Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	Colin Powell		2,232,933		Powell, the first African-American secretary of state, died on October 18 due to complications from COVID-19 and concurrent bone cancer. Powell had quite the career: he was a four-star general and served as the United States National Security Advisor under Ronald Reagan and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush the Elder before becoming Secretary of State under Bush the Younger, in addition to formulating the Powell Doctrine. However, his legacy is clouded by his involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the resulting Iraq War.
2	Squid Game		2,218,010		The fact that a page having around two million pageviews for the week is an indication that it's "losing steam" is pretty astounding, but then again, so is the show that earned those views. We've seen this South Korean smash hit, about a bunch of people who risk their lives playing children's games, at the top of the Report for the past four weeks, so forgive us if we don't care to go into any more detail than necessary about it. There may be a spike in views by the time Halloween rolls around, as we're sure to see an endless number of Squid Game costumes of varying quality and taste levels.
3	Dune (2021 film)		2,049,552		The second film adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic 1965 novel (#10) was released internationally a month ago, but opened in the United States on October 21. And unlike David Lynch's oft-maligned 1984 version, Denis Villeneuve's new interpretation (intended to be the first of a two-part adaptation) is getting great reviews and is poised to make some money.
4	Alec Baldwin		1,333,697		Tempting as it may be to crack jokes about Jack Donaghy going through the five stages of grief, this whole situation might be a bit too tragic to be glib about. This week, while on set in New Mexico for the upcoming Western film Rust, Baldwin discharged a prop gun (which, according to court documents, he was told was safe before using) that turned out to be a bit less prop-y and a bit more shoot-y than expected. Two people were hit: Joel Souza, the film's director, and Halyna Hutchins, a cinematographer whose injuries were fatal.
5	Brandon Lee		1,034,719		The Rust shooting that takes up a good chunk of this Report has sparked numerous comparisons to the untimely death of Bruce Lee's son, who famously lost his life in 1993 to an almost identical prop-gun-firing incident on the set of The Crow. The similarities were evident enough to prompt a response from Lee's relatives on his Twitter page, but the circumstances are obviously at least a little different: Lee's role in The Crow was set to make him an international star, while Hutchins's work was always behind the camera.
6	You (season 3)		941,823		Me? This Lifetime-turned-Netflix series about a stalker and serial killer named Joe Goldberg, played by Gossip Girl's gossip guy Penn Badgley, entered its third season last week. It focuses on the relationship between him and Love (Victoria Pedretti), the object of his affection from season two to whom he gets married after learning that she's just as psycho as him. It's received mostly positive reviews and enough attention to finally knock that goddamned game which I won't mention again out of Netflix's coveted number one spot.
7	Deaths in 2021		873,574		Since sadly there's reminiscences of #5's death, let's quote from The Crow soundtrack: “ The end is all that's ever true There's nothing you can ever say Nothing you can ever do ”
7	You (TV series)		869,661		On a personal note, I never bothered making it past season one after having to deal with a cast of unbelievably unrootable-for characters, including the main love interest/victim, Beck, (pictured on the left when she was a Disney Princess) whose entire role can be summed up in this video.
9	Halloween Kills		851,994		Serial killer Michael Myers (or "The Shape", in case you thought we were talking about the guy who voiced Shrek) returns to menace Laurie Strode in the 12th film of the Halloween series[2] and the sequel to the 2018 soft reboot. Like its predecessor, the David Gordon Green-helmed slasher features Nick Castle and Jamie Lee Curtis reprising their roles from John Carpenter's legendary first Halloween from 1978. While the film is doing decent business at the box office—especially for an R-rated movie in the middle of a damn pandemic—reviews aren't as strong as they were in 2018, with critics finding it messy and not as fresh as its predecessor.
10	Dune (novel)		808,546		The source material for #3, a philosophically challenging journey written by Frank Herbert about Paul Atreides and his home planet of Arrakis, where a life-extending drug and interplanetary travel fuel source known as melange (or "Spice") is harvested, also happens to be the best-selling sci-fi novel of all time. A number of sequels were written and, as mentioned above, it's also received some other critically-panned adaptations over the years.

