Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a campaign calling for release from prison for Osama Khalid (User:OsamaK), who has been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia since 2020 for editing Wikipedia (see previous Signpost coverage). Without intervention, he is due for release in 2034. EFF has further profiled Osama as "Offline", which is their broader effort to recognize people who are imprisoned for sharing media, and the context of how and why people face opposition to information sharing.

Osama was very active as a Wikipedia editor in English and Arabic, as a bot operator, in the Wikipedia IRC group chat, and he attended the international Wikimania conference multiple times. He is known to many Wikipedians both online and through in-person events, including his volunteering to teach Wikipedia editing to students at medical schools. Among the many topics he edited, Osama collaborated with Wikimedia LGBT+ to develop medical articles related to sexual health, sexually transmitted infection, and reproductive health into that group's discussion, and to coordinate translation of health topics between English and Arabic.

As previously reported by The Signpost, a coalition of organizations began to publicly call for his release in 2024. Osama was arrested along with fellow Wikipedia editor and physician colleague Ziyad al-Sufiani (User:Ziad), who was released in 2025. – BR

The Wikimedia Foundation has officially closed Wikinews, one of its longest-lasting projects, on May 4, 2026. Editing and new content creation will no longer be possible, with all of the pages on the site locked in read-only mode.

First launched in November 2004, following an online vote on Meta, Wikinews was an official Wikimedia project based on news reporting and citizen journalism, as well as one of the first portals to set that mission for itself, having been intended by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales as a way to write each story "as a news story, as opposed to an encyclopedia article". However, throughout its history, the purpose of Wikinews was repeatedly questioned, with some observers pointing out how Wikipedia already provided high-quality coverage of recent events, while others criticized the project's perceived lack of commitment to a neutral point of view. Plus, Wikinews always struggled to gain momentum in comparison to other Wikimedia portals throughout the years: at the time of its shutdown, the platform was active in 31 languages, with just over 700 active editors across the board.

This resulted in a group of users forking away, before multiple calls for the closure of the project were made. These efforts culminated in a 2024 public consultation, which concluded that:

Wikinews is not viable as a global, multi-lingual sister project in the Wikimedia ecosystem and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation. The project does not fill a need in the world through useful articles, significant readership, or significant volunteer engagement. News articles are not a good fit for the wiki model, as shown in the low editor engagement and few revisions over time. There are many stronger alternatives for the broader mission of non-profit news.

In November 2025, the Sister Projects Task Force (SPTF) advised the BoT to cease the activity of Wikinews permanently, a decision that eventually came into full effect back in March of this year.

You can find more details in our prior coverage and in this month's Special report. – B, O

Nominations for the May 2026 administrator elections began 00:00, 29 April 2026 (UTC), followed by a call for candidates through May 5, then the Discussion phase May 8–12. The Voting phase was open May 13–19.

Results were posted at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/May 2026/Results on 20 May. The administrators elected were (in alphabetical order):

• Asukite
• Bobby Cohn
• Bonadea
• Ca
• Drm310
• Reconrabbit
• Sammi Brie

All were elected with between 80 and 90 percent approval. Two additional candidates were not elected. – B

Voting is open for the 2026 election of Universal Code of Conduct coordinators until June 2 (midnight UTC).

The committee is tasked with providing an "equitable and consistent implementation of the Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC)."

Editors can vote once if they meet the following criteria:

• not be site-wide blocked in more than one public project;
• not be a bot;
• have made at least 300 edits before 24 April 2026 across Wikimedia wikis; and
• have made at least 20 edits between 24 October 2025 and 24 April 2026.

– M

On Diff, the Wikimedia Foundation announced publication of the most important financial form for nonprofits, the Form 990, for both the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedia Endowment. The WMF's Form 990 is available to view here and the endowment's 990 is here. Both forms cover the 2024–2025 financial year, except for compensation data, which is for the 2024 calendar year.

Judging by the forms' financial info, the Foundation appears to be in good financial health. The forms show net assets of –

• $297 million for the Wikimedia Foundation, up $25 million on the year prior, and
• $169 million for the Wikimedia Endowment, also up $25 million over the prior year.

