This article was originally published in Diff on 3 July 2026 by Lodewijk, licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0. He has been a Dutch Wikimedian since 2005 and is now Chair of the Wikimania Steering Committee. He is a researcher in computational social science, working on technology and innovations in deliberative democracy.

This post makes the case that internal decision-making is quietly stuck. A later post will introduce a prototype to see if we can do something about it. This post describes a project of a working group that formed after the Futures Lab in Frankfurt earlier this year, asking itself what open knowledge communities could look like in the age of artificial intelligence.

Wikipedia has proven to be a remarkable way of bringing together different viewpoints on a range of difficult topics, presented in the form of encyclopedia articles. The Wikipedia community manages all this through an approach based on fundamental trust in the ability of its users to collaborate: an open-source spirit of mutual help, and a liberating invitation for people to 'be bold' and just fix the mistakes. It also puts faith in conversations, through the 'talk pages' connected to every article.

Below, I make the case that Wikipedia communities often do not live up to their intent to be inclusive in internal policy-making; that our policies are more conservative than we realize; and that a large part of the reason is structural – the twenty-year-old format we use to make decisions is quietly working against us. Our processes have been designed with an abundance of time in mind, in an era of exponential growth. That time is over. The good news, which I'll come back to in a companion post, is that there are tangible ways to make these processes better.

When I talk to my friends in some of the larger editing communities across the world, I hear less enthusiastic characterizations about our ability to make decisions internally. In a way, that is hardly surprising: Wikipedians are a peculiar type of people, often more motivated by content than by process. And that is OK. But when I ask those same friends what their editorial and behavioral policies look like compared to a few years ago, the same story comes back again and again: the policies were often written in the early 2000s, and haven't changed much. Not for lack of wanting to, but because it is simply hard.

Notable exceptions are projects small enough to fit in a room: they can simply meet, online or offline, and agree on a new direction. The exact size will depend on the amount of trust, cultural coherence, and so on – but communities where you can recognize all your colleagues by their writing style are fundamentally different from communities where you occasionally wonder why someone isn't an admin yet. Another notable deviation is communities that incorporate the policies of another project by reference or direct translation (e.g. Bangla Wikipedia's NPOV policy).

I am myself active on Dutch Wikipedia, one of those sizable communities with a lot of policies from the 2000s. We have added some (the 2005/2006 Biographies of living persons rules, the Universal Code of Conduct), but serious rewrites have mostly fallen flat. I don't know how well my Dutch experience extrapolates here, but this is one rule of thumb I've heard: policies can often be expanded, new rules can be added to deal with edge cases or novel problems – but it is really hard to agree to rethink how we do things. And not because the current policies are so good.

We know from academic literature that implementing change in an organization is notoriously hard to begin with. In our Wikimedia universe, we seem to have encoded even more thresholds – formalized or implied – that make it hard to change policies.

While there are many corners of Wikimedia policy-making that I have not yet explored, my understanding is that there is a spectrum between "consensus-based" policy-making on one extreme and "voting-based" procedures on the other. English Wikipedia, for example, has an interesting blend of the two, built around the Requests for Comment (RfC) process, which sits mostly on the consensus side. Many of our Wikimedia decision processes, whether it is on-wiki, or in committees, take some elements and assumptions from this process. It would be impossible to discuss each different version and process here – and I will focus on the Requests for comment.

The open-source developers who were a driving force in the Wikipedia community around 2001 were probably more familiar than most people today with what a Request for Comment is supposed to look like. The process is often used to decide on standards, through formal rounds of feedback on a proposal. That makes it very suitable for a setting where you want every expert to weigh in with their best judgment to reach an almost-objectively-correct result.

The way many policy discussions actually play out in Wikimedia is unsatisfactory. In a typical RfC, the proposal is written by a small group of users who often have some incentive to push the policy in a direction. It is then put to their colleagues, who can discuss and criticize it – but who at the same time give opinions on whether it should be adopted. They share arguments, respond to other arguments, propose specific changes that might make them more amenable to support it, and so on. In other words: there's a lot going on at once. The turnout is rarely what you would hope for, in a collaborative project. 150 editors on English Wikipedia, or 50 on Dutch, is considered meaningful.

