An Office action was carried out on August 4, at the article Caesar DePaço; the action removed information from public view pursuant to a Portuguese court order issued due to litigation by Mr. DePaço. The order itself, as relayed by Joe Sutherland (the Wikimedia Foundation's Lead Trust and Safety Specialist), was to remove four specific categories of content as well as hand over limited data on eight editors who added it.

This data was later clarified as being IP addresses and email addresses. Revision deletions appear to cover edits made from 12 January 2021 up until 10 April 2025.

The compliance was announced (with the rest of the article remaining intact) while the Foundation appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. In response, several proposals were made for additional response. Some (like Pppery, who initially blanked the article in response to the announcement and expurgation of previous revisions) hold that a court order prohibiting Wikipedia from covering the article's subject neutrally precludes the existence of an article at all. Others (like User:Barkeep49, who created a {{Legal order}} template to place at the head of the article) support keeping it, with a prominent notice that certain information has been excluded due to legal strictures. The article was soon nominated for deletion by Chaotic Enby, and as of press time there are more than 170,000 characters in the deletion discussion. — J

Results from the July 2025 administrator elections have been posted. In alphabetical order, the newly-elected administrators are:

• CoconutOctopus
• Curbon7
• Hinnk
• Jlwoodwa
• Kj cheetham
• KylieTastic
• Ser!
• Smasongarrison
• UndercoverClassicist

From the 16 candidates who were on the voting ballot, 9 of them succeeded. This brings the number of new admins this year to 12, continuing the trend of AELECT producing more new admins than RfA. There is now an ongoing debrief about the election. Election officials, candidates, and uninvolved editors are welcome to give their feedback about the July 2025 election. The election process may be further work-shopped based on this feedback, with the next elections expected to be conducted in 5 months.

The Signpost thanks these editors and the others who stepped forward to be considered for adminship. – B, S

The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) announced an appointment process for non-voting members. The process will work on a rolling basis, where interested community members may nominate themselves anytime, followed by a two week public feedback process from the community. There can be a maximum of 4 non-voting members appointed to the U4C at any given time.

The U4C was last covered by The Signpost in the 18 July issue. – S

A July 31st announcement at the Arbitration Committee noticeboard read:

In May 2025, the Arbitration Committee became aware of a mass use of the checkuser tool on the English Wikipedia by an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation and contacted the WMF with our concerns about the checks. The Foundation confidentially disclosed the reason for the checks to the Committee and immediately began an internal investigation of the tool use and development of a plan to prevent similar mass checkuser tool uses in the future.

In July, the Foundation outlined their plan to prevent such actions happening again, including localized CU training for Foundation investigators and correct use of the reason field in the checkuser tool. They will also inform the Arbitration Committee of any future use of the checkuser tool on the English Wikipedia that involves more than ten actions. The Foundation confirmed to us that the data gathered through the checks was not shared and has been destroyed. It should be noted that – as the platform operator – the Foundation's use of the checkuser tool is governed by their legal department, not by the local or global checkuser policy.

Due to the access to nonpublic personal data policy, the Committee is limited in what it can reveal about the nature of the checks, those checked, and the results of those checks. We apologise for the vague nature of much of this statement as we try to navigate our obligations under the personal data policy and provide transparency to the community.

— For the Arbitration Committee, HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:39, 31 July 2025 (UTC)

Subsequent talk page discussion didn't reveal a whole lot in the way of detail, and arbitrator ScottishFinnishRadish implied that it was difficult to comment on the situation without reconvening the Committee to make additional on-record statements. Jan Eissfeldt, Lead Manager of Wikimedia Trust and Safety, had this to say in response:

Earlier this year, as part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s responsibility of keeping the platform safe, the Trust and Safety team conducted safety risk assessments that required the use of the checkuser tool. While the use of the tool was approved for internal review of material in order to defend the projects, the logging of the checks was inadequate and the checks were excessive to the minimum necessary to meet the task. This was a case of human error, and several internal systems contributed to this error.

