Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	Kamala Harris		11,843,595		California lawyer and senator who was announced this week as the Democrat VP pick with running-mate #9. She was a popular choice, had a brief presidential campaign last year, and brings the rest of her family to the list. In the days after her selection, birtherism was reborn: though she was definitely born in California, with an American father, she is not white, which is enough to send certain people into discredit mode.
2	Shyamala Gopalan		1,851,954		As a result of #1 being chosen as a VP candidate, attention was brought in for the whole family – in order, her mother, her sister (above), her father, and her husband (below).
3	Maya Harris		1,644,390
4	Donald J. Harris		1,640,562
5	Douglas Emhoff		1,427,685
6	QAnon		1,370,205		Marjorie Taylor Greene, a vocal supporter of Q, won a primary to a safe seat in the United States House of Representatives on Tuesday. Trump twote in support the next morning, leading to a question in a briefing. Trump sidestepped it, without mentioning Q.
7	The Umbrella Academy (TV series)		986,180		Netflix released the second season of this a little while ago, setting the apocalypse in Dallas. The moral of the story seems to be that even when you try really hard, you can still get everything wrong? That, or join a cult.
8	Joe Biden		836,439		While current president Trump has spent a lot of time on this list, the Democrats are presently occupying a lot of the top 10. Biden is Trump's competition as the countdown to November's election continues. He picked a running mate, #1, this week.
9	Gunjan Saxena		814,894		An Indian female air force pilot, a movie about her life (where she's played by actress Janhvi Kapoor, pictured) was released August 12 on Netflix.
10	Deaths in 2020		813,025		They call me The Seeker I've been searching low and high I won't get to get what I'm after Till the day I die

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	Kamala Harris		2,523,180		The 2020 Democratic National Convention was a four day television event taking place from Monday to Thursday, with an average audience of 21.6 million viewers. While the real stars of the show were Biden and Harris, viewers got to see appearances from all of their favorite characters from the Democratic primaries, and even a few teasers for the 2024 arc.
2	Joe Biden		1,852,528
3	QAnon		1,379,518		QAnon stands alone as the only major conspiracy theory that's supportive of the government. Imagine if David Icke thought there were lizards controlling everything and he openly campaigned to become one of them. Imagine somone thinking that the CIA killed Kennedy but also thanking them for it. Bizarre.
4	Jill Biden		1,252,629		#2's wife (and potential First Lady) appeared in a pre-taped video at the DNC on Tuesday night, talking about how capable of a president her husband would be.
5	Elon Musk		980,785		In my skim of the news, Musk is doing something in Texas and has a new brain chip?
6	Donald Trump		847,079		Is seeking re-election.
7	Deaths in 2020		800,303		And when you're gone, who remembers your name? Who keeps your flame? Who tells your story?
8	Beau Biden		775,600		The last night of the DNC featured a tribute to the late son of #2 and Neilia Hunter, who died of brain cancer in 2015.
9	Ronald Koeman		767,192		FC Barcelona isn't what it used to be: when faced with Bayern Munchen in the shortened\empty 2019–20 UEFA Champions League knockout phase, the usually victorious Spanish squad received an 8-2 thumping! Such a humiliation led to the dismissal of their coach, and in comes a Dutchman who was an old idol of the team, Ronald Koeman, most recently manager of his country's national team.
10	Betty Broderick		749,527		Netflix released season 2 of Dirty John, which tells some of Broderick's story – she, played there by Amanda Peet (pictured), killed her ex-husband and his new wife in 1989, and is still in jail for it.

• 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.

Journalists often report on the workings of the large Wikipedia community by focusing on a few individuals. It's an old storytelling technique – older than Homer – that lets the audience identify with the "main actors" in a complex situation and draw general conclusions starting from the specific details embodied by the individuals. But does this technique reflect the true complexity of the Wikipedia community where so many editors interact? And what happens when the editing community is not so large?

"Covid-19 is one of Wikipedia’s biggest challenges ever. Here’s how the site is handling it." The Washington Post examines Wikipedia's response to the pandemic focusing on the contributions of individual editors who they identify as Jason Moore, Netha Hussain, and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight. Moore helped organize WikiProject COVID-19. Hussain, a doctor and researcher, wrote about COVID-19 and pregnancy. Stephenson-Goodknight wrote about fashion and the pandemic. They all contributed to the overall effort.