It is also a very discouraging process at an individual level: when a colleague who is not intimately familiar with these processes wants to participate, it takes a lot of reading-up to understand how the process works, where the discussion is at and how to engage effectively. Not only that, but the process encourages the production of enormous amounts of text and discussion, nearly impossible to process in any reasonable amount of time. This likely biases effective engagement toward a small group of enthusiasts. And the time investment is enormous.

All in all, I see a few challenges that are worth spelling out:

• They do not involve a broad enough representation. Not everyone has the time and energy to participate. By the way we organize it, the cost of participating in a meaningful way goes up. Especially when you are not a native speaker.
• There is no reliable way of closing these processes. Especially in an RfC where the topic or proposal text may shift, and where a lot of interpretation is involved. This is particularly visible on Meta, where many proposals are not closed at all, or do not reach a conclusive result.
• A very small group can dominate the process by simply out-debating everyone else ('veto by attrition'). There are limits to this, but especially on a complex topic, most users who are not very used to the process may feel overwhelmed, and may simply choose not to participate, because they feel they cannot process the entire amount of information to form an informed opinion.
• Herding is possible (although I am not sure this is definitively established to happen) people may form their opinion based on who has participated before them. This could even be negative herding: once you see that someone you do not like has voted a certain way, you may subconsciously find reasons to object to it.
• Anchoring. Once people write down that they have a preference for a certain outcome – especially publicly – it's hard to change their minds.
• It is really, really taxing. It takes a tremendous amount of time to process pages like this, and most of it is not exactly relevant. So when people do, they are likely to miss very good arguments and objections.
• We make it unnecessarily personal by forcing people to use a forum-style discussion to really just collect feedback and preferences.

This brings risks for representation – but it also just makes the process really exhausting. I have not met many Wikipedians who look forward to these discussions. In Dutch Wikipedia, our processes are a bit different with a cleaner split between discussions and voting, but otherwise a lot of my concerns from above apply as well.

These concerns play out differently depending on the size of the community. This is not a small-wiki problem or a big-wiki problem, but the same format fails in different ways. On a large wiki, the challenge is noise: more voices than any thread can aggregate. In such a messy scenario, a bold veteran may be expected to interpret the whole thread and assess some consensus from two hundred comments. On a small wiki, the challenge is scarcity: discussions die of silence, a handful of regulars may constitute the entire "community", and a single dissenter is both a meaningful percentage of opinion and impossible to outlast – there is simply no one to do the outlasting.

Regardless of size, both scenarios risk drifting toward the in-crowd: when the same few people decide everything, every proposal implicitly critiques something they built. Newcomer dissent reads as social friction with people you'll meet in every future discussion, and conservatism follows almost mechanically. Which deters new participants, which keeps the circle small, which hardens the in-crowd. This is exactly what we do not need, when we need to welcome more colleagues into our movement.

I want to be clear about what I am not saying: that Wikipedians are bad at deliberating. The research suggests the opposite: our policy discussions are remarkably argument-driven and grounded in shared principles. The problem is not the people or the quality of their reasoning; it is that we ask a single, twenty-year-old format to do five different jobs at once: generate ideas, refine wording, measure support, change minds, and legitimize an outcome. Each of those jobs needs a different mindset, and arguably a different structure.

Luckily, the world of democratic innovation has not been on hold for the past two decades, and there are models out there from which we could learn a thing or two. I don't pretend to have the definitive answer, but the failure modes above point to a few design directions worth exploring. At a high level:

• Separate the phases. Collecting ideas, improving wording, measuring where the community stands, drafting a good compromise and making a decision are different activities. When they happen in one thread, they sabotage each other – a wording nitpick reads as opposition; an early straw poll freezes a half-baked proposal.
• Make participation accessible. If expressing a position took a few minutes instead of half an hour of writing and reading, we would hear from many more people – including the silent majority that currently only shows up in our imagination.
• Decouple opinions from identity. Most of the herding, anchoring, and personalization problems disappear when you can't see who holds a position while you form your own. On a small wiki, it does something more radical still: it makes disagreeing with the in-crowd costless for the first time.
• Look for agreement. Our current formats surface disagreement by design; you respond to a comment because you object to it. Yet what we usually want to know is the opposite: where does the community already agree? That common ground is the natural foundation to build a proposal on, and today we discover it mostly by accident.

