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

On September 23, at the general assembly meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva, Switzerland, the Chinese government's delegation blocked the Wikimedia Foundation from joining WIPO as an observer. The incident was reported by Quartz ("Beijing blocked Wikimedia from a UN agency because of 'Taiwan-related issues'") and news media in various other languages (for example, ZDNet France [1], Der Standard [2] and Netzpolitik.org [3]).

As summarized by Quartz,

... the Beijing delegate said that China had “spotted a large amount of content and disinformation in violation of [the] ‘One China’ principle” on webpages affiliated with Wikimedia, thereby contravening established UN protocols and “the consistent position of WIPO on Taiwan-related issues.” The Beijing representative also suggested that Wikimedia Taiwan has been “carrying out political activities… which could undermine the state’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” [...] Beijing claims sovereignty over Taiwan, even though the ruling Communist Party has never controlled the country.

According to one eyewitness, Teresa Nobre of Communia,

This decision came as a shock to many observers of WIPO, since there has only been one case in recent memory where an observer status application to WIPO has not been accepted. In 2014, the Pirate Party International was rejected due to being a federation of political parties.

Beijing has long been known for its efforts to prevent Taiwan or Taiwanese organizations from participating in global associations (such as the World Health Organization, or, as a recent example, BirdLife International). However, excluding an international organization like WMF for such reasons seems highly unusual, with the US delegation pointing out "the established precedent at WIPO of supporting other existing observers and Member States that also have some affiliation with Taiwan. For example, the International Chamber of Commerce, the International Law Association, the Biotechnology Industry Organization ..."

Wikimedia Taiwan reacted with a statement emphasizing its status as an independent organization and its commitment to neutrality, stating "we fairly display all points of view of a controversial topic, not the point of view from any particular country or government". The Wikimedia Foundation urged China to withdraw its objection, which would enable the application to go through next year.

On the Publicpolicy mailing list, Sherwin Siy from the Wikimedia Foundation gave some background about its motivations for joining WIPO:

WIPO is where the world's countries gather to write the treaties that shape the laws that govern the world's knowledge. If you've ever complained about DRM laws being ubiquitous, you can blame lobbying that took place at WIPO; if you're glad for recent laws that make it easier for blind and visually impaired people to access books, you can thank lobbying that took place at WIPO, too.

Those treaties are negotiated among country delegations that typically sit in a big impressive room in Geneva. Meanwhile, hundreds of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) representing publishers, broadcaster, record labels, libraries, and civil society organizations sit at the back of the room, observing the negotiations as they happen and, in between official sessions, those groups hold side briefings, pass out position papers and white papers, and try to make sure that the negotiators don't forget about their particular interests.

We wanted to make sure that the Foundation could be a part of those conversations, as a way to bring more members of the community to WIPO, and make sure that our movement's interests don't get left behind.

Creative Commons (itself already an observer at WIPO) and Wikimedia Germany reacted with statements supporting the Wikimedia Foundation's application.

Like Communia ("It was particularly disappointing that the European Union and its Member States remained silent in the discussion") and former European Parliament member Julia Reda ("Shamefully, the EU kept silent"), the German chapter also criticized the lack of support from EU member states, in contrast to the reactions of the delegations from the US and the UK.

As noted by Quartz, the Chinese government's action should be seen in the context of its previous blocking of Wikipedia and more recent reports about conflicts over Taiwan-related content on Wikipedia (see Signpost coverage: "The BBC looks at Chinese government editing"). The English Wikipedia's decision some months ago to describe Taiwan as a country also comes to mind. That said, besides Wikimedia-specific aspects, it's also worth being aware of current geopolitical developments, with almost 40 Chinese warplanes crossing the previously respected Cross-Strait median on the weekend before the WIPO incident, and observers warning that a military invasion of Taiwan is becoming a more realistic possibility.

Wikipedia falsely said I was convicted of attempted murder. I expected online abuse, but not this: The editing described by this article in the Seattle Times was done by a user who states that he is a teenager. He has also requested that he be indefinitely blocked and his request was granted. Fifteen years ago this month John Seigenthaler discovered that Wikipedia had suggested that he was involved with the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. There have been over a hundred discussions on Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard involving the word "murder" since that time. We're still making the same type of mistake.

