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Preventing XSS in MediaWiki - A new extension to protect your Wiki

Wednesday, 30 July 2025 15:40 UTC

Its no secret that the vast majority of serious security vulnerabilities in MediaWiki are Cross-Site-Scripting (XSS).

XSS is where an attacker can put evil javascript where they aren't supposed to in order to take over other users. For example, the typical attack would look like the attacker putting some javascript in a wiki page. The javascript would contain some instructions for the web browser, like make a specific edit. Then anyone who views the page would make the edit. Essentially it lets evil people take over other users' accounts. This is obviously quite problematic in a wiki environment.

This is the year 2025. We shouldn't have to deal with this anymore. Back in Y2K the advice was that "Web Users Should Not Engage in Promiscuous Browsing". A quarter of a century later, we have a better solution: Content-Security-Policy.

Everyone's favourite security technology: CSP

Content Security Policy (CSP) is a major web browser security technology designed to tackle this problem. Its actually a grab-bag of a lot of things, which sometimes makes it difficult to talk about, as its not one solution but a bunch of potential solutions to a bunch of different problems. Thus when people bring it up in conversation they can often talk past each other if they are talking about different parts of CSP.

First and foremost though CSP is designed to tackle XSS.

The traditional wisdom with CSP is that its easy if you start with it, but difficult to apply it afterwards in an effective way. Effective being the operative word. Since CSP has so many options and knobs, it is very easy to apply a CSP policy that does nothing but looks like it's doing something.

This isn't the first time I've tried MediaWiki and CSP. Back when I used to work for the Wikimedia Foundation in 2020, I was tasked with trying to make something work with CSP. Unfortunately it never really got finished. After I left, nobody developed it further and it was never deployed. *sads*

Part of the reason is I think the effort tried to do much all at once. From Wikimedia's perspective there are two big issues that they might want to solve: XSS and "privacy". XSS is very traditional, but privacy is somewhat unique to Wikimedia. Wikimedia sites allows users and admins to customize javascript. This is about as terrible an idea as it sounds, but here we are. There are various soft-norms around what people can do. Generally its expected that you are not allowed to send any data (even implicitly such as someone's IP address by loading an off-site resource) without their permission. CSP has the potential to enforce this, but its a more complex project then just the XSS piece. In theory the previous attempt was going to try and address both, which in retrospect was probably too much scope all at once relative to the resources dedicated to the project. In any case, after i left my job the project died.

Can we go simpler?

Recently I've been kind of curious about the idea of CSP but simple. What is the absolute minimal viable product for CSP in MediaWiki?

For starters this is just going to focus on XSS. Outside of Wikimedia, the privacy piece is not cared about very much. I don't know, maybe Miraheze care (not sure), but I doubt anyone else does. Most MediaWiki installs there is a much closer connection between the "interface-admin" group and the people running the servers, thus there is less need to restrict what interface-admin group can do. In any case, I don't work for WMF anymore, I'm not interested in dealing with all the political wrangling that would be needed to make something happen in the Wikimedia world. However, Wikimedia is not the only user of MediaWiki and perhaps there is still something useful we could easily do here.

The main insight is that the body of article and i18n messages generally should not contain javascript at all, but that is where most XSS attacks will occur. So if we can use CSP to disable all forms of javascript except <script> tags, and then use a post processing filter to filter all script tags out of the body of the article, we should be golden. At the same time, this should involve almost no changes to MediaWiki.

This is definitely not the recommended way of using CSP. Its entirely possible I'm missing something here and there is a way to bypass it. That said, I think this will work.

What exactly are we doing

So I made an Extension - XSSProtector. Here is what it does:

Set CSP script-src-attr 'none'.
- This disables html attributes like onclick or onfocus. Code following MediaWiki conventions should never use these, but they are very common in attacks where you can bypass attribute sanitization. It is also very common in javascript based attacks, since the .innerHTML JS API ignores <script> tags but processes the on attributes.
Look for <script tag in content added for output (i.e. in OutputPage) and replace it with <script tag. MediaWiki code following coding conventions should always use ResourceLoader or at least OutputPage::addHeadItem to add scripts, so only evil stuff should match. If it is in an attribute, there should be no harm with replacing with entity
Ditto for <meta and <base tags. Kind of a side point, but you can use <meta http-equiv="refresh" ... to redirect the page. <base can be used to adjust where resources are loaded from, and sometimes to pass data via the target attribute. We also use base-uri CSP directive to restrict this.
Add an additional CSP tag after page load - script-src-elem *, this disables unsafe-inline after page load. MediaWiki uses dynamic inline script tags during initial load for "legacy" scripts. I don't think it needs that after page load (Though i'm honestly not sure). The primary reason to do this is to disable javascript: URIs, which would be a major method to otherwise bypass this system.
We also try to regex out links with javascript URIs, but the regex is sketchy and i don't have great confidence in it the same way i do with the regex for <script.
Restrict form-action targets to 'self' to reduce risk of scriptless XSS that tricks users with forms

The main thing this misses is <style> tags. Attackers could potentially add them to extract data from a page, either by unclosed markup loading a resource that contains the rest of the page in the url or via attacks that use attribute selectors in CSS (so-called "scriptless xss"). It also could allow the attacker to make the page display weird in an attempt to trick the user. This would be pretty hard to block, especially if TemplateStyles extension is enabled, and the risk is relatively quite low as there is not much you can do with it. In any case, I decided not to care

The way the extension hooks into the Message class is very hacky. If this turns out to be a good idea, probably the extension would need to become part of core or new hooks would have to be added to Message.

Does it work?

Seems to. Of course, the mere fact i can't hack the thing I myself came up with isn't exactly the greatest brag. Nonetheless I think it works and I haven't been able to think of any bypasses. It also seems to not break anything in my initial testing.

Extension support is a little less clear. I think it will work for most extensions that do normal things. Some extensions probably do things that won't work. In most cases they could be fixed by following MediaWiki coding conventions. In some cases, they are intrinsically problematic, such as Extension:Widgets.

To be very clear, this hasn't been exhaustively tested, so YMMV.

How many vulns will it stop?

Lets take a look at recent vulnerabilities in MediaWiki core. Taking a look in the vulns in the MediaWiki 1.39 release series, between 1.39.0 and 1.39.13 there were 29 security vulnerabilities.

17 of these vulnerabilities were not XSS. Note that many of these are very low severity, to the point its debatable if they even are security vulnerabilities. If I was triaging the non-XSS vulnerabilities, I would say there are 6 informational (informational is code for: I don't think this is a security vulnerability but other people disagree), 9 low severity, 2 medium-low severity. None of them come close to the severity of an (unauthenticated) XSS, although some may be on par with an XSS vuln that requires admin rights to exploit.

While I haven't explicitly tested all of them, I believe the remaining 12 would be blocked by this extension. Additionally, if we are just counting by number, this is a bit of an under count, as in many cases multiple issues are being counted as a single phab ticket, if reported at the same time.

In conclusion, this extension would have stopped 41% of the security vulnerabilities found so far in the 1.39.x release series of MediaWiki, including all of the high severity ones. That's pretty good in my opinion.

Try it yourself

You can download the extension from here. I'd be very curious if you find that the extension breaks anything or otherwise causes unusual behaviour. I'd also love for people to test it to see if they can bypass any of its protections.

It should support MediaWiki 1.39 and above, but please use the REL1_XX for the version of MediaWiki you have (i.e. On 1.39 use REL1_39 branch) as the master branch is not compatible with older MediaWiki.

My first attempts of STEMM writing in the English Wikipedia through The World Destubathon

Wednesday, 30 July 2025 12:00 UTC

Flower of Paphiopedilum acmodontum, which its English Wikipedia article was expanded.

It starts with an invitation by one person in the English Wikipedia by the username of Dr. Bloefeld. It’s a simple, amicable letter:

Hello. You’re invited to participate in The World Destubathon. We’re aiming to destub a lot of articles and also improve longer stale articles. It started today on Monday June 16 and will run until Sunday July 13. There is over $3300 going into it, with $500 the top prize. If you are interested in winning something to save you money in buying books for future content, or just see it as a good editathon opportunity to see a lot of articles improved for subjects which interest you, sign up on the page in the participants section if interested. Even if you can only manage a few articles they would be very much appreciated and help make the content produced as diverse and broad as possible!

I checked upon the main page and it seemed interesting. US$500 for the top price, another US$500 for the top STEMM editor, plus some others. Everyone agrees that all that glitters there is gold, but being in my obligatory internship right now, it seems a bit far-fetched to have any chance to gain those prizes. Perhaps, I can get it if I push myself to gear six and “no-life” my entire spare time throughout the period, but I have many other things to do. Nevertheless, I decided to join, but only by the weekend of the third week, after I had completed some of my other matters.

The first article I expanded is Melicope sororia, an endemic Borneo shrub. A short backstory, back in the previous day before I officially joined, I was in a presentation during my internship work about an another Melicope species, M. pteleifolia, a more common species usually eaten as a herb, with extensive pharmacological research (which is the main topic of the aforementioned presentation). However, M. pteleifolia do not have an article in the English Wikipedia (at the moment of this article’s writing), so I decided to adopt another Melicope article and decided with M. sororia.

Definitely, I do not have trouble of bio-writing; I have my biochemistry degree background with academic writing experience. The main experience that I did not have however is bio-writing for the English Wikipedia, or any STEMM writing in particular. Although I have extensive writing experience back in my native language (Malay) Wikipedia, which I am an administrator of, the robust writing manners of the English Wikipedia can intimidate many non-native English speakers. However, verily the bigger trouble is to not obtain the experience rather than the inexperience itself. As what the typical saying goes, “be bold“, which is also reiterated by Dr. Bloefeld himself.

Indeed, some articles were easier to be worked upon than others. Articles of Melicope species from Hawaii for example is easier to expand due to extensive reference material given its position in a first-world region, such as Hawaii’s own Department of Lands and Natural Resources, and Bishop Museum’s Plants of Hawaii. However, some plants were more obscure on references, such as M. jugosa from Borneo. Two plants, M. madagascariensis and Sarcomelicope glauca from Madagascar and New Caledonia respectively, have references in French that I have to translate and understood. Despite that, a silver lining exists for both plants, as analyses find out possible medical-worthy bio-molecules from both plants, for which I am glad to give light onto through the de-stubs.

Throughout the four remaining weekend days (and others), I managed to successfully expand 26 articles, mostly about individual plant species, which many of them are endangered or possibly even extinct by now. One Melicope from Hawaii was thought to be extinct but rediscovered in 1993, while an orchid species from Mount Kinabalu of Borneo, known only from a single locality, was thought to be gone since 2015.

For those 26 articles, I was recognized by Dr. Bloefeld as the leading STEMM writer for the two latter weeks in the de-stubathon. Indeed, 26 is far from the hundreds or articles expanded by the top editors (the top winner managed to pull out 451 expansions); as what I said, time was my main limit. However, the ultimate prize for me is the experience I procured from STEM writing in the English Wikipedia, which can become the bridge that I finally seek between my Wikipedia participation to my formal background.

So, what now? Simple, more de-stubbing. The competition itself is a part of Dr. Bloefeld’s ambitious decade-long 50,000 Destubbing Challenge. As of writing, over 14 thousand articles are expanded, with many of them are from Dr. Bloefeld’s competitions, which is shy of the supposed half-point milestone expected for the end of 2025. Of course, this is not my current Wikipedia priority, but I’ll try to expand one or two articles about every day or two. You can track my progress in my project page, now named as “D-Stu(r)b”. To conclude, my deepest appreciations to Dr. Bloefeld as the main organizer, and Wikimedia UK and the Open Knowledge Association (OKA) as the main partners, with the latter responsible for the prize pool.

AWW Skill Up Workshop: H1 2025 Impact Report.

Wednesday, 30 July 2025 11:00 UTC

From the moment Africa Wiki Women dared to plant the seed of the AWW Skill Up Workshop in February 2025. Strategic efforts has gone into nurturing it. A proof that no idea, no project can take flight until someone takes ownership of it.

What began as a baby idea, born out of a deeper mission not just to train, but to transform. To fill the persistent gap of underrepresentation of African women in digital knowledge has now turned into confident strides equipping African women with the right tools, resources and knowledge.

Wondering what “AWW Skill Up Workshop,” is? It’s a movement for growth and visibility. Designed as a dynamic capacity-building journey, to equips women and mission-aligned allies with the digital skills, and professional knowledge to contribute to Wikimedia projects and shape the world around them.

***AWW Skill Up Workshop H1 2025 Topics***

Here’s how the journey unfolded in H1 2025

February; cracked open with Wikipedia 101 & 102 and Wikimedia Commons training, laying the groundwork for digital storytelling.

March; leveled up with Digital Literacy, to deepen African women’s experience with digital knowledge empowerment.

April; ushered in the Art of Public Speaking, helping women own their voice, show up confidently and present their ideas and thoughts in a way that inspires action and brings change.

May; took a strategic pause to focus on the Africa Wiki Women Accelerating Gender Equality campaign.

June; we closed the first chapter with Innovating Project Management in the Digital Age, readying participants to lead big initiatives

***AWW Skill Up Workshop H1 2025 Participating Countries***

In just five months, AWW Skill Up has leapt borders touching 18 countries from Namibia, Chad, Cameroon, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt, Tanzania, South Sudan, Botswana, South Africa, Rwanda, Madagascar, Uganda, Republic of Congo, Kenya, Togo, Gambia, and the Netherlands. With women comprising 51.9% of the total participation rate in H1 2025.

***AWW Skill Up Workshop H1 2025 Women Participation Trend***

Feedback through the survey show that participants aren’t just learning new skills, but the knowledge is spilling into their careers and igniting fresh impact. And this is just the beginning.

As we look to the second half of 2025, Africa Wiki Women is not slowing down. The vision is bigger:

To reach more countries.
To bring in top-tier professionals and trainers.
To deepen impact through every workshop session.
To catalyse the Wikimedia journey of women across Africa and beyond.

Wikimedia Foundation Bulletin 2025 Issue 14

Tuesday, 29 July 2025 21:31 UTC

Here is a quick overview of highlights from the Wikimedia Foundation since our last issue on July 11. Previous editions of this bulletin are on Meta. Let [email protected] know if you have any feedback or suggestions for improvement! The bulletin will be back after Wikimania with a special issue on August 19.

Upcoming and current events and conversations

Let’s Talk continues

Wikimania 2025: Register to join virtually the 20th Wikimania taking place from August 6-9. The programme has highlights from across Wikimedia projects and communities including the reveal of who will be this year’s Wikimedians of the year.
Strengthening a neutral point of view: An overview of NPOV policies across Wikipedia projects, shows that 153 Wikipedias out of 342 (45%) don’t have easily accessible guidance on neutrality. The research was conducted to help understand how neutrality is ensured in our projects. and to provide an opportunity for peer learning across project communities. Read the full research and join the conversation.

Annual Goals Progress on Infrastructure

Tech News: See all the 60 community-submitted tasks that were resolved over the last two weeks in Tech News week 29 and 30. For example, the request to add Malayalam fonts in the Wikisource Book Export Tool was resolved and now, the rendering of Malayalam letters in exported Wikisource books are accurate.
Temporary Accounts: After the rollout of temporary accounts on 18 large and medium-sized Wikipedias, we are monitoring the impact of this change, and preparing for the next deployments. See the full project update.
Add a link: Administrators can now limit “Add a Link” to newcomers, as opposed to keeping it open to more experienced editors as well. “Add a link” helps newcomers to start editing, so restricting the feature to them enables Administrators to cater the feature to that specific group, which they can do via the Community Configuration feature.

Annual Goals Progress on Volunteer Support

Digital Safety: PEN America shares 5 tips for bolstering your safety and privacy online.
Amicus brief: Our amicus brief in Patterson v. Meta: Defending free speech and the open internet in another Section 230 legal case.
UK Online Safety Act: Court hearings for the Wikimedia Foundation’s challenge to the UK Online Safety Act “Categorisation Regulations” happened on July 22 and 23. A verdict is not expected until August.
Advocacy sessions: Collaborate for change at these policy advocacy sessions at Wikimania 2025.
Public-Interest content: Expanding Indonesian Wikipedia with Public-Interest Content through Project Gayatri.
The Wikipedia Test: Learn how to use the Wikipedia Test, a tool to protect the public interest internet.
Equity Fund: As it closes, the Equity Fund has announced its final round of grants to six past grantees. It will also be providing four “Connected Grants” to movement organizations who will pair closely with one of the grantees to collaborate together.
Don’t blink: The latest developments from around the world about protecting the Wikimedia model, its people and its values.
Content Translation: Translators who use the Suggestions feature in the Content Translation tool can now select and receive article suggestions that are customized to geographical locations of their interest using the new “Regions” filter.
Wikifunctions: Wikifunctions now has a new kind of Types: Wikidata-based enumerations, also known as light-weight enumerations.

Annual Goals Progress on Effectiveness

See also: quarterly Metrics Reports

Endowment: Sharing the Wikimedia Endowment’s Form 990 for fiscal year 2023 – 2024. Learn more from the frequently asked questions.

Board and Board committee updates

See Wikimedia Foundation Board noticeboard · Affiliations Committee Newsletter

Annual plan: The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees approved the Foundation’s annual plan for next year virtually in their quarterly meeting. You can read more about the goals for next year and a summary of the continuous conversations that shaped the plan.
Board selection: The Elections Committee shared a list of the all eligible candidates. As there are more than 10 eligible candidates, a shortlisting process is currently taking place. Representatives of Wikimedia movement affiliates that are currently compliant with their reporting obligations can participate in the shortlisting process. Learn more about this process and next steps on Meta.

Foundation statements

WIPO permanent observer: For fifth time, China blocks Wikimedia Foundation as permanent observer to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

Other Movement curated newsletters & news
See also: Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · The Wikipedia Library · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters

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Episode 187: Dan Andreescu

Tuesday, 29 July 2025 21:20 UTC

🕑 1 hour 33 minutes

Dan Andreescu (user name Milimetric) is a staff software engineer in the Data Platform Engineering team, and an interim manager in the Experiment Platform team, both in The Wikimedia Foundation.

Links for some of the topics discussed:

Wiki Exploration Program phases in 2024-2025

Tuesday, 29 July 2025 20:13 UTC

The Wiki Exploration Program is a field exploration project which was initiated by the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group in 2017 from the need to document the lesser-known and rarely visited heritage sites in West Bengal and later has been extended to other parts of India as well since 2023. There have been 33 phases of this program till date and as a member of the user group, I have planned and participated actively in almost all of them.

The different phases of this program have been funded by the Wikimedia Foundation majorly through different Rapid Fund phases since long. The user group supports a small team consisting of travel bloggers, amateur and professional photographers and drone operators, to conduct the exploration phases.

A temple in Cooch Behar, which was not documented before on Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Herpking

West Bengal has a plethora of heritage structures, some of which are not present on the internet at large as well and the photographs taken under this program serves as the only available images of those buildings for many of them. These images can be of immense help while writing an article on Wikipedia. It may not be irrelevant to mention here quite a few such monuments documented by the West Bengal Wikimedians User Group cease to exist at present and these photographs are the only evidence of them. Through this program, we have documented almost 85% of the built heritage of West Bengal.

An old temple at an old neighbourhood in Nabadwip, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Amitabha Gupta

In the year 2024-2025, we photo documented 100 different heritage structures each located in the districts of Cooch Behar and Nadia of West Bengal, where near about 100 places in each district has been covered. Most of these structures were declared as heritage sites by West Bengal Heritage Commission.

A wall painting at a cave in Ellora, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Anjan Kumar Kundu

In this year, we have also explored heritage structures located outside of West Bengal by venturing into the documented Aurangabad district in the state of Maharashtra and the remote northern part of Sikkim. While planning, we had realized that other than rarely visited heritage sites; popular sites are also not systematically documented on Wikimedia Commons, so we had decided to included some well-known heritage sites in the list, including the UNESCO World Heritage sites of Ajanta and Ellora caves.

A drone shot of a monastery in North Sikkim, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Biswas Dibyendu

Till now, around 40,000 images have been uploaded through this program since 2017. During the last 6 months, these photographs have drawn 5 million views on different Wikimedia projects.