None of this is hypothetical. The civic-tech world has spent the last decade building and testing exactly these ideas – most famously in Taiwan, where the vTaiwan process used a tool called Polis to find unexpected common ground on regulating Uber.

In a later piece, I go a step deeper on what each of these directions could mean in practice – and introduce a prototype that tries to put them to work in our own communities. This prototype may initially work better for committees, wikiprojects or other targeted processes, but hopefully at least manages to trigger the imagination of what a solution could look like where the policy processes take less effort and engage more people. What I hope at least, is that we think and talk about it. Please don't think that your current method is the only possibility!

If this interests you, please reach out! We would love your feedback.

Twenty-five years ago, we built an encyclopedia. I refuse to believe that the way we made decisions in 2004 is the best we can do in 2026. The editors who join us next year deserve rules they can actually read, trust – and change.

For background on Wikipedia and the UK Online Safety Act, see prior Signpost coverage:

• "Legal status of Wikimedia projects 'unclear' under potential European legislation" (Special report, February 4, 2023, analysis from when the Online Safety Act was still under debate as a bill)
• "Wikimedia Foundation sues over UK government decision that might require identity verification of editors worldwide" (In the media, May 14, 2025)
• "Wikimedia Foundation court challenge to UK Online Safety Act rules dismissed" (News and notes, September 9, 2025)

Phil Bradley-Schmieg is a Principal Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, focusing on litigation and regulatory compliance work.

The Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA) is legislation in the United Kingdom that aims to hold platform operators accountable for the safety of the people who use their apps and visit their websites. Though most obligations (like its child safety rules) are already in place and widely applicable (including to Wikipedia), additional duties are still to come.

In 2027, the law will impose extra obligations on the most popular services. They are being selected according to their userbase size and features, rather than their perceived level of risk to the public, with Category 1 subjected to most scrutiny and legislation.

We're pleased to announce that on 10 July 2026, the Wikimedia Foundation was notified by the UK's communications and post regulator, Office of Communications (Ofcom), that, based on a novel reading of the law, Wikipedia is not currently deemed a Category 1 service under the Online Safety Act (OSA). However, as part of that announcement, Ofcom informed the Foundation that Wikipedia must remain on a "watch list" of platforms that do not currently qualify as Category 1 services, but that could become Category 1 at any point in the future.  Any future Category 1 designation remains an existential threat to Wikipedia, open knowledge, and the privacy and safety of the community of contributors. The Foundation will continue to advocate for safeguarding public-interest spaces like Wikipedia, pushing for a more formal and permanent exemption of these spaces under the OSA.  

While the Wikimedia movement as a whole is deeply committed to advancing online safety, the concern has been that, should Wikipedia be deemed a "Category 1" website, it would be subjected to measures that would interfere with users' privacy and editing rights. For example, Category 1 sites will need to build an identity registration system and then restrict the rights of users, worldwide, if they don't "voluntarily" register their real ID. This threatens Wikipedia's core values of privacy, safety and community moderation.

In 2023, the Wikimedia Foundation, in partnership with Wikimedia UK and others, launched a campaign in 2023, involving meetings with the government, Parliamentary debates, prominent media outlets, and an open letter, with the goal of educating policymakers. Despite this campaigning, the Online Safety Act nevertheless became law (without substantial improvement) in late 2023. The situation then took a turn for the worse in early 2025, when the UK released detailed rules for the categorization of sites based on how many UK users they have, plus whether they have a "content recommender system" and (for smaller sites) "forwarding or sharing functionality".  

