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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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