The 2024 election for the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation is now complete.Preliminary results were announced earlier this week. 12 candidates ran for 4 Community- and Affiliate-selected Trustee seats in this election. The vote was conducted using asingle transferable vote system, which transfers votes from eliminated candidates after each round to the voter's next preferred candidate.

The four candidates with the most votes were –

• Christel Steigenberger (User:Kritzolina,candidate statement)
• Maciej Artur Nadzikiewicz (User:Nadzik,candidate statement)
• Victoria Doronina (User:Victoria,candidate statement)
• Lorenzo Losa (User:Laurentius,candidate statement)

These four winning candidates will need to pass a background check and have all other bylaw requirements confirmed before they can be officially appointed at the board's December meeting.

Two of them (Doronina and Losa) are already on the board and were re-elected. The election came not long after the board's controversial refusal to ratify the "Movement Charter" after it had been worked on over several years (Signpost coverage:"Wikimedia community ratifies Movement Charter, Wikimedia Foundation rejects ratification"). As one Wikimediannoted on the Foundation-l mailing list: "Victoria and Lorenzo, who were greatly associated with the Movement Chart BoT veto some months ago, were reelected by the community, despite many predictions that they would suffer a big backlash for making public their positions, and a number of people was quick to predict their certain removal from office, especially Victoria."

A visual representation of the vote is given by theSankey diagram above. Incoming Board memberNadzik also analysed some voting statistics onthis page on Meta.

Congratulations to the winners and our thanks to the other candidates who ran in the election:Bobby Shabangu,Deon Steyn,Erik Hanberg,Farah Jack Mustaklem,Lane Rasberry,Mohammed Awal Alhassan,Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, andTesleemah Abdulkareem. –Sb,H,S

After a year of fewer RFAs, a flood of candidates have signed up in the upcoming trial ofAdministrator elections. With the call for candidates having closed on 14 October, 35 candidates will be seeking to be elected (or re-elected) as administrator. The full list of candidates can be found on therespective AELECT subpage.

There were a total of 14RFAs this year until October. Considering AELECT, this brings 2024 to 49, reversing amulti-year trend of fewer admin candidates in successive years. The latest year with more RFAs was 2015, with 53 candidates over the year.

However, it is not clear how many of said candidates will end up passing. As far as is known, the previous record for the number of active RFAs at once is 28 on6 December 2005, perthis discussion in October 2007. The elections will also use private voting via SecurePoll, which may skew the results.

The discussion phase will be open for 72 hours, from 22 to 24 October. Anyone may ask questions at the election subpages, and candidates are "encouraged" to reply. Voting begins from 25 October and will continue till 31 October, closing at 23:59 UTC. After three days for discussion and questions, the candidate pages will be closed for discussion, and voting begins.

Admin elections and other RFA reform efforts were last covered byThe Signpost in the26 September issue. –S

Note: This section was prepared before the large number of applicants emerged for the administrator elections trial.

In priorSignpost coverage we discussed the declining number ofactive administrators:

• 2019-07-31 (first time under 500 active administrators)
• 2019-12-27 first time under 500 for a month
• 2023-01-01 first time under 500 for a year
• 2023-10-23 first time under 450
• 2023-12-04 more records in the 440s
• 2024-03-29 another new record: 441
• 2024-07-04 more records in the 430s
• 2024-07-22 another new record: 430
• 2024-09-04 another new record: 427
• 2024-09-26 another new record: 419

Now, on 7 October, Rick Bot has recorded 418 active administrators, another record low count. The monthly averages of data reported by the bot daily were:

2024

Period	daily average
January	465.7
February	473.3
March	448.2
April	438.3
May	438.3
June	434.6
July	435.4
August	432.5
September	425.4
October	421.0[a 1]

For comparison, using the same methodology, the average number of active administrators in the past several years (also shown in a chart created earlier through mid 2019) was:

Other years

Period	daily average
2017	543.0
2018	528.6
2019	515.1
2020	508.3
2021	487.2[b 1]
2022	470.0
2023	464.1

A trend of declining numbers of active administrators is apparent in both the monthly and annual sets of data. If no more changes occurred after the 10 October data cutoff date, then 2024 would tally a loss of 43 over the 2023 average. The next greatest annual decline in this table was about half as many: -21.1 between 2020 and 2021. –B

On September 27, Brazilian WikimedianJoão Alexandre Peschanski was revealed to be one of the over 150 international researchers who co-signeda collective op-ed that deemeddisinformation to be "one of the biggest short-term threats to humanity", and called for more protection and easier access to online data for those who study it and its perceived impact on public opinion.

This is a notable bit of news, since Peschanski—also known on-wiki asJoalpe—currently serves as the executive director of theWiki Movement Brazil User Group, an association founded in 2013 and regularly affiliated to theWikimedia Foundation since 2019.

The op-ed is available in several languages, includingSpanish,German,Italian andPortuguese, and has been re-published byseveralmediaoutlets. –O

TheProduct and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) was appointed this week. This council was introduced as a one-year pilot program as part of Board of Trustees'three proposals in lieu of the Movement Charter.

Apart from WMF CPTOSelena Deckelmann and other WMF staff, the council includes:

• EPorto WMB and one more affiliate member
• Eugene233
• Lahi
• Putnik
• Sohom Datta
• TheDJ
• GorillaWarfare
• FJMustak
• Benjamin Mako Hill

According to the initial proposal, the 8 volunteer members would include 5 at-large technical contributors and 3 Wikipedia volunteers, at least one of who would be from the English Wikipedia. While it's not clear which category each selection was for, 4 volunteers have English Wikipedia as their most edited project –Sohom Datta,TheDJ,GorillaWarfare (also admin and OS),Benjamin Mako Hill.

PTAC was last covered byThe Signpost in the14 August issue. –S

The WMF published two bulletins since ourlatestSignpost issue – one forlate September andearly October respectively.

Of note wereThe Power of the Commons, an event hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and other organizations as part ofThe Summit of the Future at theHeadquarters of the United Nations anda new change to the Wikidata Query Service.

Highlights from the October issue includean e-mail from the "Wikimedia Foundation Board Governance Committee" and itsMovement Charter debrief process (Spoilers: They'll collect feedback until January 2025).

More notably,nominations are currently open for positions onAffCom,Ombuds commission and thetrust and safety Case Review Committee. AffCom plays an advisory role in official accession of new affiliates to the movement; the ombudsfolk are tasked with investigating complaints about infringements of the WMF privacy policy and related policies by CheckUsers, oversighters and others with access to sensitive user data; and the case review committee represents the community for appeals of certain trust and safety office actions. Applications for the Affiliations Committee close on November 18, 2024, and applications for the Ombuds commission and the Case Review Committee close on December 2, 2024.

Wikimedia Foundation hasfiled an amicus brief in a Mexican case known asRichter v. Google – more information about the casehere, it is compared toSection 230 in the United States. Although Mexico does not have statutory Section 230 protections, theInternet Society says that they are subject to similar content moderation restrictions and protections due to international treaties with the U.S. and Canada.

–B,S

The Wikimedia Foundationannounced a new round of grants from its Knowledge Equity Fund (seepreviousSignpost coverage), awarding "13 organizations in 10 countries, supporting work to address knowledge gaps and create and share new knowledge" with$1.362 million in total.

It also published impact reports for some of the Round 2 granteesannounced in August 2023, and noted some highlights from three such reports:

• Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara ("Alliance of the Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago", AMAN) – Indonesia ($200,000 USD):Final narrative report,Final financial report
  • "They organized three training sessions for indigenous and citizen journalists in North Sumatra, Riau, and Nusa Bunga. They report that 'in 2023, as many as 154 articles have been written by indigenous journalists (JMA) and published on their website. The traffic involved 3,728 users with 20,537 reactions on the website (clicks, shares, comments, etc).' [...]"
• Black Cultural Archives – United Kingdom ($290,000):Interim narrative report
• Criola – Brazil (a civil society organization dedicated to advocating for the rights of Black women in Brazilian society, $160,000):Final narrative report
• Data for Black Lives – United States ($100,000):Final narrative report
• Create Caribbean ("the first digital humanities center in the Caribbean", based inDominica, $75,000):no reports posted yet
  • "They received 60 nominations to their public call for participants for their oral history project. The team has conducted virtual and onsite interviews with people in Antigua, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Dominica and St. Lucia to collect nontraditional sources of knowledge."
• Project Multatuli (Indonesia, $50,000):no reports posted yet
  • "with the grant, they have produced 16 stories, including two photojournalism essays, that touch on a wide range of issues in Indonesia, ranging from the role of indigenous women in society, public health, and culture to underprivileged youth, disability, and human rights. [....]"