In May of this year, the Arbitration Committee identified the oversight and alerted us of the situation. We investigated the use of the tool and identified the human and system errors that contributed to this oversight. Accordingly, we are going to adopt several new practices, including retraining individuals, as use of the Checkuser tool by Trust and Safety staff remains relatively rare. We also wish to acknowledge and thank the Arbitration Committee for identifying and raising this issue with us, and also for the effort they put into reviewing our mitigation plan with us. We understand that this additional work likely has been disruptive to their workflows, and we continue to be sorry about that. We are confident that the plan in place will significantly reduce the probability of something like this happening in the future.

— --Jan (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 31 July 2025 (UTC)

As with most things, reactions were mixed, with some saying this was a significant breach of trust, whereas others pointed out that using the CU tool at all was a sign of proper channels being followed (as large numbers of people have direct database access and can simply read the logfiles if they so choose). — J

Discussion is ongoing in on the Administrators' Noticeboard on whether to unban Morning277. They were arguably very involved in Wiki-PR Wikipedia editing scandal and subsequently CBAN-ned by the community in 2012.

This topic was previously covered in the Signpost in October 2013, January 2014, and February 2015 issues. – S

The ongoing controversy with Wikinews, spurred by the public consultation about Wikinews opened on Meta in June, has led to further developments, and there is now (on Meta) an open RfC to close the Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee Sister Project Task Force itself. The SPTF, described on its own page as "a group of community members and Foundation trustees working together to build a strategy to support the life cycle of non-Wikipedia projects across the movement", is challenged by the proposal's opener, A09, who says that "just about everything went wrong" with the proposal to close Wikinews, and concludes their post by saying:

In other Wikinews news, a proposal on Meta has been opened by Pharos for "Wikinews Pulse", envisioned as a "more universal, data-driven version of Portal:Current events, with generated headlines displaying a variety of daily events from the rich data on Wikidata, and that would then link out to relevant updated Wikipedia articles and pages on the various language editions of Wikinews". — J

The Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees has posted June 2025 meeting outcomes.

The shortlisting process for the upcoming election concluded, with 6 candidates being selected by affiliates to proceed for final voting. The campaigning period continues till August 26, after which voting will be open for 2 weeks.

The shortlisted candidates are:

• Bobby Shabangu – Bobbyshabangu (talk · contribs)
• James Alexander – Jamesofur (talk · contribs)
• Lane Rasberry – Bluerasberry (talk · contribs)
• Michał Buczyński – Aegis Maelstrom (talk · contribs)
• Ravan J Al-Taie – Ravan (talk · contribs)
• Wojciech Pędzich – Wojciech Pędzich (talk · contribs)

– S

These are the latest Wikimedia Foundation bulletins.

• Bulletin 9 (May 16)
• Bulletin 10 (May 30)
• Bulletin 11 (June 13)
• Bulletin 12 (June 27)
• Bulletin 13 (July 11)
• Bulletin 14 (July 25) "The bulletin will be back after Wikimania with a special issue on the 19th August."

Notable news includes 2FA being made mandatory for Checkusers and Oversighters, and Temporary accounts being rolled out in 18 large and medium Wikipedias. – S

• The U4C passed a motion about mass blocks on Hebrew Wikipedia. This sets up a final layer of escalation for appealing hewiki blocks via U4C.
• During July, four functionaries resigned their Checkuser and Oversight rights – Alison, Bradv, Joe Roe and RickinBaltimore.
• After 21 days, the recall petition for Night_Gyr was certified. Discussion was notably heated, with nearly 48 thousand words from editors on the page.

In the last Discussion report, I introduced a new contrivance of my own design — the electric winnower — which can automatically seek through noticeboard threads and tabulate their subject lines, lengths and numbers of participants; this allows the thousand or so threads that occur each month to be simmered down to a manageable list of the hundred, or two hundred, or fifty, or ten most active.