From Vandalism to Administrator: My Journey on Wikipedia

Tuesday, 29 July 2025 12:00 UTC

I never imagined that a curious click on Wikipedia would change the course of my digital life transforming me from a mere passerby browser into an active administrator who edits daily on a free encyclopedia filled with millions of articles.

Before I got to know Wikipedia from the inside, I used to spend my free time playing video games and scrolling through social media apps. I had no deep interest in any knowledge-based project, until I started hearing about cryptocurrencies and encryption technologies. I decided to look for reliable information, and found myself on Wikipedia pages which opened a wide gateway to a new world of content.

From there, an idea was born: Why not contribute to editing these articles? Why should I remain just a consumer?

I entered Wikipedia with a spirit of discovery, but quickly ran into the wall of ignorance regarding its policies and editing mechanisms. I didn’t know how articles were written or published, and driven by enthusiasm or maybe haste, I started adding and modifying content randomly, unaware that what I was doing was considered “vandalism” by the encyclopedia’s standards.

The result? I was blocked three times and each time felt more discouraging than the last. I felt frustrated, even considered leaving the site altogether. But something inside me kept pulling me back, a feeling that I had a place here, if only I learned the right way.

The third block was a turning point. It lasted 14 days, but those were the most important days of my journey. During that time, I decided to learn instead of regret. I started reading the policies, one page after another, diving into the guidelines, and finally understood how articles are built, how discussions are managed, and how Wikipedia is not just a writing platform, but a community with its own system and culture.

What really helped me at this stage was a meeting with fellow editor Michel Bakni during an educational workshop. He patiently offered me support and advice in a respectful and kind manner. His words were like a compass that redirected my path and taught me how to be a helpful editor and not a burden on the content.

Days passed, and my learning turned into practice, practice into passion, and passion into meaningful contributions. I wrote hundreds of articles, improved thousands more, and made over 63,000 edits on Arabic Wikipedia alone — and over 110,000 edits across all Wikimedia projects.

Then in 2024, I received a surprise I still recall with astonishment: I was nominated for an administrator position on Arabic Wikipedia and the one who nominated me was the same admin who had previously blocked me three times!
It was an indescribable moment… not just a promotion, but a living testimony that mistakes are not the end of the road, they can be the beginning, if accompanied by a will to learn.

Shortly afterward, I also became an administrator on Wikidata, and began performing my duties there with a different kind of passion, where knowledge is built in the form of interconnected data serving all Wikimedia projects.

But of course, administrative work is no walk in the park. Challenges and obstacles arise, especially when making decisions that try to balance policies with the principle of consensus. Sometimes you find yourself in heated discussions, or between parties with conflicting views. From this, I learned that administration isn’t about authority, it’s about responsibility, and that neutrality and composure are the true tools of a real admin.

Today, Wikipedia has become part of my daily routine. Not a day passes without me editing or contributing, it’s like a second heartbeat in my life. It’s not just an encyclopedia… it’s a community, a mission, and a life experience.

And if you’re reading my story now and think your rocky start might hold you back, I’m here to tell you don’t let the beginnings scare you. Maybe that first fall is exactly what you need to rise stronger and go farther than you ever imagined.

Third Edition of Bangla Wikibooks Writing Contest Concludes Successfully

Tuesday, 29 July 2025 07:00 UTC

Promotional banner for the Bangla Wikibooks Writing Contest 2025, created by Shakil Hosen and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 on Wikimedia Commons.

The third edition of the Bangla Wikibooks Writing Contest, “Wikibooks Writing Contest 2025”, was held from May 7 to June 7, 2025, turning into a vibrant gathering of both active and new volunteers from the Bangla Wikimedia community.

This year, the contest was organized as part of the “Bangla WikiConnect” initiative, which aims to engage new contributors and writers interested in building a free knowledge base in the Bangla language, while also encouraging experienced volunteers through structured collaboration and community spirit.

A total of 251 users registered to participate in the contest. Among them, 58 participants submitted at least one page in accordance with the contest rules. A total of 1,696 pages were submitted during the one-month period. After thorough evaluation by a team of eight experienced reviewers, 1,162 pages were finally accepted, containing a combined 1,146,509 words.

In comparison, during the 2024 edition of the contest, 418 users registered and 67 participants submitted at least one page. That year, 717 pages were submitted, out of which 624 pages were accepted. The total word count of the accepted pages in 2024 was 1,148,079 words. However, an important change was made in 2025: for pages related to programming and mathematics, the code snippets and mathematical equations were excluded from the word count. As a result, this year’s statistics reflect a slightly different representation.

The entire review process was completed within a month after the contest ended. Thanks to the reviewers’ dedicated efforts, the final results were published on July 8.

To make participation easier and more accessible, 18 participants were provided with internet support during the contest. In addition, a dedicated Telegram group was actively used for Q&A, troubleshooting, and sharing information in real-time, helping to build a responsive and interactive environment for participants.

Throughout the contest, the organizing team has actively shared promotions and updates on various social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter/X, and Instagram. These efforts helped attract new contributors and cultivate a collaborative atmosphere across the community.

This year’s contest also reflected a growing diversity in participation. Around 11.11% of the reviewer team were women, and 30% of the top ten winners were women, two of whom were newcomers to the Wikimedia movement. This positive trend highlights the inclusive and welcoming nature of the Bangla Wikimedia community.

The contest once again demonstrated that with collective effort, proper guidance, and technical support, building high-quality, freely accessible educational content in the Bangla language is not only possible but thriving.

Wikipedia:Administrators' newsletter/2025/8

Tuesday, 29 July 2025 04:16 UTC

News and updates for administrators from the past month (July 2025).

Administrator changes

CheckUser changes

ST47

Guideline and policy news

Technical news

Arbitration

The arbitration case Indian military history has been closed.
The arbitration case Article titles and capitalisation 2 has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case closed on 31 July.
The arbitration case Transgender healthcare and people has been opened. Evidence submissions in this case will close on 11 August.

Miscellaneous

Archives
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2020: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
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2022: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 10, 11, 12
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Tech News 2025, week 31

Tuesday, 29 July 2025 00:24 UTC

Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.

Weekly highlight

The Community Tech team will be focusing on wishes related to Watchlists and Recent Changes pages, over the next few months. They are looking for feedback. Please read the latest update, and if you have ideas, please submit a wish on the topic.

Updates for editors

The Wikimedia Commons community has decided to block cross-wiki uploads to Wikimedia Commons, for all users without autoconfirmed rights on that wiki, starting on August 16. This is because of widespread problems related to files that are uploaded by newcomers. Users who are affected by this will get an error message with a link to the less restrictive UploadWizard on Commons. Please help translating the message or give feedback on the message text. Please also update your local help pages to explain this restriction. [1]
On wikis with temporary accounts enabled and Meta-Wiki, administrators may now set up a footer for the Special:Contributions pages of temporary accounts, similar to those which can be shown on IP and user-account pages. They may do it by creating the page named MediaWiki:Sp-contributions-footer-temp. [2]
View all 21 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week.

Updates for technical contributors

Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWiki

Meetings and events

Wikimania 2025 will run from August 6–9. The program is available for you to plan which sessions you want to attend. Most sessions will be live-streamed, with exceptions for those that show the “no camera” icon. If you are joining online to watch live-streams and use the interactive features, please register for a free virtual ticket. For example, you may be interested in technical sessions such as:
The MediaWiki Users and Developers Conference, Fall 2025 will be held 28–30 October 2025 in Hanover, Germany. This event is organized by and for the third-party MediaWiki community. You can propose sessions and register to attend.

Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.

Migrating my tools to the Toolforge Build Service

Tuesday, 29 July 2025 00:00 UTC

Over the past few weeks, I migrated almost all of my tools to the Toolforge Build Service, and I thought it would be useful to write a bit about the process and my motivation for doing it.

Why I did it

Recently, the Wikimedia Cloud Services team announced the Toolforge push-to-deploy beta, which makes it possible to set up integration with a code forge such as Wikimedia Gitlab that will cause newly pushed versions of a tool’s code to be deployed to Toolforge automatically. This has the potential to significantly simplify the development of tools: instead of having to log into a Toolforge bastion server and deploy every update to the tool manually, one can just run git push and everything else happens automatically.

Currently, the beta has some limitations: most importantly, web services are not supported yet, which means the feature is actually useless to me in its current state because all of my tools are web services. (It should already useful for bots, though it’s not clear to me if any bots already use it in practice; at least I couldn’t find any relevant-looking push-to-deploy config on MediaWiki Codesearch.) However, I’m hopeful that support for web service will be added soon. In the meantime, because it already seems clear that this support will only include tools based on the build service (but not tools using the various other web service types supported by Toolforge), now seems like a good time to migrate my tools to the build service, so that I’ll have less work to do to set up push-to-deploy once it becomes available.

What I did

I also used this as an opportunity to adopt some best practices in my tools in general, even if not all of them were related to the build service migration. I’ll go through them here in roughly the order in which I did them in most tools.

Add health check

A health check is a way for the Toolforge infrastructure to detect if a tool is running (“healthy”) or not. This is useful, for instance, to enable restarts of a tool (including deploying new versions) with no downtime: the infrastructure (Kubernetes) will bring up a container with the new version of the tool, wait for it to become ready according to the health check, switch traffic from the old container to the new one, and only then tear down the old container.

Since 2024, Toolforge installs a TCP health check by default: the tool is considered healthy if it accepts connections on the web service port. However, this doesn’t guarantee that the server is actually ready to handle requests; we can do better by defining a health-check-path in the service.template file, at which point Toolforge will instead use an HTTP health check and test if the tool successfully responds to HTTP requests to this path. It’s apparently conventional to call this path /healthz (though last I looked, nobody seemed to know what the “z” stands for), and as it doesn’t need to return anything special, the Python code for this endpoint looks very simple:

@app.route('/healthz')
def health():
    return ''

(Plus a return type, import-aliased to RRV, in those tools where I use mypy.) And it’s configured in the service.template file like this:

health-check-path: /healthz

I usually did this improvement first (unless I forgot or it was already set up) because it meant that most of the following improvements could be deployed without downtime for users.

Splitting prod and dev dependencies

In most of my tools, I previously had only one requirements.txt file (compiled using pip-tools from requirements.in). This means that the tool’s installation on Toolforge included not just the packages required to run the tool (Flask, Werkzeug, mwapi, etc.) but also the packages required to test it (Flake8, mypy, pytest, etc.). This is wasteful (mypy is big!), and a build service based tool would install its dependencies more often than before (each time a new image is built, i.e. during every deployment), so I took an improvement I’d already done years ago in the Wikidata Lexeme Forms tool and followed through with it in my other tools: split the testing packages into a separate file (dev-requirements.txt, compiled from dev-requirements.in). The dev packages are installed locally (pip-sync *requirements.txt) and in CI (pip install -r requirements.txt -r dev-requirements.txt), but not on Toolforge. In most tools, this shrunk the installed venv roughly by 50%, which is pretty neat!

I also added a CI job that verifies that I didn’t accidentally put a prod dependency into the dev requirements, by only installing the prod requirements and checking that python app.py runs through without crashing on a missing import. This isn’t perfect, but since I know that I’m not doing any advanced lazy-import stuff in my own code, it’s good enough for me. (I guess an alternative would be to reuse the health check for this.)

Configuration from environment variables

All of my Flask tool read the Flask configuration from a (user-only-readable) config.yaml file in the source code directory; this contains, at a minimum, the secret key used to sign the session, and sometimes more information, such as the OAuth consumer key and secret. This is still possible on the build service (by specifying the mount: all option), but it means the tool will rely on NFS, which is generally undesirable. A more forward-looking option is to store the config in environment variables, which Toolforge added support for two years ago.

It turns out that Flask has a method, app.config.from_prefixed_env(), which will automatically load all environment variables whose name starts with a certain prefix (I use TOOL_) into the config. It even has support for nested objects (using double underscores in the name), so that configuration like app.config['OAUTH']['consumer_key'] can be represented as the environment variable named TOOL_OAUTH__consumer_key.

However, there’s one problem with this: Toolforge requires environment variables to have all-uppercase names, but my existing code was expecting lowercase names inside the OAUTH config dict. I worked around this by first converting the configuration keys to all-uppercase (initially, still inside the config.yaml file); then, I moved the configuration to envvars, and finally commented out the contents of the config.yaml file (example SAL). All of this was possible while the tools were still running on the legacy web service types. (The code reading the config.yaml file is still there, by the way – it’s much more convenient for local development, even if it’s not used on Toolforge anymore.)

Move CI from GitHub to GitLab

The CI for most of my tools was on GitHub, mainly because many of them predated Wikimedia GitLab (or the availability of GitLab CI there). However, I don’t really fancy giving Microsoft deploy access to my tools, so I moved the CI over to GitLab CI. For most tools, this was very straightforward, to the point where I just copy+pasted the .gitlab-ci.yml file between tools. (In QuickCategories, setting up a MariaDB service for CI required a little bit more work.)

Actual build service migration

The migration to the build service starts with the Procfile, which tells the infrastructure how to run the tool. I used the same Procfile for all my Python tools:

web: gunicorn --workers=4 app:app

This defines an entrypoint called web which will run Gunicorn, with four worker processes, importing app.py and running the app WSGI app from it. Toolforge specifies the $PORT environment variable to tell the tool where to listen for connections, and Gunicorn will bind to that port by default if the environment variable is defined, so no explicit --bind option is necessary. Of course, this also requires adding gunicorn to requirements.in / requirements.txt, so that it will be installed inside the image. Also, don’t forget to git add Procfile…

A significant benefit of the build service is that it gives us early access to newer Python versions. By writing 3.13 in a file called .python-version (don’t forget to git add this one either!), and specifying --use-latest-versions when running toolforge build start (presumably this will become the default at some point), our tool will run on Python 3.13, whereas the latest version available outside of the build service is currently Python 3.11 (until two weeks or so from now). I didn’t actually notice any Python 3.13 features I wanted to use in my tools (except for one tool where I was able to replace a TypeAlias annotation with a type statement), but it’s still nice to use the same version in production as the one I develop on locally. (Of course, I also bumped the Python version in CI from 3.11 to 3.13.)

That said, there is one issue with Python 3.13 that I had to work around. All of my Python tools use the toolforge library for its set_user_agent() function (it has other features but I mostly don’t use them); this library imports PyMySQL as soon as it is imported. PyMySQL, in turn, immediately tries to initialize a default user name for database connections from the environment (even if the tool is never going to open a database connection), via the Python getpass.getuser() function. However, inside a build service container, no user name is set, and so this function raises an error. This was fine in earlier Python versions, because PyMySQL catches the error; however, Python 3.13 changed the error being thrown from KeyError to OSError, which PyMySQL didn’t catch. PyMySQL subsequently added this error to the except clause; however, they haven’t published a new release since that commit. Due to this bizarre confluence of edge cases, it’s impossible to import toolforge or pymysql in a Toolforge Build Service tool on Python 3.13 or later when using the latest released version of PyMySQL. My workaround is to install PyMySQL from Git, using this requirements.in entry:

pymysql @ git+https://github.com/PyMySQL/PyMySQL@main

I look forward to the day when I’ll be able to remove this again.

The remaining part of the build service migration is the service.template file, which contains default arguments for calling webservice commands. I changed the type from python3.11 to buildservice, and also added mount: none to specify that the tool doesn’t need NFS mounted. Then, after pushing the changes to GitLab and building a new container image, I deployed the build service version with commands like this:

webservice stop &&
mv www{,-unused-tool-now-runs-on-buildservice} &&
wget https://gitlab.wikimedia.org/toolforge-repos/translate-link/-/raw/2e2349a9fb/service.template &&
webservice start

This stops the webservice (using the old defaults in www/python/src/service.template), moves the old source code directory away so I don’t get confused by it later (I’ll remove it eventually™), downloads the new service.template file right into the home directory, and then starts the webservice again using the defaults from that file. And last but not least, I updated the instructions in the README.md (initially as a separate commit, later in the same big migration commit because I couldn’t be bothered to separate it anymore).

More details

If you want to follow the migrations in more detail, you can look at the relevant Git commit ranges and SAL entries:

Wikidata Lexeme Forms: Git, SAL
Wikidata Image Positions: Git, SAL
QuickCategories (was mostly already migrated to the build service from T374152): Git, SAL
SpeedPatrolling: Git, SAL
PagePile Visual Filter: Git, SAL
Ranker: Git, SAL
Translate Link: Git, SAL

At some point, I should also apply most of these improvements to cookiecutter-toolforge, though I’m not so sure about the split-requirements part (I feel like it might overcomplicate the dev setup for other developers for little benefit). Let me know what you think :)

From Dagbon to Johannesburg: My Journey to WikiIndaba 2024

Monday, 28 July 2025 22:00 UTC

When I boarded the plane from northern Ghana to South Africa for WikiIndaba 2024, I had no idea just how much the experience would expand my understanding of Wikimedia, language equity, and cultural preservation. As a long-time member of the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, this was my first time attending the continent’s largest gathering of African Wikimedians. I’m especially grateful to the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, who generously sponsored my participation and made it possible for me to be part of this unforgettable gathering.

From the very beginning, the energy at The Capital on the Park in Sandton was electrifying. Over the course of three days, I joined fellow Wikimedians from across Africa who are all working in different languages, countries, and contexts but united by a shared commitment to open knowledge. There was an instant sense of community. I felt at home.

One of the most powerful moments of the conference for me was the keynote by Professor Langa Khumalo, who spoke passionately about the urgent need to preserve African languages through digital tools. His words echoed everything we’re doing as Dagbani Wikimedians. It reminded me that our work goes beyond editing; it’s cultural preservation, identity protection, and future-building.

Another standout session was the Language Diversity Hub Updates presented by Sadik Shahadu, Executive Director of the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group. As a fellow Ghanaian and an advocate for marginalized languages, Sadik shared updates on initiatives across Africa aimed at supporting underrepresented language communities. His presentation was very impactful, especially hearing about efforts to build tools, resources, and support systems for language communities like ours. It was a reminder that we are not alone and that there is a broader, collective movement behind what we do.

Equally memorable was the screening of the Kente weaving documentary presented by Harriet Bayel from the Global Open Initiative Foundation (GOIF). The documentary offered a stunning visual narrative of Kente’s cultural importance, weaving traditions, and the people who keep it alive. The session sparked a lot of reflection for me, especially about how we can use multimedia, video, oral storytelling, and images to document aspects of Dagomba culture in a similarly powerful way.

The session on information integrity and media responsibility was thought-provoking. It shed light on the growing threat of misinformation and how we, as African Wikimedians, are uniquely positioned to combat it by writing our own truths, based on reliable sources and community knowledge. It made me think more critically about fact-checking in my own contributions, especially in topics where sources are limited or biased.

The Africa Wiki Women roundtable facilitated was another moment that left a strong impression on me. It was centered on gender gaps in our movement and ways to create more supportive environments for women to thrive. I was reminded that inclusiveness isn’t just an idea, it requires action, policies, and constant reflection.

Also valuable were the sessions on Wikimedia governance models, youth engagement and funding by Veronica Thamaini, and the introduction to the Event Registration Tool. Each gave me new ideas for how the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group can improve our systems, support young editors, and manage events more effectively.

And then there were the moments in between, conversations over lunch, deep reflections during the cultural tour of Soweto, and sharing personal Wikimedia journeys with people who instantly felt like family. Visiting Nelson Mandela’s house was emotional for me. It reminded me that our work, documenting knowledge, telling stories, preserving heritage, is a continuation of a much bigger mission.

None of this would have been possible without the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group, who believed in me and invested in my growth. I am also thankful to the organizers and everyone who made the event so meaningful. This wasn’t just a conference; it was a turning point. I walked in as a contributor; I walked out as a stronger advocate, a connector, and a visionary for what’s possible when Africans tell their own stories, in their own languages. WikiIndaba 2024 has left a lasting impact on me, and I look forward to continuing this journey with even more passion and purpose.
— Abdul-Rasheed Yussif

A Journey Through the Hausa Community Wiki for Human Rights 2025 Campaign

Monday, 28 July 2025 20:14 UTC

The Hausa Wiki for Human Rights 2025 project has officially concluded and it exceeded all expectations. The campaign was designed to engage Hausa-speaking communities in contributing to Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons on topics related to human rights, environmental justice, and open knowledge.