Another round two grantee doesn't seem to have provided reports yet (but the Foundation"will share the rest of the final reports as we receive them"):

• Filipino American National Historical Society (United States, $70,000)

In the recent announcement, the Foundation notes that

Throughmultiple community conversations that we hosted in 2023, we heardfeedback from volunteers about the goals and impact of the Knowledge Equity Fund which led us to make some key changes for our upcoming rounds of funding.

These changes include

• More consistent and clear communication about the Knowledge Equity Fund, its grants and impact
• Opportunities for movement groups to also receive grants for work they are doing to address knowledge equity
• Clearer measures of impact for Knowledge Equity Fund grants

The announcement also states that

With the conclusion of Round 3, the Fund now has $815,000 USD left [from the $4.5 million it was set up within 2020]. The Equity Fund will run one last “round” in the next 4 months, where we will choose a handful of the most impactful grantees from the first rounds and provide them with a final “top up grant” to deepen their work with the movement and ensure that the content they create is present on the Wikimedia projects.

–AK,H

• Annual reports:Wikimedia Ukraine,Wikimedians for Offline Wikis User Group
• Articles for Improvement: This week'sArticle for Improvement isLongshore drift. Please be bold in helping improve this article! Next week's Article for Improvement (beginning 21 October 2024) isImage.

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

A new paper titled "The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia"^[1] estimates

"that 4.36% of 2,909 English Wikipedia articles created in August 2024 contain significant AI-generated content"

In more detail, the authors used two existing AI detectors (GPTZero and Binoculars), which

"reveal a marked increase in AI-generated content in recent[ly created] pages compared to those from before the release of GPT-3.5 [in March 2022]. With thresholds calibrated to achieve a 1% false positive rate on pre-GPT-3.5 articles, detectors flag over 5% of newly created English Wikipedia articles as AI-generated, with lower percentages for German, French, and Italian articles. Flagged Wikipedia articles are typically of lower quality and are often self-promotional or partial towards a specific viewpoint on controversial topics."

The researchers also conducted a small qualitative analysis "to better understand the motivations for using LLMs to create Wikipedia pages", by manually inspecting the edit histories of a smaller subset, namely "the 45 English articles flagged as AI-generated by both GPTZero and Binoculars" (corresponding to 1.5% of those 2,909), and looking at the other contributions of the editors who created them. In this rather small sample, they identify four different such motivations:

Advertisement

One prominent motive is self-promotion. Of the 45 flagged pages, we identify eight that were created to promote organizations such as small businesses, restaurants, or websites. [...]

Pages Pushing Polarization

[...] we also identify pages that advocate a particular viewpoint on often polarizing political topics. We identify eight such pages out of the flagged 45. One user created five articles on English Wikipedia, detected by both tools as AI-generated, on contentious moments in Albanian history [see also figure 2, below ...] In other cases, users created articles ostensibly on one topic, such as types of weapons or political movements, but dedicated the majority of the pages’ content to discussing specific political figures. We find two such articles that espouse non-neutral views on JD Vance and Volodymyr Zelensky.

Machine Translation

[...] We find three cases where users explicitly documented their work as translations, including pages on Portuguese history and legal cases in Ghana. [...]

Writing Tool

Other pages, which are often well-structured with high-quality citations, seem to have been written by users who are knowledgeable in certain niches and are employing an LLM as a writing tool. Several of the flagged pages are created by users who churn out dozens of articles within specific categories, including snake breeds, types of fungi, Indian cuisine, and American football players. [...]

These are among the first research results providing a quantitative answer to an important question that Wikipedia's editing community and the Wikimedia Foundation been weighing since at least the release of ChatGPT almost two years ago. (Cf. previousSignpost coverage:Community rejects proposal to create policy about large language models,"AI is not playing games anymore. Is Wikipedia ready?", and in this issue:"Keeping AI at bay – with a little help from volunteers", summarizing media coverage ofWikiProject AI Cleanup). The"Implications of ChatGPT for knowledge integrity on Wikipedia" were also the topic of a research project conducted in 2023-2024 by UT Sydney researchers (funded by a$32k Wikimedia Foundation grant) which just published preliminary results where "Concerns about AI-generated content bypassing human curation" arehighlighted as one of the challenges voiced by Wikipedians.

The new study's numbers should be valuable as concrete evidence that the generative AI has indeed started to affect Wikipedia in this manner (but might potentially also be reassuring for those who had been fearing Wikipedia would be overrun entirely by ChatGPT-generated articles).

That said, there are several serious concerns about how to interpret the study's data, and unfortunately the authors (a postdoc, a graduate student and an undergraduate student from Princeton University) address them only partially.

First, the researchers made no attempt to quantify how many of the articles from their headline result ("4.36% of 2,909 English Wikipedia articles created in August 2024 contain significant AI-generated content") had also been detected (and flagged or deleted) by Wikipedians. Inspecting the aforementioned smaller subsample of 45 (1.5%) articles where both detectors agreed, they found that

"Most of the 45 pages are flagged by moderators and bots with some warning, e.g., 'This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources' or even 'This article may incorporate text from a large language model."

Even for this smaller sample though, we are not told what percentage of AI-generated articles survived.

In other words, the paper is a rather unsatisfactory read for those interested in the important question of whether generative AI threatens to overwhelm or at least degrade Wikipedia's quality control mechanisms - or whether these handle LLM-generated articles just fine alongside the existing never-ending stream of human-generated vandalism, hoaxes, or articles with missing or misleading references (see alsoour last issue, about an LLM-based system that generates gene articles withfewer such "hallucinated" references than human Wikipedia editors). Overall, while the paper's title boldly claims to show "The Rise of AI-Generated Content in Wikipedia", it leaves it entirely unclear whether the text that Wikipedia readers actually read has become substantially more likely to be AI-generated. (Or, for that matter, the text that AI systems themselves read, considering that Wikipedia is an important training source for LLMs - i.e. whether the paper is evidence forconcerns that "Theouroboros has begun".)

Secondly and more importantly, the reliability ofAI content detection software - such as the two tools that the study's numerical results are based on - has been repeatedly questioned. To their credit, the authors are aware of these problems and try to address them. For example by combining the results of two different detectors, and by using a comparison dataset of articles created before the release of GPT-3.5 in March 2022 (which can be reasonably assumed to be virtually free of LLM-generated text). However, their method still leaves several questions unanswered that may well threaten the validity of the study's results overall.

In more detail, the authors "use two prominent detection tools which were suitably scalable for our study". The first tool is

GPTZero [.....] a commercial AI detector that reports the probabilities that an input text is entirely written by AI, entirely written by humans, or written by a combination of AI and humans. In our experiments we use the probability that an input text is entirely written by AI. The black-box nature of the tool limits any insight into its methodology."

The second tool is more transparent:

An open-source method,Binoculars [...] uses two separate LLMs [...] to score a texts for AI-likelihood by normalizingperplexity by a quantity termed cross-perplexity [...] The input text is classified as AI-generated if the score is lower than a determined threshold, calibrated according to a desiredfalse positive rate (FPR). [...] For our experiments, we use Falcon-7b and Falcon-7b-instruct [as the two LLMs, following the recommendation of the authors of theBinoculars paper.] Compared to competing open-source detectors, Binoculars reports superior performance across various domains including Wikipedia"

The "superior performance" of theBinoculars tool (online demo) for the Wikipedia "domain" sounds very reassuring, with bothprecision and recall at or near a perfect 100% according to figure 3 in the "Binoculars" paper^{[supp 1]}. But it refers to the performance on a 2023 dataset called "M4",^{[supp 2]} where the AI "articles" to be detected were generated in a rather simplistic manner. ("We prompted LLMs to generate Wikipedia articles given titles, with the requirement that the output articles contain at least 250 words", see also the results for e.g.ChatGPT). It seems unwise to assume that this is representative of all the ways in which actual editors try to use AI to generate new articles in August 2024. Indeed the authors explicitly acknowledge this in a different part of the "Rise" paper, pointing out they did not attempt to "simulat[e] the various ways Wikipedia authors might use LLMs to assist in writing—taking into account different models, prompts, and the extent of human integration, among other factors." As a small illustration of potential issues with this, the few concrete examples of articles detected as AI-generated that are included in the paper (figure 2, see above) all start with an infobox - something which ChatGPT can certainly generate if explicitly prompted to do so, but which seems to be absent from most or all of the examples in the M4 dataset.

What's more, as is evident from Figure 1 (above), both tools disagreed frequently, with GPTZero being much more detection-happy than Binoculars in English, French, and German, but much less in Italian. The authors acknowledge that "the tools we use are primarily for detecting AI-generated content in English. While GPTZero supports Spanish and French, it is not designed for other languages."