The highest-paid WMF executives listed on the WMF's Form 990 for the reporting period were then-CEO Maryana Iskander, CPTO Selena Deckelmann and CAO Lisa Seitz, with total reported compensation of $553,360, $517,425 and $463,076 respectively. 271 WMF staff received more than $100,000 of reportable compensation. The Wikimedia Endowment has no paid staff of its own. – AK

There will be two Wikimedia Café discussion opportunities during the last weekend of May. Both sessions will focus on the the 2026-2027 Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan. Participants may attend either or both sessions.

1. Saturday, 30 May 2026 at 15:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to the Americas, Africa, and Europe.
2. Sunday, 31 May 2026 at 05:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to Asia and the Pacific.

Café participants are highly encouraged to read in advance at least this summary of the plan. Optionally, Café participants are encouraged to read portions of the plan that interest them and ask questions or provide feedback on the Annual Plan talk page.

Please see the Café page for more information, including tables of timestamp conversions for both sessions, the agenda, and how to register!

On 21 May, User:SCherukuwada (WMF) (Deputy Chief Product & Technology Officer at WMF) announced that 6 members of the Community Tech team were laid off, with the team at large disbanded. Among other things, CommTech supported the Community Wishlist, with a number of the laid off employees also being long standing volunteer contributors.

This decision has caused significant community outrage. According to a comment on meta from technical contributor, Sohom

I would trust [the 6 fired employees to figure out] what the community wants more than anything, and the fact that the Foundation does not see the immediate benefit in retaining these engineers in a job where they explicitly work on community-requested features feels extremely sad and is a significant problem.

Some editors have claimed a connection between the firings and attempts at unionising the WMF. So far, a hundred editors have signed a petition signifying solidarity with the union. WMF legal counsel Stephen LaPorte later clarified that the Foundation respects the right of the staff to unionise, and will proceed to negotiate in good faith.

With the situation still evolving, The Signpost will be covering this topic in depth in the next issue. – S

• Milestones: The following Wikimedia projects have reached milestones: Fulfulde Wikipedia (Fula language, also called Fulfulde) reaches 18,000 articles (from Diff).
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Harbor, and next week's (beginning 25 May 2026) is Partnership for Peace. Please be bold in helping improve these articles!
• More Wikis block archive.today: Consensus to block or deprecate the notorious web archiving service has been reached on the Arabic, English, French, Romanian and Swedish Wikipedias, Wikidata, French Wikivoyage, French Wikiquote, French Wikibooks, and Dutch Wikibooks. English Wikivoyage has removed links to the site in the mainspace.
• Choose your Picture of the Day WISEly...: The Visual Geometry Group (VGG) of the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford has developed a new demo for an audiovisual search engine, based on the WISE AI tool, aiming to help users look for images and videos under the Media of the Day category on Wikimedia Commons. You can give feedback on the demo on this page.
• Wikiversity adopts an AI policy: English Wikiversity has adopted an official artificial intelligence policy on April 17, with it being permitted where it follows "good scholarly practices". The project also has guidance for editors using it on the project.

Indonesian readers and editors can finally log in to Wikimedia projects again after the country had blocked access to the auth.wikimedia.org domain for nearly two months (see earlier coverage in the 10 March 2026 issue).

After repeated delays by the Wikimedia Foundation to register with Indonesian authorities since November 2025, Indonesia gave the Foundation a final seven days' grace on 15 April to comply or otherwise face a wider access block on all Wikimedia projects. In a statement on 25 April, the Foundation agreed to register after having sought "assurances that there would be no unlawful content takedown orders or data disclosure requirements that could put the Wikimedia community-led model at risk".

In a Diff post, the Foundation stated that it had completed the Wikipedia app's administrative registration process as an Electronic System Provider (PSE) on 30 April 2026, having been assured by the Ministry of Communications and Digital Affairs (Komdigi) that this was an administrative formality. A letter shared by Komdigi with the Wikimedia Foundation's legal team stated that the registration will not be a legal basis for content moderation or data disclosure that could undermine the Wikimedia community-led model. The completion of the registration was briefly delayed due to an issue with the registration platform. The community's open letter has 17,489 signatures at its closing on 2 May 2026, mostly from anonymous editors (some may be registered editors who could not login). – RS

Israeli media outlet Ynetnews has released a deep dive into alleged antisemitism on Wikipedia, claiming that "[t]he group 'Tech for Palestine' employs dozens of senior editors who have so far changed about 10,000 entries to create a false narrative in favor of the Palestinians, Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah." Drawing on research by Israeli academic Shlomit Aharoni Lir, a research fellow and lecturer at the University of Haifa and a researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies (Israel), the article argues that Wikipedia's place in the information ecosystem, combined with freedom of editing and anonymity, makes it a key target for those who desire to manipulate human knowledge and public perception. Topics covered include suspicions of "involvement by external actors", the disqualification of information sources, and alleged fabrication of histories such as inventing Hellenistic Palestine.

