Wikipedia's lead sentence problem" had 6,460 page views in the day following publication.

ACTRIAL, the autoconfirmed article creation trial started in September and was scheduled to last for 6 months. The WMF planned to study the impact on newly registered accounts, quality assurance processes, and content quality.

In November trouble surfaced as an administrator was desysoped and the case of Mister Wiki, who had worked briefly as a paid editor.

Wikipedia was back on its usual course at the start of the year, as represented by our "Interview with Ser Amantio di Nicolao". With over 2 million live edits at the time of the interview, Ser Amantio leads all editors in the number of edits.

But all was not well with The Signpost. Kudpung, who soon became editor-in-chief, published "Death knell sounding for The Signpost?" in March decrying the lack of volunteer writers and copyeditors. In the comments section of the article many ideas were offered on how to best continue publishing. The overall feeling was that, yes, somebody – somebody other than the commenter – should keep on doing the much needed work. Enough writers and copyeditors continued to show up, including Bri who shared editor-in-chief responsibilities with Kudpung for much of the year. We published 13 issues for the year.

In the same issue the "ACTRIAL wrap-up" reported that the autoconfirmed article creation trial had been completed with generally positive results. New article creation in mainspace had been limited for six months to autoconfirmed editors - those with at least 10 edits who had been registered for at least 4 days. In the April issue The Signpost reported the ACTRIAL results were adopted by landslide and implemented as a permanent restriction.

The April issue was especially large, with 17 articles including "Future directions for The Signpost" following up on March's "Death knell..." article.

In May, The Signpost received community consensus to begin using watchlist messages to alert readers that a new issue has been published.

Following Wikimania we interviewed the "2018 Wikimedian of the Year, Farkhad Fatkullin" reminding Signpost readers once again of the best of Wikipedia. Fatkullin tells us "one only learns by doing. Whenever one grows experienced, he or she usually smiles at the mistakes that were made along the way. So we better enjoy getting it wrong, not taking anything too seriously. The community will eventually get things right!"

Before the announcement of the Nobel Prize in physics there was no Wikipedia article on Donna Strickland, one of the three winners in physics in 2018, The seriousness of this "missing article" was underlined by The Signpost's response. Three authors debated "Wikipedia's Strickland affair" and Bradv, who had declined an earlier draft of the article, gave his views. Despite a wide ranging debate, almost all the participants agreed that there were some good reasons to decline the draft, and that Wikipedia could have done a better job on some aspects of the controversy.

Possible conflict-of-interest editing by then Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker was the focus of "Wikipedia not trumped by Trump appointee" in late December.

The February issue started a storm over "Pesky pronouns". Cries of "transphobia" on one side and "censorship" on the other resulted in the humour column being blanked via MfD. Editor-in-chief Bri voluntarily stepped down from that post following the brouhaha, and two other writers stopped contributing to The Signpost as well.

"Wikipedia's response to the New Zealand mosque shootings" in March showed how two communities, New Zealanders and Wikipedians, can come together in response to a tragedy.

A lengthy interview with Katherine Maher in April helped mark her three years as executive director.

The insertion of about 16 photos by a licensee of The North Face in May set off another undisclosed paid editing scandal. The North Face was roundly condemned by the WMF in a blog post which was then picked up by dozens of news outlets.

Wikipedia's biggest blowup of the year, Framgate resulted in several Signpost articles starting in June including "A constitutional crisis hits English Wikipedia". This author's "Did Fram harass other editors?" was deleted via CSD within one day of publication. The crisis dragged on for over three months as the WMF decided to give jurisdiction over its one-year block on Fram to ArbCom. ArbCom's final Solomonic decision vacated the block and allowed the community to decide if Fram would be reinstated as an administrator. One day after a Request for Adminship was started, the majority of !votes opposed the reinstatement, and Fram withdrew his nomination.

Coverage outside the English-language version of Wikipedia was highlighted from July through October which included "The French Wikipedia is overtaking the German", "The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia", "Chinese Wikipedia and the battle against extradition from Hong Kong", and three other articles about China.