^² There are twelve Halloween movies, but Halloween III: Season of the Witch doesn't feature Michael Myers. It's a long story.

• 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.

Ninety-year-old William Shatner, aka Captain Kirk, took a 10-minute suborbital joyride on Blue Origin's New Shepard flight 18 to the edge of space on October 13, compliments of an enterprising young man named Jeff Bezos. Kirk reportedly took the shuttlecraft because the transporter beam was out of order.

Two paying passengers, Chris Boshuizen, cofounder of Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, cofounder of Medidata Solutions, went along for the ride. According to CBS, neither paying passenger "has an entry in Wikipedia and both seem content to keep personal details personal". What's this? Klingons attempting a double reverse Streisand? The Klingons deny the accusation.

Blue Origin Vice President Audrey Powers was also on the flight. But she had to wait three days before she got an article. "Beam me up, Scotty", a misquote purportedly from Captain Kirk, has had an article for 16 years, as well as a disambiguation page. "It's borderline on the simulator, captain. I cannae guarantee that she'll hold up!". We can only wonder how it all ends. – S

Noam Cohen, a longtime reporter on all things Wikipedia, has a new article: "VIPs expect special treatment. At Wikipedia, don't even ask." Appearing in The Washington Post, the article shows how big shots are sometimes treated on Wikipedia. Just to drop a few names: John C. Eastman, Jimmy Wales, Mark Dice, Richard Dawkins, Amy Fisher, Andrew Yang (allegedly), the United States Congress, the Vatican, and the Gupta family of South Africa. Keep up the good work, folks!

Cohen does note a few BLP mix-ups or other failings: Edward Kosner, articles that include the real names of porn stars, deadnaming, and the subject of this month's opinion article.

Cohen concludes "But with the big platforms choosing to comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted ... there is one corner of the Internet that turns a skeptical eye toward everyone, even VIPs." Another example of modern mainstream journalism treating Wikipedia as "the good cop" of the internet, as previously described in this book chapter from Wikipedia@20.

Angela Merkel will soon give up her job as chancellor of Germany which she has held for 16 years. AFP and The Statesman find power in the Merkel rhombus, aka Merkel-Raute in German. They note "It has its own Wikipedia page and its own emoticon." "<>" – S

Reflecting cultural biases, German Wikipedia described homeopathy as simply eine alternativmedizinische Behandlungsmethode, "a form of alternative medical treatment", but English Wikipedia says it is "pseudoscience" (The Local, Germany's long-standing love affair with homeopathy [in English]). Maybe someone read the article – German Wikipedia was edited to add "pseudoscience" to the lede on 14 October.

To be fair, we note that distinguishing science from pseudoscience, the demarcation problem, is an application of epistemology and that – according to Wikipedia – the appearance of the word epistemology in English was predated by the German term Wissenschaftslehre (literally, theory of science), which was introduced by philosophers Johann Fichte (German) and Bernard Bolzano (Bohemian) in the late 18th century. – B

A stylish, well-written, new podcast dot com dedicates its first six episodes to Wikipedia.

• First episode – "Don't Bite The Newbies" (48:00) surveys the Wikipedia community, somehow leaving out the newbies, but does manage to have interesting discussions with Ser Amantio di Nicolao, Giraffedata and his brother, laodah, Another Believer and Sandiooses, married couple LoriLee and Dominic, GorillaWarfare and Sandister. Others, including Larry Sanger and Rosiestep, are mentioned or make brief appearances.
• Second episode – "Hello World" (43:24) – Covering the beginnings of Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is featured and all is well until the show moves on to Larry Sanger, the "co-founder" of Wikipedia. Larry was unavailable for awhile, but Dominic, who went to college with Larry, says some very interesting things. Larry was eventually contacted and says that he "got the idea on January second" 2001 for a Wiki-encyclopedia. Wales later replied that he thought of a Wiki-encyclopedia the previous December. It gets a bit complicated and "juicy" from there. Larry will be back in a future episode.

The series runs for another four weeks. A different series on another web project will be coming in January.