The article favourably mentions the letter sent by James Comer and Nancy Mace – chair of the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and chair of the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Information Technology and Government Innovation – to the Wikimedia Foundation, in which Comer and Mace announced that the U.S. Congress was investigating Wikimedia because of "multiple studies and reports highlighting efforts to manipulate information on Wikipedia for propaganda" (see previous Signpost coverage, "US Congress probes Wikipedia"). It goes on to introduce the concept of knowledge poisoning as a form of "soft terrorism" and favourably compares Elon Musk's Grokipedia and Justapedia to Wikipedia, describing them as "two online encyclopedias that are also not free of problems and biases, but at least on the Israeli-Palestinian issue they do not take a clear side". At the conclusion of the article, Aharoni Lir asserts that as things stand –

Wikipedia plays a substantial role in the dumbing down of the masses, in which entire publics take part in a struggle based on shallow perceptions and a lack of understanding of reality. Wikipedia used to be the thing itself, but now it is a symbol of a dystopian reality, of a beautiful vision of democratizing knowledge that has become a source of exclusion, bias and deception.

The article's illustrations include a picture of Aharoni Lir pictured next to a Wikipedia puzzle globe decorated with a red swastika.

The article does not mention or explain relevant Wikipedia policies such as NPOV or verifiability. It also gives little space to Wikipedia's internal governance processes for dealing with violations, although it mentions that "From late 2024 to early 2025, English Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, considered the site’s 'Supreme Court,' suspended nine pro-Palestinian editors, as well as two pro-Israel editors." Shortly after the article's publication on April 26, the Maghreb arbitration case resulted in another editor being banned indefinitely and two more being topic-banned. A May 8 article by Jewish News Syndicate quotes Aharoni Lir as acknowledging this indefinite ban and an earlier one from January as a "significant step", which however "does not repair the content contamination they left behind".

In 2020, Shlomit Aharoni Lir had published a peer-reviewed paper about gender bias on Wikipedia (Signpost coverage). In 2024, she authored a non-peer-reviewed report for The World Jewish Congress titled "The Bias Against Israel on Wikipedia", which was roundly criticized by the Wikimedia Foundation for "mak[ing] a number of unsubstantiated claims of bias on Wikipedia" (Signpost coverage). The recent Ynetnews article quotes Aharoni Lir as describing this response by WMF as "dismissive and contemptuous," however, she says, "later the atmosphere changed. The penny dropped. They understood there is bias against Israel, and that it is a problem." Aharoni Lir's later criticisms (amplified in an August 2025 Jerusalem Post article) of social media posts related to the October 7 attacks and Hamas, made by a shortlisted candidate in last year's Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees elections, appear to have contributed to the Board's controversial decision to remove that candidate from the community vote (Signpost coverage).

– M, AK, B, H

You would think that professionals with an ounce of respect for the public, or the volunteers here, would not follow the advice given by Law.com at "The Wikipedia Play: Overlooked Reputation Lever for Law Firms in the AI Era" (subscription required). The Signpost has been onto this sort of thing since at least our 2019 Special report, "Are reputation management operatives scrubbing Wikipedia articles?", if not our 2015 Op-ed, "We are drowning in promotional artspam". Or maybe it was 2012 thing 1 thing 2 thing 3? In any case, we don't call what we do a "Reputation Lever" over here. – B

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, in conjunction with the Sweden and UK Wikimedia chapters, have signed a memorandum to "expand public access to reliable information on food, agriculture and related topics." The organisation plans to contribute various forms of content, and engage with the Wikimedia community across a variety of platforms. This continues an ongoing collaboration between the FAO and Wikimedia community, having collaborated with the aforementioned chapters since 2019, regularly engaging in the annual Wikimania event, and have hosted a Wikimedian-in-Residence. – M