We organized events across four states in Northern Nigeria, reaching grassroots participants with hands-on training and awareness sessions. Here’s a breakdown of the journey:Katsina State:

Katsina State

The campaign kicked off on 11 July 2025 at Bishir Babajo Community School, Funtua. Teachers, students, and community members gathered to learn about human rights and how they can be documented on Wikimedia projects in the Hausa language.

Kaduna State:

On 12 July 2025, we continued at Dalle International School, Shika Zaria. This session focused on basic Wikipedia editing skills and emphasized the importance of writing in local languages for human rights advocacy.

Kano State:

On 19 July 2025, the campaign reached Jakara Central Primary School’s Computer and Entrepreneurship Hall. The vibrant turnout included youth leaders, teachers, and volunteers. Participants received hands-on editing guidance and explored the role of Wikimedia in preserving knowledge.

Jigawa State:

The next day, 20 July 2025, we were warmly welcomed in Malam Madori town at the Community Computer Center. Despite being in a more rural area, the event saw enthusiastic participation, highlighting the growing interest in open knowledge even in remote communities.

Online Launch:

On 23 July 2025, we hosted an inclusive online meeting and contest launch via Google Meet. This session catered to those who couldn’t join the physical events. The virtual meet-up introduced the project, guided participants on how to edit in Hausa, and officially opened the writing contest.

All events were facilitated by experienced Hausa Wikimedia contributors: Smshika, Hauwa’u, Mahuta, and Gwanki. Their leadership ensured consistent quality and participant engagement throughout the campaign.

We are proud to say the project reached far beyond our expectations. From high turnout and vibrant discussions to the number of articles improved and new editors recruited this campaign made a real impact. Many attendees expressed excitement at being part of something meaningful and learning how to amplify local knowledge.

One key takeaway was the importance of inclusion linguistic, geographical, and digital. Participants who had never heard of Wikimedia before now understand its power, and many are already contributing to Wikipedia in Hausa.

This is just the beginning. The contest continues, and the energy sparked in these sessions lives on in every article, image, and data entry made by our community.

Iterative Improvements (July 2025)

Monday, 28 July 2025 16:25 UTC

The Release-Engineering-Team of the Wikimedia Foundation just deployed a major upgrade of Wikimedia Phabricator.

You can now enjoy

collapsing project workboard columns by clicking on their header (allows faster scrolling to the next column on mobile)
a preview of tasks when pasting a task URI in a web application which supports the Open Graph Protocol
seeing your personal flags set on tasks in Maniphest search results
copying the path of a file shown in Diffusion code browsing
setting workboard column triggers to add or remove subscribers
the initial value of due dates and story points shown in task history
ending up on your previous page after "Log In to Comment" (instead of the homepage)
a warning in the task comment field when it is closed as duplicate
no more "Unknown Object" shown under "Referenced Files" in tasks
(admins only) no more getting subscribed when deleting a comment
(admins only) disabling vandal user accounts from a mobile device
and a good bunch of other bug fixes.

Downstream dependency tree of tasks: T370266: Update to Phorge upstream 2024.35 release
Upstream changelog: https://we.phorge.it/w/changelog/2024.35/

Apart from that stuff above, we recently also

fixed incomplete global search results for tasks
added a more useful error message when fulltext search times out (while we are also looking into Search issues in general)
made video/mp4 files render inline

If you have comments or questions about Phab, please bring them up on the Phabricator Talk page!

From idea to article: how a Wikipedia article is born

Monday, 28 July 2025 12:00 UTC

How does a page get made? What are the rules? And can anyone do it?

28 July 2025, Alice Woods.

Wikipedia is so ubiquitous that many people using it have never known an internet that existed without it. You are using it, whether aware of it or not, via Google information boxes, Siri or Alexa or through AI and GPT.

Despite this, many people are unaware of why or what it takes to create a Wikipedia page. So, how does a page get made? What are the rules? And can anyone do it?

Notability and conflict of interest[edit | edit source]

A Wikipedia page should only be made if the subject is notable and meets Wikipedia’s guidelines. If a page is created that does not meet notability criteria, it may be deleted. When an article is flagged for deletion, there is always a chance given to its creator/editor to make a case for why it should be included. But it’s important to check before you start any new page.

The notability guide for Wikipedia is available here: Wikipedia:Notability
There are also subject specific guides available: Category:Wikipedia_notability_guidelines

Once an editor has identified that the page they wish to create meets notability requirements they should also consider conflict of interest and what their personal connection is to the topic.

All editors should avoid contributing or editing about themselves, their family and friends as well as anyone they have a financial relationship with. If there is a Wikipedia page about you, or someone close to you that you do think needs to be changed there is information about how to do so in the following article. It’s important to follow Wikipedia’s processes carefully.

The conflict of interest guideline for Wikipedia is available here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest

How topics and people are identified for creation[edit | edit source]

There are a number of ways Wikipedia editors identify pages that need to be created; these include using ‘on-wiki’ tools such as project pages and worklists.

Project Pages[edit | edit source]

Project Pages help coordinate editing efforts on specific themes or topics and assist editors in knowing what to prioritise. There are many different project pages available which editors use to identify pages for creation and, in Australia, this includes the Australia Project and projects for each state and territory. There are also project pages for;

These pages help organise work and often highlight missing or underdeveloped content. A full list of Australian Wiki projects are listed here and internationally here.

Worklists[edit | edit source]

A worklist on Wikipedia is generally used to track articles in need of creation or updating. These curated lists are most often used within project pages like the ones listed above as well as off-Wiki when created for specific events. They are also created by editors for certain events, like edit-a-thons.

Of course editors don’t have to select to write a page that appears on a list and, as discussed in this article (Who edits Wikipedia), pages are selected and worked on by people who have an interest or passion in that area. If you identify a page that you think needs to be created - you can do so. You can also create your own worklists to track your personal goals or interests.

Before creating a page it is also important to make sure you check whether that page already exists! If it does you can, of course, edit and improve that page.

Writing an article[edit | edit source]

There are numerous guides available about how to create a Wikipedia page including the following ‘on Wiki’ guides like:

Some important points to consider when making your page are:

Reliable sources: make sure that you have a selection of reliable sources
Citations: make sure that sources can be cited correctly
Social media: You should not use blogs or social media as references on Wikipedia
Sources: primary sources (like press releases or official websites) can be used however they need to be backed up by a range of secondary sources (independent publications such as books, journals or reputable news outlets).
General guide: each page has at least three sources before being published to Wikipedia

Copyright[edit | edit source]

When adding information to Wikipedia, you must be aware of copyright. Make sure that you are not replicating exactly what is being said elsewhere and that it is rewritten in your own words. It is strongly recommended NOT to copy/paste wording from any sources that you are using, even if you plan to change it.

You should also:

Ensure neutrality: Make sure you show all major viewpoints and not ‘take sides’; this is to ensure that Wikipedia presents a neutral point of view.
Avoid promotional language: Do not use promotional language and write in a factual professional tone.

Ownership of a page[edit | edit source]

When you write a Wikipedia page you do not “own it”. All content is licensed under Creative Commons (see Wikipedia's Copyright FAQ) and will be collaboratively edited by other Wikipedia editors. This is a strength of Wikipedia - rather than a weakness!

Other editors may come along and do numerous things to improve a page including;

Adding content, from small chunks of text to significant amounts of text
Copy editing (always appreciated!)
Adding an image
Adding an information box
Improving or adding citations
Flagging sections which need improved citations

There are endless amounts of contributions which can be made.

If you do not agree with changes made to the page you are welcome to discuss this on the article’s talk page or, in instances where the changes are incorrect or vandalism, you can also revert the changes made. This should not be used to undo good-faith contributions as this can disrupt the collaboration that Wikipedia strives for.

Conclusion[edit | edit source]

Who is in charge of content on Wikipedia? - Short video from A Wiki Minute.

Wikipedia is built by volunteers around the world every day. If you’re interested in contributing, there’s a place for you. Start small, use the tools available and don’t be afraid to ask for help.

You're welcome to join Wikimedia Australia’s regular online sessions demonstrating how to edit, and Drop-In sessions discussing questions about editing. Or if you prefer to learn at your own pace join up to the free online course “An Introduction to Wikipedia” using quizzes and videos to guide you through the process.

You can make a difference, one edit at a time!

Closing Content Gaps: Highlights from my July as an AWA Inclusion and Climate Justice Fellow

Monday, 28 July 2025 07:00 UTC

Inclusion is not a trend or buzz, it is a responsibility. July was all about action and impact. Building on the experience from June, I focused on content creation, capacity building and community support for my participants as we worked together to bridge knowledge gaps around climate justice and gender equity in Namibia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.

On capacity building, I hosted two virtual training sessions with a hands-on demo on: “Article translation using the content translation tool” and “Creating new articles on Wikipedia”. These sessions emphasized how multilingual contribution remains a valuable tool for knowledge equity. Also, participants learnt what qualifies for notability in the context of climate and gender equity, and how to create a well-referenced article. The feedback from participants was positive, especially from the new editors who had little or no experience with editing Wikipedia. I further provided support by hosting a general office hour, and one-on-one mentorship sessions with a few, offering guidance and answering questions.

In line with the fellowship goals, we created 16 new Wikidata items, including Every Girl Can, Equal Namibia, Zimbabwe Youth Biodiversity Network, and improved several existing items about climate and gender-related topics in Namibia, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, with information from reliable sources. We also worked on translating 8 articles from English to Igbo language. The outreach dashboard and manual scoring system helped to track the progress and impact of all the edits.

Screenshot after a virtual training session

With August in view, I plan to host more sessions on Wikimedia Commons, media file licensing, and structured data contributions. I also hope to recruit more participants as I intensify ongoing content creation efforts on Wikidata and Wikipedia. The vision grows stronger when we grow together. Follow our journey as we document climate, equity and gender narratives in Southern Africa that deserve global recognition.

Wikimedia UK joins forces with Black Cultural Archives to enhance access and knowledge sharing of Black British history

Sunday, 27 July 2025 23:20 UTC

The Wikimedia Foundation has confirmed the six grantees for its final round of grants under The Equity Fund. Having all been previously supported, the chosen organisations will each receive a final “top up grant” to further deepen their work with the movement, and enable their work to help connect and strengthen the Wikimedia projects.

Wikimedia Foundation Equity Fund Grantees

The six grantees are:

The Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN)
Black Cultural Archives (BCA)
Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ)
Create Caribbean
International Centre For Journalists (ICFJ)
The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)

Connected Grants

Alongside the six grants, the Foundation will also be providing “Connected Grants” to movement organisations who will pair closely and collaborate with one of the grantees.This connected grant would be a one-year grant to support your group’s collaboration and work with the grantee, including how they can best connect with and get their knowledge equity focused work on the Wikimedia projects.

Wikimedia UK is delighted to be paired with the Black Cultural Archives (BCA), a vital custodian of Black British history, driven by passion, sustained through challenges, and uplifted by community. We will support by:

Providing expertise and networks to amplify BCA’s work
Offering insights into best practices to help refine BCA’s methods
Promoting BCA’s’ open-access resources while helping the organisation develop a sustainable model to engage future generations
Assisting in guiding crucial conversations on ethics, digitisation, and licensing

Partnership and collaboration

This is a powerful knowledge-sharing opportunity, one that will help in navigating strategic challenges and unlock new possibilities in safeguarding Black British history. Wikimedia UK has a strategic commitment to knowledge equity and an extensive track record of collaborating with cultural heritage organisations to share their content and engage staff, volunteers and the public with open knowledge.

Through this project, the Wikimedia UK team will support Black Cultural Archives in their endeavours to increase access to their important collections; exploring and piloting ethical approaches to knowledge sharing including digitisation and licensing. The work will sit within the portfolio of Wikimedia UK’s experienced Topics for Impact Programme Coordinator, supported by the Director of Programmes and Evaluation and Chief Executive.

The post Wikimedia UK joins forces with Black Cultural Archives to enhance access and knowledge sharing of Black British history appeared first on WMUK.

weeklyOSM 783

Sunday, 27 July 2025 18:03 UTC

17/07/2025-23/07/2025

lead picture

[1] | Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org | Map data © OpenStreetMap Contributors.

About us

Raquel Dezidério Souto, our editor for Brazilian Portuguese, Artur Fernandes, Gabrielle Lima, Myllene Lopes, Paloma Caetano and Tatiana Vianna have compiled ► statistics on how often weeklyOSM has mentioned each of the 102 OSM-related software products selected for analysis. The statistics are based on 10 years of publication, corresponding to issues #272 to #768 (2015–2025). There are links to the project and other useful information for those who want to explore new possibilities or improve their mapping practices.

Mapping

The proposed tagging scheme for windmills and watermills was rejected with 10 votes in favour, 9 against, and two abstentions.

Community

Charlie Plett has finished mapping the administrative divisions of the Spanish Empire in OpenHistoricalMap and shared a time-lapse animation.
In the latest episode of the Geomob podcast, Ed interviewed Gregory Marle, an organiser of the State of the Map Europe conference, which will be held this year on 14 and 15 November.
The Unique Mappers Network, the OpenStreetMap Community in Nigeria, has celebrated its 8th anniversary with a grand event on Saturday 12 July. You can watch a registry of this special moment.
oldnab shared his first impressions of OpenStreetMap and his journey of mapping urban recycling drop-off points.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

^[1] The OpenStreetMap Foundation announced the deployment of vector tiles on OpenStreetMap.org, resulting in a sharper and faster visual layer. Furthermore, this upgrade allows developers to create their own custom styles.
The OpenStreetMap Awards 2025 will present seven categories of community-driven awards at the State of the Map 2025 conference, with nominations being sought for projects announced between 1 January 2024 and 1 April 2025. The winners will be announced during SotM 2025, in Manila, Philippines.

Events

The OSMF’s State of the Map Working Group has announced that the call for venues for State of the Map 2026 is now open and will run to Sunday 31 August. The selected venue for 2026 will be announced during State of the Map 2025, which will take place in Manila in October.
SotM Nigeria 2025 will be held from 28 to 30 October. You can submit your abstract and register on the event’s website.

OSM research

Zihan Guo and others have presented a large-scale dataset from ~12,000 EV chargers across six cities worldwide (Amsterdam, Johannesburg, Los Angeles, Melbourne, São Paulo, Shenzhen), enriched with OpenStreetMap-based geospatial features such as land use, road network proximity, and nearby amenities. By integrating OSM with hourly charging records, weather data, and pricing, the dataset enables advanced modelling of EV demand, spatio-temporal dynamics, and cross-city transfer learning.
Dementeva, Meeusen, and Meleuman have written an article that provides a primer on the use of OpenStreetMap as a potential source of contextual geographic information for augmentation with survey data, focusing on methodological opportunities and limitations as well as mapping general OSM data wrangling methodology.
A new study, carried out by Chifuniro Baluwa and others, has mapped 764 residential areas in Blantyre District (Malawi) using a participatory, low-cost approach that integrated local knowledge with OpenStreetMap validation. The team leveraged YouthMappers and the Malawi OSM community to fill in critical data gaps during a major cholera outbreak, producing fine-scale location data now publicly available for health response and planning.

Maps

The shelter hut map built using uMap, which we reported on earlier, has been expanded by Wafer. It can now be combined with your own GPX tracks. Additionally, known hiking trails, regions, and rivers have been added, allowing for a wide range of route combinations. If you’d like to contribute, you can register in the forum and submit your observations.

OSM in action

Ute Roos, of Heise, reported that the European Commission has developed the EU Tourism Dashboard, a platform offering interactive visualisations of key data and indicators relevant to the European tourism ecosystem. Among its features is the ‘Indicator Map view’, an OpenStreetMap-based interactive tool that displays a range of regional statistics directly on the map interface.

Software

A logo for CoMaps has been chosen out of a pool of 21 submissions. CoMaps is a fork of OrganicMaps.
Markers4Map allows you to create a map marker in just one step, generate a web map link and export the results in JSON. You can also include a link in the marker label and generate a map with OpenLayers.
Bastian Greshake Tzovaras has created the Mastodon PanoramaxContribs bot account. It automatically produces a daily summary of contributions made to the various Panoramax instances. Check out the first one.

Programming

Anqi Xu shared some midterm progress updates on their Google Summer of Code project, focusing on transliterating non-Latin script search results in Nominatim.
goodahn has used ► pre-rendered OSM tiles and Leaflet to control a low-end robot without an internet connection. The script they used to batch render the tiles is available on GitHub.

Other “geo” things

On Monday 23 June, during Digital Day 2025, Isabel Fischer, Sonja Lindhauer, and Alexander Winkler led an online digital walking tour. They explained how Berlin’s cultural heritage is being digitised and made accessible to society.

Upcoming Events

Where	Venue	What	Online	When
Ciudad de México	Microsoft Teams (Remote)	~~Mapping Party Semanal LATAM Weekly LATAM Mapping Party~~		2025-07-24
Hannover	Kuriosum	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2025-07-24
Wien	Schlupfwinkel (Kleine Neugasse 10, 1040 Wien)	75. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch		2025-07-24
		UN Mappers Mappy Hour		2025-07-25
		OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2025-07-25
		OSM World Mappy Hour		2025-07-25
Δημοτική Ενότητα Παπάγου	Piu Verde, Άλσος Παπάγου	OSM Greece – Συνάντηση της ελληνικής κοινότητας (Αθήνα)		2025-07-26
Jalpaiguri	Beguntary More (Law College Gate)	5th OpenStreetMap West Bengal Mapping Party		2025-07-26
Siliguri	Guru Nanak Chowk	6th OpenStreetMap West Bengal Mapping Party		2025-07-27
Noida	Noida Sector 18 Metro Station	19th OpenStreetMap Delhi Mapping Party		2025-07-27
Stadtgebiet Bremen	Online und im Hackerspace Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen		2025-07-28
Salt Lake City	Woodbine Food Hall	OSM Utah Sidewalk Map Night		2025-07-31
Düsseldorf	Online bei https://meet.jit.si/OSM-DUS-2025	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2025-07-30
		[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2025-07-31
		Eastern Europe Mappy Hour		2025-07-31
		UN Mappers #ValidationFriday Mappy Hour		2025-08-01
		HOT Training WG: Advanced Waterways Mapping Webinar		2025-08-02
		OSM India Online (Remote) Mapping Party		2025-08-03
Amsterdam	TomTom Amsterdam	Maptime Amsterdam: Map & Meet		2025-08-04
Salzburg	Bewohnerservice Elisabeth-Vorstadt	OSM Treffen Salzburg		2025-08-05
Salt Lake City	Woodbine Food Hall	OSM Utah Monthly Map Night		2025-08-06
		Missing Maps London: (Online) Mapathon [eng]		2025-08-05
Derby	The Brunswick, Railway Terrace, Derby	East Midlands Pub Meet-up & OSM 21st Birthday Party		2025-08-05
San Jose	Online	South Bay Map Night	✓	2025-08-06
		iD Community Chat		2025-08-06
Stuttgart	Stuttgart	Stuttgarter OpenStreetMap-Treffen		2025-08-06
Dresden	Bottoms Up	OSM-Stammtisch Dresden		2025-08-07
Potsdam	machbar Potsdam, Haus 5,Friedrich-Engels Straße 22	206. OSM-Stammtisch Berlin-Brandenburg		2025-08-08
Stuttgart	Umweltzentrum Stuttgart Rotebühlstraße	Stuttgarter OSM-Geburtstagtreffen		2025-08-09
臺北市	國立臺灣科技大學研揚大樓 512 教室	COSCUP 2025 OpenStreetMap x Wikidata開放內容議程軌		2025-08-10
København	Cafe Mellemrummet	OSMmapperCPH		2025-08-10
Zürich	Bitwäscherei Zürich	178. OSM-Stammtisch Zürich		2025-08-11
臺北市	MozSpace Taipei	OpenStreetMap x Wikidata Taipei #79		2025-08-11

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by IVIDES.org, Lejun, MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, adiatmad, barefootstache, derFred.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Craig Franklin Award 2025

Friday, 25 July 2025 12:00 UTC

Nominations are now open

25 July 2025, Ali Smith.

Wikimedia Australia is pleased to announce the opening of nominations for the 2025 Craig Franklin Award. This award recognises an individual or organisation that has made a positive impact on the Wikimedia movement in Australia.