As mentioned in the paper's abstract (see above), the authors try to control for false positives by calibrating both detectors to a 1% false positive rate on the control dataset (of presumably AI-free Wikipedia articlesfrom March 2022). A technical issue that appears to have been overlooked here is that this 2022 dataset was generated (byHugging Face) from the source wikitext dumps using the well-known "mwparserfromhell" Python package, whereas the authors obtained their August 2024 articles byscraping the text rendered by the Wikipedia API andapplying some of their own cleanup steps. LLM-based text classification tools can sometimes be quite sensitive to minor formatting aspects.

More importantly, it seems rather adventurous to assume that the articles from that March 2022 dataset are comparable in all relevant properties to the newly created articles from August 2024 (i.e. that the 1% false positive calibration on the former will mean a 1% false positive rate on the latter). The authors are clearly aware of thisconcept drift problem, but only make a very perfunctory attempt to address it:

"One concern is that pre-March 2022 pages may be more polished due to years of editing. However, we observe that a higher number of edits weakly correlates with a higher AI-detection score for pre-March 2022 articles (Appendix D), suggesting that the FPRs for those articles may even be inflated. While the base assumption cannot be watertight, we observe a relatively consistent distribution of page categories between the two data pools, and we rely on the consistency of our chosen tools’ reported FPRs."

For many people, the fact that additional edits by human Wikipedia editors make the AI detection score goup in both detectors might increase skepticism about their overall validity. But the authors take it as an argumentstrengthening their paper's overall "Rise of AI-Generated Content" claim, by alluding to the possibility that its estimate might be too low. At various other points of the paper the authors likewise express awareness that their measurement method is subject to substantial errors and uncertainties, but claim that these can only go in their favor (i.e. could only mean that the actual rate of AI-generated articles is higher than their estimated lower bound). And there are other issues that likewise make one wonder a bit about the stringency of the peer review process that the paper has undergone, for example its claim that "The Wikipedia data we collect is under a Creative Commons CC0 License."

The study has only been been published as anarXiv preprint at the time of writing. But according to aremark in the accompanying code, it has been accepted at the "NLP for Wikipedia Workshop" at next month'sEMNLP conference.

The authors have commendablypublished code used for the paper (although not under an open source license). Unfortunately though for readers who might want to replicate part of the paper's quantitative or qualitative analysis (or check whether some of the AI-generated articles it detected have slipped through Wikipedia'sNew pages patrol), none of the data underlying the paper's main results is being published (even though they were based entirely on public information from Wikipedia):

"Detecting AI may have unexpected negative consequences for people implicated as having generated that text. We have therefore been encouraged to omit any identifying information in the specific pages we discuss; however, we will provide more specific data to researchers upon request provided that it not be disseminated further."

But these concerns did not stop the authors from discussing the aforementioned concrete examples in a way that makes it very easy to identify involved users. (One reader of the paper has already done so,pointing out the specific longstanding sockpuppeting case that the editor featured in figure 2 was involved in.)

• See thepage of the monthlyWikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.

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.

From the abstract:^[2]

"This paper presents a new tool to support efforts to fill in these gaps by automatically generating draft articles and facilitating post-editing and uploading to Wikipedia. A rule-based generator and an input-constrained LLM are used to generate two alternative articles, enabling the often more fluent, but error-prone, LLMgenerated article to be content-checked against the more reliable, but less fluent, rule-generated article."

From the abstract:^[3]

"Wikipedia is composed from consensus. [...] While it is often positioned as a self-evident good, its usage on Wikipedia is not without concern. In this paper I mobilizeChantal Mouffe’s (2000) feminist critical political theory andJohanna Drucker’s (2014) methods of interface analysis to raise important questions about the relationship between consensus and peer production. [...] I identify the multitude of ways that Wikipedians perform consensus: not only through understanding and decision-making, but also through acts of composing, showing, processing, closing, and calculating. However, because Wikipedia’s socio-technical vision is over-determined by consensus, its political design is ill-equipped to address the political conditions of pluralist societies. As a result, I identify the reasons why Wikipedia should strengthen its democratic commitment by engaging with dissensus. By conducting this research, I demonstrate how consensus has transitioned from a democratic ideal into an interface and why it should be re-imagined within peer production projects."

From the abstract:^[4]

"Working from a feminist affective framework, this article reports on a study of student-editors' experience with Wikipedia-based writing, using their reactions to a key editing guideline, 'Be bold,' as an entry-point for examining their affective experience. The 'Be bold' guideline, which encourages would-be editors to 'just go for it,' is nearly as old as the English language version of Wikipedia itself yet has received little critical attention. Drawing on survey and focus group interviews from participants at the undergraduate and graduate level, this study's findings provide new understandings of novice editors’ affective experiences in Wikipedia while offering a critical analysis of the 'Be bold/ guideline."

See also apost by one of the authors in the "Wikipedia Weekly" Facebook group, with discussion

From the abstract:^[5]

"This article detailssettler colonial erasure of Native American and Indigenous histories, knowledges, and philosophies on [English] Wikipedia. I show that long-time Wikipedia editors follow the settler colonial logic of elimination to omit Native histories from Wikipedia’s American history pages; block Native and allied editors from adding scholarship that centers Native experience; and ban Native and allied editors from the website so that settlers can lay claim to digital space. To do so, I concentrate on Wikipedia’s United States and American history pages, and I detail editor discussions regarding Native histories on Wikipedia’s talk pages, noticeboards, and off-Wikipedia message boards where editors congregate. I supplement this information with interviews of Wikipedia editors engaged in editing these topics. [...] I ultimately provide suggestions for the Wikimedia foundation to combat settler colonial erasure on Wikipedia."

See also a "Public response to the editors of Settler Colonial Studies" by Wikipedia adminUser:Tamzin in the June 8Signpost issue, arguing that the paper's author had failed to disclose a conflict of interest and that the paper contained multiple factual errors.

From the abstract:^[6]

"This study examines the impact of integrating Google Translate into Wikipedia's Content Translation system in January 2019. Employing anatural experiment design anddifference-in-differences strategy, we analyze how this translation technology shock influenced the dynamics of content production and accessibility on Wikipedia across over a hundred languages. We find that this technology integration lead to a 149% increase in content production through translation, driven by existing editors become more productive as well as an expansion of the editor base. Moreover, we observe that machine translation enhances the propagation of biographical and geographical information, helping to close these knowledge gaps in the multilingual context."

See alsomw:Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#July_2024

From the abstract:^[7]

"[The] Wikipedia Revision History (WikiRevHist) [dataset ... can be a] valuable resource[] for NLP applications. [...] we report Blocks Architecture (BloArk), an efficiency-focused data processing architecture that reduces running time, computing resource requirements, and repeated works in processing WikiRevHist dataset. BloArk consists of three parts in its infrastructure: blocks, segments, and warehouses. On top of that, we build the core data processing pipeline: builder and modifier. The BloArk builder transforms the original WikiRevHist dataset from XML syntax into JSON Lines (JSONL) format for improving the concurrent and storage efficiency. The BloArk modifier takes previously-builtwarehouses to operate incremental modifications for improving the utilization of existing databases and reducing the cost of reusing others' works. In the end, BloArk can scale up easily in both processing Wikipedia Revision History and incrementally modifying existing dataset for downstream NLP use cases. The source code, documentations, and example usages are publicly available online and open-sourced under GPL-2.0 license."

From the abstract:^[8]

"The article compares selected entries on Wikipedia concerning significant historical events in three language versions: Belarusian, Lithuanian, and Polish. [...] I apply the method of ideological critique to investigate whether national values influence the objectivity of Wikipedia articles written in local languages. A comparison of multilingual Wikipedia entries reveals the prevalence of “local” points of view on controversial historical events."

From the abstract:^[9]

"After 2007, researchers started to observe that the number of active editors for the largest Wikipedias declined after rapid initial growth. Years after those announcements, researchers and community activists still need to understand how to measure community health. In this paper, we study patterns of growth, decline and stagnation, and we propose the creation of 6 sets of language-independent indicators that we call “Vital Signs” [formerly available athttps://vitalsigns.wmcloud.org/ ]. Three focus on the general population of active editors creating content: retention, stability, and balance; the other three are related to specific community functions: specialists, administrators, and global community participation. [...] We present our analysis for eight Wikipedia language editions, and we show that communities are renewing their productive force even with stagnating absolute numbers; we observe a general lack of renewal in positions related to special functions or administratorship."