Time constraints, as well as an enormous backlog of unanalyzed discussions going back the whole year, meant that the last issue's report could not go any further than introducing the concept and giving a brief table-level overview of the basic statistics. However, this issue I have had more time available, and rather than the whole year this report is only covering a couple of months: June, July, and what little we've had of August.

The caveats I noted in the last report still apply, of course: perhaps most obviously, the winnower is only set up to prowl a short list of the noticeboards (and thereby misses a giant range of discussions held at other locations). More esoterically, it's an imperfect heuristic: size or participation is at best a loose proxy for the wider importance of a conversation. That is to say, all models are wrong, but some models are useful.

While individually reviewing all of the threads, my predictions from last time were largely borne out: a fair number of the most-active noticeboard discussions are indeed simple quotidian arguments which happen to be incredibly verbose. However, many of them are verbose for reasons that make them useful for making sense of Wikipedia: they touch on sensitive issues, they involve murky areas of ambiguous policy, or they deal with some new phenomenon that isn't well-covered by guidelines. Often, the behavior of a system in chaotic conditions can teach us a lot about how it functions (or doesn't): vehicles are tested by driving them into brick walls for a reason.

With that said, I will here analyze a portion of the fifty most-active noticeboard discussions for June, July and August 2025. The other portion, featuring the Village Pumps, will be in this issue's Community view (with descriptions written by Bri, as time has not permitted me to cover both).

The Reliable Sources Noticeboard, darling of the world's news media, did not have anything huge happen in the last couple of months. Of the four discussions that took place at RSN and made it into the most-active for this period, none were RfCs that made formal determinations, and none had formal closures.

AN is something of a stolid older brother to the considerably more rambunctious AN/I: it is far less urgent administratively (it is set aside for issues that resolve in days, not hours) and physically (threads tend to stay on it for much longer before being archived). In recent years, AN has subsumed some additional functions, such as ban appeals, which formerly fell under the purview of the Arbitration Committee (and indeed, under the purview of the Signpost's own Arbitration report).

ANI, known to many as the Great Dismal Swamp, is a noticeboard for "urgent incidents and chronic, intractable behavioral problems".

Generally speaking, nobody enjoys being brought here. It is a place for settling disputes between editors when interpersonal discussion fails, and for reporting vandalism slightly too sophisticated for AIV, but it is also a place where long-term patterns of disruption and harassment over decades are addressed and summarily adjudicated by ad-hoc straw polls. It's also a place where people go to hash out beef, settle grudges, whip out dossiers of old drama, and get their enemies banned. The main job of administrators on this board is to figure out which category any given filing falls into, and respond accordingly. It forms a critical part of Wikipedia's governance structure, but it is very resistant to any attempts at making it legible, and most people who aren't heavy editors do not really know about it.

It is not a place of honor. Mostly, it is a chaotic mixture of a school cafeteria and a school principal's office: there are very few explicit rules that govern its operation. While arbitration cases are often stressful, and concern people at their worst behavior on their most sensitive topics, arbitration is a highly regulated procedure in which discussion is moderated according to consistent rules, and decisions are made according to a consistent process. This is not true on ANI: basically anything can happen. This is not to mean that "anything goes" — indeed, people are often punished quite severely for breaking the rules of the venue — they just aren't really written down anywhere, and few can agree on what they are.

Owing to the uniquely and profoundly unpleasant nature of ANI proceedings, in which people invariably get stressed out and say stupid things, I have done my best to refrain from constructing an æ-style gallery of of heated editing moments. You may note that users are here referred to by their initials (the attached links lead to the full threads).

There are a variety of other, more specialized noticeboards, among them BLPN, ELN, FTN, NPOVN, NORN, BN, ACN, BOTN. These tend to be used for rather specific types of content discussion, and while they're definitely relevant to the project as a whole, they don't get as much everyday traffic as the major ones.