The Washington Free Beacon addresses when deeds and misdeeds of a public figure, whether or not micro-, get included in a Wikipedia article about them. More precisely, the media coverage is about Wikipedians debating whether self-declared deeds or misdeeds (depending on your ethical stance presumably) including microlooting, are suitable for a biography of a living person (BLP). – B

Indonesian outlet Inilah reports that a deadly train collision in Jakarta, Indonesia, involving a taxi and two trains sparked off a brief edit war in the incident article as well as that of the taxi company, Green SM. One of Green SM's taxis first stalled on the tracks at a crossing and caused a collision with a train. Editors were fleshing out details of the incident, including Green SM's initial response to the collision (that the public found lacking), when anonymous editors began to remove mentions of the company and related information from both pages, with one edit summary stating (in Vietnamese) that it was done under directions of their superior to remove negative information about the company. The removed content was restored and both pages were semi-protected to stabilise them. The anonymous editors earned a sockpuppeting report and corresponding blocks. – RS

The New York Times reports that Mac Cummings's Terakeet reputation management firm charges its customers "on average" a $5–$10 million annual fee for ongoing reputation management, which might include polishing clients' Wikipedia pages, among other online activities. Some of those customers have included "MetLife, JP Morgan Chase, Oracle, Target, Walmart, Disney and Bain Capital" (links added), though we don’t know if Terakeet edited Wikipedia on their behalf.

Of particular interest is Goldman Sachs and its outgoing General Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, who was a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein.

See this issue's Disinformation report for further coverage. – SB

In the lead-up to his trip to Australia, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation conducted an interview with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. Topic included his opinion on AI and how it impacts Wikipedia's "vision", Elon Musk's development of Grokipedia, and how the projects maintain trust.

Wales has also participated in several other recent interviews, such as this one with The Guardian referring to the recent Australia social media ban as an 'unmitigated disaster', and this other one with Forbes, discussing Nupedia, and their "seven-step scrutiny process", making sure to advertise his latest book. – M

• One side is being paid and ...: Air Mail covers some of the basics of paid-editing, reviewing The Bureau of Investigative Journalism's (TBIJ) stories on Qatar, and other reports on Vivek Ramaswamy, and even George Santos. Stephen Harrison is quoted throughout. (link; free with registration)
• Who is corrupting whom?: In "Who Decides What's True on Wikipedia?", Coleman Hughes from The Free Press interviews Ashley Rindsberg on the influence of anonymous editors on shaping "the internet's encyclopedia through ideological bias, and corrupt[ing] the AI systems being trained on it."
• And another one: Boing Boing reports on another "much more engaging" Wikipedia game called "Catfishing", "The Wikipedia guessing game I can't stop playing".
• Training (AI) in progress: Reuters has reported that plans by tech giant Meta to record keystrokes on employees across websites will include Wikipedia, as well as on hundreds of other sites. Internal Meta messages allegedly suggested this was for the purposes of training their artificial intelligence models. CNBC followed up on the report.

• AI brain on drugs: "A new Wikipedia-style site is purportedly made entirely of AI-hallucinations, treating visitors to preposterous insights beamed from a nonexistent reality." (Futurism); "A Wikipedia Clone Built on AI Hallucinations Is Here to Hasten Along the Death of the Internet: If we're all going to drown in a sea of nonsense, it might as well at least be funny." (Gizmodo) No surprise, unfortunately, that the most-read pages on Halupedia are "dominated by topics that cross the line from dark humor into unabashed or dangerous bigotry" despite "some light moderation" by the site's owners (Fast Company).
• Doing justice: "A room of one's own on Wikipedia: The editors who have been doing justice to women on the internet for over a decade", "The initiative seeks to correct biases and show the protagonists of history beyond their role as daughters or wives" (El País in English)
• Secretly influential: Twenty-somethings and a 16-year-old contributor to Wikipedia's music articles are profiled by Pitchfork, who says they combat "music journalism's slow erosion" by joining the "secretly influential cabal that edits Wikipedia". If you haven't heard of hyperpop, dariacore, hexD, digicore, landfill indie, recession pop, shitgaze, or SoundCloud rap, try to keep up – read up, that is. And maybe help out with that SoundCloud rap draft.
• And Jimmy said, Let there be light: and there was light.: We may have misquoted just a bit there, but The Economic Times does assert that "In 2001, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger Opened a Simple Wiki for a Slow Project: That Fix Established the Foundation for Wikipedia".
• Vandal lies on Wikipedia, fools AI and calls it an experiment: The Register reports that Ron Stoner named himself world champion of a card game on Wikipedia and fooled a couple AI bots. It's an old game that doesn't really fool anybody. Should we blame Stoner, the AI bots, or The Register?
• Wikipedia ethos, but for country data: OpenFactBook is "the same data the [U.S.] government long offered [in the CIA Factbook], only now it’s maintained by dedicated volunteers" (Fast Company)
• Larry Sanger repeats himself: The Washington Examiner posts What happened to Wikipedia’s neutrality? by Sanger. Ho hum.
• Wikipedians give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to soccer match articles: The Athletic, part of The New York Times, asks "What makes a match worthy of Wikipedia?"