See also:

• A Twitter thread by one of the authors
• Thedocumentation page of the 83,400€ Wikimedia Foundation grant that gave rise to this paper
• Our coverage of an earlier paper from the same project:"Wikipedia Editor Drop-Off: A Framework to Characterize Editors' Inactivity"

From the abstract:^[10]

"we conduct the first data-driven study of ban evasion, i.e., the act of circumventing bans on an online platform, leading to temporally disjoint operation of accounts by the same user.We curate a novel dataset of 8,551 ban evasion pairs (parent, child) identified on Wikipedia [by "Wikipedia moderators", atWikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations], and contrast their behavior with benign users and non-evading malicious users. We find that evasion child accounts demonstrate similarities with respect to their banned parent accounts on several behavioral axes — from similarity in usernames and edited pages to similarity in content added to the platform and its psycholinguistic attributes. We reveal key behavioral attributes of accounts that are likely to evade bans. Based on the insights from the analyses, we train logistic regression classifiers to detect and predict ban evasion at three different points in the ban evasion lifecycle. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods in predicting future evaders (AUC = 0.78), early detection of ban evasion (AUC = 0.85), and matching child accounts with parent accounts (MRR = 0.97)."

See alsoearlier coverage on research about sockpuppets on Wikipedia

Supplementary references and notes:

TheIndependent Journal Review, borrowing fromThe Daily Caller, recentlyclaimed that your Wikipedia donations might be funding "feminism andracial justice", instead of just keeping the lights on.The Commune Mag andOpIndia then joined the fray, alleging that Wikimedia's finances are tied to shadowy donors. Karah Rucker ofStraight Arrow Newslisted left-leaning leaders likeArt+Feminism andBlack Lunch Table—programs we've previouslyhighlighted inThe Signpost. Meanwhile, in yet another familiar critique of Wikipedia's alleged political leanings,Vozbranded the platform as “Wokepedia”, saying it is the world's largest encyclopedia in one sentence, and it "now resembles a sort ofOrwellian authority" in the next one.

At this point, it's like watching a rerun. Every few weeks, a new outlet accuses the free encyclopedia of the mind-numbing non-napping known as part of thepolitics of perception. Next,Matt Walsh, a commentator forThe Daily Wire (not the most reliable source, to be honest),described a scene from his own movieAm I Racist?, where a supposed "white-guilt" group tries to get him arrested by reading the Wikipedia article about him to the police. SeepreviousSignpost coverage on Walsh's commentary. –JSG,S

WISH-TVreported on thelatest edition ofWikiConference North America, which took place inIndianapolis from October 3 to October 6. The station interviewed Nigerian Wikimedian James Popoola—a frequent contributor toWikidata andThe WikiVibrance Project—Justin Clark, the digital initiatives director at theIndiana State Library, and the conference's organizer, Dominic Byrd-McDevitt. As further highlighted in the article, the mayor of Indianapolis,Joe Hogsett, proclaimed October 4 as "Wikipedia Day", while theIU Indianapolis Library received $280,000 from the local Library Fund in order to improve information onIndiana's digital heritage on Wikipedia. –S

Devexreported on how Wikipedia's army of human volunteers is being hailed as its greatest weapon against the rise ofartificial intelligence. Interviewed by the platform,Wikimedia Foundation CEOMaryana Iskander emphasized that while AI churns out a lot of "slop" by prioritizing speed over accuracy, Wikipedia's crowdsourced approach has kept it a beacon of reliable information. Despite the hype surrounding the AI's quick progress, Iskander notes that Wikipedia's human editors remain cool and confident, because, well, it turns out that good old-fashioned community curation still works.

Additionally,404 Media haspicked up on the formation ofWikiProject AI Cleanup (see previousSignpost coverage), created by volunteers to tackle a growing problem: AI-generated content that introduces errors or misleading information into articles.ExtremeTech alsohighlighted the surge of "AI-generated garbage," including a fabricated article about a non-existentOttoman fortress and incorrect information added to existing articles. Even with the challenges posed by AI, at leastthis human editor is confident that community-driven curation will remain the best guarantor of quality.–JSG

Ashley Rindsberg shows "How Wikipedia is Becoming a Massive Pay-to-Play Scheme" atPirate Wires, writing that "a boomtown industry feeding an insatiable demand for services like article creation, editing, management and deletion has emerged." One of his first targets is Pakistani company Abtach, which is reportedly tied to "at least 130 different Wikipedia editing front companies that operate under domains like Wikicreatorsinc.com, Wikicreation.services, Wikipedia Pro, Wikipedia Legends, and USAwikispecialists.com." Seethis story inThe Signpost for more details.

For examples of slightly more sophisticated paid editing, Rindsberg provides links to articles about British investment immigration consultancies, Canadian frozen foods producers,cellulite-busting self-massage accessories, custom T-shirt retailers, Swedish online travel agencies, German disinfectant brands, industrial waste management companies,RegTech software firms, as well as packaging producers, electronic device recyclers, and self-storage chains. That's just what he considers "black hat" paid editing.

The more sophisticated "white hat" editors are linked to articles onBain & Co,Yelp,Qualcomm,Kaspersky Lab, software companyForcepoint, theRSA Conference, as well as aNew York Times exec and corporate clients likeReddit,MetLife,Accenture,Intel,IBM,Hubspot,Hilton,Vox Media,Dick's Sporting Goods,United Airlines,Amdocs,Gallup,Allergan,Breyers,Vimeo andWaymo.

Along the way, he mentions several of the better known scandals involving paid editing, including MyWikiBiz (see relatedSignpostcoverage), Legal Morning (seepreviousSignpost coverage) and WhiteHatWiki (seesee previousSignpost coverage). It's an excellent introduction to paid editing on Wikipedia, and you shouldn't be surprised if you see some of these names again.

In the words of Rindsberg, "the question this leaves us asking is whether we can really apply the historic term 'encyclopedia' to a sprawling network of thousands of articles carefully pruned by the PR departments of billion dollar companies, or if Wikipedia is something else entirely." –S

A crossword published inUSA Today by constructor Ada Nicolle featured an unexpected nod to Wikipedia. One clue highlightedAnnie Rauwerda, founder of the popularDepths of Wikipedia accounts on Instagram and other social media platforms, which showcase quirky and obscure content from the site. Other clues celebrated Icelandic-Canadian heritage, such as a reference toGimli, Manitoba—the Canadian town with the highest population of Icelanders outside of Iceland itself.

Ina recent interview withThe Michigan Daily, Rauwerda reflected on how her account has grown into a hub for curious readers and Wikipedia enthusiasts, emphasizing the thrill of discovering—and correcting—obscure content. She also discussed the unique challenges of maintaining the account while navigating Wikipedia's complex editing rules, and the role her platform plays in demystifying the editing process and encouraging new contributors. From clickbait headlines to deep dives into obscure history, Depths of Wikipedia has evolved into a cultural phenomenon that brings new visibility to the weird and wonderful corners of our beloved encyclopedia.–JSG

According to areport byStefan Weber, an Austrian media researcher noted for his work as a "plagiarism hunter", currentUS Vice President and presidential candidateKamala Harris "copy-pasted a Wikipedia article" into her 2009 bookSmart on Crime (co-authored with Joan O'C. Hamilton), alongside plagiarism from other sources. The allegations werepublicized by US conservative activistChristopher Rufo in what may be intended as anOctober surprise ahead of theNovember 5 presidential election. (Rufo and a co-author had previously investigated plagiarism in academic publications byHarvard University presidentClaudine Gay, contributing to her resignation.)

The New York Timessummarized a different plagiarism expert's initial reaction as stating that "the errors were not serious, given the size of the [book]." However, a day later the same expert (Jonathan Bailey, who runs a site called "Plagiarism Today")followed up to clarify that his statement had been based on the examples provided in Rufo's post only, and that after reviewing the full dossier by Weber, he judged "the case [to be] more serious than I commented to the New York Times" although he still maintained that "the pattern points to sloppy writing habits, not a malicious intent to defraud." Specifically, Bailey stated that

"The most serious allegation concerns Wikipedia. Harris’ book contained roughly two paragraphs copied from Wikipedia without citation. To be clear, that is plagiarism. It’s compounded by the fact that Wikipedia is typically not seen as a reliable source, and, according to Weber, there was an error in the information."

The Harris campaign rejected the plagiarism allegations outright as "a partisan attempt to weaponize a 15-year-old work", as summarized in aWashington Postarticle. Conversely, Harris' political opponentJD Vance seized on them by posting on Twitter/X "I wrotemy own book, unlike Kamala Harris, who copied hers from Wikipedia." The WaPo article also reported an unnamed source as claiming that while Harris' involvement in the book included "reviewing drafts", she "was not involved in the formatting of outside excerpts and citations".