Further discussions with the government proved fruitless. In May 2025, therefore, the Foundation took those Categorisation Regulations to court.  Our challenge was joined by user:Zzuuzz, in possibly a world-first collaboration between a platform operator and its users. The Foundation and Zzuuzz argued that the categorisation criteria were irrationally overbroad, and likely to lead to the unjustified imposition of Category 1 duties on low-risk sites like Wikipedia. This violated human rights.

In August 2025, the High Court decided to reject our case, instead giving the online safety regulator, Ofcom, a chance to creatively interpret the Categorisation Regulations and Category 1 duties to avoid a bad outcome for Wikipedia. The court stressed that the dismissal of our challenge "does not give Ofcom and the Secretary of State a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia's operations", otherwise "the Secretary of State may be obliged to consider whether to amend the regulations or to exempt categories of service from the Act".

On 10 July 2026 we were notified that Wikipedia is not currently categorized as a Category 1 website, but that may change in the future. While the Foundation is relieved by Ofcom's agreement that Wikipedia is not a Category 1 service, without any clear and sustainable limits to categorization, Wikipedia remains vulnerable should Ofcom choose to reassess its decision. The work is not over, and the Foundation will continue to partner with affiliates and editors to monitor the situation and work to expand understanding of our model and why it should be protected under the OSA.

Once again, we extend our thanks to user:Zzuuzz (referred to by the randomly-generated "BLN" moniker in the ruling). The judge's ruling specifically called out Zzuuzz's submissions, calling them "detailed and compelling", and a "powerful case" for Wikipedia's protection under human rights law.

The format of this Signpost piece was adapted from email threads titled "For what are you grateful this week?" that were sent to Wikimedia-l. We encourage you to comment about what's making you happy or grateful this month in the talk page of this Signpost piece. If you're interested in contributing to future editions of "On the bright side", then please reach out on The Signpost's Newsroom talk page.

• Father's Day
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Father's Day is celebrated in the United States on the third week of June. A half-hour episode of the series Horizons explored the science of what happens to men's minds when they (who are psychologically at least somewhat healthy) become fathers. The episode may be found here (external link).

• Canadian weather, and Canada Day
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The 1st of July is Canada Day. According to kids, here is a weather report for Canada, Utah, and Seattle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO8Lk05NY8k

• How to be a United States diplomat
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Would you like to travel, communicate in multiple languages, build relationships, respond to humanitarian needs, promote economic development, and work with intelligence and security partners? Consider a career in diplomacy. Just in time for the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, here's a real diplomat reviewing the American television show The Diplomat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3jc3Mir2YQ

Skillful translations of the sentence "What's making you happy this week?" would be very much appreciated. If you see any inaccuracies in the translations in this article, then please {{ping}} User:Pine or User:Clovermoss in the discussion section of this page, or boldly make the correction to the text of the article. Thank you to everyone who has helped with translations so far.

What makes you happy or grateful this month? You are welcome to write a comment on the talk page of this Signpost piece.

Simple summary: If the community is under threat and strategy priority 1.1 is supporting the community, a simple, straightforward strategy would be to increase the financial investment in the community. Given the importance of the volunteer editor community to Wikipedia and its mission, spending 25% on the community seems like a minimum, but looking at WMF financial documents reveals only 13% of donations go to the community in the form of grants and the average community leader gross salary is far below the average WMF gross salary. On its 25th birthday, WMF committing to spending 25% of donations to support the community would be a move toward equity and sustainability for the movement. We estimate affiliates or the community could hire over 100 people at the average WMF salary or about 250 at the US national average salary.

By the counting of the WMF, the Wikimedia movement is made up of approximately 265,000 volunteers each month (https://wikimediafoundation.org/). Upon Wikimedia’s 25th birthday, and in the face of fewer readers and a tiring Wikimedia community, there have been calls for bold proposals and new directions (Schiste, 2026^[1]; Jemielniak, 2026^[2])

Here I suggest that in celebration of its 25th year and in the face of concerns about this community (which resulted in its being strategy point 1.1), the WMF spend *at least* 25% of its revenues on supporting its community. Not only to bolster what already works, but to try new things; in particular, to identify ways to make contributing sustainable and professionally valuable for contributors. Turning contributor's volunteer efforts into something that is professionally valuable and pays for their good living is the way to achieve multi-generational sustainability for the movement or mission, similar to the way contributing is valuable is for WMF employees (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross, 2024^[3], Buttliere, Vetter, Rasberry, Pensa, Mietchen, & Mkrtchyan, 2025^[4])..

