Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	Naya Rivera		3,919,003		On July 8, this Glee star was declared missing, presumed dead, after she didn't return from swimming in a lake. As of this writing, the search is still underway. While her co-stars from a near 30-year career send supportive messages that she will be found alive, Glee fans have noted that she would not be the first of the young cast to face a tragic death, with the latest entry being at #25.
2	Alexander Hamilton		3,692,204		This bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman became one of the founding fathers of the United States of America after using his wits to make the best of that situation. He was husband of #10, and killed by #5 (but probably not how it happened as portrayed by #6 in #3).
3	Hamilton (musical)		2,203,846		The 2015 musical about #2, #5 and #10, written by and starring #6 alongside #19 and #22, was recently released digitally as #21. It's proving popular on Wikipedia (no shit, Sherlock) as people around the globe realize they don't know very much about this important part of US history.
4	Nick Cordero		1,525,484		The second musical actor on this week's list is another not-Hamilton entry. It's a Waitress (theatre pictured) entry. Cordero died on July 5 from medical complications after being infected by #11 nearly four months ago.
5	Aaron Burr		1,244,169		Another historical figure featured heavily in #3 and #21, Burr ran away from the east coast after killing #2, only to be charged with treason a few years later. He was already charged with (though never tried for) murder, so hiding out in Europe for a few years and never returning to public office was probably a wise choice.
6	Lin-Manuel Miranda		1,116,135		If you love musicals, you'll love this guy, who wrote #3 (starring in it as #2) among others. If you don't like musicals, then this is the guy you blame for making Moana so catchy. You're welcome.
7	Ghislaine Maxwell		1,036,223		Slipping down the list from last week is the lady with the name all the newscasters pretend they can say. The recently-arrested associate of #13 was born in France, which is where the name comes from.
8	Mary Kay Letourneau		1,001,528		This sex offender recently died of cancer (pictured), with her husband/former student at her side. With such an old case, I assume that more recent high-profile cases of pedophilia like #13 contributed to the fascination getting her a million views this week.
9	Vikas Dubey		990,245		I can't say I know much about Dubey, but it seems he was a criminal who became a politician who became a criminal again, who got arrested this week before being released and then being involved in a traffic collision on July 10. Attempting to run away, he was shot dead. I can see why this has a lot of views now.
10	Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton		916,606		Making her way up the list is the philanthropist and socialite Eliza, wife of #2, who is currently known for #22's performance in #3 and #21, though her final power song does list the many accomplishments she achieved in her long life.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	Dil Bechara		992,310		This Indian film was released July 24; based on The Fault in Our Stars, their Ansel Elgort is played by recently-deceased actor Sushant Singh Rajput (#20). His love interest is played by Sanjana Sanghi (pictured).
2	Regis Philbin		990,535		The American television host and national treasure passed away on July 24. He spent many decades of his 88 years hosting every kind of show, holding the world record for most hours on US TV.
3	QAnon		903,777		This conspiracy is a mainstay of certain factions of Trump supporters. It is, then, talked about so much when discussing the president that everyone outside of these little groups has to come to Wikipedia to try and understand it. It's the belief that there is a covert anti-Trump group operating within the US government. And I thought that was just the Democratic party.
4	Deaths in 2020		878,394		Beyond the door there's peace I'm sure And I know there'll be no more Tears in Heaven
5	Alexander Hamilton		812,860		Founding Father, subject of Hamilton, was a great writer of his time. Our thanks to musical role originator Lin-Manuel Miranda.
6	John Lewis (civil rights leader)		769,352		The Freedom Rider died last week; the continued article views may be because the news is now making it to other parts of the world, where he wasn't known.
7	COVID-19 pandemic		731,002		This report would've probably been heavy on the 2020 Summer Olympics and Tenet if this year hadn't been totally derailed by SARS‑CoV‑2. 16 million people have been infected, with 645,482 of those cases fatal. The top two most afflicted countries are those with very unhelpful leaders, whose supporters are probably making things worse.
8	Folklore (Taylor Swift album)		695,294		The pandemic prevented musicians from touring, but not recording. A great example of this can be seen in how Taylor Swift took the postponement of her Lover Fest by doing a whole album in isolation, which was revealed only 16 hours before its release. Reviews are saying it may be her best album yet, which shows what can happen when you actually lock one of the 21st century's greatest songwriters at home for a few months.
9	Jeffrey Epstein		667,797		Though she's now missing from the list, Epstein's (perhaps literal) partner-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell was recently arrested. The news this week is that she's being moved from cell to cell while in custody, possibly to prevent an assassination attempt.
10	Cursed (2020 TV series)		609,204		Netflix continues to hold strong here, especially in these days of #7. This time it's an adaptation of a Frank Miller illustrated novel retelling the Arthurian legend through the eyes of Nimue as the Lady of the Lake – portrayed by Katherine Langford (pictured), who owes her career to another Netflix show.