The Wikipedia article in question isMidtown Community Court, which according to Weber was plagiarized inthis revision.–H

• Wikipedia paces to victory: In an unexpected twist, Wikipedia isn't just forlate-night research dives anymore—it's also the name of aharness racing horse!Standardbred Canadareports the nobly namedStandardbredpacer, a three-year-old son of Mcwicked,came from five lengths back in the stretch to win anOntario Sire Stakes Gold division race, overcoming Crush Kill Destroy, Unrivaled Hanover, Legal Attack and Chain Gang. The next time someone will say “Wikipedia is fast,” they won't just be talking about the servers.
• Camille Herron's race for wiki supremacy: Multiple magazines and news outlets, includingRunner's World,Canadian Running Magazine,Women's Health, andAthletics Illustrated all reported that ultrarunnerCamille Herron went from trails to keyboards, getting flagged for editing her own Wikipedia page to emphasize her achievements, as well as removing some of the achievements in the article aboutKilian Jornet — turning this into a race of reputation, rather than endurance. Wikipedia'sneutrality got a workout as Herron's edits sparked controversy over athletes curating their own narratives. Actions have consequences, though—Herron was swiftly dropped by her primary sponsor,Lululemon, making this yet another high-stakes lesson in online reputation management gone wrong.
• Recent research piece picked up:The Arabian Postpicked up on a study comparing how people perceive credibility between Wikipedia,ChatGPT, and Alexa. While their coverage didn't mentionThe Signpost directly, it did link back toourRecent research piece from two issues ago. So, even though we weren't named,The Signpost served as a bridge betweenthe originalNature article and international media coverage.
• Wikipedia "winner" goes viral!: A viral screenshot of a Wikipedia page claimingAbhijeet Sawant as the winner ofBigg Boss Marathi season 5 has stirred up social media, leading to debates on whether it's true or just another case of Wikipedia vandalism. The buzz evengot coverage byThe Free Press Journal, which pointed out the ongoing confusion.
• Goa's newest archive: Indian outletGoamankat Timeshighlighted local Wikipedian Tanmay Pereira Naik's efforts to expand and improve articles related toGoa on Wikipedia, which include everything from documenting local history and politics to covering underrepresented topics like traditional cuisine and Goan personalities.
• Wikipedia training camp: Nigerian newspaperThe Punchreported that a group of 20 participants attended a Wikipedia editing workshop in Nigeria, hosted by theTyap Wikipedia User Group. The workshop aimed to improve digital literacy and expand representation of Nigerian topics on the encyclopedia.
• Portland City Auditor reopens Gonzalez case: After initially determining there was insufficient evidence to determine that thePortland, Oregon mayoral candidate brokecampaign finance law by hiring a firm to burnish his Wikipedia page, the city auditorreopened the case.KOIN reports that "Gonzalez's office had paid a company called Codename Enterprises, operating under WhiteHatWiki, to assist with edits and contentious matters on Gonzalez's Wikipedia page." See alsothe report inThe Oregonian and previousSignpost coveragehere,here, andhere. The next installment of this long running saga is expected with the release of the revised City Auditor's report on or beforeHalloween.
• "Under the radar" page move rankles: ScholarAsaf Romirowsky criticised the article onIsraeli apartheid in an interview for theJewish Journal, saying that the Wikipedia article's title and opening paragraph are "a work of fiction"; the same article also claims that the Requested move to the current title was accomplished "under the radar". This is not the first page move controversy reported byThe Signpost; find more about previous instanceshere, andhere.
• Spotlight on Bangladeshi Authors:An article inThe Daily Star explored how Wikipedia categorizes prominent Bangladeshi literary figures likeAbbasuddin Ahmed andHumayun Kabir. The piece highlighted issues with labeling writers based solely on linguistic or geographical ties, which sometimes results in misclassifications—such as identifying them only as "Bengali" or "Indian", rather than acknowledging their heritage. The article argues for more precise representation on Wikipedia to honor these authors' contributions to the cultural andliterary history of Bangladesh, and to avoid losing the nuances of their identities due to historical geopolitical changes.
• High interest in 5784: In itsyear-endInternet culture wrapup, theJerusalem Post noted that "Israel's Wikipedia entry... [got] approximately 14,769,946 views in a year, more than Israel's entire population." Other Wikipedia pageviews were noted, as well as Google search and YouTube popularity, to gauge interest in various Israel-related topics (and some Jewish public figures in the US and elsewhere).

• If sockfarms don't succeed, try, try again:University of Sydney researcher Olga Boichak writes inForeign Policy about "How Russia Invaded Wikipedia", commenting on the nationwidesplinternet and the creation ofRuviki, the government-backed fork ofru.wiki.
• The silent majority?: The Wikipedia article for the 2024Silent Hill 2 remake was recently locked after persistent disruptive editing aimed at lowering review scores.According toIGN, the edits skewed the ratings from various sources to make the remake seem less well-received. In a move straight out of the game's own playbook, admins had to put the page under "lock and key"—much like the puzzles and locked doors players navigate inSilent Hill 2—to keep the chaos at bay.
• Are press releases news?: Outlets such asBusiness Standard andNewsTap both covered theWikimedia Technology Summit 2024, with the former publishinga press release and the latter seeminglyslightly rewriting it. The summit was hosted withIIIT Hyderabad and focused on enhancing inclusivity and innovation within Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. The press release highlighted sessions on developing tools to better support diverse communities and promoting equal participation in tech development.
• Check the stats first:UnHerdreported that Wikipedia recently renamed its article on the UK's grooming gang scandals to "Grooming gang moral panic in the United Kingdom", sparking controversy. The change, which was based on discussions citing sources like a2020 Home Office report, was intended to reflect how the media and public framed the issue. Critics argue that the new title downplays the severity of the abuse, causing debate over whether Wikipedia is succumbing topolitical correctness at the cost of historical accuracy. The Wikipedia article highlights another government report andstatistics that show that White men in the UK sexually abuse children more than Muslims or South Asians.
• The court reads: Followingthe last issue's coverage of the ongoing legal case between India's Asian News Network and the Wikimedia Foundation, adedicated article was written and published on 10 October 2024. However, the article has now been mentioned in the court on 14 October, and wasn't exactly well-received, as reported byBar and Bench andLive Law. On 16 October, the court pretty muchordered a deletion of the article, which wassnow-kept at a short-lived AfD.

In early April, a few of us in theWikiCup thread of theWikimedia Discord were discussing the problem ofsystemic bias on Wikipedia regarding postcolonial, economically emerging, and/or non-Anglophone countries. This is a common topic of complaint among both Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians, and for good reason; it's still a major weak spot for the English Wikipedia community.Epicgenius, one of the judges of this year's WikiCup, first suggested a contest focusing on developing countries on April 5th. Over the next few days, we brainstormed different ways to run this hypothetical contest: the name, the inclusion criteria, and scoring. Quite a few people chimed in, andIxtal and I decided toBOLDly set up a project page, aiming for July–September to run the contest. Soon thereafter, we decided to recruit a third coordinator,TechnoSquirrel69; that ended up being a very good decision.

Initially we were thinking about calling it the "Global South WikiContest", but we soon realized that "global south" is too nebulous and subjective of a grouping, so we settled on the IMF's list ofdeveloping countries as a basis. We also decided to give bonus points for "least-developed" countries and for "higher-level" articles about broad topics relating to these developing countries, as both of those factors tend to be more challenging to write about. Some fun themed awards were also of course necessary.

While planning this back in April, we weren't expecting more than maybe twenty participants. Interest picked up in the Discord as July approached, and we refined the details on the contest's talk page. When we actually opened up for signups and TechnoSquirrel69 set up a watchlist notice, we ended up with aroundeighty participants, far more than we were prepared for. This actually ended up being fine as many of those who signed up didn't submit anything, but it was very exciting to us coordinators, as it indicated adesire to work on systemic bias.

The course of the contest was largely hiccup-free, and we didn't have to decline very many submissions. We weren't able to get a bot up and working in time either, so we manually updated the leaderboard as submissions came in. As I mentioned above, I was very happy that we had brought on TechnoSquirrel as a third coordinator, because I moved across the Atlantic Ocean at the end of August and was unable to properly keep up with submissions and discussion for a time.

After the contest wrapped up on September 30th, we openeda discussion on the talk page to get some feedback, and we've already gotten some great criticism, praise, and ideas.

I'm very happy we did this experimental contest. We ended up with three new featured articles (Qalaherriaq,Siege of Baghdad, andGenghis Khan!), ten new featured lists, 88 new good articles, and a truckload of article reviews and DYK nominations, all relating to parts of the world underserved by our encyclopedia—that's nothing to turn one's nose up at! I'd like to express my appreciation for my fellow coordinators, andChaotic Enby for making our special "belt buckles" inspired by the map's resemblance to one.