DOJ to Seek Congressional Curbs on Immunity for Internet Companies: (paywalled) The Wall Street Journal reports that the US Department of Justice is seeking to change the Section 230 protections for internet platforms. According to the WSJ, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act "gives internet platforms broad latitude to police their sites and shields them from legal liability related to users’ actions, except in relatively narrow circumstances." While the WSJ did not mention Wikipedia in the article, Wikipedians might still feel threatened. Section 230 is central to the way Wikipedia operates: it says that the WMF is not responsible for your edits. Back in July Digital Trends stated the case bluntly in If Section 230 gets killed, Wikipedia will die along with it. It quoted Sherwin Siy, the Wikimedia Foundation’s senior manager for public policy saying

[If we were to] live in a world where there is no Section 230 in the United States, that changes things drastically ... It makes it a very different landscape. You’d see a lot of platforms being much more hesitant to allow users to publish things without any vetting. It would expose, for example, the Wikimedia Foundation to a lot more potential liability. It actually would just be a punishing amount of risk.

Bills cosponsored by Republicans and Democrats have been proposed to modify section 230, and presidential candidate Joe Biden has proposed revoking it.

• Grand Central mistake, Is the Grand Central Clock Worth $20 Million? in "Untapped New York": The article traces many of the mysteries and myths of the four faced clock in Manhattan. One of the myths which began about 1999 mistakes the opaline glass faces for the precious stone opal. This 2006 edit in Wikipedia puts the crown jewel in the myth, valuing the clock at $20 million.
• Kirsty Crommie in TES gives us all A lesson for teachers from the Scots Wikipedia page: Last month it was discovered that AmaryllisGardener (AG) had been one of the main editors on the Scots Wikipedia for 7 years despite having very limited knowledge of the Scots language. Crommie gently tells us that "It is perhaps time to remind ourselves of the importance of demonstrating grace, empathy and kindness." She adds that AG's "passion, inquisitiveness, perseverance and hard work are surely traits we want to celebrate and promote." Thank you for reminding us.
• What Happens to Scots Wikipedia Now? by Stephen Harrison on Slate covers the Scots controversy from all sides, concluding that "small Wikipedias" have special difficulties and could use some special help from other Wikipedians.
• Building Wikipedia, in Kannada and Tulu: Published in the Times of India, the story concentrates on how the speakers of these two Dravidian languages in southwestern India try to build Wikipedia communities. A Tulu speaker noted that the "majority of Tulu culture is passed on orally, and it is important to document it for generations."
• One good way to ask for a correction, contact a reporter: Sapakoff: Raiders owner Mark Davis corrects Wikipedia on Charleston, Citadel ties Mark Davis, the owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, was upset that Wikipedia got his age, birthplace and middle name - it's just an "M" - wrong. So he called up reporter Gene Sapakoff who then wrote an article about Davis. Problem solved.
• NZ tourism's Wikipedia problem: Fox Glacier page dominated by deaths, rural NZ non-existent: The news website Stuff quotes Wikipedian User:Giantflightlessbirds extensively saying that New Zealand's tourist sites have skimpy or poorly written Wikipedia pages and that rural NZ areas "did not have a website presence".
• Entrepreneur must just like us: 5 Tips To Get Yourself a Personal Wikipedia Page in Entrepreneur (India). Simplified, the 5 tips are, in order:
  • read the COI guideline,
  • ignore it and get many people to help you write the article,
  • write for a large audience,
  • add photos and keep the page updated, then
  • hire a paid editing company.

This raises the question of "why not just skip to step 5 right away, especially if you are going to ignore the COI guideline?"

In earlier attempts to encourage the never-ending quest for free advertisements on Wikipedia, Entrepreneur has published

• Entrepreneurs Are Paying Wikipedia Editors to Create Profile Pages and
• Amy Osmond Cook's May 2017 advertorial What I Learned When a Wikipedia Troll Deleted My Page.

• #KyivnotKiev: Kyiv not Kiev: Wikipedia changes spelling of Ukrainian capital The Ukrainian Foreign Minister is rather pleased that the "fortified bastion" of Wikipedia has decided to move the Kiev article to Kyiv.

• A language generation program’s ability to write articles, produce code and compose poetry has wowed scientists by Prasenjit Mitra in The Conversation: if the language generation program named "Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3" (GPT-3 for short) can do all those writing tasks, do we need Wikipedians anymore? The answer is likely "yes", since some of the program's inspiration and much of its input comes from Wikipedia.

• Which Celebrity's Wikipedia Pages Do These Random And Weird Facts Come From?: BuzzFeed tells us that Wikipedia's celebrity bios' "personal life section = everything." Then they give a quiz on some of the odd and bizarre facts contained in these sections - mostly about people in the entertainment industry. This reporter has not kept up on the personal lives of entertainers and only answered correctly on 4 out of 13 questions, but that was good enough to score better than "than 47% of quiztakers." Since there were only 4 possible answers to each question, by pure luck I'd be expected to get 3.25 answers correct. Perhaps the media outlets that tell us that people are especially interested in celebrities' personal lives are incorrect.