• Vulnerability is what makes it work: "The Backstory: The Night Wikipedia Almost Vanished" talks (literally) about when the Wikimedia Foundation decided to make Wikipedia a donor-funded enterprise – casting it somewhat imprecisely as a bit of a story about a single night's decision about the late 2007 fundraising campaign (Signpost coverage: "Fundraiser ends, $500,000 donation received") and its banner messages. The central idea is this quote from the podcast (around the 9:29 mark): "Why did it work? Its vulnerability...if people stop caring, it disappears." (Elvis Duran and the Morning Show on demand)

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Reviewed by User:e_mln_e

This paper^[1] by Michael Falk (of the WikiHistories project) uses Critical Code Studies methods to examine Wikilambda, the extension of the MediaWiki software that underlies Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia.

Wikifunctions, a collaboratively edited library of computer functions, is the newest Wikimedia project, launched in 2023. Abstract Wikipedia, a language-independent version of Wikipedia that the Wikimedia Foundation has been developing since 2020, relies on Wikifunctions and thereby Wikilambda to convert structured data from Wikidata into natural language. In other words, Wikilambda is the programming language using Wikifunctions to fetch structured data and facts from Abstract Wikipedia, to translate it and render it into other written language.

Published in the journal AI & Society, the paper argues that Wikilambda is an attempt to create a ‘perfect language.’ Comparing it to previous attempts to create perfect languages, the paper suggests Wikilambda cannot meet its stated goals, and points to assumptions about its potential users that likely aren't correct.

What does the author mean by a perfect language? The article refers to Umberto Eco's 1995 book The Search for the Perfect Language, which looks at various attempts in history to create ideal languages. Umberto Eco (1995, 73) distinguishes two kinds of ideal language: the “perfect” and the “universal.” As described in the article:

A perfect language is one that is “capable of mirroring the true nature of objects. Such a language must analyse the world into its constituent parts, and provide means to build it back up again. Each word must correspond to a real component of nature, and each syntactic rule must correspond to a way that nature combines primitive elements into complex entities.

A universal language is ideal in a different way: it is a language “which everyone might, or ought to, speak. Esperanto is an example among the spoken languages. Among programming languages, BASIC, Logo, Python and Scratch are examples of languages that are intended to be universally accessible.

Umberto Eco's book describes many such projects that have failed in the past, because language is not easily severed from symbolism or necessitate a significant learning effort, while not offering the advantages of connection it promised. For instance, Esperanto didn't grow to become a lingua franca. Researchers^{[supp 1]} note that:

Despite the logical concept and intellectual appeal of a standard language, Esperanto has not evolved into a dominant worldwide language. Instead, English, with all its idiosyncrasies, is closest to an international lingua franca. Like Zamenhof, standards committees in medical informatics have recognized communication chaos and have tried to establish working models, with mixed results. In some cases, previously shunned proprietary systems have become the standard. A proposed standard, no matter how simple, logical, and well designed, may have difficulty displacing an imperfect but functional “real life” system.