Our readers have likely seen articles like this before, though the Post does an exceptionally good job. Over a dozen articles in The Signpost have reported how Wikipedians have been affected by and reacted to the pandemic, including in our columns "Project report", "Community view", "Gallery", "Recent research", "Traffic report", "News from the WMF" and "From the editors". This column, "In the media", has reported over 7 months on about twenty stories published off-Wiki about Wikipedia's response, starting with Omer Benjakob's groundbreaking story published in Wired on February 9. Almost all these stories are highly complimentary to several individual editors, who deserve the recognition. Almost all report on the contributions of a broad segment of the community, which perhaps deserves even greater recognition.

"Why Wikipedia Decided to Stop Calling Fox a ‘Reliable’ Source" Noam Cohen in Wired traces Fox News's fall from the esteemed heights of being considered a "generally reliable" source on Wikipedia in the areas of science and politics. Starting with a series of challenges to Fox's reliability in the article Karen Bass by editor Muboshgu, Cohen ends with the reasoning of admin Lee Vilenski

We don’t have to assume that Fox is acting in good or bad faith—we simply need to assess if we can trust the information being provided. In this case, a lot of users suggested using our policies that it couldn’t be trusted enough to be 'reliable' for these two topics.

In other words, Wikipedians simply needed to rationally reassess Fox's record in these two areas. It's compelling reading, and he accuses Wikipedians of being "old-school" and even of having "integrity". But many Wikipedians have distrusted Fox's reliability since the beginnings of the project. More likely this distrust simply grew stronger as time passed. Or perhaps the political balance of editors has changed over the years. Thanks for the kind words, Noam.

In "The Wikipedia War That Shows How Ugly This Election Will Be" (August 13), The Atlantic examines the reactions to then-presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden naming Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate for the 2020 U.S. Presidential election. According to The Atlantic, several news sources, including Fox News, have crossed a line in their reporting on Harris. Perhaps the worst offender was an op-ed, now denounced by its publisher Newsweek, which argues that Harris is not eligible to run for the office which requires being a "natural born citizen". The author of the op-ed, John C. Eastman, doesn't question that Harris was born in Oakland, California, but was expounding on a novel theory of the meaning of "natural born citizen". According to Newsweek, this questioning of her eligibility is now being used by others to support the "racist lie of Birtherism" that was used against Barack Obama.

Wikipedia's reaction was fairly quick in reporting Biden's naming of Harris. Questioning Harris's racial identity and a sexist slur soon followed. One editor was banned. Within 45 minutes of the announcement, the article had been updated, vandalized, corrected, and semi-protected. The questioning of Harris's African American identity then moved to the talk page.

See News and notes for the main story on the Scots Wikipedia incident

"A Teen Threw Scots Wiki Into Chaos and It Highlights a Massive Problem With Wikipedia" is about the language editions of Wikipedia that are supported by smaller editing communities that are vulnerable to problems that can go undetected in these communities. One example cited by Gizmodo is the Croatian Wikipedia, whose admins have come under criticism for wide-ranging instant bans of editors who disagree politically with them. An article in The Signpost alerted the broader Wikipedia community to the problem, but an RFC is still pending a Steward close. Another example from Gizmodo is the Cebuano Wikipedia, the second largest Wikipedia by article count, yet almost entirely written by a non-native speaker from Sweden using a bot. A healthy community is essential to check the sanity of contributions and keep order, yet a look at List of Wikipedias shows that only 28 out of 313 language editions of Wikipedia have had more than 1000 active editors in the past 30 days. Only 80 editions have more than 100 active editors. Considering that many of these "active" accounts are bots, spammers, or passing admins banning the spammer, that's a lot of editions that need some love and care - both from enthusiasts and native speakers.

FT Alphaville (not paywalled) describes "something like an 'edit war'" on the article about Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple Labs. Ripple is in the business of transferring money across borders using its own cryptocurrency. Garlinghouse was caught off-Wiki saying that SWIFT, a leader in the field of cross-border money transfer, had a 6% error rate – a claim which has been convincingly refuted. He has also had some legal difficulties. A controversy section which described these facts was removed several times, first by an anon whose IP address geolocates to a city near a known Ripple business address, then by a logged-in user who FT-A suggests may be a Ripple employee.