• The Daily Nous Mapping the Big Picture: The Daily Nous features a project by a GitHub user to graphically represent the connections among various Wikipedia articles related to philosophy.

• Crypto-hating Wikipedia editor David Gerard claims another victim: David Gerard is blamed by Cointelegraph.com for deleting an article on an Australian blockchain company, Power Ledger. Cointelegraph accurately states that the AFD "shows Gerald [sic] arguing that content from crypto news publications is 'not usable for claims of notability,'..." To nail down this indisputable point Cointelegraph quotes Gerard's article from the January Signpost.

“No crypto blogs, no crypto news sites — because these look like specialist trade press, but they’re really about advocacy: promoting their holdings. Many are blatantly pay for play, and very few ever saw a press release with ‘blockchain’ in it that they wouldn’t reprint.”

A small wiki audit of the Malagasy Wiktionary found that the wiktionary, which has the second largest number of entries (over 6,103,961), has had a large number of their pages automatically translated. Bot-Jagwar is a bot account run by Jagwar, the sole admin who has made edits. On the project, his bot has made more than 22 million edits (and counting). Jagwar also has a secondary bot account, Bot-Jagwar II which has made a further 6,976 edits. Another major bot contributing to mg.wikt, making the exact same type of edit, is Ikotobaity, with 2,456,748 edits run by Lohataona until 2017; the bot has been inactive since 20 October 2017. These three bots have created 6,076,769 new mainspace pages, which is 99.23% of all mainspace pages on mg.wikt. (Jagwar also ran bot edits on his main account, so the true number of bot-created entries is likely 50,000 higher.)

In this blog post, Jagwar detailed the history of his bot and mg.wikt. The bot began editing in 2010, at a rate of 50,000 edits per day, initially simply importing foreign words from other wiktionaries. After the wiki reached 200,000 pages in 2011, he wrote a script that "upload[ed] the word forms of that language", and propelled Malagasy Wiktionary to be the third largest. In 2012, Jagwar developed a more refined script. He uses NLP and automated translation in order to generate new entries, with no human intervention nor oversight. In the blog post, he wrote that translation errors were estimated at <5%, though he had "no precise idea" of it.

There is no active editing community, and Jagwar is the sole active admin on the site. Jagwar himself has only made 6 edits in the last 90 days, of which only 3 were in mainspace. The audit noted that there are various mistakes in the entries. Of a random survey of 100 non-Malagasy entries, the auditor concluded that 49 were "unusable", 29 "partially usable", and only 22 were "fully correct and usable" (though they may still have minor errors). Of Malagasy entries, the report noted that:

There are 41,902 entries categorised as lacking any definition, most of which seem to be Malagasy entries, and around 30,000 of which are the result of the definitions being removed due to copyright violation many years ago. Although there are 1,150,182 Malagasy entries in total, most of these are inflected forms, which can generally be safely created by bots. These definitionless entries are not strictly speaking incorrect, but a definition is the most central function of a dictionary, so these entries fail to be a useful part of the dictionary as a whole.

The bots also ran 218,156 edits at chr.wikt from 2012 to 2014 and 127,389 edits at ku.wikt from 2012 to 2013. The audit concluded that "Even an editing community of the size of the biggest Wiktionary, en.wikt, would not be able to clean up after these bots by hand". It strongly recommended deleting all non-Malagasy entries, removing translation sections, and telling the bot owners to cease automated creation of entries, and weakly recommended deleting all definition-less entries. – adapted by Eddie891 from Large-scale errors at Malagasy Wiktionary, written by Metaknowledge, with help from Surjection, AryamanA, Erutuon, and Smashhoof, along with input from a fluent speaker of Malagasy who wishes to remain anonymous.

A Request for Comment (RfC) to deprecate the inline parenthetical citation style was closed by Seraphimblade on 5 September as having reached consensus "that inline parenthetical referencing should be deprecated". The RFC, which was begun by CaptainEek on 5 August, drew a large amount of attention and discussion. A watchlist notice for the RFC was placed on 29 August after a discussion determined that it was a sufficiently high-profile RFC.