Falk argues Wikilambda is an attempt to create two ideal languages:

The proposed “template language” for Abstract Wikipedia is intended to be both perfect and universal: it will be perfectly able to express any fact, and universally accessible by writers all over the world. To implement this “template language,” the Abstract Wikipedia team has gone about developing another perfect and universal language: Wikilambda. This programming language will enable the people of the world to collaborate to build the constructors and renderers that will define and express the sum of human knowledge. According to the Wikilambda developers, Wikilambda is universal because it breaks the hegemony of English; it is perfect because it is not actually a language.

If WikiLambda indeed is an attempt to create ideal languages, it follows that it is at the same risks of failing as the many other such projects documented by Umberto Eco. The article analyzes why.

The article opens with a reference to Signpost's 2023 coverage of an evaluation of WikiLambda, which found the project "at substantial risk of failure"^{[supp 2]}.

The article includes four sections. After the introduction in Section 1, Section 2 describes Wikilambda and its relationship to Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia (see above), and how it treats language as a conduit, i.e. that "when we speak or write, we pack “content” into a sentence, which is then delivered to a speaker or reader who unpacks the content at the other end." Falk argues that language is not reducible in this way, because of our use of metaphors, and different constructs to understand the world.

In Section 3, Falk discusses Wikilambda itself.

The main argument for Wikilambda’s universality is that it will break the hegemony of English. Most programming languages, observe Wikilambda’s creators, use English as a source of vocabulary. JavaScript has objects, functions and if-statements, rather than Objekte, Funktionen and wenn-statements. Since languages like JavsScript use English words, they force budding programmers to “learn English first” before they learn to program, which is unfair (“Wikifunctions:Vision” 2023). To solve this problem, Wikilambda does not use words to denote parts of a computation. Instead, each part of the computation is assigned a Z-number or Z-key in the Wikifunctions database. When a person visits a function in the Wikifunctions interface, they are presented with a translation of these Z-numbers and Z-keys into their preferred language.

Falk notes this is justified by Wikilambda developers as preventing a system reproducing imperialist, Western thinking^{[supp 3]}, which directly contradicts their other beliefs about language as a simple conduit for facts. Further, he points out that because English is the de facto lingua franca, developers communities turn to it to discuss across languages.

In Section 4, Falk turns to the function orchestrator, examining "What abstractions have the Wikilambda developers invented to describe their new language? What can these abstractions tell us about the natureand intent of their project?." Falk notes that the first metaphor is that of orchestration:

The orchestrate function takes as its input a piece of Wikilambda code (a ZObject), some configuration settings (invariants) and an ImplementationSelector. Its task is to run the given Wikilambda code, using the ImplementationSelector to choose between available “implementations” in the Wikifunctions database. It is this ImplementationSelector that most clearly virtualises the “orchestration” metaphor. Normally, a programming language will have just one way of doing each action: one function for addition, one for integer division, one for instantiating an array, and so on. If there are two ways of doing something, it would normally be up to the programmer to decide: perhaps there are two division routines, one that is fast and approximate and one that is slow but exact, and the programmer can select which one is appropriate for their task. The Wikilambda language is different, because there may be many ways of performing each operation, and it is the orchestrator’s job rather than the programmer’s to choose between them.

He then dives into the specific of language design, to argue that Wikilambda developers are working to carve new abstractions, to make Wikilambda a language escaping traditional programming metaphors and constructs. He also notes the language often fails because of its high level of abstraction, and has to return to default programming conventions.

The article is a good introduction to the full Wikilambda project, and a convincing analytical examination of the potential failure points of the project. It situates Wikilambda in the history of programming languages, and provides a useful case study of developers' use of metaphors and understanding of language. It also points to contradictions in the project we should be mindful about. The article concludes with the irony that Wikilambda developers explicitly criticized "One ring to rule them all" approaches^{[supp 3]}, yet implement one such solution. It also highlights the moral commitments made by the team: they make the entire translation process (structured data, functions, interpreter) transparent, contestable and modifiable by humans. "If nothing else, Wikilambda is a thundering critique of corporate AI hype."

• Background on Critical Code Studies Methods: https://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2024/12/reflections-on-method-for-critical-code.html

• See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
• The Wikimedia Foundation has published the findings from the 2025 edition of its annual global survey of Wikipedia readers. Among other results, it reports that

"Looking at usage trends across all 11 surveyed Wikipedias from 2024-2025, it's clear that Google and YouTube are again consistently the most-frequently named platforms across survey waves and Wikipedia language editions. However, it is also clear that ChatGPT use for learning and accessing knowledge has grown considerably among Wikipedia readers from 2024-2025, particularly on arwiki, jawiki, kowiki, ptwiki, and ruwiki."