If you know someone or a group worthy of recognition, we encourage you to submit a nomination.

Click here to fill out the Nomination Form[edit | edit source]

Nominations close Friday 22 August, 2025.

The winner will be announced at the Wikimedia Australia AGM on Sunday, September 14, 2025

Please note: The Wikimedia Australia Award subcommittee will also consider individuals or organisations who were not nominated and who are not directly associated with Wikimedia Australia.

For more information, see the Craig Franklin Award information page.

Announcing the 2025-2026 Annual Plan

Thursday, 24 July 2025 16:00 UTC

Each year, we develop and publish an annual plan that underscores our mission, reflects on the accomplishments and challenges of the previous fiscal year, and sets a course for the year ahead. Wiki Education’s 2025–2026 Annual Plan builds on last year’s strong progress, deepens our commitment to free knowledge and student learning, and prepares us to mark key milestones – for both our organization and for history itself.

Looking Back: 2024–2025

Fiscal year 2024–2025 was an outstanding year for Wiki Education. We improved content for millions of Wikipedia’s readers, launched an exciting new content campaign, finished work on our new impact visualization tool, and celebrated Wiki Education’s 10-year anniversary. We are tremendously proud of what we accomplished together.

Key Highlights

Thanks to our three-year grant from the Mellon Foundation, our Wikipedia Student Program continued the largest ever social justice initiative in the humanities on Wikipedia, empowering postsecondary students across the U.S. and Canada to close long-standing content gaps. These contributions are expected to reach more than 200 million readers by the end of 2026.

Other notable Student Program campaigns included an initiative supported by the Broadcom Foundation which increased the representation of diverse STEM professionals on Wikipedia, providing young readers with relatable and aspirational figures in these fields.

During a critical election year, our Scholars & Scientists Program offered expert-led courses focused on enhancing Wikipedia’s election-related content. Articles improved throughout the campaign’s courses were viewed nearly 21 million times. We also deepened our public health work through partnerships with PCORI and the WITH Foundation, expanding content on medical topics and healthcare for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

And in celebration of next year’s U.S. Semiquincentennial, we launched the “250 by 2026” campaign in partnership with the American Association for State and Local History, empowering experts across the country to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of U.S. history.

Supporting all of this work is our Dashboard platform, which is also used by Wikimedia affiliates and volunteers worldwide. Throughout the past year, we’ve made significant improvements to its performance, reliability, and features to respond to increasing interest in and use of the software.

Looking Ahead: 2025–2026

Key Highlights

In the upcoming fiscal year, we will continue our social justice in the humanities initiative, and advance the “250 by 2026” campaign celebrating U.S. history. We will further improve health-related content on Wikipedia and make complex scientific information accessible and understandable to the general public. Finally, we will continue shining a light on the biographies of women and people of color in STEM.

In 2025–2026, we’ll embark on research that will help us understand how and to which extent students are currently using AI tools for their writing assignments. We’ll also launch a pilot to better understand the potential of using AI as a tool for their own information research process, and we’ll update our resources to improve our guidance on engaging with AI.

Technology continues to be a vital part of our work, and we’re excited to build upon our promising exploration of a Canvas integration for the Dashboard platform. We’ll also continue to assess the responsiveness of our digital tools to the needs of cultural institutions, especially as we seek to expand our “250 by 2026” campaign.

The Wiki Education Board of Trustees approved our new annual plan during their June meeting. We’re grateful to our Board, funders, partners, program participants, and the global Wikimedia community for their ongoing support of our work and collective mission.

We look forward to another great year of shared progress and impact!

For the complete 2025–2026 Annual Plan, please visit wikiedu.org/annual-plan

Interested in incorporating a Wikipedia assignment into your course? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to learn more about the free resources, digital tools, and staff support that Wiki Education offers to postsecondary instructors in the United States and Canada.

Wikimedia Commons Depicts statements over time

Tuesday, 22 July 2025 22:26 UTC

Wikimedia Commons now uses Structured Data on Commons (SDC) to make media information multilingual and machine-readable. A core part of SDC is the ‘depicts’ statement (P180), which identifies items clearly visible in a file. Depicts statements are crucial for MediaSearch, enabling it to find relevant results in any language by using Wikidata labels, as well as having pre precise definition and structure than the existing category structures.

SDC functionalities began to roll out in 2019. Multilingual file captions were introduced early that year, enabling broader accessibility, followed by the ability to add depicts statements directly on file pages and through the UploadWizard.

Although there are numbers floating around showing a general increase in usage of structured data on Commons, there didn’t seem to be any concrete numbers around the growth in use of depicts statements.

I was particularly interested in this, as must tool WikiCrowd is steadily becoming a more and more efficient way of adding these statements en masse. So I decided to see what data I could come up with.

Getting the data

When going through historic data, and generating previous versions of the Wikidata Map I made use of JSON dumps of Wikidata that were started on archive.org. Fortunately there were many saved for Wikidata, however I didn’t have such luck for the Wikibase JSON dumps of Commons, which only seem to be preserved up until 2022.

After a bit of digging around, I found the wmf_content.mediawiki_content_history_v1 dataset that is stored within the Wikimedia analytics infrastructure (which I fortunately have access to). This data set provides the full content of all revisions, past and present, from all Wikimedia wikis.

Knowing that this includes the Wikibase mediainfo content that stores the depicts statements, and that the structure of the internal JSON representation hasn’t changed much (if at all) throughout the years deployed on commons, this seemed like the right place to look.

Depicts per revision

The data can all be accessed via Spark (which I had to jab and poke at the config for until it worked), and after much iteration I came to a query that would extract the base set of information that I needed

revision_id – Unique ID of the revision on Wikimedia Commons
revision_dt – Point in time that the revision was created
id – MediaInfo ID for the file
depicts_qids – Extracted Wikidata item IDs for depicts statements within the revision

The query:

Looks for the mediainfo content element only, as this is where the Wikibase JSON actually lives.
Decodes the content as a JSON object, looking at the $.id element and $.statements.P180 element, and saving them for another query (parsed_data).
This parsed_data, particularly for P180 statements, is then exploded into a list of mainsnak values.
This explosion is then collected again as a list, using collect_list

WITH parsed_data AS (
  SELECT
    revision_id,
    revision_dt,
    get_json_object(content, '$.id') AS id,
    get_json_object(content, '$.statements.P180') AS depicts_json
  FROM (
    SELECT
      revision_id,
      revision_dt,
      revision_content_slots['mediainfo'].content_body AS content
    FROM wmf_content.mediawiki_content_history_v1
    WHERE wiki_id = 'commonswiki'
      AND page_namespace_id = 6
      AND revision_content_slots['mediainfo'].content_body IS NOT NULL
      AND CARDINALITY(revision_content_slots) = 2
  )
),
exploded_depicts AS (
  SELECT 
    revision_id,
    revision_dt,
    id,
    explode(from_json(depicts_json, 'array<struct<mainsnak:struct<datavalue:struct<value:struct<id:string>>>>>')) AS depicts_statement
  FROM parsed_data
  WHERE depicts_json IS NOT NULL
)
SELECT 
  revision_id,
  revision_dt,
  id,
  collect_list(depicts_statement.mainsnak.datavalue.value.id) AS depicts_qids
FROM exploded_depicts
GROUP BY revision_id, revision_dt, id
ORDER BY revision_dt

And the result looks something like this:

revision_id	revision_dt	id	depicts_qids
346989938	2019-04-23 12:31:02	M75908279	[Q4022]
347004424	2019-04-23 15:08:17	M75908279	[Q4022, Q4022]
347004425	2019-04-23 15:08:19	M75908279	[Q4022, Q4022, Q12280]

Depicts per file each month

From here, we are further reduce our dataset, which currently includes every revision of every file, into a set that includes only the single latest revision of each file in a given month.

month – The month in question for the data
qid – Wikidata item ID that is being depicted
qid_count – Number of images that depicted the qid in the given month

When broken down, this query:

Find the earliest revision_dt time, that marks the start of the window and first depicts revision every created.
Generate a list of months from this earliest point in time, to the current month, our data_spine.
For each month, join all prior revisions, then assigning a row number, and keeping only the latest per depicted id.
Split the depicts_qids array into individual qid rows, so each qid appears on its own row for the corresponding month.
Group by month and qid, count the occurrences and order the result.

WITH date_spine AS (
  SELECT explode(sequence(
    DATE_TRUNC('MONTH', (SELECT MIN(revision_dt) FROM revisions_temp)),
    DATE_TRUNC('MONTH', CURRENT_DATE()),
    INTERVAL 1 MONTH
  )) AS month
),
latest_per_month AS (
  SELECT 
    month,
    id,
    depicts_qids,
    ROW_NUMBER() OVER (
      PARTITION BY month, id 
      ORDER BY revision_dt DESC
    ) as rn
  FROM date_spine ds
  CROSS JOIN (
    SELECT 
      id,
      revision_dt,
      depicts_qids,
      DATE_TRUNC('MONTH', revision_dt) as revision_month
    FROM revisions_temp
  ) r
  WHERE r.revision_dt < ds.month
),
final_states AS (
  SELECT 
    month, 
    id, 
    depicts_qids
  FROM latest_per_month 
  WHERE rn = 1 AND depicts_qids IS NOT NULL
),
exploded_qids AS (
  SELECT 
    month,
    explode(depicts_qids) AS qid
  FROM final_states
)
SELECT 
  month,
  qid,
  COUNT(*) AS qid_count
FROM exploded_qids
GROUP BY month, qid
ORDER BY month, qid;

Finally leading to a result that looks something like this…

month	qid	qid_count
2019-05-01 00:00:00	Q1001	1
2019-05-01 00:00:00	Q1003545	190
2019-05-01 00:00:00	Q1010400	2

And if you are interested, and have access, this dataset is currently stored in addshore.commons_depicts_monthly, and the raw notebook is stored in a Github gist.

Looking at the graphs

I would embed the HTML of these graphs to make them interactive, but it seems I kept too much data into some of them, so pictures will have to suffice…

The first graph looks at all Wikidata items that are depicted more than 2500 times. The top 5 items are:

Q34442 (road) – wide way leading from one place to another, especially one with a specially prepared surface which vehicles can use
Q5004679 (path) – small road or street
Q532 (village) – small clustered human settlement smaller than a town
Q3947 (house) – building usually intended for living in
Q11451 (agriculture) – cultivation of plants and animals to provide useful products

When looking at the same data on a log scale, it’s even easier to see a dip in depicts statements for various items between Feb 2024 and 2025. I believe this is due to the Mass revert of computer-aided tagging by SchlurcherBot due to the evaluation of the experiment that was deemed a failure. See T339902 for further evaluation.

It’s clear to see that road has been winning since July 2021, where it overtook Q527 (sky) which was then in the top spot, and Q828144 (floor exercise) which was second, and Q623270 (horizontal bar) which was third.

Having a look at the earlier days of the structured data, up until August 2021, we are see that a very different set of Wikidata items were taking the top spots.

Q41176 (building) – structure, typically with a roof and walls, standing more or less permanently in one place
Q10884 (tree) – perennial woody plant
Q527 (sky) – everything that is above the surface of a planet, typically the Earth
Q3947 (house) – building usually intended for living in
Q16970 (church building) – building for Christian worship

But most of these have since been left in the dust of others.

I thought it might be a nice idea to look at the first ~2025 or so Wikidata items, to see how the original set of items on Wikidata are being used as part of the Commons depict statements.

Again we see Q532 (village) here which has the clear top spot. There was a sharp spike in Q525 (sun) around March 2024, and interestingly Q801 (Israel).

I also wanted to have a look at some of the Wikidata items that have been used as part of my WikiCrowd tool over the years.

Back in early 2022 I wrote my first blog post on the tool after initially putting it online. In May 2025 I reworked the tool a fair bit at and around the Wikimedia hackathon adding a grid view, and making it even easier to add statements en masse. I think both of these events can be seen to have caused spikes in depicts statements for these items.

However, what on earth happened in April and May of 2023? :D

So…

I really like this approach of reviewing historical structured data on Wikimedia Commons, it was far less complex than downloading a bunch of JSON dumps, and likely I could have got to the same dataset with the downloadable XML dumps, and some additional time and extraction.

A similar method won’t quite be as easy with the Wikidata data stored in the same wmf_content.mediawiki_content_history_v1 table as this, as the JSON structure stored in MediaWiki content has changed at least once, however adapting the queries to extract both formats would likely be trivial.

This new history table (that I have not used before) is stored using the Iceberg system. One consequence of this is that data is simply appended to the dataset, rather than needing to entirely reload the data, which I have previously seen happen among the analytics data sets.

I can see how this sort of analytical data could now be easily incrementally calculated month by month as part of the WMF data lake, and exposed via some very nice APIs, looking across the structured data world the Wikibases that are used within Wikimedia sites exposes. Currently, tools such as commonswalkabout provide similar point in time snapshots of the state of usage of statements on the projects via SPARQL queries, but these queries are often slow.

Ultimately, if this could be productionixed someway, it would be very nice to display this kind of usage infomaation on the Wikidata properties and items that are being used, and also somewhere on Wikimedia Commons.

“AI for Youth, by Youth”: Why Young People Must Shape the Future of AI Governance

Tuesday, 22 July 2025 14:15 UTC

What happens when students are told for years that “Wikipedia does not count as a source” only to then be handed generative AI tools without question? The result is confusion and a missed opportunity to critically shape our digital futures.

Author: Sophia Longwe, Project Manager Policy, Wikimedia Deutschland

At the third UNESCO Global Forum on the Ethics of AI in Bangkok, Sophia Longwe from Wikimedia Deutschland had the opportunity to speak on the panel “AI for Youth, AI by Youth.” Speakers were from Bangladesh, Namibia, Mexico, Japan, the United Kingdom or Germany, and it was clear to everyone that AI is already transforming how we learn, work, and participate in society. And yet, young people are rarely invited to shape how these technologies are governed. Here is her report.

Working in public policy around digital technologies, I often come back to one central question: what kind of infrastructures do we want, and who gets to shape them? Reflecting on my own experiences in school and university, I remember how Wikipedia was routinely dismissed as an unreliable source. Fast forward a few years, and educational institutions are now integrating generative AI tools without any critical reflection. This shift reveals a deeper problem: we are expected to adapt to emerging technologies, but excluded from the rooms where these technologies are designed, regulated, and deployed.

What career should I pursue?

In Germany, AI already influences decisions in education, employment, and public services invisibly and with little transparency. While the EU AI Act is an important step, it did not meaningfully include youth perspectives in its development. That is a missed chance to shape policies that will profoundly affect our futures.

Of course, there is enormous potential in AI beyond the hype of generative tools. AI could support personalized learning, improve public administration, and even help strengthen democratic participation. But to achieve this, we must move away from the mindset that AI is a silver bullet for every problem. Instead, we need to invest in contextual, networked, and public-interest-driven information systems.

A recent example in Germany makes this clear: the Federal Employment Agency decided to add a generative AI interface to its fragmented databases to help young people with career guidance. The chatbot is expected to answer life-changing questions, such as ‘What career should I pursue?’ But generative AI is not a knowledge base; it’s a probabilistic model. It generates plausible-sounding, but often inaccurate, responses. The result is a system that invents careers, contradicts itself, and risks misleading young people at critical decision points. That is not meaningful digital transformation but simply confusion, dressed up as innovation. And it comes at a time when young people are already navigating multiple crises in a volatile world: climate change, digital divides, and difficult job markets around the world.

The risks of AI are not theoretical. In schools, housing, recruitment, and other essential areas, algorithmic systems often lack transparency, oversight, and accountability. These systems do not just replicate existing injustices but scale them. And it is precisely young people, particularly from marginalized communities, who are most affected and least involved in shaping these technologies.

Co-creating with young people

That is why we need genuine co-creation. Youth engagement must go beyond symbolic consultations and become structural participation. We should be active agents in shaping the digital infrastructures that shape our lives. This also means taking data justice and epistemic justice seriously. We need to shift from treating people as data objects to recognizing them as informed, contextualized data subjects. It matters who we are, where we come from, and how our knowledge and histories shape digital realities. Hence, we need more collective ownership of the infrastructures that govern information.

This is where the Wikimedia movement offers a real alternative. Unlike most large platforms, Wikipedia is not driven by engagement metrics or profit. It’s the only non-commercial Very Large Online Platform (VLOP) recognized under the EU Digital Services Act. Projects like Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons are transparent, multilingual, fact-based, and community-governed. They show what it looks like to build participatory knowledge infrastructures that serve the public interest and the common good.

At Wikimedia Germany, we carry this ethos into our policy work by supporting the Youth Internet Governance Forum Germany. Through this initiative, young people are empowered to participate meaningfully in national and global internet governance. As part of the Youth Internet Governance Forum Germany, I had the privilege of contributing to the Strategic Foresight Task Force on Global AI Governance at Germany’s Ministry for Digital and State Modernization. We regularly participate in consultations at the International Telecommunication Union’s Council Working Group on the Internet, where we advocate for multilingualism, digital inclusion, and youth representation. These efforts were recently recognized in the Internet Society’s and ICANN’s report titled ‘Footprints of 20 Years of the Internet Governance Forum’, which highlighted the critical role of Youth Internet Governance Forums in shaping global digital policy. Whether it is co-organizing a Youth Conference at the German Foreign Office, hosting workshops on the Global Digital Compact and WSIS+20 review (World Summit on the Information Society), or engaging in complex technical fora like ICANN or the IETF, young people are not just the future of digital governance but already shaping it.

But for this engagement to be meaningful, it must go beyond visibility. Youth contributions must be structurally integrated into policymaking. That means building capacity early, co-creating agendas, and ensuring that young voices are reflected in laws, strategic foresight processes, and international negotiations. Too often, youth participation is confined to side sessions that are disconnected from the real decision-making. We need to break down these silos and avoid duplicative, fragmented processes that waste resources and reinforce exclusion.

To make AI governance more inclusive, we must move youth and civil society from the margins to the center. Youth initiatives are essential in that mission as spaces where everyone, not just companies or governments, has the legitimacy to shape digital futures.

weeklyOSM 782

Sunday, 20 July 2025 11:22 UTC

10/07/2025-16/07/2025

lead picture

[1] Wanderer, a self-hosted Fediverse-based trail database | © Flomp | Map data © OpenStreetMap Contributors

Mapping

The comprehensive proposal for mapping road markings was approved with 21 votes for, 5 votes against, and 1 abstention.

Community

HazelCyril asked whether OpenStreetMap maintains records of the last time a user posted a diary entry or created map notes.
KhubsuratInsaan questioned if promoting OpenStreetMap as a leisure activity could be effective, since in certain social contexts the idea of ‘doing something for free’ is viewed as repugnant.
After the US community reached a consensus to delete ecclesiastical boundaries from OSM, Minh Nguyễn demonstrated how to map a Catholic archdiocese in OpenHistoricalMap instead.
Andy Townsend highlighted the challenges of mapping areas without clearly defined boundaries, noting that OpenStreetMap still struggles to accurately represent such regions. The problem lies in how people perceive and define the concept of place, an issue explored in detail in Euan Mills’ dissertation, which describes a social experiment where he walked 4.5 km along the A10, stopping roughly every 200 metres to ask ten unsuspecting passers-by ‘Excuse me, what area is this?’.
UrbanRoaming reported an amusing twist in Lima, Peru, where a hiking trail mapped eight years ago, by OpenStreetMap user BikeRoad, recently went viral on Instagram. The reason? The route still doesn’t appear on Google Maps, but shows up perfectly in Pokémon Go, which uses OSM data. As a result, adventurous Instagrammers are now giving Pokémon Go bragging rights as a more dependable trail guide than Big Tech’s map of choice.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

The OpenStreetMap Foundation’s Operations Working Group announced that recent security updates to OSM’s OAuth requires some applications to be upgraded to remain compatible, including the HOT Tasking Manager, osm-api-js, and osm-auth.
The OpenStreetMap Foundation has announced the launch of its 2025 Engineering Working Group Microgrant programme, aimed at supporting community members developing software projects that enhance the OSM platform and ecosystem. A total of £30,000 has been allocated, to be shared among several innovative and impactful proposals. Individual grants are capped at £6,000, but applicants with ambitious ideas are encouraged to think big and apply nonetheless.