David Gerard, a Wikipedia administrator and noted cryptocurrency skeptic, reverted the removal of information about Garlinghouse four times over the course of three weeks, following a similar number of edits by others over two months. He was quoted saying

It’s not clear precisely who did this but, if it looks like corporate whitewashing and quacks like corporate whitewashing, then we’ll treat it as such.

The Signpost completely concurs with Gerard’s judgement on this matter. Cryptocurrency is a type of private token, something like money, issued on the web with a Rube Goldberg mechanism used to verify transactions. These digital wooden nickels have been commonly used in money laundering and other criminal transactions, and extensively advertised on Wikipedia. There are many more articles about cryptocurrency on Wikipedia that have suffered from whitewashing much more than this one.

The WMF published Wikimedia Foundation kicks-off fundraising campaign in India on August 5 and many Indian newspapers closely repeated the story, including Inventiva, News 18, The Quint and Live Mint. The Indian Express went well beyond the press release/blog, writing that "Its balancesheet however, tells a different story. According to a Wiki page on its fundraising statistics, the website was able to raise $28,653,256 between 2018-2019, bringing its total assets to $165,641,425. The previous financial year, it garnered $21,619,373 — a marked rise from the $56,666 it earned through donations in 2003."

• Did aliens build the pyramids?: Elon Musk has been in the media before, commenting on the Wikipedia article about him. For his second act, Indian Express reported that he tweeted claiming that the Pyramids were created by aliens, and trying to back up his claim in a different tweet by quoting the Wikipedia article about the Great Pyramid of Giza. USA Today reported on the same tweets, but questioned Musk's seriousness rather than his sanity. According to BBC, these tweets caused Rania Al-Mashat, Egypt's Minister of Tourism, to respond to Musk on Twitter that the pyramids were in fact not built by aliens, and invited him to view tombs of the pyramid builders in Egypt. J

• The third time's the charm: "Please trash me on Wikipedia, I’m begging you": Musk's latest tweet about Wikipedia might have caused a trash storm, if the article hadn't been extended protected only 4 edits after the tweet. The silliness moved to the talk page soon after that.
• Google: Links From Wikipedia Does Nothing For Your Site & Has No SEO Value according to John Mueller of Google, quoted in Search Engine Roundtable, who wrote about businesses inserting a link into Wikipedia. "All you're doing is creating extra work for the Wikipedia maintainers who will remove your link drops. It's a waste of your time and theirs."
• How to get a Knowledge Panel for your brand, even without Wikipedia: According to Search Engine Land about half of all of Google's Knowledge Panels use information from Wikipedia. But what should a business do to get this free advertising from Google if they can't create a Wikipedia article? They should try to create their own "independent" and "trustworthy" content on other sites, such as Wikidata!
• Edit-a-Thon sheds light on LGBTQ life in the Lowcountry. From ABC News Chanel 4, Charleston South Carolina, covering Wikipedia gaps in South Carolina Lowcountry content.
• "Wikipedia Updates Radio Infoboxes": The story in Radio World was written by Wikipedian Tcr25 and suggests that stations check the info in the box, and avoid conflicts of interest. An RfC had just completed an overhaul of infoboxes for radio and television stations.

The Scots Wikipedia is a quiet, sleepy, low activity edition of Wikipedia written in the Scots language, the Anglic language traditionally spoken in the lowlands of Scotland. Nobody paid it much mind... until August 2020, when a Reddit thread entitled "I've discovered that almost every single article on the Scots version of Wikipedia is written by the same person – an American teenager who can’t speak Scots" spread across the Internet. This young volunteer, who dedicated a large amount of time over seven years to translating segments of the English Wikipedia into Scots, unfortunately seemingly was never told that maintaining English sentence structure and translating words 1:1 from a dictionary is no way to translate at all. Further investigation showed the quality problems ran deep: articles untouched by the prolific user in question also had poor quality and ungrammatical Scots, meaning that many more articles on Scots Wikipedia may be essentially worthless. The author of the Reddit post called the incident "cultural vandalism on an unprecedented scale" and wrote that "This is going to sound incredibly hyperbolic and hysterical but I think this person has possibly done more damage to the Scots language than anyone else in history."