Alongside Google and YouTube, ChatGPT also received the highest favorability ratings among these other sources.

Other finding are about reader demographics, e.g. gender and age:

Consistent with previous findings from 2023 and 2024, Wikipedia readers skew young overall, although this can vary substantially by project. German Wikipedia readers in particular tend to skew older.

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.

Compiled by Tilman Bayer

From the abstract:^[2]:

"[...] data extracted from Wikidata can be interesting for working on geonyms, classifying nouns in place names (e.g., English alley) and their content similarity across languages, e.g., whether Italian piazza and Chinese guǎng chǎng both express the concept ‘square.’ In this paper we explore the use of Wikidata entries to represent the semantic content of geonyms and compare cross-linguistic representations, and thus Wikidata’s potential as a novel, powerful resource for geo-semantic, cross-linguistic research."

From the abstract:^[3]

"This paper examines how the concept of bibliographic families and derivative relationships, foundational to modern bibliographic models like FRBR and BIBFRAME, manifest within Wikidata's community-driven knowledge base. Through systematic analysis of over 2,2 million creative works across audiovisual, musical, literary, and video game domains, we explore the emergent patterns of relationships between works. Our findings reveal that while traditional WEMI relationships represent only 2% of the identified connections, a rich ecosystem of other relationship types dominates the descriptive landscape.

From the abstract:^[4]

"Nine New Zealand tertiary institutions collaborated with four Wikidata experts to upload a combined national dataset of doctoral and master’s theses. Thesis records, including author and advisor names and richly described with main subject statements, were extracted from each repository, combined, and data cleaned before being uploaded to Wikidata. The team then undertook additional data enrichment, round-tripped Wikidata’s QID identifiers back to individual repositories, and used the new records to cite theses on authors’ Wikipedia pages. Wikidata queries and other visualizations were created to demonstrate how connecting the thesis metadata to records for authors, advisors, institutions, and subjects allows new insights into our collections."

From the abstract:^[5]

"In this paper, we describe the extraction of all the location entries from a prominent Swedish encyclopedia from the early 20th century, the Nordisk Familjebok ‘Nordic Family Book.’ We focused on the second edition called Uggleupplagan, which comprises 38 volumes and over 182,000 articles. [...]. It showed a higher density within Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The paper sheds light on the selection and representation of geographic information in the Nordisk Familjebok, providing insights into historical and societal perspectives. It also paves the way for future investigations into entry selection in different time periods and comparative analyses among various encyclopedias."

Two papers from a special issue titled "Wikidata Across the Humanities: Datasets, Methodologies, Reuse":

From the paper:^[6]

"Digital Scriptorium (DS; https://digital-scriptorium.org/) is a national consortium of institutional members who contribute data describing their premodern manuscript holdings to a union catalog of premodern manuscripts owned in North American collections, the DS Catalog. The DS Catalog is built in Wikibase and operates in many ways on the same data principles and organizational structure as Wikidata [...]

Integrating manuscript metadata into Wikidata, however, is not straightforward. Wikidata was not designed with manuscripts in mind, and its flexible but general-purpose schema presents modeling challenges for representing the complexity of premodern manuscript metadata [...]. Descriptive elements like artistic attribution, ambiguous production dates, or multilingual titles in original script require more nuanced representation than current property infrastructure often allows."

From the abstract:^[7]

"This article presents a historiographical investigation of nineteenth-century French art using Wikidata. It draws on a dataset of over 12,000 artists who exhibited at the Paris Salon between 1848 and 1880, each identified and, where possible, aligned with Wikidata entries. This alignment allows for both a quantitative analysis of artists’ posthumous visibility–assessing their presence in Wikidata and the completeness of their entries–and a qualitative evaluation of the data itself. Using OpenRefine, Wikidata entries were compared with specialized sources such as the Getty Research Institute’s Union List of Artist Names, providing insight into the reliability of basic biographical information and the broader documentation available. [...]
Three key patterns emerge: first, women artists remain largely invisible in historiography, reflecting the professional and institutional barriers they faced during their lifetimes. Second, artists highly recognized in their own time tend to maintain substantial posthumous documentation, showing the durability of reputations and the traces historians rely upon. Third, association with modernity is a particularly strong factor in ensuring posthumous recognition [...]"