Events

Videos from SOTMUS 2025 presentations are now being uploaded to OSM-US’s YouTube channel.

OSM research

Scientists from the US and Germany have investigated so called ‘death by GPS’, where drivers are distracted, drive in bad weather conditions, follow the satnav blindly, or the satnav’s map does not account for road conditions (rough shortcuts not suitable for the vehicle, for example).
A recent study by Jakub Trojan and Tereza Srnečková highlighted how university-led mapathons, like those at Tomas Bata University in Zlín, can enhance the quality and volume of citizen-contributed geographic data on platforms such as OpenStreetMap, fostering both education and community-driven mapping for humanitarian purposes.
Ming Liu and team used OpenStreetMap road and POI data to assess Dalian’s urban nocturnal light environment. By linking night-time brightness with urban functional zones, they identified both lighting-vulnerable areas and lighting hotspots, offering valuable insights for healthier, more sustainable city lighting.
Researchers from MIT’s Senseable City Lab, along with collaborators from other institutions, have cited OpenStreetMap as a data source in a new study examining the relationship between street design, speed limits, and driving behavior. Using 51 million telemetry data points from vehicles, the study evaluates the influence of street features, extracted from OSM, on drivers’ compliance. Moreover, the study uses a model, based on OSM, to predict driver compliance to a 30 km/h limit when applied to areas where it is 50 km/h at the moment.
PeopleForBikes highlighted the importance of OpenStreetMap data in evaluating urban bike infrastructure in its 2025 City Ratings. Cities such as Baltimore have improved their scores by updating OSM with more accurate low-stress bike routes, showing how better mapping directly impacts planning and advocacy, for safer, more connected cycling networks.

OSM in action

^[1] Christian Beutel, aka Flomp, has built Wanderer, a self-hosted, Fediverse-based trail database that allows users to upload recorded GNSS tracks or create new routes, complete with rich metadata features to build an easily searchable catalogue.
Der Spiegel, in a recent video report on car theft in Berlin, highlighted how Saxony’s Special Commission for Vehicle Crime uses an OpenStreetMap-based application to track suspects by analysing their movements through cell tower data.
Befristet tooted that the University of Vienna Library has launched an interactive web map using OpenStreetMap and uMap to display its various locations.

Software

GrabMaps has introduced the KartaCam 2, a portable LiDAR-equipped camera designed for capturing high-resolution street imagery and detailed 3D indoor environments. The collected LiDAR point cloud data can also be uploaded to the newly released KartaView 3D platform.

Programming

Sarah Hoffmann has outlined several anticipated features for Nominatim version 6, including auto-completion, improved performance, enhanced address handling, and expanded support for complex categories and complex OSM objects.

Releases

The Organic Maps July 2025 update has been released.
MapComplete version 0.54.0 is out now, including a ‘copy’ button feature for some types of OSM object and MangroveReview-based POI reviews now parsed with markdown.
HeiGIT reported that a new version of ohsome-planet, a command-line tool that transforms OSM history PBF files into an analysis-ready data format, has been released.

Did you know that …

… the OSM changeset feature was brainstormed during a 2008 hackathon in London?
… even almost 10 years later OSM Tag History, created by Martin Raifer, is still available and can be used to consult the historical evolution of the use of OpenStreetMap tags and generate graphs automatically? This application was first published by us in September 2016, and we’re publishing it again because these detailed statistics are hard to find.

OSM in the media

The removal of North Korea’s Ryesong River from Naver Maps has sparked ► controversy in South Korea, amid suspicions of possible data manipulation. Naver claimed that the omission resulted from using OpenStreetMap data for regions outside South Korea, asserting that the river was missing from OSM’s 2023 data. However, an OSM Foundation representative refuted this, stating the river has never been removed from OSM. The debate intensified after concerns emerged that radioactive waste from a uranium refinery upstream on the Ryesong River could be flowing into South Korea.
The Italian National Institute of Statistics has published an update of their document ‘Use of the OpenStreetMap to calculate indicators for road accidents on the Italian roads’, based on 2023 OpenStreetMap data.

Upcoming Events

Where	Venue	What	Online	When
Noida	Noida Sector 18	OSM India monthly mapping party (online)		2025-07-20
San Jose	Online	South Bay Map Night	✓	2025-07-23
Kiel	Mango’s	Kieler Mapper*innentreffen		2025-07-22
Berlin	Online	OSM-Verkehrswende #69	✓	2025-07-22
Ciudad de México	Microsoft Teams (Remote)	Mapping Party Semanal LATAM Weekly LATAM Mapping Party		2025-07-24
Hannover	Kuriosum	OSM-Stammtisch Hannover		2025-07-24
Wien	Schlupfwinkel (Kleine Neugasse 10, 1040 Wien)	75. Wiener OSM-Stammtisch		2025-07-24
		UN Mappers Mappy Hour		2025-07-25
		OSMF Engineering Working Group meeting		2025-07-25
		OSM World Mappy Hour		2025-07-25
Δημοτική Ενότητα Παπάγου	Piu Verde, Άλσος Παπάγου	OSM Greece – Συνάντηση της ελληνικής κοινότητας (Αθήνα)		2025-07-26
Jalpaiguri	Beguntary More (Law College Gate)	5th OpenStreetMap West Bengal Mapping Party		2025-07-26
Siliguri	Guru Nanak Chowk	6th OpenStreetMap West Bengal Mapping Party		2025-07-27
Noida	Noida Sector 18 Metro Station	19th OpenStreetMap Delhi Mapping Party		2025-07-27
Stadtgebiet Bremen	Online und im Hackerspace Bremen	Bremer Mappertreffen		2025-07-28
Düsseldorf	Online bei https://meet.jit.si/OSM-DUS-2025	Düsseldorfer OpenStreetMap-Treffen (online)		2025-07-30
		[Online] OpenStreetMap Foundation board of Directors – public videomeeting		2025-07-31
		Eastern Europe Mappy Hour		2025-07-31
		UN Mappers #ValidationFriday Mappy Hour		2025-08-01
		HOT Training WG: Advanced Waterways Mapping Webinar		2025-08-02
Amsterdam	TomTom Amsterdam	Maptime Amsterdam: Map & Meet		2025-08-04

Note:
If you like to see your event here, please put it into the OSM calendar. Only data which is there, will appear in weeklyOSM.

This weeklyOSM was produced by MatthiasMatthias, Raquel Dezidério Souto, Strubbl, Andrew Davidson, adiatmad, barefootstache, derFred, mcliquid.
We welcome link suggestions for the next issue via this form and look forward to your contributions.

Summarizing the Conversation: Empowering Students to Write and Disseminate Scholarly Literature Reviews via Wikipedia-Editing Assignments

Friday, 18 July 2025 16:00 UTC

Rachel Miller, PhD is an associate professor of art history at California State University, Sacramento.

When assigning art history research papers, a question from students that I always dread is “How many sources do I have to use?” I’ve tried out different responses, from a curt “As many as you need” to a lengthy explanation of the necessity of comprehensively understanding what has already been said about a topic before being able to make an original intervention. Honestly, none of these answers seem to satisfy students. Much more useful has been my implementation of Wikipedia-editing projects in several of my courses on ancient, medieval, and early modern art, where the focus is on providing a literature review of the scholarship on a particular artwork.

In these projects, students select existing Wikipedia articles on works of art, re-organize and factcheck the information that is already in the article, and add additional content. Unlike a traditional research paper, Wikipedia articles do not have an argument, and students are not allowed to add original analysis, as per Wikipedia’s policies. Because of this restriction, my students and I approach the Wikipedia assignment as if we were writing literature reviews on an art historical topic. Without the pressure to have an original contribution, students come away from this assignment with a strong grasp on how to do comprehensive research with the goal of understanding the current state of a field, while also producing a piece of writing that is useful for the millions of people who visit Wikipedia daily.

Rachel Miller. Photo courtesy Rachel Miller, all rights reserved.

First, students need to understand what a literature review is. I explain to them that scholarship is like an ongoing conversation. When they do research on a particular topic, it’s like they’ve just walked into a room where scholars have been having a conversation without them. How do they get caught up on what has been said before they arrived? I explain that the ultimate goal is for their Wikipedia article to be a guide to this ongoing scholarly conversation for Wikipedia users who are interested in getting up to speed on this topic.

To gather sources for their literature review, I help them each find the most recent comprehensive scholarly writing on their selected artwork. For some students, this might be a recent publication in a top-tier journal like Art Bulletin or Renaissance Quarterly, where they can mine the footnotes for all the sources that have been published about their artwork. For students who are working on artworks housed in major museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this could be as simple as going to the object page for the artwork on the museum’s website and accessing the comprehensive bibliography that many museums keep records of for all their holdings. For others, this might involve looking at recent museum exhibition catalogues which usually include substantial bibliographic lists for each piece in the exhibition. (Before the semester begins, when I am creating a list of possible Wikipedia articles the students might work on, I prioritize artworks that have these kinds of sources written about them.) After the students have compiled a bibliography, I review how to access these sources, including demonstrations on how to get electronic sources from our library databases and how to request physical books that we don’t have on campus via interlibrary loan.

The next step is having them read all their sources and compare and contrast the information contained with them. I tell them it is helpful to start with the oldest source they have and then take notes on how the information changes as the “scholarly conversation” progresses through time, while also paying attention to what kind of information seems to be the most contentious. I then set up a discussion board on our LMS, Canvas, where students share one heading that they plan to add to their Wikipedia article that describes some of the debate that they see in the sources. I give them this chart as a guide, which helps them figure out how to categorize the information they’re encountering:

In your sources, if you see…	… then you should think about adding this heading
a scholarly debate over the iconography or symbolism	Iconography and/or Symbolism
a debate over the identity of the figures in the artwork	Identity of Figures
a conversation about which story is being depicted in the artwork	Subject
scholars connecting the work of art to some larger historical or cultural issue, such as gender issues or political events	Historical Context
a lot of investigation into the history of ownership of the artwork	Provenance
arguments about the identity of the artist	Attribution
arguments about the dating of the work	Dating
arguments about the identity of the patron	Patron

Once the students begin drafting their articles, I talk to them a lot about “red flag” phrases such as “Scholars have said…” or “It is believed…” and how they should instead use specific names of scholars and the dates in which the arguments they’re referencing were proposed. I also talk to them about the importance of not just stating the scholar’s thesis but also giving the reader a sense of what evidence was used to support the author’s conclusion. When I give feedback on their drafts, I pay very close attention to these kinds of issues and require them to fix these problematic phrases before they can publish their edits.

I’ve found a lot of success with this way of approaching the Wikipedia editing project. Not only does it produce articles that usefully summarize important scholarly debates for a global audience (such as this one on Titian’s Pastoral Concert), it also helps students to understand that like in many scholarly fields, art historical knowledge is ever-evolving, with theories adapting when new evidence is discovered. Quite a few of my students have gone on to write more advanced research projects on the same artworks they worked on for their Wikipedia assignment. In those cases, they’ve used their research from the Wikipedia assignment as the foundation for more original scholarly investigations, confident enough in their understanding of how the scholarly conversation had unfolded before they arrived to then become an interlocutor themselves.

Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-07-18/WikiProject report

Friday, 18 July 2025 00:00 UTC

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18 July 2025

WikiProject report

WikiProject Medicine reaches milestone of zero unreferenced articles

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By WhatamIdoing

Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine, one of the most active groups of editors, would like to share good news: Every {{Unreferenced}} article tagged by the group has been addressed. This is the first time in the group's long history that we have seen zero unreferenced articles in our searches.

Like the broader community, we have been working for years to reduce the number of unreferenced articles within the group's scope, and like the broader community, the backlog has been steadily declining. Five years ago, we had about 500 articles to go. In November 2024, we realized that we were down to about 135 articles, and we decided to get the job done. Here's what we did:

Put selected lists on the group's talk page, and ask everyone to help out. Aim for something that's not too long and not too homogeneous, so everyone has a chance to help out.
Keep a central list, and advertise it through any newsletter or other group communication channel you use. This doesn't have to be fancy. In our case, Ajpolino made a list in his userspace. We updated the list via PetScan every now and again (example of PetScan query). If you don't want to maintain a list directly, then try https://bambots.brucemyers.com/cwb/index.html Once your group has signed up, the Bambots list automatically updates once a week.
Invite newcomers to help. Find newer editors who have been editing articles within your group's scope. I occasionally run a script to get a list of new names, but you can do this by looking in article histories or with Special:RecentChangesLinked on a list of key articles. Adding a source is something that many newcomers can do, so instead of inviting them to just join the WikiProject, invite them to help with this specific project. Be sure to check back to see if they did, and click the thanks button when they help out!
Identify interdisciplinary subjects, and ask related WikiProjects to help. We got help from other projects, including Wikipedia:WikiProject Academic Journals. The last handful were quickly solved by Wikipedia:WikiProject Unreferenced articles.

One thing we didn't do is keep track of who helped out. A contest format would let you do a better job of tracking participation, and tracking would let you thank people individually afterwards. For example, I know that 23impartial and Iztwoz steadily chipped away at the list for months, because I happened to see many of their edits, but I don't know how many people contributed to this goal in previous years or how many articles each editor addressed. What I do know is that I'm really happy to have this backlog down to ordinary maintenance mode, and that I appreciate every person who helped, whether in big ways or small, so that WikiProject Medicine could reach this milestone. Thank you!

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Amazing. I hope everyone involved has exchanged barnstars. CMD (talk) 08:18, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chipmunkdavis, I'm sorry to say that we didn't track who did the work, so I don't know whom to deliver the barnstars to. In general, I find that Wikipedia:Barnstars are getting used less these days compared to when we were new editors, and I think we should try to fix that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:02, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you! This is quite an accomplishment! Bearian (talk) 10:07, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Great achievement and an example for all WikiProjects. --Wolbo (talk) 12:49, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A milestone worth celebrating! Congrats to all editors who helped out, recently and in years past. —Ganesha811 (talk) 13:15, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well done and it would be great if you could now all join the discussion at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Unreferenced_articles#Unsourced_and_untagged_articles to tag unsourced articles which have been missed such as Fothergill's sign or mistagged such as Uterine hypoplasia Chidgk1 (talk) 17:50, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Chidgk1 FTFY [1]. Not the best sources, but it's what there is. Toadspike [Talk] 21:22, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Aaand I got the other one too (with a much better source). I hope this makes up for the fact that I had no idea this effort was going on :) Toadspike [Talk] 21:39, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ToadspikeThank you for fixing those examples and it would be great if you or anyone could contribute to the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Unreferenced articles#Unsourced and untagged articles Chidgk1 (talk) 07:29, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Impressive and very inspiring! —David Eppstein (talk) 18:02, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well done, WAID--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 18:45, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-07-18/Traffic report

Friday, 18 July 2025 00:00 UTC

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18 July 2025

Traffic report

God only knows

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By Igordebraga, Shuipzv3, CAWylie, GN22, SSSB, -insert valid name here-

This traffic report is adapted from the Top 25 Report, prepared with commentary by Igordebraga, (June 1 to July 5) Shuipzv3, (June 1 to 21, June 28 to July 5), CAWylie (June 1 to 7, 14 to 28), GN22 (June 1 to 7, June 28 to July 5), SSSB (June 8 to 14) and -insert valid name here- (June 28 to July 5).

Feels like I've been here before (June 1 to 7)

Rank	Article	Views	Notes/about
1	ChatGPT	2,587,387	So, this is here again. It's the sixth time this chatbot tops this list, tying with the Ebola virus and standing behind only a goddamned pandemic and a well-known politician as the articles with the most #1 appearances. And it's not a case like YouTube getting more pageviews out of nowhere, ChatGPT is popular and on the news and thus the traffic is valid. But the specific reason for the views boost is unclear. Is it the new Record mode for meetings? Is it the bot cheating to not be turned off? The arrival of competitor Claude 4?
2	Jonathan Joss	1,468,640	In one of the most bizarre yet sad events of the year, this Native American actor was shot and killed on June 1. In January, Joss, best known for voicing the King of the Hill character John Redcorn, lost his San Antonio home in a fire for reasons unknown. This week, he and his husband returned to collect the mail and survey the damage, when Joss and a neighbor resumed a year-long feud, resulting in the neighbor shooting and killing Joss. His husband called the feud a homophobic hate crime, despite the SAPD refusing to acknowledge it as such.
3	List of Indian Premier League seasons and results	976,066	India's top cricket league was formed in 2008, and the 2025 edition came down to two teams seeking their first title, ultimately ending with the Royal Challengers Bengaluru beating the Punjab Kings. The tournament's biggest winner Chennai Super Kings (5 championships in 18 editions) ended this year's edition in last place!
4	Deaths in 2025	950,636	I don't wanna die But I ain't keen on living either...
5	Sinners (2025 film)	945,999	While still in the box office top 10 two months after release, having passed $350 million worldwide, the supernatural horror period piece has become available for digital rental and download, and quickly shot up to the charts of services like Prime Video, Fandango at Home and iTunes Store. An HBO Max inclusion is also expected at some point.
6	Coco Gauff	877,859	An American tennis player who was the highest-paid sportswoman of 2024, and one year after being doubles champion at the French Open, got the singles title against #8 – only her second Grand Slam trophy.
7	Ballerina (2025 film)	783,968	Technically the full name is From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, showing this is set in a world where seemingly every corner has someone involved with an assassin society. Ana de Armas already showed she could beat up men as a Bond girl in No Time to Die, and now gets a whole movie of her slaughtering males (and even a few females) as an orphan raised to be both a ballerina and a contract killer. Having a winning formula of this popular leading lady, stylized violence, and avoiding the meandering plot that made John Wick: Chapter 4 overlong, Ballerina got positive reviews and opened to $50 million worldwide – not enough to overcome the family-friendly blockbuster currently dominating theaters, but covering half the movie's budget.
8	Aryna Sabalenka	762,304	Back to Stade Roland Garros, the current tennis #1 who plays for no flag due to her country's involvement in a terrible thing that doesn't end, and for the second time this year reached a Grand Slam final, only to be defeated by an American (#6). Sabalenka certainly hopes this won't happen a third time at Wimbledon.
9	Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning	747,317	Ethan Hunt, a secret agent whose pechant for jumping, hanging, diving, and driving dangerously borders on a death wish, finishes off his fight against a rogue artificial intelligence that started in 2023's Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning and in a way revisits all the eight installments of the franchise. While Tom Cruise beat Lilo & Stitch with Minority Report, this time he's lagging behind the remake, but still with great earnings of over $450 million!
10	Dept. Q	745,056	On May 29, this Scottish crime thriller series, based on the books by Jussi Adler-Olsen (pictured), was released on Netflix. The series stars Matthew Goode as a detective investigating a cold case.