• WMF fought the law, and the law won: Appeals Court Says State Secrets Privilege Means NSA Can Avoid Wikimedia Foundation’s Unlawful Surveillance Allegations Given the U.S. government's Cold War attitude we can now only respond with music.
• For better or worse: the Dallas Morning News tells us "Why Facebook makes us worse but Wikipedia makes us better". The Facebook part is the same old stuff: long and disgusting. The Wikipedia part is short and sweet.
• "Credible sources such as Wikipedia root out election disinformation" (Business Day). According to Bobby Shabangu, of Wikimedia South Africa, Wikipedia is needed to help sort out disinformation in South African elections.
• Wikipedia is so politicized and dishonest it's no longer worth reading: if you believe Tucker Carlson (Fox News).
• Annie Rauwerda, the queen of the Wikipedia rabbit hole: Interviewed by Mashable. Rauwerda started Wikiracing during middle-school. In April 2020 she started a project to entertain a few friends by posting odd Wikipedia articles on her Instagram account @depthsofwikipedia. After a few months her followers were growing by up to 5% per week. She now has about 370,000 followers on Instagram, 90,000 on TikTok, and some more at another Instagram account @depthsofcraigslist.

• But I don't like spam!: Google Doesn't Use The Wikipedia WikiProject Spam Reports For Search Spam (Search Engine Roundtable). Refers to Wikipedia:WikiProject Spam/LinkReports.
• Meet the man who wrote 2,200 Wikipedia articles: The Star (Malaysia) featured Dody Ismoyo. He began editing as an undergraduate in Malaysia, continued editing as a master's student in Australia. As of early October he created over 2,200 Wikipedia articles, uploaded over 2,400 photos to Commons and made more than 200,000 edits in 11 years of editing and is the 180th most active English-language Wikipedian.
• He reads Wikipedia every night, and is only the #3 earner on Jeopardy: [1] (Voice of America News). The question is "Who is Matt Amodio?" He won 38 consecutive appearances on Jeopardy, number 2 of all-time, earning $1,417,401, number 3 following James Holzhauer and Ken Jennings. If you missed seeing him this year, just wait for the Tournament of Champions.
• Even registered Wikipedians embody the banality of evil: [2] Policy Options/Options Politiques, Institute for Research on Public Policy
• Radio New Zealand reported on a 24-hour editathon to highlight women in science and engineering on Ada Lovelace Day
• New AI goes a little Frankenstein: The Megatron-Turing Natural Language Generation model – an NVidia/Microsoft project trained on Wikipedia and other sources called The Pile, plus Common Crawl's web snapshot – eclipsed GPT-3 [3] (Singularity Hub). ZDNet says the model "suffers from bias" in a piece mentioning AIs behaving like Nazis.
• Spoiler alert: Wikipedia contains spoilers: Sorry to break the news to you, Yahoo! Lifestyle, but Home and Away spoilers are a regular day at the office here.
• Adopted, but not enough for Wikipedia: The city of Waltham, Massachusetts has "adopted" a Red Sox player from Ohio, whose name has intermittently appeared in the city's Wikipedia entry (WCVB, Boston and NBC Sports).
• Support for African languages: According to South African Independent Online, WikiAfrican Foundation will sponsor "AfroCuration events" for native speakers of isiZulu, Sesotho, Tshivenda, and Afrikaans. The article notes that no African language's Wikipedia edition has yet broken the 100,000 article mark.[4] More information can be found at meta:AfroCuration campaign.
• I remember long ago another starry night like this ... but what year was it?: According to OutInPerth, ABBA band member Bjorn Ulvaeus had to look up the band's history on Wikipedia to recall when they first recorded "Just a Notion", a song that will appear for the first time on their album Voyager that came out a few days ago. (The answer was 1978.)[5]
• Squidly: The Wolfram Research blog confirmed what we already knew from our own Top25 report: a lot of people came to Wikipedia to read about Squid Game. It held the #1 spot here for four weeks runnning.
• Little plot of horrors: BuzzFeed asks "What's A Horror Movie Plot So Messed Up, You Wish You Never Even Read Its Wikipedia Page?"
• California: love it or leave it, but check Wikipedia first: Inc. recommends company executives in California read List of U.S. state budgets before deciding whether to freeze (in place) fight (budget policies), or flee (the state).
• Swarming a truthy solution: Daniel Nagy says in a Bitcoinist interview that his Ethereum storage layer, Swarm, may support a proliferation of forks to avoid the "one official truth" problem of Wikipedia, and other projects like OpenStreetMap and Project Gutenberg. The author says it is an "impossible dilemma"; given there are over 8,000 pages at Category:Wikipedia pages under discretionary sanctions (that's about 0.125% of all articles here) we wonder why he's got so much trouble with the "one official truth".
• Wikivoyage not indexed by search engines? Blogger gaganpreet documents their observation that queries in the search engines DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and Bing omit links to Wikivoyage. This blogger speculates that Bing has blacklisted Wikivoyage for some reason, and consequently those other two sites have copied that Microsoft site.