How can we increase the support to the community? Well, in fiscal 2025, the Wikimedia Foundation brought in 208 million USD in revenue, mostly from donations, and spent approximately 191 million USD over the course of that year (Figure 2 below; Wikimedia Financial Statement 2025; page 6^[5]).

The good news is that 200 million USD is quite a substantial revenue and enough to solve any problem the WMF turns its attention to; a theoretical 25% spend rate would mean that up to 50 million USD could be used to support community actions or given as grants.

As you can see in Figure 2, the WMF gives out approximately 28.7 million USD, or about ~15% of the money it spends each year (13% of revenue), as grants, which is the main mechanism the WMF supports the community through. This is lower than I—and I think many—expected, especially as the volunteer editor community is so vital to Wikimedia and the upkeep of its projects.

For perspective, internet hosting costs about 4 million a year, other operating expenses in general cost about 8 million a year, and travel and conferences about 6.5 million a year. Salaries and Benefits for WMF employees are 114 million.

So Wikimedia is spending money on the community, but actually, getting to a 25% spend rate would mean doubling the amount spent currently (13% to 25%). The upside is that this could double the support the community receives. To me it feels like a layup easy move for an organization where strategy 1.1 is support volunteers.

Even 25% of revenue sounds quite modest for such a community driven organization which strives to be an example, so I would suggest this be increased each year, to keep in line with how old Wikimedia is (26% next year, then 27%, 28%, 29%), up to perhaps 90%. This would require a different mindset at WMF, one in which its mission is to facilitate the community, where as now perhaps they are trying to do (too many) things themselves or they feel some responsibility, which also results in things that the community is not happy with - because it is not the way they would have done it.

Where does all of this 208 million go? Well the single largest section in the budget is that the salaries of the people who work at WMF, at 114 million per year. If one adds 'Professional service expenses' to salaries, 68% of the budget is going to salaries. The key that rubs me a little bit the wrong way is that the salaries WMF is offering are far far higher than what is available to community projects or in the grants that WMF makes to the community, who are often working for only a small fraction of those amounts each month.

Many of the biggest problems for Wikimedia projects are due to the limitation that Wikimedia has on being mostly a volunteer organization. This limits the amount of time that people can put in, because they also themselves need to make a living. This also applies to most community leaders and people who put really a lot of effort into Wikimedia (e.g., administrators, users with extended rights).

Except for those who work at WMF or a few large affiliates, the people who work within the community of Wikimedia in many cases are doing it as a volunteer or as an un(der)paid community leader. These are exactly the people that WMF should be supporting, because they are doing it because they want to, not for the money and even sometimes at the cost of their own happiness, family, or career. This is also evidenced by the focus in the last years being on recruiting new editors, and the focus on recruiting students and young people, rather than making editing an attractive thing to do for adults or professionals in general.

The idea is that the WMF should transition to fostering the community and supporting it in achieving its mission, rather than unnecessarily trying to do everything itself. There is tension now both that the foundation does not listen to the community and also that everything the foundation does is wrong. This is perhaps and probably because WMF is trying to do everything its self, rather than helping the people in the community do the things they want to do. This can also be seen in the recent community wishlist debacle (Orlowitz, 2026^[6]). Instead of establishing a way to help the people with the wishes do it, an elaborate structure was set up to vote on wishes and then the foundation implement them. Basically we are taking work from people who really want to do it and paying a lot of community resource money to people who see it as a task and for which they are almost surely going to be criticized anyways.

This is a perfect example where helping those who are already doing it do more of it makes much more sense as a general way of doing things. Not only do the volunteers have the drive that makes good work, they are likely to accept much less money for doing it and probably even do a better, more community accepted, job. At least, people at the foundation should interface with them and maybe lead a group of volunteers to help them in their own work. If the argument is that the budget is not big enough to really pay people directly (though there are 150 million in salary already being managed), at least let's make contributing valuable as professional activity for people to do (Buttliere et al., 2024/2025/2026).