The story hit the news media, for both high and low reasons. For the high road, this was a massive and notable failure of Wikipedia, one that has likely poisoned training data sets for the Scots language used by translation algorithms, and led any curious human readers to think that Scots is simply English in an accent with a few funky words thrown in. For the low road, the hobbies and naivety of the prolific user were mocked. Some of the notable coverage includes:

• Alleged Teen Brony Has Filled the Scots Wiki With Thousands of Fake Translations (Gizmodo)
• Shock an aw: US teenager wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia (The Guardian)
• Scots Wikipedia taken over by American teenager who wrote thousands of 'very odd' articles without learning language (i)
• How a Scots Wikipedia scandal highlighted AI’s data problem (Quartz)

Several of the tabloid-style sources omitted from this list got the story essentially wrong, confusing Scots with the Scottish Gaelic language, suggesting that the user might have just been writing in silly Groundskeeper Willie-ese, or that the user's admin status was relevant (a status much-misunderstood by the media). The problem was the user's edits: there has been no allegation of misuse of admin tools.

Within the Wikipedia community, several actions were kicked off. User:MJL, the only other active admin on Scots Wikipedia at the time, boldly set up their own "AMA" (short for 'Ask Me Anything') on the Scotland Subreddit to explain the situation as well as solicit interest in potential fixes for Scots Wikipedia. The prolific user apologized for his mistakes after being informed of his lack of proficiency in Scots and has withdrawn from editing for now. Various split discussions eventually coalesced into an RFC on Meta-Wiki: meta:Requests for comment/Large scale language inaccuracies on the Scots Wikipedia. The current short-term course of action with the most support seems to be having a bot perform some sort of mass rollback of affected articles if they meet criteria (which are still being determined), enlisting new admins, and some proposals for other new bots.

The long-term solution requires understanding how this disaster happened in the first place. On Wikipedia user page language templates, the prolific contributor only marked himself a 2/5 and a 3/5 (changing over time) at Scots proficiency in the first place. If he was really that bad at Scots – more like a 1/5 – how did nobody notice? The answer: there simply wasn't anyone to notice. To the extent there ever was an authentic Scots-speaking Scots Wikipedia community, it had departed by 2012. The contributor's contributions were "Scots-y" enough to keep non-native speakers paying mild attention to the wiki from realizing the extent of their problems, and the user himself was a young kid when this started, clearly without the best self-awareness. If even one or two native Scots speakers had been active, they could have sounded the alarm, long before seven years had passed of wasted, counterproductive effort. The fundamental problem at Scots Wikipedia is the lack of a Scots-speaking community of editors. Perhaps not only bad things have emerged from the incident: the burst of attention has drawn the attention of Scots language groups. If the end result is to expand the Scots Wikipedia community, then perhaps something good will have come of this. –Sn

In early July, the Wikimedia Foundation announced the creation of the Interim Trust & Safety Case Review Committee (CRC), designed to allow appeal of certain less clear-cut cases decided by the WMF (both on-wiki and event bans), including appealing against a decision by T&S not to act on a complaint. A charter, a public call for applicants, and a Q&A with WMF Vice President of Community Resilience & Sustainability Maggie Dennis were also created. The CRC charter sets out the scope, objectives, and minimum candidate requirements.

The CRC is specifically temporary, designed to terminate with the creation of a permanent process as part of the Universal Code of Conduct. If those discussions have not concluded by July 1, 2021, then a new candidate call can be made for a new term or a single up to six-month extension can be granted if there is a clear indication the process will wrap up by then (such as if an implementation date has been agreed).

Process: Maggie Dennis responded to a question: "Let's say user FooBar is blocked as a T&S office action and requests case review [...] What does the appeal process look like, both from FooBar's perspective and the review committee's perspective?"