Owing again to time constraints, some of these do not have as much of a detailed analysis as I would have hoped to write. For some others, there is not much to say – an infobox argument from 2025 is virtually identical to an infobox argument from 2015. However, on the whole I am satisfied with the winnower's approach. There was a point, when I had much more free time than I do now, when I was in the habit of following nearly every single noticeboard discussion on the entire project: a look through the electrically winnowed top fifty feels like it more or less gives the same degree of general Gestalt. And even if they are not all worth reading (some are quite long), perhaps then they are worth reading a couple sentences of summary.

I think this will become more useful if it becomes possible to include talk pages, project pages, and project talk pages – of which we have 10,099,815, 1,511,331, and 209,282 respectively. These numbers mean that a more scientific approach must be used than just grabbing each one and checking for recent posts: but this can be worked out.

It may seem trivial to keep up with the daily goings-on of our internal processes, but the daily goings-on are what constitute the monthly goings-on, and the monthly goings-on are what constitute the yearly goings-on, and those constitute everything that's changed from 2001 to now, so:

It's 2025, do you know where your consensus is?

On 11 March 2014, an account by the name of BarunH (talk · contribs · count) was created. A few days later, they uploaded to Wikicommons a photograph of David Woodard, apparently taken by BarunH in Seattle in October 2013. The photo is a closeup, taken from a low angle, apparently quite close to the subject; it more closely resembles a selfie than a photograph by another person. Two hours later, a French IP address added the photograph and made a number of changes to the English Wikipedia article. This address was later globally blocked as an open proxy, in what will become a recurring theme. On 5 May 2015, BarunH uploaded what they claimed to be their own photograph of Judy Nylon. Mere minutes later, an IP address from Atlanta, Georgia (another globally-blocked open proxy) added the image to Nylon’s article. Later that year, BarunH started to make a foray into editing the English Wikipedia, with a number of edits to an article about the Czech Lute.

On 19 June 2015, an account by the name of Swmmng (talk · contribs · count) was created. Their first edit was to an article about a book written by Woodard’s close friend and publisher Christian Kracht. They then embarked on writing a series of articles about Czech artists, including Woodard's in-laws (Ivan, Saša, Sonja and Vladimír Večtomov, and Jana Andrsová), while making occasional edits to Woodard's own article and creating a Wikicommons category for him. In February 2016, they wrote an article about "Per la ricuperata salute di Ofelia" and were kind enough to upload a photo they had taken of the original sheet music (held in the Czech Museum of Music) with their Sony DSC-WX80 camera.

Throughout the year, they continued doing genuinely good work improving the English Wikipedia’s coverage of Czech art. They also made some edits to David Woodard’s article; on one occasion they attempted to remove a talk page complaint, which had pointed out that the words "Pure Aryan" had deceptively been removed from the title of the San Francisco Gate article about Woodard’s expedition to Nueva Germania; these words would be left out of the source in every translation of the article.

On 13 November 2016, Swmnng created an article about Woodard's wife Sonja Vectomov. They also uploaded a photograph of Vectomov, which they had taken with their Sony DSC-WX80 on 21 September 2016. Vectomov’s hair and outfit are identical to what’s seen in the photo-op of her for her own record company, taken on the occasion of her debut album on 23 September 2016. Swmmng later declared in a DYK nomination that they “shot the photo—on my own volition, not for hire—in Czech Republic”.

On 26 February 2017, the user CWells (talk · contribs · count) uploaded a photograph of David Woodard and Melvin Belli, taken with a Leica S1 camera in 1996, allegedly by CWells (although it was later deleted as a copyright violation). It was almost immediately added to Belli’s English Wikipedia article by a Prague-based IP address. Then, over the following month, it was added to other articles about Belli and Mark Twain’s poem "The War Prayer", by an IP range in the Czech town of Novy Bydzov (near Vectomov’s home city of Hradec Králové). After two years, IP proxies and the user Judgtastic added the photo to Belli's Arabic, Afar and Esperanto Wikipedia articles. And even in February 2025, a Prague-based IP added the photo to Belli's Indonesian Wikipedia article. Previously, CWells had also uploaded a 2008 photograph they had taken with a Leica C-Lux camera of Woodard at Cabaret Voltaire, together with his friend Christian Kracht and convicted terrorist Ma Anand Sheela; over the years, it was added to the various articles on Cabaret Voltaire, Kracht and Sheela by a series of IP addresses (largely from New York, London and Czechia).