In general, the idea should be to free existing volunteers up to do more of the work that they already are, or want to be, doing. The problem is those volunteers need to go and also have another job, which limits their availability. In our studies of Wikimedia academics (Buttliere, Vetter, & Ross, 2024), we found that many academic contributors want to be doing more, and are even doing more at their own expense (e.g., in terms of publishing papers or 'doing the work their boss wants'). They are contributing even though it is probably hurting their professional prospects, because their work for Wikimedia unfortunately does not translate well into professional careers or tenure criteria.

One of the themes Wikimedia has set out to achieve for 2026 is trying new things quickly (2026 annual plan^[7]). Increasing the budget spent on the community could mean both better supporting the ongoing successes and also funding new initiatives.

If the target is to spend 25% of 190 million USD (WMF’s 2025 operating expenses) on the community, the question is where could this extra ~ 20 million in funding for the community come from? We are essentially looking for about 10% of the overall budget, which, although not large overall, again is actually almost doubling the budget for the community.

Figure 2 shows the income (top) and operating expenses of the foundation (bottom). One can see that 20 million is not very large compared to some categories. For instance, donation processing expenses are more than 8 million USD. This means that ~3.9% of all the money that is donated to Wikimedia goes to middle people who take the money from the donor and give it to Wikimedia. Four percent seems at first glance quite high, and reducing this expense by 50% saves the community 4 million USD and still means that these middle people get to make 4 million on a system they can hopefully use for other clients as well. That 4 million is already 20% of the budget that we are looking for.

To make informed decisions, one would need a more detailed summary of the budget, #transparency, but looking at the expenses of the 190 million dollars Wikimedia spent in 2025, almost 130 million (68.4%) of it was spent on salaries and professional services. Again, about 15.3% of it going explicitly to the community by way of awards and grants and only a smaller portion of this going directly to paying for the time of community leaders. This is a pretty serious imbalance, especially when considering the relative size of those two groups.

What is also interesting is that the foundation only reports having about 650 staff (Who we are^[8]), meaning WMF spends about ~177,000 USD per employee. This is a very good salary, approximately 2.25 times the national US average, and I believe that all Wikimedians deserve such a salary. My question is whether community leaders and contributors have such high salaries.

My suspicion is that this 177,000 USD is multiple times higher than the average salary of community members, and especially those very often part time community leaders who get e.g., 1,000 USD a month for half their working effort. This is a simple survey to do among administrators or other extended privileges users, simply asking them their salary and working to make it comparable to those at WMF. Looking at some of the grants awarded to even relatively large affiliates, my suspicion is that community salaries are lower, but it is not a study i have done yet (because it is more than a volunteer effort and who would pay for my time to do it?). The problem is that there’s just not enough money to go around; which is exactly why increasing the funding to the community could be so useful. This increase in investment would also be a move toward more equality in the movement.

This funding imbalance is an obvious source of frustration and resentment between the community (the poors) and the foundation (the rich) that can be addressed in a manner that everyone can agree on, i.e., by increasing support to the community - i.e., strategy 1.1!

Putting an extra 20 million toward the community, or giving the community control of this money, would allow it to hire 112 Wikimedians at the average salary as those working at WMF, and if we make it the average salary in the US (~75,000 USD), we could hire another 266 people full time. WMF reports that there are 179 affiliate groups in good standing^[9]. This would mean that every affiliate could hire another person (full time!), with a good salary, and there would still be at least 50 new initiatives that could be tried (if new initiatives have 2 half time people to start).

Investing in greater equality between the community and WMF would already be a worthwhile move. For a movement founded on equality and openness to knowledge, it is interesting that the average WMF employee earns more than twice the average salary in the US, which also puts them into the 1% worldwide ^[10].