Wiki-PR, now known as Status Labs, was "Caught with their hands in the cookie jar, again" in December, as extensively documented in The Wall Street Journal and December's Signpost special report. This six year old paid editing scandal continued through January 2020 and is still unresolved.

This article on the history of The Signpost turned out to be simply a history of Wikipedia focusing on The Signpost. Given our subject matter, it could not have been otherwise. Together with Gamaliel's ten-year history of The Signpost from five years ago, we now have a 15 year history of Wikipedia. We would like to extend this history to include, among other topics, the four year history of Wikipedia before The Signpost began publishing. If you would like to contribute a history of this period, please check out these data sources and contact us at our Suggestions page. The final word about any history of Wikipedia must include extensive input from the Wikipedia community. If you wish to comment on important Wikipedia topics from 2015–2019, please post them in the Comments section below.

Two long term administrators, RHaworth and Kudpung, were de-sysopped in February. Both results held individuals to account for their responsibilities to the community, including the norms of communication and special care required in their position. Arbitration Committee member Xeno in the Kudpung case suggested a need to dispel a blue wall of silence,^[1] while supporting a surprisingly controversial remedy that "the community is reminded that attempting to have a community-wide discussion of problematic behavior early on can prevent unnecessary escalations."

RHaworth was desysopped For his failure to meet the standards expected of an administrator, including repeated misuse of the deletion tool. He was made an administrator in 2005.

The Kudpung case closed on February 29. Of the 15 active arbitrators, 5 abstained or recused themselves for this case. This leaves the majority for the case under Arbcom rules as six. The most severe proposed remedy, "Kudpung desysopped", was adopted by the majority. An alternative was a suspended desysopping, under behavioral stipulations to retain the suspension – a novel proposal as far as we know at The Signpost.

The most significant findings of fact centered around thorny reactions generally, and two specific interactions with administrator, checkuser, oversighter, and arbitrator GorillaWarfare in particular. Kudpung has occasionally made remarks towards other editors that could be interpreted as personal attacks. In disputes with other editors, he has also made nonspecific threats of retaliating against or "investigating" the other party. The term proud women used by Kudpung^[2] was described by Arb Joe Roe as "well over the line".

Administrators' noticeboard (AN) cases prior to the current Arbcom case occurred in 2015, 2017, 2018, (which were closed without action), and the 2020 incident that was closed as resolved after this case request was filed in response. Arbitrators considered whether this constitutes a clean history with respect to prior dispute resolution, and whether absence of AN actions implies absence of cause for Arbcom actions up to and including de-sysopping. Multiple iterations of the "Previous attempts at resolution" section seemed to underline the difficulty in determining exactly what attempts at resolution actually occurred and what they mean now.

Kudpung, who was an administrator since 2011, spearheaded the RFA Reform initiative of 2011 (see previous Signpost coverage) and wrote passionately about the subject for The Signpost (see the Adminship series). He also was the force behind the initiatives leading to the articles for creation process (see previous Signpost coverage). He marked his userpage semi-retired on February 29.

• "Harrassment and wiki-hounding" case was initiated by Mclarenfan17 27 January 2020; respondent Tvx1 – Cas Liber among six arbs voting to take the case with rationale has taken place over five years suggest that our current dispute resolution mechanisms are not resolving it nor investigating conduct issues
• DeltaQuad was reinstated as bureaucrat and administrator on February 8, following the former Arbitration Committee member's sudden resignation in October 2019. She did not reply by our deadline to The Signpost's inquiry on whether she intends to return to her former position of ArbCom clerk.
• QuackGuru was blocked for three months under editor conduct in e-cigs articles discretionary sanctions.

This cartoon was originally published by Greg Williams on March 20, 2007, as part of the WikiWorld series. Text was excerpted from the Wikipedia articles Wilhelm scream and Sheb Wooley.

WikiWorld was a weekly comic, carried by the The Signpost, that highlighted a few of the fascinating but little-known articles in the vast Wikipedia archives. WikiWorld offers visual interpretations on a wide range of topics: offbeat cultural references and personality profiles, obscure moments in history and unlikely slices of everyday life – as well as "mainstream" subjects with humorous potential.