Don't worry baby, everything will turn out alright (June 8 to 15)

Rank	Article	Views	Notes/about
1	Brian Wilson	1,811,539	The main composer for The Beach Boys fit the cliché of a "troubled genius", as along with writing immortal tracks such as "California Girls", "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "God Only Knows" and "Good Vibrations" he struggled with mental illness in a way that ultimately led to the cancellation of the album Smile (later released in truncated, re-recorded and unedited versions) and an unlikely partnership with his psychologist Eugene Landy, something even documented in the movie Love & Mercy and the Barenaked Ladies song "Brian Wilson". Wilson retired from touring in 2022 and has now died a few days prior to his 83rd birthday, with former bandmate Al Jardine noting he had been struggling with the long effects of the COVID-19 caught during his last concerts. Wilson is survived by his first wife Marilyn Wilson-Rutherford and their daughters Carnie and Wendy Wilson (themselves successful musicians on the trio Wilson Phillips) and grandchildren, along with five adopted children from his second marriage.
2	ChatGPT	1,578,075	ChatGPT continues to have a presence on this list, predominantly as a consequence of being one of the most visited websites world wide.
3	Air India Flight 171	1,481,480	On June 12, this scheduled flight of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner from Ahmedabad, India to London, United Kingdom crashed into the hostel block of B. J. Medical College, less than a minute after takeoff. At the time of writing, the total number of fatalities stood at 279: 241 from the plane (out of 242 passengers and crew), and 38 on the ground. One passenger who did not survive was Vijay Rupani (#8), who served as the Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2016 to 2021. Among at least 61 people injured were one sole survivor on the plane, and 60 on the ground.
4	Jannik Sinner	1,456,937	The 2025 French Open came down to the top 2 of the ATP rankings, Jannik Sinner attempting his first championship at Stade Roland Garros and Carlos Alcaraz defending his title. In a final for the ages lasting 5 hours and 29 minutes (only 24 minutes shorter than the record-holding Grand Slam final), Alcaraz came down from losing 2-0 and saved three consecutive championship points to again triumph in Paris.
5	Carlos Alcaraz	1,320,186
6	Melissa Hortman	1,180,939	On June 14, Hortman, a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives for the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party (DFL), was shot and killed along with her husband in their home. John Hoffman, a DFL senator in the Minnesota Senate, and his wife were also shot in a separate but related incident, but survived. According to the FBI, the suspect in the shootings impersonated a police officer. According to investigators, the suspect had a manifesto and a list of 70 targets, including prominent Democrats such as Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota and vice-president candidate in the 2024 United States presidential election; Ilhan Omar, a member of the United States House of Representatives; Tina Smith, senator for Minnesota; and Keith Ellison, Attorney General of Minnesota. Other targets on the list included abortion-rights advocates and abortion providers.
7	Straw (film)	1,109,076	Tyler Perry continues making thrillers starring black women on streaming, this time a Netflix production where Taraji P. Henson is a single mom having her own Falling Down-like day of fury.
8	Vijay Rupani	1,084,212	The Chief Minister of Gujarat from 2016 to 2021, he died in #3.
9	Housefull 5	1,009,444	The latest film to come from Indian cinema. This murder mystery film has two different endings depending on the version you happen to be watching. The killer remains the same, but the mastermind is different.
10	Deaths in 2025	971,800	For #1: The glass was raised, the fired rose The fullness of the wine, the dim last toasting While at port, adieu or die A choke of grief, heart hardened, I Beyond belief, a broken man, too tough to cry...

Well, I feel so break up, I wanna go home (June 15 to 21)

Rank	Article	Views	Notes/about
1	Juneteenth	2,331,029	The U.S. nearly has a federal holiday every calendar month. This one, combining "June" and "nineteenth", commemorates the June 19, 1865 order affirming the abolition of slavery in Texas (announced by major general Gordon Granger, pictured). While Texas and other states had honored the day at the state level, it was made a national holiday in 2021.
2	Anne Burrell	2,228,139	This popular TV chef was found unresponsive in her apartment on June 17. While first responders believed her death to be from cardiac arrest, officials are investigating a possible drug overdose, as numerous pills were also found nearby.
3	Iran–Israel war	1,849,344	This conflict began on June 13 when Israel launched surprise strikes against Iranian (#7) military and nuclear facilities, killing several top military officials and nuclear scientists. Iran and its Houthis ally have retaliated by launching missiles against Israel. The war saw a significant escalation on June 22, when the United States attacked several Iranian nuclear facilities.
4	28 Years Later	1,538,992	After years in development hell, the third post-apocalyptic horror film in the series that began in 2002 finally got its premiere on June 20, receiving positive reviews and having a strong opening that beat Pixar's latest movie and stood only a few million behind a family-friendly remake. Sony Pictures was given distribution rights under the proviso of future sequels, and wasted no time in making a fourth film, filmed immediately after this one and set for release in January.
5	Ali Khamenei	1,473,228	The man who has been supreme leader of Iran since 1989 has issued a fatwa against the acquisition, development and use of nuclear weapons, has called for the destruction of Israel, and supported the Axis of Resistance, a coalition of militant and political organizations involved in the Iran–Israel proxy conflict.
6	J. J. Spaun	1,414,729	This American golfer vaulted into the Top 10 world ranking by winning the U.S. Open on June 15.
7	Iran	1,276,177	The ever-controversial Islamic Republic that was once known as Persia. Its antagonistic relationship towards Israel already led to rockets and bombings last year, and this time it got worse (#3).
8	2025 FIFA Club World Cup	1,048,385	Amidst all the controversy regarding immigrants and travel bans, the United States received 29 clubs from all over the world of the sport they call "soccer". Temperatures are high, some games are barely attended, but there are fun moments, mostly regarding the European teams that were supposedly unbeatable failing to break ties if not downright losing (to Brazilian teams, making the sad state of the national squad all the more embarrassing).
9	Deaths in 2025	969,011	When darkness falls, may it be That we should see the light When reaper calls, may it be That we walk straight and right...
10	Melissa Hortman	799,168	The suspect who shot Hortman and her husband dead, and wounded John Hoffman and his wife, was captured on June 15.

New York City boy, you'll never have a bored day (June 22 to 28)

Rank	Article	Views	Notes/about
1	Zohran Mamdani	4,699,945	In the Democratic mayoral primary on June 24, this Uganda-born American defeated ten candidates to become the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City.
2	Northrop B-2 Spirit	1,961,215	On June 22, the U.S. carried out strikes in Iran. Six B-2As dropped 12 GBU-57 "bunker buster" bombs onto Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, and a seventh dropped two more GBU-57s onto the Natanz Nuclear Facility. (and along with the air strikes, the facilities were hit by Tomahawk missiles fired from submarines)
3	Lauren Sánchez	1,777,276	This journalist married Jeff Bezos on June 27 (both are to the right of Boris Johnson in the adjacent image), with the day before and after holding various parties. Given her husband is the third richest person in the world, the wedding downright has an article here, being held in various historical sites of Venice and with a notable list of guests that included Bill Gates, Leonardo DiCaprio, Katy Perry and Ivanka Trump.
4	28 Years Later	1,468,178	After 2007's 28 Weeks Later didn't have the original director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, both have returned to part 3 of the zombie apocalypse series, featuring a group going to the United Kingdom where the rage virus started and discovering whatever horror emerged from decades of mutations. Reviews were positive, the movie has already passed $100 million worldwide and covered its $60 million budget, and given it was shot back-to-back with part 4, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple will continue the story in January.
5	Iran–Israel war	1,359,972	Thankfully for everyone who feared this could kick off World War III, both countries agreed to a ceasefire after 12 days of mutual bombings on June 24.
6	Shefali Jariwala	1,210,665	An Indian actress and model known for her work in multiple music videos and reality shows, and died fairly young at 42 following a sudden fall in blood pressure.
7	Squid Game season 3	1,210,359	Netflix returned to the South Korean show about people down in their luck going through deadly versions of children's games for money. Season 3 is basically the second part of season 2, following what happened after the unsuccessful rebellion led by returning winner Seong Gi-hun, while also showing one of the guards overseeing the games trying to take one of the players back to his sick daughter, and the brother of the games' organizer trying to locate the island where the games happen. Given it's the show's final season, a few viewers were disappointed, particularly as the final scene is basically a tease for an upcoming spin-off series set in the United States.
8	Mira Nair	1,083,530	#1's mother is an Indian filmmaker, who even had an Oscar nomination for Salaam Bombay! and a Golden Lion for Monsoon Wedding.
9	GBU-57A/B MOP	1,063,079	#2 dropped 14 of those "Bunker Buster" bombs in the United States strikes on Iranian nuclear sites that happened in support of #5.
10	Sitaare Zameen Par	1,037,726	The 2018 Spanish movie Champions, about a suspended basketball coach forced to manage a team of people with disabilities as community service, already had a Hollywood remake, and now it's time for Bollywood to explore the same story.

Like a rainbow, fading in the twinkling of an eye, gone too soon (June 29 to July 5)

Rank	Article	Views	Notes/about
1	Diogo Jota	4,163,751	Portuguese footballer Diogo José Teixeira da Silva (hence the nickname Diogo J., pronounced Jota in Portuguese) had already helped Wolverhampton Wanderers return to the Premier League and his national team win the UEFA Nations League when in 2020 he joined Liverpool FC, with whom he won the FA Cup and EFL Cup. Jota was having a great 2025, winning the Premier League with the Reds and a second Nations League title with Portugal, and also married his high school sweetheart with whom he had three children. Due to a lung surgery, he was advised not to fly back to England, so Jota and his brother André Silva left the hospital in Porto in a Lamborghini Huracán to drive all the way to Port of Santander in Spain and take a ferry. Sadly, on the way there they blew a tyre on a Spanish highway, the car veered off the road and caught fire, killing both men. The football world mourned losing a talented player at just 28 and at the height of his career, leading to hundreds attending Jota's funeral in the small city of Gondomar, where he started his career, and many tributes, including by Oasis in the opening concert of their reunion tour and Nuno Bettencourt in the Black Sabbath farewell concert.
2	Michael Madsen	1,817,568	Two actors died this week. Michael Madsen passed at 67 of cardiac arrest, made his name with tough guy roles in movies such as Reservoir Dogs, Species and Donnie Brasco, and had his sister Virginia Madsen follow him to Hollywood. Julian McMahon died at 56 of cancer, went to the United States after some works in his native Australia, and along with many TV roles in shows like Charmed and Nip/Tuck, played Doctor Doom in Fantastic Four and its sequel (ironically in the same month of a new Fantastic Four that won't feature Doom, who has been promoted to Avengers villain).
3	Julian McMahon	1,815,121
4	Jurassic World Rebirth	1,615,355	The Jurassic Park sequels are mostly derided but made lots of money, so those dinosaurs can't remain extinct. In a new take directed by Gareth Edwards and written by the same David Koepp who made the screenplays for the Spielberg-directed first two movies, a new abandoned island where InGen bred dinosaurs was discovered, and Scarlett Johansson and Mahershala Ali are mercenaries helping scientists visit it to get blood samples from the dinos for pharmaceutical research. Rebirth earned mixed to positive reviews given that as uninspired as the script was, it was less convoluted than Jurassic World Dominion and provided plenty of scenes of people chased and/or attacked by dinosaurs. The film also earned $318 million worldwide in a single weekend, raising the possibility of following the preceding Jurassic World trilogy in making over a billion dollars!
5	Squid Game season 3	1,390,761	The third and final season of this South Korean television series is the biggest-ever television launch for Netflix, getting more than 60.1 million views in the first three days. Critical reviews have been generally positive. While its creator and director Hwang Dong-hyuk has said there is no official decision on a remake, there are rumors that David Fincher is developing an English-language version. The last scene in the final episode, in which a well-known Hollywood actor cameos, does little to dissuade the possibility as well.
6	Zohran Mamdani	1,378,129	Mamdani is the Democratic Party's nominee for the 2025 New York City mayoral election, having defeated ten other candidates, including former governor of New York Andrew Cuomo in an upset. Mamdani's platform includes free public buses, public childcare, public grocery stores, rent freezes, additional affordable housing, police reform, and a $30 minimum wage by 2030. He also called for tax increases on corporations and those earning more than $1 million annually, and criticized Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Mamdani has already attracted the attention of MAGA politicians and influencers, who have attacked him using Islamophobic, racist and xenophobic language, with some even calling for his deportation.
7	F1 (film)	1,153,045	Brad Pitt plays a veteran racecar driver hired by a flailing Formula One team to salvage their season, in an expensive Apple Studios production featuring director Joseph Kosinski dealing with fast vehicles for the third time (Tron: Legacy had digital motorcycles and Top Gun: Maverick, fighter jets). Reviewers liked the combination of thrilling races (with even a few crashes along the way) and compelling character arcs and the movie sped to the top of the weekend box office, with $57 million in North America (where F1 has never been so popular compared to NASCAR or IndyCar) and $85 million elsewhere, and by its second week F1 had both surpassed Napoleon as the highest-grossing Apple Original Film and the $300 million mark.
8	Lauren Sánchez	1,092,005	This media personality married Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos in a lavish three-day event in Venice from June 26 to 28, with an impressive guest list to boot. Local officials praised the event for bringing an estimated $1.1 billion boost to the region, but environmentalists complained on the impact of 90 private jets arriving.
9	One Big Beautiful Bill Act	1,054,989	This long-awaited megabill inevitably passed the House and was signed by President Donald Trump on July 4. Despite widespread criticism, Trump claimed it was the "single most popular bill ever signed". The act extends the tax cuts that Trump set in his first term and does much, much more to benefit the wealthy while stripping millions of Americans of benefits from services like Medicare and Social Security.
10	Deaths in 2025	997,939	Lookin' for some happiness But there is only loneliness to find Jump to the left, turn to the right Lookin' upstairs, lookin' behind

Exclusions

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.

Most edited articles

For the May 30 – June 30 period, per this database report.

Title	Revisions	Notes
List of people named Peter	4150	Mostly an IP, with occasional appearances by a user, adding to this list with names all the way back to Saint Peter.
Iran–Israel war	3223^[1]	Even if Hamas is still keeping over 50 people hostage, everyone is tired of the endless suffering of the Gaza war. And the Israeli government still decided to extend to other countries, with a brief conflict in Lebanon before going all-in against Iran, with the United States even helping by bombarding Iranian nuclear sites, before a ceasefire was called after 12 days. Over 900 people were killed and thousands were wounded, and lots of aircraft, missiles and buildings were destroyed.
Air India Flight 171	2806	A plane crash that happened in Ahmedabad with over 200 fatalities, marking the first hull loss accident for the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the eleventh fatal plane crash for Air India, the last happening in 1985 as Air India Flight 182 was blown up by terrorists.
June 2025 Israeli strikes on Iran	2424^[2]	The war above was kicked off by Israel doing surprise attacks on key Iranian military and nuclear facilities on June 13.
Deaths in 2025	2068	Along with the people listed above, other deceased of the period include Ananda Lewis, Sly Stone, Bobby Sherman, Lalo Schifrin, and Jim Shooter.
June 2025 Los Angeles protests	2020	All the controversial acts of Trump's presidency are bringing his opposition together. On June 6, 2025, protests began in Los Angeles after ICE agents raided several city locations to arrest individuals allegedly involved in illegal immigration, prompting some riots and even Trump's response of nationalizing the California National Guard and calling for thousands of guard members to deploy against the protesters. Hence one week later, on June 14, L.A. was one of thousands of cities engaged in the "No Kings protests", so named because Trump has called himself a king on occasion – and given these ones weren't restricted to the U.S. and extended to countries with actual kings, there they were called "No Dictators" or "No Tyrants".
No Kings protests	1337
2025 shootings of Minnesota legislators	1140	As mentioned above, John Hoffman and his wife were injured by a man claiming to be a police officer, the guy went to the house of two other politicians only to find them empty, and then after a brief shootout with the cops broke into the home of Melissa Hortman and killed both her and her husband. The perpetrator, Vance Luther Boelter, was arrested the following day.
Timeline of the Gaza war (16 May 2025 – present)	1137	Even if it was better to see this end, instead Israel has renewed its offensive on the Gaza strip, and even the country's allies condemned their actions that included targetting aid workers and schools.
2025 New York City Democratic mayoral primary	1037	Polls have started for New York's election in November. Incumbent mayor Eric Adams left the Democrats to run as independent, and the 384,251 people voting in the primary chose State Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani as their candidate.
Zohran Mamdani	1006
Legalism (Chinese philosophy)	966	Been a while since we've seen the work of FourLights here!
Thug Life (2025 film)	880	From Kollywood comes this gangster action drama reuniting director Mani Ratnam and actor Kamal Haasan after nearly 40 years, earning negative reviews and low box office compared to an elevated budget.
Timeline of science fiction	878	A user who made Good Articles out of many "(celestial body) in fiction" articles is now going for the genre as a whole.
James Cook	873	A Good Article was achieved out of the Royal Navy officer, explorer, and cartographer who in the 18th century mapped coastlines, islands, and features across the Pacific from Hawaii to Australia.

^ 1006 in the capitalized title "Iran–Israel War".
^ Page has since been merged into Iran–Israel war

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Wow! ChatGPT was so high ranked! Rafael! (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects 15:24, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-07-18/Recent research

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18 July 2025

Recent research

Knowledge manipulation on Russia's Wikipedia fork; Marxist critique of Wikidata license; call to analyze power relations of Wikipedia

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By Smallbones, E mln e, Tilman Bayer and JPxG

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

Knowledge manipulation on Ruwiki, the Russian Wikipedia fork

Reviewed by Smallbones

Ruwiki, a fork of the Russian Wikipedia, is widely believed to be financed and published by people close to the Kremlin. The authors of this paper^[1] construct a dataset consisting of 33,664 pairs of articles taken from over 1.9 million articles on the official WMF Russian Wikipedia and the Ruwiki articles of the same title. To avoid confusion, Ruwiki is generally called "RWFork" in this paper.

The authors do not use the word "propaganda" in the paper, nor do they directly refer to RWFork as "disinformation". But you can take "knowledge manipulation" as used in the title as having the same meaning. Accusations of spreading propaganda have long been made between Russia and Western countries. The situation has only gotten worse since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Putin government has attempted several times to replace, block, or just undermine the Russian Wikipedia — and they haven’t been shy in saying so. See Signpost coverage in May 2020, April 2022, June 2023, January 2024, July 2024, and June 2025.

The stated purpose of RWFork according to the paper is that it is "edited to conform to the Russian legislation" without directly saying that Russian legislation requires the use of propaganda, e.g. writing "special military operation" instead of the "Russian invasion of Ukraine."

The structure of RWFork facilitates a direct comparison of articles on both encyclopedias. This comparison effectively reveals not just the topics required to be modified by Russian legislation, but also which are controversial enough that an active ally of the government in practice has made further edits. Both encyclopedias are powered by MediaWiki software. RWFork copied almost all of the over 1.9 million articles from Russian Wikipedia. 97.33% of the articles were unchanged (identified as "duplicates") over the period studied 2022- 2023. 0.92% of the articles were never copied or were immediately deleted and are identified as "missing" in the paper. Only 1.75% of the articles were changed - which may be the most surprising result of the paper. 0.96% had changes which affected the article text and 0.79% had changes that didn’t affect the text, such as article categorization or references. Though the percentage of changed articles is small, the resulting dataset is still quite large at 33,664 entries. Most variables, such as page views, and edit reversion rates and IP editing rates are collected from the Russian Wikipedia articles. RWFork's lack of available data other than the articles themselves and the article's editing history result in most comparisons based solely on Russian Wikipedia data - e.g. if the Russian Wikipedia article has a high number of page views, both articles in the pair are considered as frequently viewed. The main exception is that the timing of edits (often called the "time-card" on Wikipedia) is available for both articles in the pair.

This dataset is the major accomplishment of the authors, and is freely available online. It is described in enough detail to answer several important questions. Were the changed articles relevant or controversial (using page views and reversion rates)? When were the articles changed (using time-cards)? Were there patterns in the articles changed (using article geography and subject matter)?

Three figures from the paper give these basic results.

Figure 3a. shows that page views from the Russian Wikipedia articles are much higher for the changed articles than for the duplicate and missing articles. Figure 3b. shows very similar results for edit counts. Figures 3c. (for IP edit rates) and 3d. (for revert rates) have smaller differences between the changed articles and the duplicate articles, but overall these results strongly support the hypothesis that changed articles are especially relevant and controversial.

Figure 4 shows the editing time-cards for RWFork (top) and Russian Wikipedia (bottom). The top card shows that RWFork is mostly edited during ordinary Moscow working hours on weekdays, whereas Russian Wikipedia is edited at earlier and later times as well as during the weekend. This strongly suggests that RWFork is edited more by professional editors and Russian Wikipedia by more volunteers.

Figure 5 is a bit more complex. It shows how all the article groups (changed, duplicate and missing) change for the geography of the article subject. Articles about Ukraine (UA) fall, much more often than those from elsewhere, into the changed group. Conversely, articles about Russian or U.S. topics fall most commonly in the missing group, which suggests that there are different reasons that country-specific articles end up in different groups.