The Coolest Tool Award is an annual award ceremony showcasing the Wikimedia tools that the community nominates for being useful and worth publicizing. Previous winners of this prize are now indexed in the Wikimedia Toolhub, whereas before, the various tools which won prizes or were nominated could not be found anywhere in a single list.

Nominations for the Coolest Tool Award 2021 closed 27 October. However, watch the page for prize announcements, or in wiki-spirit, post messages on relevant talk pages to help the judges in the competition make good evaluations for what tools to recognize. – B

You can now "subscribe" to a discussion and get notifications for new replies in it! This is a very exciting change. This feature was implemented by the Editing Team as part of the Talk pages project. We appreciate their hard work. You can enable this feature, which is part of the Discussion Tools beta, by checking the "Discussion tools" checkbox under Preferences → Beta features and clicking "Save". – E

Toby Negrin, the head of WMF's product department, posted a letter of resignation on 12 October. The function of the department is to "build, improve and maintain the features of Wikimedia sites". This departure leaves the WMF with less than half of the C-team that was previously around: the positions of the heads of the Technology, Communications, and Operations departments are all still vacant, as is the CEO. – Y, B

Wikimedia Enterprise, the commercial data service launched by the WMF, officially opened for business on October 25. With three different API services offered starting at $25,000/year, the product is designed for corporations who depend on Wikimedia data such as Google posting knowledge boxes on their search page. It is designed to minimize or eliminate any backflow effects on Wikipedia content or the Foundation. The WMF has capped commercial revenue at 30% of overall revenue. Previous coverage in The Signpost resulted in some skeptical comments from Wikipedians. – G

In last month's News and notes, we covered the RfA 2021 review in "Another look at requests for adminship". The review has progressed into a brainstorming phase to address these issues, and possibly a handful of others:

• Corrosive RfA atmosphere
• Level of scrutiny
• Standards needed to pass keep rising
• Too few candidates
• "No need for the tools" is a poor reason as we can find work for new admins
• RfA should not be the only road to adminship

There is no fixed deadline, but it may have wrapped up by the time The Signpost is published. We will cover more details at this month's Discussion report. – B

3–5% of editors using Apple's Safari browser may be blocked in the next few months. This includes logged-in, active editors who may not understand why they've encountered a block. This is because of iCloud Private Relay, a new service in Safari, which is similar to a proxy or a VPN. There is a discussion about this on Meta. The goal is to learn what iCloud Private Relay could mean for the communities. – Tech News weekly editors, selected by B

• CEO's listening tour begins: Presentations by Maryana Iskander, the incoming Wikimedia Foundation Chief Executive Officer, are viewable at Maryana's Listening Tour on meta and a presentation at WikiConference North America (Red Stage video) – there have also been presentations at WikiCon 2021, WikiArabia, and Wikidata Con.
• Maggie Dennis, VP of Community Resilience and Sustainability answers questions on Chinese bans and other topics 1:02:10. The main surprise is that the big picture and so many details can fit into one hour.
• Beijing strikes again: China vetoed WMF's accreditation to World Intellectual Property Organization again, citing the same "one China" issues as the last time.
• The Farsi Wikipedia banned IP editing for six months starting on 22 October, joining the Portuguese Wikipedia in the IP-free experiment. The Spanish Wikipedia will likely start its IP-free experiment as the other two experiments are concluded.
• The Wayback Machine shows us the way forward: their nightmare vision is a dystopian future filled with censorship and "copyrighted facts".
• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of this week's newest Wikimedia movement affiliate, Wikimedia Small Projects in Spanish on 23 September. The group is a development from SmallProjects grant which was approved 13 August this year.
• No new administrators: There were no successful requests for adminship in October. The total number of successful candidacies during 2021 stands at seven.
• Take the lead: The lead section-writing contest of English Wikipedia has come back after five long years.
• Fundraising banners: Annual fundraising banners will be displayed on English Wikipedia beginning 30 November. The community has been invited to make suggestions.