From the abstract:^[8]

"Text Implicitness has always been challenging in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with traditional methods relying on explicit statements to identify entities and their relationships. From the sentence "Zuhdi attends church every Sunday", the relationship between Zuhdi and Christianity is evident for a human reader, but it presents a challenge when it must be inferred automatically. Large language models (LLMs) have proven effective in NLP downstream tasks such as text comprehension and information extraction (IE).

This study examines how textual implicitness affects IE tasks in pre-trained LLMs: LLaMA 2.3, DeepSeekV1, and Phi1.5. We generate two synthetic datasets of 10k implicit and explicit verbalization of biographic information to measure the impact on LLM performance and analyze whether fine-tuning implicit data improves their ability to generalize in implicit reasoning tasks."

From the paper:

"[...] a set of 10,000 random entities from Wikidata was extracted, specifically targeting entities of the Human class2, e.g. Vincent Rodriguez III). The entities’ biographical information3 have been extracted via the Wikidata API, filtering out irrelevant information, such as identification parameters, visual references, and associated technical metadata. As shown in Table 2, 14 triples describe relevant information about the biography of Vincent Rodriguez III (e.g., occupation, country of citizenship, sexual orientation), with 18 values. Our aim is to create two parallel sentences for each person, one that describes a fact or info about them explicitly, and the other implicitly."

Supplementary references and notes:

The rules of Wikipedia clearly state that the platform is not a battleground. The policy expresses this plainly, almost optimistically, as if reminding us of our better selves: we are here to work together, not to argue. However, anyone who has been editing the encyclopedia for a while knows that conflict is an unavoidable part of the process. Edits are challenged, sources are debated, and phrasing is negotiated. On the surface, these are just routine editorial processes, but they can feel surprisingly personal to those involved. Many of us do not separate our writing from our identity as much as we believe. When someone changes our words, it can feel like an attack on our judgment, expertise, or understanding: this is where tension starts emerging.

People take up editing certain articles because they care about a topic, a field, a detail in history, or a cultural moment—something they want to help document and explain. However, enthusiasm can easily turn into attachment. When we care about something, we want it to be accurately represented, or at least in a way that feels right to us. So, when another editor disagrees, criticism can feel threatening rather than welcoming. The disagreement itself isn't the problem; it's actually crucial for improving articles. The real issue is how quickly disagreement can shift from a discussion about content to a heated competition over who is right.

This dynamic explains a lot of Wikipedia's internal issues. Once editors focus on proving they are right, instead of working together for further accuracy, the project's purpose is lost. Discussions shift away from content and become about positions; reverts turn into symbols, and talk pages transform into arenas. The quality of the article—something we all claim to care about—becomes secondary to the desire not to back down. This is where conflict does real harm: not just to relationships on the platform, but to the product we are supposed to build together.

The consequences are significant. New editors, including experts who could enhance the encyclopedia, often leave over just one negative encounter. They perceive intensity as hostility, or gatekeeping, or a sign that their contributions are not welcome. Meanwhile, long-time editors can become weary, defensive, or hardened due to repeated arguments. Communication becomes sharper, patience shorter, and collaboration more strained. A few tough interactions contribute to a culture that quietly pushes people away. Once this culture sets in, reversing it becomes much harder than stopping it from forming in the first place.

If we genuinely believe that Wikipedia is not a battleground, then the answer is not to avoid disagreement, but to change the way we handle it. We can explain reverts, instead of just making them. We can ask for reasoning, instead of jumping to conclusions. We can take a moment before responding to a pointed message. We can strive, at the very least, to read each other with understanding. These are simple habits, almost trivial on their own, but culture is built from habits that are repeated often enough to become the norm (for better or for worse).

Wikipedia succeeds because it relies on collaboration. But collaboration only works when everyone feels respected, heard, and treated as partners, instead of opponents. If we want an encyclopedia that reflects the best of collective knowledge, we must resist the urge to turn every disagreement into a contest. We have to remember, especially in moments of frustration, that, nine-and-a-half times out of ten, the person on the other end did not come here to fight either.

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