The authors' also offer a "taxonomy of patterns of knowledge manipulation" (Table 4 from the paper), i.e. a classification of the different types of changes made on RWFork to the imported articles. This is more refined data, based on clustering algorithms, and begs for further analysis:

There is indeed far more research that this data might be used for. For example, researchers might investigate whether the articles modified on RWFork have also been modified on Polish, Hungarian, or other eastern European language Wikipedias, possibly indicating a Russian interest in spreading propaganda beyond its borders.

Mapping the Dispossession of the Commons

Reviewed by E mln e

A collective of humanities scholars publishes a manifesto and a commentary^[2] to renew critical research approaches in Wikimedia research, grounded in critical humanist traditions. The group and the manifesto emerges from last year's Wikihistories symposium,^{[supp 1]} a new research events series in the critical humanist tradition (co-organized by Wikimedia Australia). The manifesto and commentary are a call for the community to focus on the following themes:

Map the dispossession of the commons
Recognise Wikimedia’s role as a hub of global knowledge infrastructure
Examine power relations
Explore the juxtapositions of Wikimedia policies and practices
Investigate linguistic and cultural plurality
Assess the implications of algorithms
Historicise Wikimedia's epistemology
Study Wikimedia’s data as partial, temporary, fallible and shifting
Situate research practice
Build a shared project of critical investigation across disciplines

In a blog post last week,^{[supp 2]} one of the authors (Heather Ford) characterized the manifesto as a continuation of the Critical Point of View Conference series in 2010/11 (Signpost coverage), and the collective volume developed from it^[supp
3].

While there is previous research on the manifesto's topics - in particular the "dispossession of the commons", i.e. the impact of Large Language Models and other reuses by technology companies (cf. below) on the ways Wikimedia projects function as commons - the call seems designed to encourage further inquiries and strengthen the academic community in this area.

"The Realienation of the Commons": A Marxist critique of Wikidata's license choice

Reviewed by Tilman Bayer

In a paper titled "The Realienation of the Commons: Wikidata and the Ethics of 'Free' Data",^[3] Zachary McDowell and Matthew Vetter argue that

In many ways, Wikipedia, and its parent company Wikimedia, can be viewed as the standard-bearers of Web 2.0’s early promises for a free and open Web. However, the introduction of Wikipedia’s sister project Wikidata and its movement away from “share alike” licensing has dramatically shifted the relationship between editors and complicated Wikimedia’s ethics as it relates to the digital commons. This article investigates concerns surrounding what we term the “re-alienation of the commons,” especially as it relates to Google and other search engine companies’ reliance on data emerging from free/libre and open-source (FOSS/FLOSS) Web movements of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Taking a Marxist approach, this article explores the labor relationship of editors to Wikimedia projects and how this “realienation” threatens this relationship, as well as the future of the community.

In more detail, the authors explain their application of Marx's theory of alienation to Wikipedia and Wikidata as follows:

[...] Wikipedia editing allowed the average editor to subvert the capitalist status quo. The Wikipedia community was created around this new economic model—CBPP [commons-based peer production], which connected editors with their labor and connected other editors to each other through that labor. Karl Marx [...] defined alienation as “appropriation as estrangement” and stated that “realisation of labour appears as loss of realisation for the workers” [...]. Marx’s concept here refers to the relationship between the product of the labor and how it is both used and disconnected from the laborer. This relationship with labor (and the community around it) marks the important distinction that helps illustrate our use of the term “realienation” with regard to Marx’s usage of “alienation.” [...]
Instead of Wikipedia’s CC-BY-SA (“share alike”) license (a license that requires derivatives and other uses of the licensed material to retain the same license), Wikidata utilizes a license that has no requirements. This might sound ideal for “freedom,” but in reality, Wikidata seems to appropriate that particular FOSS imaginary of sharing while instead delicensing information into data by assigning it a CC0 license—allowing companies to extract, commodify, and otherwise use these data in ways to create systems without requirements to honor the license or reference the works that were utilized.

A problem with the paper's argument here is that their depiction of the CC0 license as contrary to Wikimedian values (and mocking scare quotes around “freedom [...]”) is incompatible with the Wikimedia movement's conception of free licenses itself, as pointed out by several Wikimedians in a discussion with the authors in the "Wikipedia Weekly" Facebook group:

I think this [paper] is bad for the open movement as they try to make a new definition of what "free" is, contrary to Freedom defined [i.e. the definition used in the Wikimedia Foundation's 2007 licensing policy resolution that specifies the admissible content licenses on all Wikimedia projects, not just Wikidata], the Open definition and for example the Free in Free Software Foundation or the open source definition.

One of the authors rejected this criticism as making a mountain out of a molehill, while the other stated that the main argument I would emphasize in response is that we need to be more attentive and critical to the outcomes of CCZero licensing.

As per its abstract (quoted above), the paper explores the postulated re-alienation [...] especially as it relates to Google and other search engine companies’ reliance on data from Wikimedia projects. In case of Wikipedia, the authors devote ample space to summarizing earlier research about its importance for Google's search engine, and concerns that Google's Knowledge panel feature (introduced in 2012) might have significantly reduced traffic to Wikipedia as well as average Web users’ understanding of where information comes from when sourced from Wikipedia. However, they also acknowledge that the relationship between Google and Wikipedia had been (somewhat) mutually beneficial overall.

In contrast though, and rather peculiarly considering their overall claim that Wikidata's CC0 license makes the project more exploitable by search engine companies, the paper cites no research or other concrete evidence about whether and how much information from Wikidata is being using in Google Search or in its knowledge panels. At one point, the authors even lament that

it is of deep concern that the Wikimedia community and Wikidata volunteers know very little with regard to how third-party consumers use Wikidata.

But McDowell and Vetter don't seem to have considered how they themselves, and the strong claims they make in their paper about the exploitation of Wikdata due to its license choice, might be affected by this lack of knowledge.

Published in the 2024 issue of the International Journal of Communication, the paper also briefly mentions

large language model generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications such as ChatGPT or Google’s Bard

as a more recent example of this "realienation". However, it largely focuses on search engines and discusses artificial intelligence mostly in form of AI apps such as Google Knowledge Graph [and] VAs [voice assistants] (e.g., Siri, Alexa), presumably due to its submission date (the ambiguous 11-9-2022) predating the release of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022.

Briefly

See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.

Other recent publications

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 and JPxG

"Digital sovereignty": A history of "Wikimedia’s atypical organizational model"

From the abstract:^[4]:

"Based on the authors’ extensive involvement [with e.g. Wikimedia Germany and the Wikimedia Foundation] since the early years, this article examines Wikipedia’s journey of over two decades to unravel relevant aspects of sovereignty within its unconventional organizational framework. The concept of digital sovereignty was nascent when Wikipedia emerged in 2001. In its 24-year evolution, Wikimedia’s atypical organizational model, shaped by a mix of intent and happenstance, fostered digital independence while unintentionally creating pockets of dependence. Looking at the origins and the foundational principles, this article sheds light on various aspects of dependence, brought about in the areas of content, collaboration, governmental influence, legal framework and funding models."

The authors envision Wikipedia — which at the time of its origin "could have remained a marginal experiment" — as a self-determining digital space. However, they conclude that this state is not the result of deliberately orchestrated hierarchy, but as an almost-accidental stumbling into independence through a mix of idealism and adaptation.

"Jürgen Habermas revisited via Tim Cook's Wikipedia biography: A hermeneutic approach to critical Information Systems research"

From the abstract:^[5]

"Critical Information Systems (IS) research is sometimes appreciated for the shades of gray it adds to sunny portraits of technology's emancipatory potential. In this article, we revisit a theory about Wikipedia’s putative freedom from the authority of corporate media's editors and authors. We present the curious example of Tim Cook's Wikipedia biography and its history of crowd-sourced editorial decisions [... W]hat we found pertained to authoritative discourse – the opposite of “rational discourse” – as well as Jürgen Habermas's concept of dramaturgical action. Our discussion aims to change how critical scholars think about IS's Habermasian theories and emancipatory technology. Our contribution – a critical intervention – is a clear alternative to mainstream IS research's moral prescriptions and mechanistic causes."

Specifically, the paper focuses on talk page debates about whether the article should mention the Apple CEO's homosexuality, where advocates of privacy prevailed until Cook himself

[...] wrote an auto-biographical essay about his sexuality, published by Bloomberg Media. [...] Corporate powers determined and disseminated the final word about Cook’s sexuality, not Wikipedia’s global pool of co-authors and co-editors.
In short, Wikipedia’s putatively “rational discourse” (Hansen et al., 2009) did not establish the consensus; corporate media authority, the author (Cook, 2014), and his auto-biography established an orthodox position, which Wikipedia then copied.

How this critique, carried out by means of a "hermeneutic excursion", relates to our own policies on biographies of living people is not specified, as actions taken here are broadly commensurate with what policy recommends for biographies in general. The authors are unclear on this point, but offer the suggestion that the article was tainted by the use of that reference, since Cook's biography was published by a company owned by a billionaire, and he "did not release it through a social media outlet" (although Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Truth Social are also owned by billionaires).

(See also earlier coverage of other publications involving Habermas)

References

^ Trokhymovych, M., Kosovan, O., Forrester, N., Aragón, P., Saez-Trumper, D., & Baeza-Yates, R. (2025). Characterizing Knowledge Manipulation in a Russian Wikipedia Fork. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 19(1), 1924-1936. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v19i1.35910 With downloads available
- for the text https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/issue/view/658 and
- for the code and dataset https://github.com/trokhymovych/RWFork, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15073728
A preprint is also available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10663, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
^ Jankowski, Steve; Ford, Heather; Iliadis, Andrew; Sidoti, Francesca (2025-07-07). "Uniting and reigniting critical Wikimedia research". Big Data & Society. 12 (3): 20539517251357292. doi:10.1177/20539517251357292. ISSN 2053-9517.
^ McDowell, Zachary J.; Vetter, Matthew A. (2023-12-26). "The Realienation of the Commons: Wikidata and the Ethics of 'Free' Data". International Journal of Communication. 18 (0): 19. ISSN 1932-8036.
^ Klempert, Arne; Ménard, Delphine (2025). "Wikipedia's Atypical Oganizational [sic] Model: Digital Sovereignty 20 Years in the Making". In Schmuntzsch, Ulrike; Shajek, Alexandra; Hartmann, Ernst Andreas (eds.). New Digital Work II: Digital Sovereignty of Companies and Organizations. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 145–160. ISBN 9783031699948.
^ Smethurst, Reilly; Young, Amber G.; Wigdor, Ariel D. (2024-12-01). "Jürgen Habermas revisited via Tim Cook's Wikipedia biography: A hermeneutic approach to critical Information Systems research". Journal of Responsible Technology. 20: 100090. doi:10.1016/j.jrt.2024.100090. ISSN 2666-6596.

Supplementary references and notes:

^ "wikihistories 2024: Wikipedia and/as Data – wikihistories". Retrieved 2025-07-14.
^ "Institute of Network Cultures | Heather Ford on Why Critical Wikipedia Research Is More Important Than Ever". networkcultures.org. 2025-07-10. Retrieved 2025-07-16.
^ "Institute of Network Cultures | Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader". networkcultures.org. Retrieved 2025-07-15.

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Good roundup/selective dive as usual, HaeB. I saw an early presentation of the realienation research at a conference a couple years ago (and might as well disclose I know the authors) and had an initial pragmatic-defensive reaction: Wikidata can't just switch to a different license -- it doesn't function without CC0, so what's the point? But the more I sat with it, the more I felt like there was a really important point here about alienation, wikis, wiki contributors, and licensing.
Contributors are more and more frequently separated from our work. No amount of reaffirmation of our definition of freedom changes the reality that many people in our community regularly express feelings ranging from annoyance to demotivation because they feel like their labor is exploited.
Back in 2018, for example, Bfpage wrote a Signpost article about the experience of hearing Alexa read something she wrote on Wikipedia, without attribution. The paper focuses on Wikidata, but the objection about Alexa, and one of the chief criticisms here and elsewhere about more recently relevant companies like OpenAI and Google, isn't simply that they use Wikipedia, but that they treat Wikipedia (and everything else) as if they're CC0.
Google and Wikipedia/the rest of the web have had a historically mutually beneficial relationship, but that undeniably began to erode with Knowledge Panels, which have now given way to AI Search.
It seems to me the distance created between contributors and readers, owing to companies treating our work as though it's CC0, regardless of whether it is, does take a toll worth examining. I think there are now several people/groups working to better understand just that, like the WMF's Future Audiences, but "realienation" seems like a natural frame through which to talk about it.
BTW: research or other concrete evidence about whether and how much information from Wikidata is being using in Google Search or in its knowledge panels - How much of this is available? My sense is that such information would be difficult to find, and that it is easily obscured for reasons that align with the authors' arguments, but I would be happy to be wrong about that. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:47, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Wikimedia sound logo was meant to eliminate the difference between Alexa announcing that it will use Spotify to play a requested song while lifting Wikipedia text without attribution, so it is dispiriting that two years later, there is no external adoption of this Wikimedia branding. As Barbara Page pondered in that 2018 article, perhaps the WMF has calculated that large donations from reliant tech companies are better than enforcement of Wikipedia's attribution requirement especially since they do not experience the alienation. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 04:22, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Re the Wikidata license paper: It would be of far "deep[er] concern" if Wikidata/WMF was claiming to own simple DB connections, like who the painter of the Mona Lisa was. The author apparently acts like it's dispiriting to editors that such basic info is being shared, but it's the other way around. It would be dispiriting if the kind of stuff Wikidata does was being locked down further as they seem to advocate for. The CC0 license is a good fit for Wikidata. SnowFire (talk) 19:21, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I think it is important to distinguish copyright from sui generis database rights. The former does not restrict information, and the latter usually restricts only use of "significant" portions of databases (IANAL). I do not think any licence could restrict uses similar to one you named. Janhrach (talk) 18:53, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree it would be unlikely to work, but I wouldn't want the WMF to even try to restrict rights further than CC0. I want to contribute to a free database anyone can use. SnowFire (talk) 21:35, 23 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

RUfork

I'm not surprised that the vast majority of articles have not been changed on the RUfork. I suspect that both will contain articles on aardvarks, the Amazon river, the Angevin empire, the Algarve and athletes foot, along with a multitude of other topics which are not obviously controversial in a Ukrainian/Russian war. If the RUfork persists it would be interesting to see how they keep it up to date on those uncontentious subjects. A project that mostly edits in Moscow office hours does not sound like one that has recruited the necessary volunteers to maintain such a fork. If the bulk of RUfork is unmaintained and allowed to go stale then the project will be unattractive to readers and can only persist on lifesupport. If they set up a scraper feed to update uncontentious articles with the latest edits from Russian Wikipedia, then the project won't appear stale to readers, but would be even less attractive to volunteers. I doubt it will long outlive Mr Putin. If there is a follow up article on the RUfork, I would like to see this point addressed. Ϣere SpielChequers 07:36, 25 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-07-18/Opinion

Friday, 18 July 2025 00:00 UTC

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18 July 2025

Opinion

Women are somewhat under-represented on the English-language Wikipedia, and other observations from analysis

Contribute —

By Yaron Koren

The famous gender gap

Roughly 20% of the biographical articles on the English-language Wikipedia are about women - and on seemingly every other Wikipedia, the ratio between male and female article subjects is at least as lopsided. That fact, coupled with the possibly related fact that the percentage of female editors of Wikipedia is roughly 10-15% - has been the subject of numerous news articles, studies, talks, initiatives, and conferences. There are at least 15 different groups that aim to decrease both forms of "gender gap", whether as a primary or secondary goal.

As far as I know, it's rarely stated what the ideal percentage of female subjects should be for Wikipedia articles, though it's at least implied to be 50%. The "Gender gap" hub page on Meta-Wiki essentially states this explicitly, saying that the fact that "more men than women are covered in the mainspace content of our wikis" is a problem that does "harm to the Wikimedia world". But is a 50% ratio actually possible, or even desirable? To believe that may involve believing that, for every man who has achieved notability based on the criteria of the various Wikipedias, there is a woman out there in history with the same notability; so that, presumably, for every Julius Caesar, Mozart or Thomas Edison, there is a woman of roughly equal historical importance. But human history itself has not been equal, nor has it been fair.

Of course, the average person who is the subject of a Wikipedia article does not have nearly the importance of those three. After all, most professions of the 21st century have a more even gender balance than Roman emperors did. So perhaps the gender gap can be made up for further along the ranks of notability, down with us normal people. This does raise an interesting question: perhaps the ideal gender ratio is not simply a fixed number, but instead a function of the strictness of notability criteria? If anyone were tasked with coming up with a list of, say, the 50 most historically influential people to have ever lived, for example, presumably no one but the most hardline egalitarian would try to include precisely 25 women. On the other hand, going in the other extreme, an encyclopedia that tried to list every person who has ever lived (currently estimated at 117 billion people), i.e. having no notability filter whatsoever, would, if successful, end up with an almost exact gender balance.

Analyzing the notable subject lists

All of this sort of discussion might remain at the level of hand-waving and philosophizing, but there actually are ways to bring some real analysis to this discussion. Extremely helpful here are two different Wikipedia-based initiatives that have attempted to create lists of the most important subjects to cover: "List of articles every Wikipedia should have" and "Vital articles in Wikipedia". Both of these are actually multiple lists: "List of articles every Wikipedia should have" holds 1,000 subjects, while its spinoff listing, "List of articles every Wikipedia should have/Expanded" holds roughly 10,000 subjects. Meanwhile, "Vital articles in Wikipedia" is a set of 5 lists, each one a different "level": the level 1 list holds 10 articles, the level 2 list holds 100 articles, the level 3 list holds 1,000 articles, level 4 holds 10,000 articles, and level 5 holds 50,000 articles.

The level 1 and level 2 listings for "Vital articles" hold no individual people, so that leaves a total of five lists, all carefully curated and maintained, which attempt to contain the most important topics — including the most important people who have ever lived. The careful curation is important, because, looking through the lists, it's hard to dismiss these lists as motivated by any specific political or geographic bias; these lists really do seem to represent an impressive — and dare I say successful — effort to come up with something like a reasonable arbiter of ultimate notability. Even the clichéd white male pop culture enthusiast who prefers to edit the Wikipedia article on, say, Tom Cruise rather than on Juana Inés de la Cruz will presumably have no negative impact on these lists.

In addition to their quality, the other important aspect of these lists is their diversity of size: the fact that they range in length from 1,000 to 50,000 subjects means that we may be able to spot how the demographics of the individual humans within the group change as notability standards are relaxed — which may point toward trends that we can extrapolate from.

Methodology

I wrote two PHP scripts that help to analyze all this data. First is a script that scrapes each of these lists, finds the Wikidata entry for the people in that list, and then finds the "sex or gender" value for that entry - and then generates a CSV file containing all of this data for that list. The second is a script that reads any of these CSV files, and finds the gender breakdown for that list. Both of these scripts (and all of the resulting CSV files) can be found in this GitHub repository, so people can run their own analyses, or find room for improvement in this analysis.

Another note on methodology: there are individuals who are labelled on Wikidata with a gender other than male or female, such as transgender people. The "List of articles every Wikipedia should have/Expanded" list includes one person who does not fall into the two main groups (Judith Butler), while the "Level 5" Vital articles list includes around 20. There is an argument for including all of these in the "female" category, since the gender gap has been described as including them as well; and there is also an argument for having a third category for them. However, ultimately I decided to simply exclude them from the analysis, for the sake of simplicity, and since the relatively small number of such articles (roughly 0.1% of any of the lists) means that their inclusion would not have a significant effect on the numbers in any case.

Results, followed by some extrapolation

Here, then, are the results of this analysis:

List name	Number of articles	Number of people	Number of women	% female
Articles every Wikipedia should have	1,000	203	11	5.4%
Articles every Wikipedia should have, expanded	10,000	1,919	189	9.8%
Vital articles, level 3	1,000	110	9	8.2%
Vital articles, level 4	10,000	1,955	200	10.2%
Vital articles, level 5	50,000	14,645	2,463	16.8%

We can certainly see the trend here: as the notability criteria are broadened, the female percentage rises.