Here are some super-basic stats! There's some overcount for sure (I am merely human, and didn't put in any effort to split dual-GA nominations and dual-DYK nominations), but here's some basic estimates for everybody to enjoy! (In terms of creations. Sorry, reviewers, the overcount would have gotten too bad if I'd included your activities!)

Overall, members of the drive managed to create or substantially improve content concerning a grand total of86 different countries. 86! That's pretty impressive and, coincidentally, thetelephone country code for China. A pretty amazing coincidence, considering which country's coverage members of the drive improved the most.

The top five most-improved countries were:

1. China, with 1 featured list, 6 GAs, and 13 DYK appearances
2. India, with 1 featured list, 15 GAs, and 1 ITN appearance
3. Philippines, with 5 GAs and 7 DYK appearances
4. North Korea, with 2 GAs and 9 DYK appearances
5. Kiribati, with 10 GAs and 4 DYK appearances

and then, more individually:

By terms of GAs submitted:

1. India with 15
2. Tied:China,Kiribati, andHaiti with 6
3. Philippines with 5

By terms of DYKs submitted:

1. China with 13
2. North Korea with 9
3. Philippines with 7

But just because we improved those countries so much, doesn't mean we forgot about the rest. Members of the drive found time to get either a single GA, FA, or DYK for 49 individual countries. Most impressive of those were the two countries that got "only" a featured article:Iraq andGreenland, brought to you byAirshipJungleman29 andGeneralissima. If you haven't already, you should take the time to read both of their articles. They're some of the best that Wikipedia has to offer.

Members of the drive also managed to get 3 important deaths (those of presenterAparna, wrestlerAfa Anoaʻi, and former PM of LebanonSalim Al-Huss) featured In The News. These appearances were brought to us by two editors in particular:Vacant0 andJaguarnik. Everybody else, this is who you have to beat next year!

We also got plenty of lists: 10 in total, covering 8 different countries! (Three of these lists covered Ukraine) To the uninitiated such as myself, the featured list process may appear somewhat strange, but not to editors such asMPGuy2824, with their impressive 3 FLS and 7 FLRs,Vanderwaalforces, who wrote Wikipedia's firsteverNigeria-related FL,Dantheanimator with the 3 Ukraine-related FLs, and48JCL with their fascinatingList of World Heritage Sites in Botswana.

Let's look at a breakdown by continent:

The continent we worked on the most was Africa, with 36 countries represented. Second place was Asia with 19, followed by the Americas with 15. Oceania got 10, and Europe came in last with 7 countries represented. I bet no other Wiki-drive has ever had that result before!

In terms of content, a special shout-out has to go toVigilantcosmicpenguin for their series about abortion in various African countries- not only did they bringAbortion in Africa through the DYK process, but they brought 11 different country-specific articles through as well. Not satisfied with that, they also had to pause and turnAbortion in Sierra Leone into a Good Article too! In terms of eliminating systemic bias, the importance of their contributions cannot be overstated.

And while we're talking about Olympic feats, let's pause and appreciate the efforts ofArconning. They made 1 Olympic related Featured List, 7 Olympic related good articles, and then went above and beyond to get 3 of those articles through the DYK process as well. Talk about gold medalists!

But speaking of sports,BeanieFan11 saw the need to improve the articles on athletes from developing nations, and they more than rose to the challenge. But in between their GAs on NFL members, and DYKs on various athletes (did you know that Olympian judokanValentin Houinato, from Benin, is also a journalist?), they also substantially expanded or created articles on three different politicians! One of those politicians being current Prime Minister of Equatorial Guinea,Manuel Osa Nsue Nsua.

While we're learning so many cool things, let me tell you all how our coverage ofKiribati improved so much.Thebiguglyalien is responsible for five of our new Kiribati-themed good articles, and all four of its DYK appearances. And did you know how they got all those DYK appearances in just one hook?Find out for yourself here!

In a similar vein, if India placed so high, it's only because of dedicated writers likeMagentic Manifestations, who made India-related articles about a wide array of topics, fromdairy engineers tocrocodile trusts, into some Good-capital-G Articles.

And while I may not have focused on reviews too much, I am going to take a minute to highlight the contributions of our most prolific reviewer,Simongraham. They wrote Good Articles on seven different species and genuses of arthropods (mostly jumping spiders, from what it seems), and two different Soviet ships. Those witharachnophobia beware, but those who create species stubs, be even warier, for this is the type of editor we all wish we had more of.

Hopefully all the spider-phobes haven't left by now, because who isn't going to love this next topic? That's right, who wants to read about chocolate?Yue managed to write three articles onchocolate production,chocolate smuggling, and achocolate manufacturer, and they even made one into a Good Article. But they didn't stop there! Those of you interested in the flags of the world, you need look no further than their new Good Articles on the flags ofTogo,North Korea,São Tomé and Príncipe, orRwanda.

This Wikicup may not have seen many—or, actually, any—Good Topics, but one user came close:Chipmunkdavis! They wrote five Good Articles about fisheries in the Philippines, after finding out just how lacking we were. Generalissima's been prodding them to turn the entire thing into a Good Topic. And who knows, hopefully she'll have convinced them by next year? No pressure or anything, but all eyes are on you now, Chipmunkdavis!

Di did what they do best and told us all about the time "thatGerman officials exiled the Samoan king from his own kingdom". In light of the recent Olympics,Riley1012 helped to expand our coverage of artistic gymnasts from around the world.TheNuggeteer brought you coverage of Philippines storms,Averageuntitleduser wrote Good Articles onimportant Haitian women, andCambalachero proved that you can writea Good Article on pop-culture topics after all!PerfectSoundWhatever introduced us to the life and works of Kenyan musicianKMRU,Noorullah21 wrote an impressive 1k+ word GA on theKhalji Revolution, andSkyshifter got meta and treated us to hoax article! As in,a good article about a hoax article. You'll just have to read it for yourself.Fritzmann2002 specialised in article and list reviews, but took the time to write some good articles onplants from Syria andTurkey.

Some of us were busy during the contest, however—but in a drive such as this, literally every attempt counts. With that in mind, let's take some time to appreciateSohom Datta'sreview of a GA about voting in India,TappyTurtle'sreview of the article about the Wikipedia hoax,Zanahary review of an article about an Indian god of war,SunTunnels's article about aSouth African speed-climber, andQueen of Hearts's article ona crab named after a League of Legends character.

I'd also like to say thank you to our lovely co-ordinators, Sawyer777, Ixtal, and TechnoSquirrel69. It may sound cheesy, but it's true—none of this would have happened without your ideas and dedication.

This traffic report is adapted from theTop 25 Report, prepared with commentary byIgordebraga,Vestrian24Bio,CAWylie,Ollieisanerd andRahcmander.

• These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such asredlinks), 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 theTop 25 Report talk page if you wish.

The Editors by Stephen Harrison, 412 pp.
Published byInkshares, August 13, 2024
ISBN 978-1-950301-67-6

Smallbones was the editor-in-chief ofThe Signpost from March 2019 through April 2022; he now writes theDisinformation report column, while also contributing toIn the media. Disclosure: he received an electronic review copy of the book and in August received a signed paperback copy.

Stephen Harrison is a journalist andbeat reporter who writes about Wikipedia and is likely the favorite such journalist of many of the editors of this encyclopedia. He knows his subject. He knows our complicated rules, our sometimes vicious politics, and the importance of getting to know the people involved.

His work has been published inSlate,The Washington Post,The New York Times, and other media outlets. Now, though, he has also released his debut novel,The Editors.

It's not the first work of fiction about Wikipedia, but it is the first I've seen that is notsciencefiction,speculative fiction, nor likely to be seen asoverly literary. Harrison is writing for normal curious readers about the actions of Wikipedians dealing with an extraordinary – but not unimaginable – situation.

The novel's encyclopedia is called Infopendium, and has slightly different rules than Wikipedia. But people who have never edited Wikipedia, or even thought of what goes on behind the article pages, will still learn about how the Wikipedia community works.

The Editors is a suspense novel, and a real page-turner: at 412 pages, you might be tempted to finish it in one or two days. If you take this book to the beach, be sure to take along a big bottle of SPF 50+ sunscreen.

Despite the fast-paced story, Harrison's ability to develop interesting characters – much of it done on-the-run – might be his most surprising skill. Several of his black-hat editors are presented very sympathetically; the careful reader can understand their motivations. Perhaps this is to keep the reader guessing about how the action will be resolved. Perhaps it's due to the influence of Wikipedia's oft repeated principle, "assume good faith". Or perhaps he just recognizes that all editors, like all people, are flawed mixtures with different cultural backgrounds, beliefs, interests, abilities, experiences and blind spots.