In closing the discussion, Seraphimblade noted that roughly 71% of the community had supported the proposal and that there was only consensus to deprecate "parenthetical style citations directly inlined into articles", rather than {{harv}} style-references in <ref></ref> tags. The RFC led to the WP:PAREN and WP:CITEVAR guidelines needing an update, though as of The Signpost's publication deadline, what the update would look like was still under discussion. Before the RfC, CITEVAR specifically stated that "editors should not attempt to change an article's established citation style merely on the grounds of personal preference" and cited a 2006 Arbitration Committee decision that "Wikipedia does not mandate styles in many different areas", including citation style. – E

• The total number of edits on all wikis reached a new monthly high in August at 54.8 million edits. Monthly edits on the English Wikipedia however won't soon reach the highs of 6.7 million set back in 2007. While edits have been on a generally upward path since 2014, the August number was 5.4 million.
• The total number of pageviews on all wikis in August was 21.2 billion, down from the recent high in April of 25.8 billion. On the English-language Wikipedia, there were 9.5 billion recorded pageviews in August, down from 11.3 billion in April.
• Kiev moves to Kyiv. Wugapodes closed a long-running page move discussion by moving the Kiev article. The traditional English name of Ukraine's capital city, Kiev, is similar to the Russian name of the city. The article was moved to Kyiv, based on the Ukrainian name transliterated from Ukrainian Cyrillic. While most participants in the RM cited Wikipedia's common name policy, the discussion was likely influenced by Russia's 2014 invasion of Ukraine, their annexation of Crimea, and Russo-Ukrainian War that has been fought since then.

• Milestones: The Tropical cyclone WikiProject celebrates its 15th birthday on October 5. Hurricanehink reminds us that we're "in the midst of another historically active season. The project has produced more than 1,000 good articles and 234 featured articles/lists, meaning 48% of the project's articles are rated 'good' or better."
• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of the newest Wikimedia movement affiliate, the Wikimedians of Western Armenian Language User Group.
• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Ajpolino, Jackmcbarn, and LuK3. Five aspirants ran for adminship in a near-simultaneous mid-September flight, which was forecast in previous Signpost coverage.
• The new requirements for custom user signatures began on 6 July 2020. If you try to create a custom signature that does not meet the requirements, you will get an error message.
• Registration for editing? The Portuguese Wikipedia is currently voting on a proposal to require registration to edit. Voting, which opened on September 4, will close on October 4. The discussion is currently leaning towards requiring registration to create and edit articles, but would allow IP editing in the help and talk namespaces. Between 2008 and 2014, editors had to complete a CAPTCHA to save edits.
• The Coolest Tool Award is starting its second year and looking for nominations by the October 14 deadline. JHernandez (WMF) says that "Tools play an essential role for the Wikimedia projects, and so do the many volunteer developers who experiment with new ideas and develop and maintain local and global solutions to support the Wikimedia communities. The Coolest Tool Award aims to recognize and celebrate the coolest tools in a variety of categories." The winning tools and developers will be named in November.
• Russian Wikinews has begun running English-language news stories: see this English discussion thread for more details.

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

• Pseudoscience – outcome still pending as of publishing deadline
• 1RR/Abortion
  • The one-revert restriction on all articles related to abortion, authorized by the community here and modified by the Arbitration Committee in the Abortion arbitration case, is formally taken over by the committee and vacated. Discretionary sanctions remain authorized for all pages related to abortion, broadly construed. (posted to WP:AN)
• Civility in infobox discussions – outcome still pending as of publishing deadline

• Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case#JzG opened 15:20, 9 September 2020 by MrX, a 10+ year non-admin editor. Respondent JzG is an administrator. Vote is 4/9/0 as of The Signpost's publication deadline. The case was requested to examine the history of JzG's actions as an administrator, and his general conduct that reflects adversely on his role as an administrator. The area where JzG struggles the most is with closing and re-opening discussions. On several occasions he has circumvented normal process, often when he has been involved with the underlying subject. He has also been formally warned for incivility, has engaged in edit warring, and has violated WP:INVOLVED on several occasions.

Several arbitrators voting to accept the case cited the lack of resolution to issues at the Arbcom case brought concerning the same administrator this past June. However, the committee is divided on this; after writing on 11 June 2020 [4]: I'm voting to decline today because I don't see enough recent evidence of serious incivility or personal attacks to warrant convening an admin-conduct case—but the outcome might be different if we find ourselves back here with a more solid request for a case, based on incidents occurring after today. JzG, there might be people out there looking for a good reason to file a new request. Don't give them one., Newyorkbrad stated on 9 September, in voting to decline again, commented [5] In voting to decline a previous case request against JzG in June, I urged him to remain civil even in difficult situations. It is good that in both of the recent disputed discussions, he appears to have done so.