The electric winnowing described (and employed) in this issue's Discussion report does not just work on noticeboards: it works on the village pump as well, and it is there that some of the most momentous consensa develop.

The standard caveats apply here — and there's less detail than optimal, since this is catching up to quite a bit of a backlog. Nonetheless, these are the most-active threads of the six Villages Pump^[1], from June to today: Policy, Technical, Proposals, Idea Lab, WMF and Miscellaneous.

A "disgraced CEO" is shown by "a Wikipedia page, based entirely around this incident at a Coldplay concert", according to The Times of London. Some of The Times' information comes from a conversation with Wikipedian Molly White, who nominated the offending article for deletion. The deletion nomination was closed as "delete and redirect" to the article on the Coldplay concert tour. The "keeps" led the "deletes" by several !votes, but the "deletes" prevailed based on the policy WP:BLP1E. An article on the former CEO's company Astronomer was also created and nominated for deletion. This nomination closed as "no consensus", with the discussion focusing on the surprisingly poor quality of the sources on a company with a supposed billion-dollar valuation. – S

Colleges Aren’t Supposed to Fiddle With Their Wikipedia Pages. They Try Anyway. in the Chronicle of Higher Education starts with a college administrator complaining that a trustee recently gave out two-year-old information on the size of the college's endowment based on its Wikipedia page. So who is to blame here? Perhaps it was a college trustee turning to Wikipedia for details on their own institution; perhaps a college failing to provide its trustees with easily available information. In any case, the administrator updated the information himself, and was caught by a long-time Wikipedian, himself an academic and higher-ed administrator. After a talk page notice and a discussion at WP:COIN the matter was resolved with a conflict-of-interest declaration – but not the required paid editing declaration – and the first admin posting a wish list on the article talk page.

But let's be clear here. Wikipedia does not prohibit fiddling, even if you teach in the music department. It does prohibit marketing, public relations, and promotion (as well as advocacy, propaganda, and recruitment), as explained in our core policy defining the scope of the site, and it does require people trying to edit as part of their job to declare that they are paid editors and reveal their employers (as explained in the English Wikipedia's paid editing policy and the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use).

What's missing here is that people involved in higher education can easily contribute to articles if they are a bit careful. Academic staff, students, and alumni are all allowed to edit without strict limits, as is basically everybody else, except the institution's marketing and PR people, and people who it pays to edit. There are hundreds of ways that academics, students, and alumni can add to Wikipedia. Academics are invited to contribute in their areas of expertise – with careful attention paid to not citing your own papers more than equally deserving others. They might also write material on campus history – as long as it's not promotional. Feel free to quote important documents from the archives, or to donate historic photographs. Faculty can also teach classes through WikiEd that challenge students to write Wikipedia articles.

Students can form clubs for Wikipedia editors, which can do anything individual editors can do. Individual students might want to take photos of campus buildings, notable professors, or sports events. They might also attend edit-a-thons, which can be organized on Wikipedia. This reporter has attended edit-a-thons at the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, the University of Pennsylvania, and – my favorite – the Princeton University archives (hosted by a retired Princeton librarian, the late DGG).

Alumni, parents and other family members can do all of the above, except for the WikiEd classes. You should expect to be treated like any other editor (yes, that can seem a bit rough sometimes) and if you are very close to the subject you can let your colleagues, your fellow Wikipedia editors, know that you have a conflict of interest. – S

Substackist and man-about-web Tracing Woodgrains writes How Wikipedia Whitewashes Mao: The Anatomy of Ideological Capture. The main thrust of the piece, as evidenced by the title, is to review Wikipedia's coverage of this famously bloodstained dictator – comparing its current version to its version of fourteen years ago, as well as that of erstwhile heinous tyrant Francisco Franco – and concluding that it has been softened into "practically a coronation speech for a paragraph, followed by carefully mitigated bad facts before ending strong".