I'll also note that all readers are flawed and have different experiences. This review has turned out to be a very personal experience for me, as there are several situations in the book that feel familiar. Other readers may draw on their experiences of other situations. Wikipedians might see reflections of themselves in the book and of people they know, as well as situations they have worked in.

But make no mistake: the novel is not a disguised version of a specific event or of a specific editor's actions, or aroman à clef where a simple key will unlock the meaning of the whole story. Rather it is about situations such as thepandemic – that many editors have participated in over long periods – or situations such asconflict of interest editing that occur every day.

The characters are not cheeky portrayals of real individual editors, though you might wonder for a couple of pages after they are introduced, until the same character reminds you of a different editor you know. They might be a combination of several editors who have acted in similar ways in similar situations, or even just Harrison playing with the idea of "what would a character likeUser:Real Person do if their interests, beliefs, or experiences were different?"

I'll only reveal the seemingly apparent identity of one such real-world editor:Jimmy Wales, the founder of the encyclopedia in both the novel (as User:Prospero) and in real life, gives a keynote speech at Infopendium's annual conference. But after the speech, Prospero's actions will surprise almost any Wikipedian who thought they knew Jimbo. Harrison keeps you guessing.

Wikipedians have, however, seen many of the situations that pop up in the novel: for example, a young editor struggling through arequest for adminship or attending the annualWikimania conference.

Paid editing happens nearly every day on Wikipedia.Every active long-time editor has seen how Wikipedia reacted to the pandemic. We've all seennews items covered here, especially celebrity deaths. Regular readers ofThe Signpost should know howbillionaires attempt to rewrite Wikipedia.

The novel's action starts right from the first sentence of the prologue. Harrison has reported on this phenomenon called"deaditing": a very notable person dies, and editors compete to report the death, revise the article, and just change the "is" in the lead section to "was".

Pay close attention here! Almost all the major characters in the novel are introduced in the first seven pages, as well as several of theirsockpuppets (multiple deceptive accounts used by a single editor).

The first six chapters introduce afreelance journalist who is both a hard-bitten, experienced and dedicated hack, and a flighty young woman worried that she can't make a career in the dying newspaper business. While she might represent the entire industry, she doesn't strike me as a copy of any journalist that I've met. Perhaps it's her indecisiveness. She meets one of the heroes of the prologue, as well as the "editor of the year" and many others at the Global Infopendium Conference.

The conference is thrown into chaos during Prospero's welcoming speech by a hack of the conference's computer system, while the editor-of-the year is insulted on everybody's screens. A black-hat editor is reintroduced to readers, as is a newly-minted billionaire.

And then the action really starts, as the very existence of Infopedium is at risk. There's a wild road trip across North America, some gunplay, a break-in, some government intimidation of editors. There are even a couple of romances. It's not our usual daily routine by any means.

You might think that editors would never engage in gunplay...but you'd be wrong. Do governments intimidate editors? Unfortunately, it'sfairlycommon. Long road trips are alsofairlycommon, especially among photographers. So, yes, the situations are all well within the realm of possibility.

Casual Wikipedia readers, newbies, and disinformation journalists will learn more from this novel than from any edit-a-thon, instructional video, or how-to-edit manual. Experienced Wikipedians will enjoy the fresh view of ground they know well and of editors they feel like they might know.

According totwointerviews, Harrison has already begun working on a new novel, this time about theU.S. Federal Reserve, where he formerly worked. I expect it to be similarly well-researched and grounded in reality (if not specific facts), as his epigraph modestly suggests, "This is a reported work of fiction."

He explains this sentence to the first interviewer with an example: he wants to write "a story based on themes that we're finding in our lives. Some of the fiction that I've always admired the most would beTom Wolfe.The Bonfire of the Vanities is deeply reported."

He quotesWilliam Faulkner to the second interviewer: "The best fiction is far more true than any journalism." In that sense, this is a very good piece of fiction.

Many Wikipedia editors will likely have their own personal reactions to the novel, but please remember that the book is not about you, it's not about me. It's about us, the editors, the Wikipedia community.

Enjoy!

Sgerbic leads the editing groupGuerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia and was interviewed twice by Harrison, the journalist who is the author of the book. Disclosure: she received an advance copy of the book for review.

An announcement came across my desktop recently thatSlate journalistStephen Harrison had published a book calledThe Editors. His beat is Wikipedia (yes, that is a thing), so I was a bit surprised he would be writing about Wikipedia editors, but hadn’t reached out to interview my team members. Harrison knows about theGuerrilla Skeptics on Wikipedia (GSoW) project, as he has interviewed me twice, most recently in 2023 forthis article. To my surprise, I received an email from Harrison a few weeks ago, asking if I would be interested in an advance copy of his book. Of course I would! Keeping my ego in check and not asking why he didn’t interview any of my amazing editors for a book about Wikipedia editors, I gave him my home address, and soon I received a paperback advance reader copy. I found a sunny spot on the couch, the obligatory cats joined me and I settled in to see whom Harrison had chosen to interview. Caution: some vague mild spoilers are contained below.

I was surprised to learn that this is not a book interviewing Wikipedia editors; it is rather a novel about a group of editors who seek to keep misinformation off the fourth most viewed website, Infopedium. This group is called The Misinformation Patrol. Sound familiar?

With my three cats taking turns keeping me warm and settled on the couch, I finished the 414 pages mostly in a single five-hour reading session – yes, it was just that good. And completely not what I was expecting. It's Infopedium and not Wikipedia. Harrison selected new tenets, "Aim for Neutrality", "We Need Better Sources", "Anonymity Is Fundamental" and "Keep Developing", directly inspired by from Wikipedia'sfive pillars, like "Wikipedia is an encyclopedia... written from a neutral point of view", "free content", "respect and civility", and most important — and yet confusingly frustrating at times — "Wikipedia has no firm rules".

Everything else was very familiar. Discussions, edit history, administrator elections, ambiguous rules,conflict of interest issues, sock-puppets, paid editing problems, conventions, andedit-a-thons. But more than all of this, what Harrison really understood was the passion of the editing community: he has clearly been talking to real people.

The novel centers around user Alex718, who runs The Disinformation Patrol, and the journalist Morgan Wentworth (who is clearly Harrison's alter ego), focusing on the uncovering of a paid editing mystery of billionaire Pierce Briggs, who treats Infopedium as an extension of his media empire and seeks to control articles to protect his reputation and to influence the public. Briggs understands the power of Wikipedia... er, Infopedium, I mean. The story introduces other editors with their own agendas, such as DejaNu, a librarian whose mission is to create articles for women and people of color, despite being one of those "the ends justify the means" people who will bend the rules in order to right wrongs of the past. And to a community of people hellbent on following rules, DejaNu is a polarizing character (I didn't like her at all). Another editor, turtle~dragon, who has moved from Texas to China and started a business editing for pay, moves the storyline along: he begins working for Briggs, using sockpuppet accounts to influence articles, until theChinese government finds out and forces him to cover-up a novel illness appearing inWuhan.

And this is where Harrison's expertise with this platform really shows; a crowd-sourced, all-volunteer community can't be stopped from its mission, whether it is Infopendium or Wikipedia. The idea of writing an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit is just insane: it should not exist, it should be a mess, it can't possibly maintain itself without ads and masses of paid employees! Yet it does, and it thrives; issues with the software and head-butting with other editors notwithstanding, it works.

I saw the story of Morgan Wentworth – a freelance journalist who, out of desperation for a story, attends an Infopendium convention atColumbia University in New York – and the rest of the characters developed by Harrison as reflections of the Wikipedia editors he has interviewed over the years forSlate,VICE Sports,The Washington Post,The New York Times,OneZero and other media. A good chunk of his published articles are storylines in this novel: very clever. For instance, when in the novel editors turtle~dragon and KonaYeziq get wrapped up in censorship inBeijing,Uyghurs are sent tocamps, and then there are the beginnings ofa novel virus that the Chinese government tried to cover up, I knew Harrison's articles"The Coronavirus is Stress-Testing Wikipedia’s Systems","Why China Blocked Wikipedia in All Languages” and"Why Wikipedia Banned Several Chinese Admins" were necessary research.

The inspiration behind character DejaNu, the librarian who wins the Editor of the Year award for her unwavering tenacity to right the wrongs of the past, by politically correcting articles to current standards and encouraging new editors to sign up, probably came from Harrison's articles"How Wikipedia Became a Battleground for Racial Justice" and"Closing Wikipedia’s Gender Gap". Character Alex718, whose unhygienic habits and obsession with Infopedium led him to create articles for trains and public transit since the age of seven, is probably based on this story Harrison wrote:"Wikipedia's Terrific Subway Railfans" about editors Ryan Ng and Shaul Picker, who have made hundreds of thousands of edits to Wikipedia, mostly aboutNew York’s subways.