• 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 the dog days of summer, the media often take a break from more serious stories and settle for topics that you might feel comfortable reading about at poolside. Not this summer though. There are three big stories that appear in almost every edition of every newspaper: COVID-19, racial tension, and politics, particularly about the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Stories about Wikipedia's fine coverage of the pandemic continue to be published, and stories on how politics interact with Wikipedia are all too common. Stories about Wikipedia and Black Lives Matter are just a bit rarer. Stories on conflict-of-interest or paid editing on Wikipedia are also common, when they intersect with the topics of the pandemic, politics, or race.

How volunteers created Wikipedia’s world-beating Covid-19 coverage in The Spinoff avoids being just another article praising Wikipedia's COVID-19 coverage by focusing on the effort in New Zealand. Mike Dickison, New Zealand's first Wikipedian at large, is interviewed and points out that COVID-19 pandemic in New Zealand has been viewed more than a million times. He states that Wikipedia's "got an immune system against falsehood, so it’s actually quite resilient to hoaxing and fake news and bad information."

Wikipedia, The Free Online Medical Encyclopedia Anyone Can Plagiarize: Time to Address Wiki-Plagiarism links to an academic paper by Michaël R. Laurent showing five cases of medical journals plagiarizing from Wikipedia. Unfortunately, Laurent's paper is paywalled.

UN recognises Malayali researcher's fight against COVID-19 misinformation in The New Indian Express.

There's a War Going on Over Kamala Harris's Wikipedia Page with Unflattering Elements Vanishing according to The Intercept. Harris is widely considered a front-runner to be chosen as Joe Biden's Vice Presidential running mate. They noted that Bnguyen1114 had edited the article on the potential Democratic vice-presidential nominee hundreds of times, with The Intercept suggesting that the edits would make her a more palatable candidate for progressive Democrats. We note that Bnguyen1114 says that he was doxxed on Twitter.

Bnguyen1114 later declared at WP:COIN that he has volunteered for several Democratic candidates' campaigns and many other details of his motivations in editing. "I mean seriously, I'm an open book, people." He was then topic banned from the article. There is little or no evidence that he is a paid editor.

Other coverage included the San Francisco Chronicle's online site SFGate and Fox News [1].

CNN on Wikipedia on Fox

Last week CNN reported on an RfC about Fox News's reliability as a source. CNN reported the three closers' RfC summary as "Use of Fox News in these two areas [science and politics], however, will be carefully scrutinized; it can still be used, but likely only when there are additional sources to corroborate or if it is clearly marked as opinion or biased. In other words, prior to this discussion an editor would need to make an argument why not to use a Fox News source, but now the expectation that any disputes will require the person wanting Fox to be the primary source/reference will have to make the argument for inclusion."

Arabella by Arabella?

Wikipedia's article on Arabella Advisors was being influenced by MaryGaulke, a paid editor, according to Lachlan Markay in the Daily Beast. Arabella, an organization funding liberal causes, had hired Gaulke. She targeted "excerpts on the page sourced to conservative news organizations and a leading good-government watchdog group." Gaulke has identified herself on her user page and on the Arabella Advisors talk page as being a paid editor but did not edit the article itself, consistent with Wikipedia's rules. On the talk page she requested the removal of parts of the article which were sourced from the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan watchdog group, the Washington Free Beacon, a very conservative newspaper, and the Daily Signal, the media arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation. Markay's story was picked up by the Washington Free Beacon. Markay previously worked for the Washington Free Beacon and the Heritage Foundation.