If this basic conclusion is true, then one can imagine putting together a table like this, also taking into account the 117 billion figure for all of humanity:

Number of biographical articles	Fraction of total humanity	Ideal % of female article subjects
110	10^-9	8.2%
203	10^-9	5.4%
1,919	10^-8	9.8%
1,955	10^-8	10%
14,645	10^-7	16.8%
...
117 billion	1	50%

What does "Ideal" mean in the table? It means that, if a certain language Wikipedia contains X articles about individual people, and those articles in fact cover the most noteworthy X people of all time, then that is the expected percentage of those articles that will be about women.

Do we dare fill in the rest of the table? It's all rather pseudo-scientific, but the basic premise does seem to make sense. Throwing caution to the wind, perhaps the full table would look something like this:

Number of biographical articles	Fraction of total humanity	Ideal % of female article subjects
110	10^-9	8%
203	10^-9	5%
1,919	10^-8	10%
1,955	10^-8	10%
14,645	10^-7	17%
117,000	10^-6	20%
1.17 million	10^-5	25%
11.7 million	0.01%	30%
117 million	0.1%	35%
1.17 billion	1%	40%
11.7 billion	10%	45%
117 billion	1	50%

The known numbers do fit rather nicely into the overall series.

Conclusion

The English-language Wikipedia currently holds roughly 2 million biographical articles. So, according to the aforementioned table, the English-language Wikipedia should have, very roughly, 25% female representation. So there you have it: women indeed are underrepresented on the English Wikipedia — they are 19% of all biographical articles, whereas they should be a little over 25%.

For all other Wikipedias, the ideal fraction will of course be lower. The majority of Wikipedias have fewer than 12,000 articles, which presumably means fewer than 2,000 biographical articles. These Wikipedias, according to the graph, ought to have 10% of their biographical articles be about women. (Arguably, we know exactly which articles they should have, although that is a more controversial assertion.)

By the way, this kind of analysis could also be done on other demographic traits, like ethnicity, nationality and occupation. By far the easiest trait to do an analysis on, other than gender, though, is year of birth, since data about it is generally comprehensive and uncontroversial. I actually included year of birth in these scripts' output — I did not mention it so far in this essay because the subject gets a lot less discussion than the gender ratio, though it does show up in discussions of "recentism". But the results for birth year are, interestingly, even more dramatic than for gender. One startling finding is that, in the "Level 5 Vital Articles" list, people born in 1922 or later make up a full 39% of the list; while the much smaller "Level 3" list holds only one person born after 1922 (Michael Jackson), and thus less than 1% of the overall list. In the intermediate "Level 4" list, the number is in the middle, at 17%; so again we can see this sort of logarithmic progression.

This type of analysis could lend itself to all sorts of observations about Wikipedia's deficiencies relating to different demographic groups; more broadly, it could be used to study the historical importance of different areas and groups over time (e.g., how important was 15th century Italy?).

As they say, further research is warranted.

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"Even the clichéd white male pop culture enthusiast who prefers to edit the Wikipedia article on, say, Tom Cruise rather than on Juana Inés de la Cruz will presumably have no negative impact on these lists." Quite a presumption. Innisfree987 (talk) 08:39, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I am curious what the gender gap would be if you exclude single sentence stub articles (such as those on some olympians or state legislators). Eddie891 ^Talk _Work 11:37, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for this write-up! While significantly more complicated to execute, I would love an analysis of how the percentage of female entries has shifted among Level 3 Vital Articles over time (chosen because it is significantly older than the other tiers). While the Level 3 list started from the slightly older m:list of articles every Wikipedia should have, the latter is less tailored to enwiki. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 15:12, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Using Vital Articles as a whole is fine for a "rough cut" guess, but its power dramatically fades if sliced up into subsections, e.g. the suggested inquiry into matters like "how important is 15th century Italy". That'll tell you how many 15th century Italy fans were among the editors who filled out VA5 were, and that's about it - zoomed in to that level of detail, there's going to be way more randomness from the small group of editors maintaining an area.

That's true - 15th century Italy might not have been a great example to pick, given how low its p-value is, as they say. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:20, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The other elephant in the room for any gender gap studies is the old WP:NSPORTS before the 2022 reform + the activities of certain editors who basically dumped entire player statistic tables in to Wikipedia, which means a surprisingly large proportion of Wikipedia biographies are that of random 4th division football players. A dump of 10000 random articles I did in April 2025 had the 3 most common Wikiprojects being 3231 in Biography, 713 in United States, and 556 (!) in Football. While I'm sure there were a few non-biography articles in there on games / seasons / teams in those WP Football articles, I'm sure most were players. I should go finish writing up my fuller findings, but I suspect it might be interesting to do a gender gap analysis that excludes either very short articles (as likely being just stats-only "This guy played at the 2010 Winter Olympics") or just flat excludes all sports biographies, given how sports bios are hugely male-dominated on Wikipedia (but not "interestingly" so as many of these articles get like 2 views a day, and some wouldn't survive the stricter notability scrutiny applied after the 2022 change to sports notability guidelines). SnowFire (talk) 16:15, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I am surprised the editor did not talk to participants at WP:Women in Red or even link to the project. Or, for that matter, talk to women who edit Wikipedia. We've been at this for, literally, 20 years now. The efforts to increase visibility of women are ongoing and this is just rehashing the same old stuff. It's a problem, it needs more input and participation, and the "notability" standard has long been criticized for systemic bias and a failure to assess actual notability as opposed to publicity or meaningless numerical metrics. Montanabw^(talk) 20:54, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There is certainly a problem here with using the VA project to assess representation, considering it has its own set of US-centric and androcentric biases. The central premise of this article then uses this flawed metric to imply that gender parity is an inherently problematic target (citing an arbitrary shortlist of "great men" of history), and adjusts the target to a level where men's articles would still outnumber women's by 3-to-1. When (not if) we surpass the 25% ratio, which judging by Women in Red's progress will take us about another decade, does the author think more articles about women will result in them being overrepresented? Personally, I've always seen gender parity as a direction more than a hard goal, and think trying to figure out a solid "correct" figure is inevitably going to run into issues. --Grnrchst (talk) 11:11, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To answer your question: if this analysis is roughly correct, then a ratio of over 25-30% or so would indicate over-representation of women, yes, unless the overall number of articles jumps as well. I wouldn't see that as a problem in itself, though, just like I don't see the current under-representation as a problem per se, since I think missing data is equally bad regardless of what demographics it applies to; but that's a whole separate discussion. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:30, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I mean, Wikipedia notability requirements are pretty flexible. A lot of it comes down to individual interpretations of vague rules. Technically, there'd be no problem at all with giving weight to gender. Say you've got two marginally-notable professors, writers, racecar drivers, chefs, or whatever -- one a woman and one a man. If deciding whether to have or keep an article for each, use a lower notability standard for the woman. You'd have to write this down in a rule or guideline. I personally am not in favor of this, because reasons. But it wouldn't bother me either, and maybe I'm wrong. It's not gonna happen anyway -- the editor corps, mostly male, would not go for it -- but it would address and alleviate the problem. Herostratus (talk) 07:12, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have actually seen the reverse of this: two marginally notable professors, husband and wife, had their notability called into question. The wife ended up getting merged into the husband's article as they had overlapping achievements. ✶Qux yz ✶ 22:50, 24 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Did anyone bring up the idea of moving the article name's to include the husband and wife? I would argue there's a precedent, given Category:Couples. – The Grid (talk) 00:10, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about notability, this is a very interesting answer to a very interesting question. Thank you for writing this article. Toadspike [Talk] 15:20, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-07-18/Obituary

Friday, 18 July 2025 00:00 UTC

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18 July 2025

Obituary

Pvmoutside, Atomicjohn, Rdmoore6, Jaknouse, Morven, Martin of Sheffield, MarnetteD, Herewhy, BabelStone

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By JPxG, Hemiauchenia, GreenC, Graham87, Iggy the Swan, Clayoquot, Dr. Blofeld, Gadfium, DreamRimmer, Schwede66, User:Sheminghui.WU

Pvmoutside

Pvmoutside was an editor who studied wildlife biology in Massachusetts, and once through-hiked the Appalachian Trail — from their earliest edits in 2006 they primarily edited about birds, and to a lesser extent about other animals and American politics. They wrote hundreds of stubs on animal species, and made thousands of edits to lists of birds around the world, racking up nearly 275,000 edits over their 17 years of editing. They died on August 30, 2023 at the age of 62 — 1 day after their last edit — but their death was not recognised on Wikipedia until 2025.

John Coster-Mullen (Atomicjohn)

John Coster-Mullen (21 December 1946 – 24 April 2021) was an American industrial photographer, truck driver and nuclear archaeologist who played an important role in creating a public record of the design of the first atomic bombs. He is known for his critically-acclaimed self-published book Atom Bombs: The Top Secret, Inside Story of Little Boy and Fat Man. His Wikipedia user page has an in-depth biography, written by John himself, and a community-created biography in mainspace. He edited Wikipedia during 2011.

John A. Knouse (Jaknouse)

John Arthur Knouse (June 22, 1953 – January 9, 2021) was an American environmental advocate. Born in Michigan, he studied at Juniata College and the University of Louisville and spent the last 24 years of his life in Athens, Ohio. On Wikipedia he edited from 2002 to 2020, creating hundreds of articles, mostly about environmental topics, including the pages about sustainability and overpopulation. He has an obituary on legacy.com.

Roger Moore (computer scientist) (Rdmoore6)

Roger Moore in 2005

Roger Moore was a computer pioneer who helped develop the computer language APL which would influence other languages such as C++. Moore began editing Wikipedia in its early days, his first edit was December 2005. He continued to edit until the year he died, in 2019. His Wikipedia interests included computers, opera, geography and the Peasants' Revolt.

Matthew Brown (Morven)

Matthew Brown (b. c. 1972, England) was an elected admin and Arbitration Committee member. He was most active on Wikipedia from 2003 through 2008.

Matthew graduated in 1991 from The Henley College (ages 16–19), before attending Imperial College London for a BSe in 1994. He then emigrated to the United States eventually settling in southern California. Matthew began editing Wikipedia in 2003, became an administrator in 2004, and served on the Arbitration Committee from 2006 to 2008. Outside of administrative areas, he often edited articles about historical transport and was a keen photographer. He later became a moderator at TV Tropes. In his professional life he was a Unix and database administrator. During his most active years on Wikipedia he was employed at NBC Interactive and University of Southern California. He died on February 15, 2024 due to complications of kidney failure. (Sources: [1][2])

Martin of Sheffield

Martin was a change ringer, born at Sheffield and based in Kent. After joining Wikipedia in 2011, he made more than 17,000 edits, some of which were made at Rochester Cathedral, the cathedral he rang.

He died on October 16, 2024 from prostate cancer.

Michael Arnett Dellinger (User:MarnetteD)

Michael Arnett Dellinger (August 3, 1957 – March 4, 2025) was an editor from Wheat Ridge, Colorado, who made over 300,000 contributions to the encyclopedia over 18 years, from March 2005 until August 2023. With a massive film collection of over 20,000 films, he was extremely knowledgeable about films, TV, directors and actors, and also knew a great deal about theatre, opera and literature. He was particularly fond of classic British cinema and TV series such as Doctor Who, of which he contributed a good article. Many of his contributions involved maintaining the quality of classic film and TV articles and protecting them. In 2016, Michael was awarded the "Editor of the Week" award based on community nomination. He will be remembered for being the consummate gentleman, who was always incredibly kind and friendly to others and generous with his time. He will be greatly missed by those who knew him and we hope he is sitting with his feet up watching a classic film on a giant screen somewhere up above.

Gayle Cook (Herewhy)

Herewhy at Chch WikiCon 2025

Gayle Suzanne Cook (c. 1959 – 28 May 2025) was an editor from Christchurch, New Zealand, who made 958 contributions to English Wikipedia between June 2019 and May 2025, including participating in a 2022 collaboration about Farewell Spit and a 2025 collaboration on Banks Peninsula. She edited articles about New Zealand, including geographic locations in the South Island, marine reserves, and lighthouses, which reflected her interest in sailing. She also contributed to articles on individuals involved in environmental work, public service, and local history. She attended Wikipedia meetups in Christchurch, and the May 2025 Christchurch WikiCon. She died from an aneurysm while she and her husband were on their yacht.

Smarojit Chakravarty (Krimuk2.0)

Smarojit Chakravarty (21 October 1990 – early April 2025) was an editor from Mumbai, India, who contributed mainly to cinema-related articles between April 2011 and April 2025. He received a Master's Degree from the National University of Singapore and lived in Singapore for a number of years. He became a data analyst and later worked in PR. Krimuk, as he became known on Wikipedia, had a great passion for films and actresses of all eras, but was particularly interested in the careers and films of the most successful contemporary actresses and actors in Hollywood and Bollywood. He first promoted the articles on Bollywood actresses Vidya Balan (2012), Rani Mukerji and Deepika Padukone (2013) to Featured status and later became an accomplished writer of top Hollywood actresses, promoting heavyweights such as Catherine Zeta-Jones (2016), Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain, Amy Adams and Kate Winslet (2017) and Michelle Williams and Brie Larson (2018) to Featured status. In total he contributed 12 FAs, 29 Featured lists (mainly actress filmographies and awards) and 9 Good Articles. In his later years, after moving back to Mumbai, he displayed a love for literature and was a member of a book club, where he interviewed several notable Indian authors and wrote several screenplays for films. Krimuk will be remembered for being a passionate, fun, witty, warm-hearted person who probably should have been a famous actor or director/screenwriter in Bollywood. Wikipedia will be eternally grateful for his quality work on actresses and filmographies.

Andrew West (BabelStone)

Andrew West at Juyongguan in 2013

"Andrew Christopher West (Chinese: 魏安, 31 March 1960 – 10 July 2025) was an English Sinologist. His first works concerned Chinese novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties. His study of Romance of the Three Kingdoms used a new approach to analyse the relationship among the various versions, extrapolating the original text of that novel. West compiled a catalogue for the Chinese-language library of the English missionary Robert Morrison containing 893 books representing in total some 10,000 string-bound fascicules. His subsequent work was in the minority languages of China, especially Khitan, Manchu, and Mongolian. He proposed an encoding scheme for the 'Phags-pa script, which was subsequently included in Unicode version 5.0."

from Wikipedia article Andrew West (linguist)

As a Wikimedian, he primarily contributed to English Wikipedia, Wikisource, and Wikimedia, making tens of thousands of edits. He contributed significantly to his areas of expertise and interest, while also fostering exchanges between Wikipedia editions in different languages. Rest In Peace Mr.BabelStone, and you will be remembered forever by the community and Wikipedia. The Stones will continue building Babel🕯.

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John Knouse wasn't just an environmentalist, but had a particular interest in ferns. He founded the now-defunct Wikipedia:WikiProject Pteridophytes and maintained an extensive personal webpage on the topic, including an extended bibliography of fern literature. Choess (talk) 14:59, 20 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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Friday, 18 July 2025 00:00 UTC

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18 July 2025

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Form 990 released for the Wikimedia Foundation’s fiscal year 2023-2024

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By ELappen (WMF)

The Wikimedia Foundation has released its Form 990 for fiscal year 2023-2024, which ran from July 2023 to June 2024. The Form 990 is the annual tax form required of all nonprofits in the United States. It takes the financial information from an organization’s audit report–released earlier in the fiscal year–and supplements it with additional information around governance practices and activities.

Headlines of the Foundation’s Form 990 for fiscal year 2023-2024 include:

Highest rating obtained from Charity Navigator for governance policies and practices
Past leadership transitions reported
Continued growth in community grants during a period of slow Foundation growth - grants increased by 9.3%, or $2.3M from the previous fiscal year, for a total of $27M
Expense breakdown aligns with Annual Plan goals

Read more about these and other highlights in the summary shared on Diff, and review the Meta FAQs to dive deeper.

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https://www.wikiphotographer.net/category/wikimedia-commons/feed/	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
in English Archives - Wikimedia Suomi	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
International Wikitrekk	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Language and Translation	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Laura Hale, Wikinews reporter	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Leave it to the prose	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Lucas’ Posts (#wikimedia)	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Make love, not traffic.	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Mark Rauterkus & Running Mates ponder current events	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
MediaWiki and Wikimedia – etc. etc.	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
MediaWiki Testing	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
MediaWiki – addshore	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
MediaWiki – Chris Koerner	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
mediawiki – Hexmode's Weblog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
MediaWiki – It rains like a saavi	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
MediaWiki – Ryan D Lane	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Ministry of Wiki Affairs	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Muddyb Mwanaharakati	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Musings of Majorly	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
My Outreachy 2017 @ Wikimedia Foundation	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
NonNotableNatterings	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Notes from the Bleeding Edge	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Nothing three	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Okinovo okýnko	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Open Codex	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Open Source Exile	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Original Research	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Pablo Garuda	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Pau Giner	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Personal – The Moon on a Stick	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Phabricating Phabricator	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Planet Wikimedia Archives - Entropy Wins	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Planet Wikimedia – OpenMeetings.org \| Announcements	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
planetwikimedia – copyrighteous	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Political Bias on Wikipedia	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Professional Wiki Blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
project-green-smw	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
ProWiki Blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Ramblings by Paolo on Web2.0, Wikipedia, Social Networking, Trust, Reputation, …	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Rock drum	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Routing knowledge	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Sam Wilson's notebook	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Sam Wilson: Wikimedia	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Sammy's Blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Score all the things	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Scripts++	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Semantic MediaWiki – news	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Sentiments of a Dissident	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Stories by Megha Sharma on Medium	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Sue Gardner's Blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Technical & On-topic – Mike Baynton’s Mediawiki Dev Blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
The Academic Wikipedian	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
The Lego Mirror - MediaWiki	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
The life of James R.	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
The Signpost	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
The Speed of Thought	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
TheDJ writes	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
This Month in GLAM	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Timo Tijhof	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Ting's Wikimedia Blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Tyler Cipriani: blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Vinitha's blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
weekly – semanario – hebdo – 週刊 – týdeník – Wochennotiz – 주간 – tygodnik	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
What is going on in Europe?	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wiki Education	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wiki Loves Monuments	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wiki Northeast	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wiki Playtime - Medium	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wiki – David Gerard	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wiki – Gabriel Pollard	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wiki – Our new mind	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wiki – stu.blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wiki – The life on Wikipedia – A Wikignome's perspecive	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wiki – Ziko's Blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wiki-en – [[content\|comment]]	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikibooks News	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia Australia news	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia DC Blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia Design Blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia Europe	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia Foundation	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia on Kosta Harlan	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia Security Team	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia Status - Incident History	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia Tech News	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia \| ഗ്രന്ഥപ്പുര	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wikimedia – andré klapper's blog.	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wikimedia – apergos' open musings	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wikimedia – Bitterscotch	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia – DcK Area	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wikimedia – Harsh Kothari	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia – Jan Ainali	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wikimedia – millosh’s blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wikimedia – Open World	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wikimedia – Thomas Dalton	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia – Tim Starling's blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikimedia – Witty's Blog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikinews Reports	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikipedia & Linterweb	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikipedia - nointrigue.com	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikipedia Archives — Andy Mabbett, aka pigsonthewing.	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikipedia Notes from User:Wwwwolf	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikipedia – Aharoni in Unicode	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wikipedia – Andrew Gray	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikipedia – Blossoming Soul	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikipedia – Bold household	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wikipedia – Going GNU	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikipedia – mlog	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikipedia – ragesoss	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wikipedia – The Longest Now	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikipedian in Residence for Gender Equity at West Virginia University	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
WikiProject Oregon	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikisorcery	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wikistaycation	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
wikitech – domas mituzas	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
WMUK	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Words and what not	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Wow. So wikimedia. Such quality. Many testing. Very team.	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Writing Within the Rules	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
XD @ WP	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
{{Hatnote}}	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01
Ø	XML	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 17:01	Wednesday, 30 July 2025 18:01