Conversely, and due to the law of large numbers, and also because so many Wikimedia volunteers are students, it is quite likely that the average community salary is similar to the US or worldwide average. This is a major inequality, between community leader salaries and WMF salaries. Therefore, increasing the average salary by investing more in grants and community salaries could build sustainability, or at least allow us to 'try new things quickly'. Some early readers of this post and long time contributors may be worried that making editing professionally or financially valuable could bring extrinsic motivations. These are the same motivations that WMF is using to hire employees (high salaries), hence this is not a convincing argument to me at least.

Equalizing the salaries of WMF employees and average volunteer editors, or of community leaders, creates equality and truly empowers the community that actually makes up the Wikimedia movement. Such a move would allow us to get the best out of the people that we have, and also will go a long way toward making engaging with Wikimedia an attractive thing to do. This in turn should make it easier to recruit and maintain contributors, making Wikimedia truly multigenerational.

At minimum, in the face of accusations that the foundation is doing nothing, this is a move that WMF can make that few in the community would have a problem with, thus potentially becoming the start of a new relationship between the community and the foundation at a crucial time and 25 years for the project.

This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, CAWylie, Bkissin, Marinette2356, Ollieisanerd and ButterCashier

Football, football, football!
Wikipedia Football Club!
Santa Maradona priez pour moi!

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	2026 FIFA World Cup		5,713,713		This Report marks the middle of the 23rd edition of football's biggest tournament going from the 72-game group stage into the 32-team knockout phase, leaving us with teams that were both highly expected (Spain, France, England...) but also genuine surprises such as Cape Verde, an archipelago with land area of about 4,033 square kilometres whose existence most people only just learnt about after their incredible performances, with three draws (including one for their match with Uruguay pictured to the left) and a narrow defeat in the knockout stage by defending champions Argentina in extra time.
2	Cape Verde		2,418,706
3	FIFA World Cup		1,320,235		Next edition marks the centennial of the tournament that biggest winners Brazil are the only ones to attend all 23 editions. The 2030 FIFA World Cup could just then return to where it started at Brazil's neighbors Uruguay – and also Argentina and Paraguay, to accomodate the expansion to 48 teams. Instead that seemed too straightforward for FIFA, and those three will only host a match each before the championship resumes in Spain, Portugal and Mexico.
4	Cristiano Ronaldo		1,271,925		This football legend played against another football legend (both now over 40 years old) on Friday, with Ronaldo finally scoring his very first goal of #1, though only due to a penalty kick. Nonetheless, after the controversial decision of overturning Joško Gvardiol's goal, the match marked the end of Modrić's World Cup career whereas Portugal is now through to the next round, set to play against Spain on July 6.
5	Kylian Mbappé		1,259,275		Two more football players. The upper one, who tends to be compared to an animated character pictured to the left across social media memes, is currently tied with #8 with seven goals at #1 so far (and only one behind him on #10), the most recent being the winning goal against Paraguay on the last day of this Report in a match filled with the latter's dark arts and 13 fouls, leading to Mbappé rejecting the handshake with their goalkeeper. The one below, also a victim of memes that instead compare him to an anime character (also to the left), is currently tied with Harry Kane for the second place with five goals. (The ones he scored in the Sunday after the week of this Report had him catch up with Mbappé and Messi and are the reason this here writer is supporting Kane against Haaland in the quarterfinal.)
6	Erling Haaland		1,255,015
7	Obsession (2025 film)		1,148,422		Currently the 8th highest grossing movie of the year, US$400 million not having a budget of 7 digits, and hit video on demand to make people scared of both "Freaky Nikki" and the guy who caused her personality change at the comfort of their homes.
8	Lionel Messi		1,143,249		Argentina took over the top spot of FIFA's ranking of national teams shortly before the start of #1 on the back of their captain Leo Messi, who during the not as easy as it seemed to be match against #2 (whose team is only 64th in the ranking) managed to score his record-extending 20th World Cup goal (including the record-breaking 12th for the knockout stage). Messi did make sure to pause his team's celebrations to embrace goalkeeper Vozinha and apparently swapped shirts with him after the final whistle.
9	FIFA Men's World Ranking		964,956
10	List of FIFA World Cup top goalscorers		955,172

• 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.