NYPD editing revisited

Gizmodo, following evidence provided by a Twitter bot @NYPDedits, states with few or no reservations, that IP accounts from the New York City Police Department have whitewashed Wikipedia's article on the department. The editing changed the large second paragraph of the article from text like:

"The NYPD has an extensive history of police brutality, misconduct, and corruption, as well as discrimination on the basis of race, religion and sexuality. Critics, including from within the NYPD, have accused the NYPD of rampantly manipulating crime statistics (“juking the stats”)."

to

"The NYPD has an extensive history of reducing crime in the most diverse city in the country. The Operation impact program, which placed new police officers in high crime areas to combat the growing street violence using the broken windows theory was reformed in January of 2014."

The Daily Dot reported on the same story the next day with almost the same level of certainty. The Signpost has rarely, if ever, seen a more obvious case of conflict of interest editing.

Capital New York published a similar story on the NYPD five years ago as Edits to Wikipedia pages on Bell, Garner, Diallo traced to 1 Police Plaza. The NYPD edits to the articles on Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo were more serious than even the current NYPD edits, according to Gizmodo, but that "the intent to erase wrongdoing on the part of cops is identical."

Is paid editing an ethics violation or a conflict of interest?

A report in the Charleston City Paper says that Sheriff Al Cannon of Charleston County, South Carolina hired an employee of the sheriff's office to write his biography on Wikipedia for $500, according to a July 7 report filed by Cannon's election campaign with the South Carolina Ethics Commission. Cannon's campaign paid the money to the office's social media coordinator according to his immediate superior, in an "off-duty capacity, not paid by county funds." Since the writer was off-duty, it appears that neither he nor Cannon violated South Carolina ethics laws. The author did declare a conflict-of-interest on his user page, and then on July 11 a declaration of paid editing. Cannon's election opponent, Kristin Graziano was forced to leave her job as sheriff's deputy by Cannon after he found out that she intended to run against him. Cannon wrote that the situation would create an "inherent and irreconcilable conflict of interest."

"Boris Johnson criticises Oxford decision to remove Rhodes statue" as reported in The Guardian. The governing body of Oxford University's Oriel College has voted to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said "If we go around trying to bowdlerise or edit our history in this way, it’s like some politician sneakily trying to change his Wikipedia entry." The Signpost requests that if the Prime Minister has any information on a politician trying to change "his Wikipedia entry", that Johnson should report this to us.

"Wikipedia war over Henry Dundas slavery role", in The Times (paywall). It's probably just an honest difference of opinion, but few edit wars on Wikipedia make it into The Times. In any case, the statue of Henry Dundas atop his column in Edinburgh looks a bit more shaky these days. Two Wikipedians prolonged the battle in the Times' comments section, focusing on the role of "squatters" (article ownership).

An IRA funeral

"Bobby Storey funeral: Wikipedia a battleground over IRA man’s memory as over 70 edits made". The funeral of Bobby Storey, IRA freedom fighter (as some insist) or terrorist (as others insist) prompted an edit war.

TechDirt presents a series of case studies on content moderation on different websites. This month two case studies about Wikipedia were added. Content Moderation Case Study: Can An Open Encyclopedia Handle Disinformation? (2005) about the Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident covers the case when John Seigenthaler, a respected journalist, was falsely accused of being involved in political assassinations in a Wikipedia article. TechDirt lists four decision options that Wikipedia could have made, as well as four questions on the implications of possible policy changes. Finally the controversy is described as partially solving itself by attracting many editors to the article. The ability of new editors to create articles was curbed and a new policy on biographies of living persons was created.

The second content moderation case study this month Dealing With Misinformation In Search (2004) is about googlebombing in which links to Wikipedia turn out to be a small part of the solution.

A case published in 2019 The Wikimedia Foundation Asks The European Court Of Human Rights To Rule Against Turkey's Two-Year Block Of All Wikipedia Versions was written at the time the WMF took Turkey to court. The resolution - that the WMF won the case and all Turks were allowed access to Wikipedia sites - must have surprised the case writer, who viewed the court case as a symbolic or superficial response, bound to fail as a practical matter.

"Google Search Upgrades Make it Harder for Websites to Win Traffic". Google's search results now include more paid ads and more links to other Google sites, with more than half of the searches sending readers to another Google site. Their parent, Alphabet Inc., had 2019 revenues of $162 billion and 2019 net income of $34 billion. This situation is making it harder or more expensive for advertisers, SEO firms, and other business websites to attract traffic. It may also be getting harder for Wikipedia. "Wikipedia managers", likely meaning WMF staffers, are worried that Wikipedia has not always been properly credited as the source of Google's knowledge panel: "We regularly consider the impact of third-party use of Wikipedia’s information, especially as the public increasingly consumes content outside our sites .... we’ve worked with Google over the years to improve the way they credit content from Wikipedia in the knowledge panel so that the public clearly knows when they’re reading information from Wikipedia," according to an anonymous "manager" quoted by Bloomberg News (via AdAge [2]).