Subject to process changing by the CRC, a rough outline was offered as follows:

1. User emails inbox asking for a review
2. WMF attorney confirms case is not within remit of "statutory, regulatory, employment, or legal policies", and so is subject to review
3. User is notified it is under review and given likely timeline
4. CRC Chair appoints 5 members who review the case for "appropriate handling; appropriate collection of evidence; appropriate outcomes"
5. Members vote on whether to support, overturn (partially or fully), or return to the WMF for additional investigation
6. WMF enacts that decision
7. All involved users will be notified of decision

Overturning could occur on two main grounds: the sanction was inappropriately reached (the evidence didn't warrant the sanction) or the case did not fall within the T&S remit. This would indicate that a complaint could then be resubmitted at local community level (Arbitration Committee, Administrators' Noticeboard/Incidents (ANI) or equivalents). The publicly available documentation doesn't make it clear if a case could be simultaneously overturned on both grounds and whether that would still allow for a "double jeopardy" situation. Individuals may only make a single appeal per prohibition.

Candidates: the WMF imposes a number of eligibility requirements, including holding a current or prior advanced permissions role or an experienced contributor as part of a Wikimedia affiliate. Candidates also need to be members in full good standing with no current sanctions and be fluent in English. Several roles were viewed as exclusive, including current/former WMF staff. The en-wiki Community has decided to disallow currently serving arbitrators from acting as CRC members, which Maggie Dennis said would be accepted. Gender and lingual diversity were also sought, the latter most likely also driving a project diversity.

CRC members are intended to be able to spend up to five hours a week on the role, though there were repeated statements that it was anticipated to be less.

One particular requirement was part of a major theme: anonymity. As well as keeping all case information to themselves under a currently non-published reinforced non-disclosure agreement (NDA) – above and beyond the standard non-public information agreement – candidates made anonymous applications and are to keep both others' and their own membership secret. A number of changes were made after applications closed due to "negotiation between committee finalists and Deputy GC", including further limiting CRC membership knowledge to only three Board members but giving retired CRC members the right to self-disclose after 6 months.

The initial filter of applications was made by non-applying Stewards, with members chosen from that group by the WMF General Counsel Amanda Keton. The WMF is also hiring a contractor to support the committee.

Reporting: the CRC is to provide quarterly generalised reports (number of cases ratified, number of cases overturned). It's not clear whether additional information will also be provided, such as number of cases T&S prohibits from going to appeal. –Nbb

• IRS form 990: The WMF has released its Form 990, the major financial filing required of US non-profit organizations, for the year ending June 2019. Links to other WMF financial documents and to a FAQ on Form 990 can be found here.
• New administrator: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Eddie891, who has the additional distinction of being a Signpost staffer.
• Wiki Loves Monuments during the pandemic: WLM will be held this year despite all the difficulties posed by the pandemic. About half of the 40 participating countries will be holding the contest during September, according to the usual schedule. Other countries, including Brazil, Russia, and the United States, will hold the event during October. Bangladesh is scheduled for November and Israel for the month of Tishrei.
• Milestones: Adam Cuerden is expecting to mark his 500th Featured picture today. Congratulations.

Amendment requests adjusting one editor's editing restrictions are not discussed here.

• Pseudoscience – outcome pending as of publishing deadline

Arbcom member DGG included this statement in his decision: [This case has] helped me settle my position on the more general question of DS (discretionary sanctions): I would abolish them, and then there would be no more such questions. among other merits of terminating the procedure, is that it leads to inappropriate requests for us to involve ourself in deciding content. What is within the scope of arb com is to end the concept of DS, and the only reason I do not now propose it by motion is that I do not think it would have a majority yet.

• Palestine-Israel articles – outcome: new editors may not request a page move
• Brahma Kumaris – outcome: article probation terminated
• Genetically modified organisms – outcome: remedy 2 changed:

2) Editors are prohibited from making more than one revert per page per day on any page relating to genetically modified organisms, agricultural biotechnology, and agricultural chemicals, commercially produced agricultural chemicals and the companies that produce them, broadly construed and subject to the usual exemptions.

• Case request by Danielklein declined 13 July
• Case request by AranyaPathak declined 17 August
• Case request by Jenhawk777 withdrawn 21 August

• Lightbreather unban unsuccessfully appealed

As part of Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Lightbreather, Lightbreather (talk · contribs) was site banned and subject to several restrictions. Following an appeal to ArbCom by email, a motion to unblock Lightbreather and lift the restrictions was posted for discussion on-wiki. The request was closed 18 July after Arbcom decided not to reverse the ban.

• Arbitration Committee noticeboard: changes to functionary team