Details matter. Wikipedians can spend extraordinary amounts of time just checking and correcting a small detail. Sometimes this obsession with detail yields extraordinary results. - S

Success has many fathers. This story is a small but beautiful example of how Wikipedia helps with the reproduction of images, told via the stories of the "fathers" of the image in question.

This story begins on the 17th of January 1974 in the small city of Beverwijk, in the Netherlands. The 36th edition of the Wijk aan Zee chess tournament is taking place, and it attracts a multitude of chess grandmasters from across the world: Argentina, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Spain and the US (though, notably, no Russians). The tournament was (and still is) sponsored by steel producer Hoogovens, later Tata Steel.

The tournament concludes and is won by the American chess and poker player Walter Browne, with a score of 11/15. Local Dutch newspapers, without the budget to pay photographers of their own, rely on photo news agencies for pictures of the event. The Anefo photo agency sends Rob Mieremet. He shoots 13 photographs in total. Mieremet (1947–2015), as winner of the Silver Camera award for best Dutch photographer in 1973, is certainly a good photographer, but he is no ardent lover of chess. He is unsure as to the name of one of the players, so he names one of the photographs "Browne" (assuming it to be Walter Browne, the tournament winner). The photo is thus filed as "Browne". Despite this, any chess players would know the pictured person to be the famous Serbian chess player Milan Matulović (who would go on to take bronze in the tournament).

After 44 years of operation, Anefo closed its doors in 1989, and its photo archives were handed over to the Netherlands Government Information Service (Rijksvoorlichtingsdienst). The collection was further transferred to the Dutch National Archives (Nationaal Archief) in 1996. In 2011 the National Archives and partner Spaarnestad Photo uploaded 350,000 photographs to the database http://gahetna.nl – originally under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA-3.0), later under a CC-zero license, which made most photographs freely available. Several thousand of these photographs were then uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Wikipedia volunteers, with the intention that they be used in Wikipedia articles.

One such volunteer was Mr.Nostalgic. A Dutch Wikipedian, and a keen photographer himself, Mr.Nostalgic works for a pharmaceutical company, and photography is his hobby. He saw value in the National Archives collection, and decided to upload 350,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons on his own initiative, in his spare time, using 5 laptops and Pulover's Macro Creator.

Over a period of five months, Mr.Nostalgic uploaded 2,000 photos to Wikimedia Commons a day, including 270k photos from the original Anefo archives. Lo and behold: the photograph of Milan Matulović, still disguised as "Browne", snuck its way into Wiki Commons on 23 October 2018. That same evening, another Wikipedian (me – Vysotsky) identified "Browne" as "most probably Milan Matulović", and added the photograph to several different language versions of the Wikipedia article about Matulović. Two years later (Nov. 2020), Wikipedia user Materialscientist uploaded a cropped version of the photo.

In 2020, the national postal service of Serbia, Pošta Srbije, decided to honour five chess grandmasters. They chose "the first Serbian chess grandmaster, chess bohemian and romantic, globetrotter and polyglot" Bora Kostić, alongside Petar Trifunović, Milan Matulović, Milunka Lazarević and, of course, Svetozar Gligorić.

The artistic design was done by Boban Savic, but the original images were supplied by the Serbian Chess Federation and a sports journalist. These original images were without a doubt obtained via Wikimedia Commons. Not only was the image of Matulović almost certainly taken from the original Anefo photograph, but the photo used of Petar Trifunović bore similarities to another Anefo photograph by Harry Pot from 1962. The inevitable conclusion: Serbian postage owes a debt to Wikipedia-style cooperation.

Three Wikipedians worked together with two non-Wikipedians and several institutions, all separated by time and geography, to achieve a real world result that none of them might have expected.