• "You Can Download the Entirety of English Wikipedia to Browse Offline" in Vice. A new 89 GB snapshot is available, compatible with an offline browser.
• Smithsonian Institution promotes editathons "Women in Science on Wikipedia" (SI Archives blog, July 7).
• Bollywood time travel? "Here's the truth behind Sushant Singh Rajput's Wikipedia page 'revealing his death before it happened'" in DNA India. The truth is that Wikipedia edits are recorded using the UTC time code, not local Indian time.

A new project, Abstract Wikipedia, was announced. The project, in a preliminary form, was described by Denny Vrandečić in an article in The Signpost, in the April, 2020 issue.

Wikipedia Weekly continues its series of videos about current issues in the Wikipedia/Wikimedia universe. Two recent shows, which are now hosted on Commons, accompany this story. Today's edition will take place on YouTube about one hour after publication of The Signpost. Tune in then to participate, or tune in later to see the results of the discussion on the topic Wiki Movement Year by Year, Wikimania 2005 Flashback.

• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of the newest Wikimedia movement affiliates:
  • Wikimedia Community User Group Sudan
  • ​Helping Give Away Psychological Science (HGAPS)
  • Para-Wikimedians Community User Group
  • WikiBlind User Group
• New Affiliation Committee members were appointed:
  • Başak Tosun
  • Jeffrey Keefer
  • Bunty Avieson
  • Suyash Dwivedi
  • Ravan Al-Taie
  • Camelia Boban (re-appointed)
  • Anthony B. Diaz joined as a new adviser.
• New administrator: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator Red Phoenix.
• Hoax mix-up: The Battle of Ceber was briefly deleted on 6 July after being accused of being a hoax, before being restored as merely having no references. A good reminder to ensure your articles have at least one reference to avoid trigger-happiness...
• Our sex symbols are gone: The AfD for List of sex symbols (4th nomination) put the coup de grace on the huge list which had existed since 2004 with a brief break in 2006 after a previous deletion. The page's large revision history meant that the deletion required steward rights. Around the time of the deletion nomination, the list had more than 1000 entries and 1446 citations.
• Oops, I did it again: Another round of forced logouts reported by WMF on July 9 due to "fail[ure] to cover some cases" in the response to last month's security incident
• Citizendium transferred: Larry Sanger announced a change in ownership of the Citizendium domain names, as its contributors continue to discuss shutdown (see previous coverage in The Signpost)

Macruzbar formerly worked for the Wikimedia Foundation, as the communications lead in the Community Engagement department. She now works in the Google Open Source program office, where she leads the community engagement program.

An authority, according to Clay Shirky, "is a person or institution who has a process for lowering the likelihood that they are wrong to acceptably low levels." (see full quote at right). Do you want to develop into such an authority? Do you want to review other people's edits, using scores from ORES while helping to improve the ORES edit quality prediction model? WikiLoop DoubleCheck helps you do this by making the peer-review process of Wikipedia a collaborative effort that anyone, including non-registered users, can use. It is an open-source, crowd-sourced counter vandalism tool for Wikipedia and Wikidata. WikiLoop DoubleCheck is built on web technology and can be launched quickly from either desktop or mobile phone without installing resident software. Its goal is to reduce the barriers for editors to assist in patrolling Wikipedia revisions.

WikiLoop is an umbrella program for a series of technical projects intended to contribute datasets and editor tools from the technical industry back to the open knowledge world. This program was originally conceived as a virtuous circle: providing data and tools to enhance human editor's productivity, and making the Wikipedia editorial input more machine-readable for open knowledge institutions, academia and researchers interested in advancing machine learning technology. It originated at Google as the missing link in the data loop: the Knowledge Graph relies on the open knowledge source to be healthy. This is the reason why the program focuses its efforts on editor tools that can improve the content quality of Wikipedia.

Learn more about the program on its page on Meta. You can also try the tool now, and leave feedback or comments on the tool's talk page on English Wikipedia.