Harrison begins the novel with several pages of edit history for the article on billionaire Pierce Briggs, and introduces the cast of editors, which will set them on a spiral of intrigue to unmask who is behind the edits that are seeking to control information and spread misinformation. Personally, I found this an intriguing way to begin: maybe it's just me, but as I read the back-and-forth of the edits, I found myself in editor mode thinking, "How I would have handled some of these edits myself?" It was quite realistic.

Though the characters do become a bit of a caricature of an obsessive Wikipedia editor with a savior complex — think lots of missed meals, lack of relationships and days without showering — Harrison understands the passion, desire to be fair and neutral, rule-following, with free-information-to-the-masses attitude that I see in the Wikipedia editing community. It shows that Harrison has done his homework. At the end of the novel, the heroes of the story, who start out with many different agendas, find that they all share the same agenda. The storyline is fun, there is mystery and intrigue and the characters' individual stories and agendas seem plausible. I'm not giving away too much, because there are many twists and mysteries for even the non-Wikipedia editor to enjoy.

Coming back to GSoW for the moment, the group referenced in the novel, the Misinformation Patrol, focused on general problems with all articles, was made up of experienced editors who were recruited to join the Patrol and were operating anonymously with each other on Infopedium. Very different from the GSoW – we specialize in articles on science and pseudoscience. We also have created our own training program (that generally takes four months to complete), operate in many languages, and we are gathered off-Wikipedia in a private Facebook group called "The Secret Cabal", which allows us to know each other in real life. What Harrison is describing is more akin toWikiProjects, which exist all over Wikipedia, but are repositories of ranked lists of things to do, and are mostly dormant. Good intentions, but in my opinion, the anonymity of the users and the lack of mentorship and leadership are what kill these projects. GSoW not only trains one-on-one, but about half of our new people have never coded or worked in IT; we shun wall-of-text instructions and give lots of personalized feedback and mentoring. It's a different "vibe", which hopefully will keep us focused on our goals of making the best encyclopedia – the same goal that Harrison’s characters have with Infopedium.

One of Harrison's storylines involves a paid editing scheme from the viewpoint of a paid editor themselves falling victim to his "customer". Personally, I have dealt with several cases of someone in real life paying for an edit, then being blackmailed for more money to protect the edits from being removed. Something I warn professionals of often is that there is really no shortcut to having a Wikipedia article written about you, since it stands on its own or not, and money paid or special favors aren't going to help. Also different was the "training" that DejaNu tried to do at her library, which is something I suspect happens at Edit-A-Thons: brand new editors creating brand new Wikipedia articles in a couple hours with little instruction. Although I suspect this happens, it is not how I run my team. We start with minor edits and after much instruction over weeks and many small changes build up to a rewriting a stub article; never ever would we instruct someone new to create a brand new article in a few hours.

Overall, this is a fun read, with a very interesting sub-text and very well researched. I suspect Harrison would love to thumb his nose at a tennis-playing billionaire who treats Wikipedia as his own social network, and travel across country in a Scooby-doopediaMystery Machine to uncover who is behind the misinformation. I wonder how Wikipedia founderJimmy Wales — if he ever reads this novel — would think of his character Gerald Budd’s home inPalo Alto with "half-eaten microwavable meals covering the coffee table" and "(T)iny gray hairs fram[ing] the drain of the bathroom sink, clinging stubbornly to the porcelain surface". But as I've never met Wales, I don't know; maybe he would get a good laugh out of it?

Just for the fun of it, if Harrison created characters and storylines from the people he has interviewed over the years, which of these characters might I have influenced? On page 34, while Morgan Wentworth is walking past a series of editors, she overhears these two conversations: first, a man in afedora who says, "If a page presents false balance, that actually undermines the truth", and then a woman with a French accent who says, "We cannot return to the past and compose 'better sources' for those people who lacked power". If you blend those two random editors and add in a lot ofimposter syndrome that someone like me could be running a project like GSoW, I think Harrison has me figured out. Plus my pure joy of training new editors.

Harrison’sThe Editors and my GSoW project have more in common than not. We both revere this important encyclopedia, remove misinformation, admire journalists, respect the pillars of editing and the editors themselves. Hopefully this review inspires you to pick up a copy.

Disclosure: WereSpielChequers attended a book launch event and received a complimentary copy of the book.

The Editors is set in our world before and during theCOVID lockdowns. But instead of Wikipedia, there is a similar online encyclopaedia, called Infopedium.

If the works ofJRR Tolkien can be oversummarised as an exploration of the trope of the hero as orphan in a faux medieval setting, then Mr. Harrison's work is an estrangement of daughters in near modern times. But I'm sure readers of this publication will be more interested in the similarities and contrasts between the Infopedium of the book and Wikipedia. Imagine, if you will, a project as dominant on the Internet as Wikipedia was when twenty years old, but with the shonky business continuity practices of a much younger Wikipedia, long before dual sites, possibly even before that time when Wikipedia lost its main anti-vandalism defence for a weekend because the relevant volunteer needed his spare server for other purposes.

There are significant commonalities ranging from a very similar hell week, tosockpuppetry and malicious interference from foreign government. But there are also marked differences, including the age profile of retirees and schoolkids, as if the smartphone had not been invented (one assumes that Infopedium, unlike Wikipedia, has crackedmobile editing). While it isn't explicitly stated that Infopedium has decided to standardise on American English, its US focus and complete absence of any characters from the rest of the English speaking world are rather suggestive. The narrow cast of characters, repeatedly crossing each others' paths in very different parts of the site, gives the feel of a much much smaller community, more akin to that of theGeorgian orWelsh language Wikipedias than what we are used to on EN Wiki. Another unsubtle difference between the two lies in editor motivation: yes, we've had our obsessives and hagiographers (a subset ofPOV warriors), but there are also people who edit Wikipedia because we enjoy it, and many of us manage to balance editing with other interests. AnRfA candidate who appeared to be editing in all possible waking hours would likely be told to take a break, as the expectation at RfA is that you answer questions in order - but it isn't just a seven-day "open book" exam, it is one where it is normal for the candidate to absent themselves for twenty hours at a time.

Of course, it is possible that almost every character in this book is at least loosely based on a real current or former member of this community. But somehow I doubt I'd be the only Wikipedian who reads this book and concludes that they wouldn't be an Infopedian. All that said, in accordance with edicts from my wife, I now have to pick two books from my library to go to the charity shop because I've decided to keep this one, and yes, I'd buy the sequel, were there to be one.

See also:Wikipedia:Identifying blatant advertising

Complaining aboutThe Signpost and itsself-righteousness is an exhausting task. Its poor editorial judgment continues, and it's almost unbelievable that, once again — contrary toWP:NOTPROMO — the newspaper mentions this same book. What a surprise, given its consistent blatant disregard for core Wikipedia policies. It's somewhat impressive how consistently it showcases this particular novel. We've moved well beyond subtle promotion, it's full-blownproduct placement now, complete with a link to the article about the publisher, which is, you've guessed it, tagged as containing promotional content. There is, needless to say, adouble standard because if this book wasn't anovelization of Wikipedia, it wouldn't even get a footnote.

Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info onPhabricator and onMediaWiki.org.

Figure 1: A graph from the researchers research report.

Many world-renownedresearchers have researched this and produced many scathingresearch reports that found astonishing evidence thatThe Signpost violated Wikipedia'spolicies and guidelines regardingneutrality throughout thepre-order marketing window of this book. Through cutting-edge analysis of its coverage in their prestigiousresearch facilities, worrying patterns ofpromotion,sensationalism, andundue weight in its reporting on this book were exposed in their bombshell research findings (shown in Figure 1). Wikipedia's policies and guidelines on maintaining aneutral point of view are made crystal clear, so it's scandalous that the newspaper — which is hosted on Wikipedia — ignored them when covering this book.

Thisunrequited love is made even clearer by the fact that the bookdoesn't even mention the newspaper. It takes real dedication to promote a single book this often, and it's reassuring to see that some things never change. Forfeiting neutral coverage in favor of incessant mentioning of this book is, to me, the beginning of theend of Wikipedia as we know it. If Wikipedia can no longer enforce a neutral point of view on its pages, it empowers editors to use the newspaper and itstalk page subscriptions to launch outrageouspromotional campaigns. It's a mockery of the need for neutrality to host this on Wikipedia. Imagine editing for Wikipedia, strictly adhering to policies and guidelines, and then seeing how themedia elite of this website blatantly ignore all of these policies.

...if it doesn't look like anything, squint harder. As always, click on the squares to type your letters, but don't press enter. You've been warned.