Uncommonly among writers who make complaints about Wikipedia coverage, he seems to both possess a decent understanding of the collaborative editing process, and explicitly instruct readers not to slide on over to Wikipedia and get into arguments with everybody. One may disagree with the conclusions he draws, but as for myself, between this guy and the doxenheimers at dox dot dox (this is not even a reference to just one site!) I'll take a tracegrains flogging any day of the week. – J

In an odd bit of news, SFGate makes the dubious claim that Merrimaker is Wikipedia's favorite dive. No, this is not a case where a couple of trustees could have gone there to avoid being identified on the jumbotron. And it looks too classy to be a dive bar. So what is a dive bar? Nick, the bartender in It's a Wonderful Life might have been defining one when he explained "Hey look mister, we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast and we don't need any characters to give the joint atmosphere. Is that clear?" Both SFGate and Wikipedia's article appear to have fallen into the trap of thinking that just because something is authentic, it's cool. So are dive bars cool? Definitely not if they're not air conditioned, highly unlikely otherwise. Make mine a boilermaker. – S

• "All the finesse of a Wikipedia plot summary": That's the phrase a critic used to pan the chronological viewing option of The Last of Us Part II. It's a common enough complaint among critics of movies, videos, and games, but we would have thought PC Gamer could have come up with a more original critique.
• Naomi Ackie was born on August 22, 1991: Ackie claims in the podcast Podcrushed (episode 122) that she was born on August 22, 1991, not on November 2, 1992. She says that she has had "a member of her team" and others correct the date over the course of years, only to see it changed back each time. The Signpost has not found a very reliable source citing a date either way, though the podcast might suffice for now. Her story in general is confirmed by the article's edit history. Her interviewer Penn Badgley said something similar had happened to him on Wikipedia: his son is not named James.
• Jenna, are you pregnant?: on Today with Jenna and Friends (starting about 7:25) host Jenna Bush Hager revealed that her mom, former first lady Laura Bush, used to read Wikipedia and then call Jenna to ask whether it was true that she was pregnant. Sorry, but after an hour of checking, this reporter couldn't find anything that might prompt that question. (Also in written format.)
• Wikipedia Narco? : Brian Charrington, a convicted drug trafficker who was awaiting possible humanitarian release from prison for health reasons, died on July 22, according to The Mirror. He "updated his own Wikipedia page with detailed information about his international criminal career" according to The Mirror. The Spanish newspaper El Pais was a bit more careful, saying that "he allegedly updated his own Wikipedia biography" (emphasis added). This allegation has been discussed on the Wikipedia bio and its talk page and the documentation looks questionable to this reporter.
• Canadian content: the newspaper The Globe and Mail, located in Toronto, Ontario, wrote about the province's Wikipedia editor community (archive), highlighting two editors, Andy Filipowich and Hannah Clover (2024 Wikimedian of the Year).
• Who? Us, of course.: Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand board member Marshall Clark talks to Radio New Zealand podcast Nights, titled "Who edits Wikipedia?".
• Take out the slop: 404 Media noted new speedy deletion rules for "AI slop" only about 24 hours after the RfC was closed on 4 August. PC World followed the next day, also using "AI slop" in their headline.
• Sustainability improved by Wikipedia: "The ITTO is Using Wikipedia to Reduce the Impact of Logging" (WoodCentral, Australia). It's not clear what the Wikipedia nexus is but maybe International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) are directing partners to review Reduced-impact logging.

The backwards 'E' was unintentional. So was the 'H'. And the rotated 'T'. (—author)

By the way, no, I don't know why the boxes look all crapways either. Nothing in the templates or the CSS changed. I tried to fix it for a while today but I couldn't figure it out — if you want to poke around and try your hand, pop on over to the Newsroom and we can have a go at it (—ed.)