An Office action was carried out on August 4, at the article Caesar DePaço; the action removed information from public view pursuant to a Portuguese court order issued due to litigation by Mr. DePaço. The order itself, as relayed by Joe Sutherland (the Wikimedia Foundation's Lead Trust and Safety Specialist), was to remove four specific categories of content as well as hand over limited data on eight editors who added it.

This data was later clarified as being IP addresses and email addresses. Revision deletions appear to cover edits made from 12 January 2021 up until 10 April 2025.

The compliance was announced (with the rest of the article remaining intact) while the Foundation appealed to the European Court of Human Rights. In response, several proposals were made for additional response. Some (like Pppery, who initially blanked the article in response to the announcement and expurgation of previous revisions) hold that a court order prohibiting Wikipedia from covering the article's subject neutrally precludes the existence of an article at all. Others (like User:Barkeep49, who created a {{Legal order}} template to place at the head of the article) support keeping it, with a prominent notice that certain information has been excluded due to legal strictures. The article was soon nominated for deletion by Chaotic Enby, and as of press time there are more than 170,000 characters in the deletion discussion. — J

Results from the July 2025 administrator elections have been posted. In alphabetical order, the newly-elected administrators are:

• CoconutOctopus
• Curbon7
• Hinnk
• Jlwoodwa
• Kj cheetham
• KylieTastic
• Ser!
• Smasongarrison
• UndercoverClassicist

From the 16 candidates who were on the voting ballot, 9 of them succeeded. This brings the number of new admins this year to 12, continuing the trend of AELECT producing more new admins than RfA. There is now an ongoing debrief about the election. Election officials, candidates, and uninvolved editors are welcome to give their feedback about the July 2025 election. The election process may be further work-shopped based on this feedback, with the next elections expected to be conducted in 5 months.

The Signpost thanks these editors and the others who stepped forward to be considered for adminship. – B, S

The Universal Code of Conduct Coordinating Committee (U4C) announced an appointment process for non-voting members. The process will work on a rolling basis, where interested community members may nominate themselves anytime, followed by a two week public feedback process from the community. There can be a maximum of 4 non-voting members appointed to the U4C at any given time.

The U4C was last covered by The Signpost in the 18 July issue. – S

A July 31st announcement at the Arbitration Committee noticeboard read:

In May 2025, the Arbitration Committee became aware of a mass use of the checkuser tool on the English Wikipedia by an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation and contacted the WMF with our concerns about the checks. The Foundation confidentially disclosed the reason for the checks to the Committee and immediately began an internal investigation of the tool use and development of a plan to prevent similar mass checkuser tool uses in the future.

In July, the Foundation outlined their plan to prevent such actions happening again, including localized CU training for Foundation investigators and correct use of the reason field in the checkuser tool. They will also inform the Arbitration Committee of any future use of the checkuser tool on the English Wikipedia that involves more than ten actions. The Foundation confirmed to us that the data gathered through the checks was not shared and has been destroyed. It should be noted that – as the platform operator – the Foundation's use of the checkuser tool is governed by their legal department, not by the local or global checkuser policy.

Due to the access to nonpublic personal data policy, the Committee is limited in what it can reveal about the nature of the checks, those checked, and the results of those checks. We apologise for the vague nature of much of this statement as we try to navigate our obligations under the personal data policy and provide transparency to the community.

— For the Arbitration Committee, HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:39, 31 July 2025 (UTC)

Subsequent talk page discussion didn't reveal a whole lot in the way of detail, and arbitrator ScottishFinnishRadish implied that it was difficult to comment on the situation without reconvening the Committee to make additional on-record statements. Jan Eissfeldt, Lead Manager of Wikimedia Trust and Safety, had this to say in response:

Earlier this year, as part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s responsibility of keeping the platform safe, the Trust and Safety team conducted safety risk assessments that required the use of the checkuser tool. While the use of the tool was approved for internal review of material in order to defend the projects, the logging of the checks was inadequate and the checks were excessive to the minimum necessary to meet the task. This was a case of human error, and several internal systems contributed to this error.

In May of this year, the Arbitration Committee identified the oversight and alerted us of the situation. We investigated the use of the tool and identified the human and system errors that contributed to this oversight. Accordingly, we are going to adopt several new practices, including retraining individuals, as use of the Checkuser tool by Trust and Safety staff remains relatively rare. We also wish to acknowledge and thank the Arbitration Committee for identifying and raising this issue with us, and also for the effort they put into reviewing our mitigation plan with us. We understand that this additional work likely has been disruptive to their workflows, and we continue to be sorry about that. We are confident that the plan in place will significantly reduce the probability of something like this happening in the future.

— --Jan (WMF) (talk) 17:29, 31 July 2025 (UTC)

As with most things, reactions were mixed, with some saying this was a significant breach of trust, whereas others pointed out that using the CU tool at all was a sign of proper channels being followed (as large numbers of people have direct database access and can simply read the logfiles if they so choose). — J

Discussion is ongoing in on the Administrators' Noticeboard on whether to unban Morning277. They were arguably very involved in Wiki-PR Wikipedia editing scandal and subsequently CBAN-ned by the community in 2012.

This topic was previously covered in the Signpost in October 2013, January 2014, and February 2015 issues. – S

The ongoing controversy with Wikinews, spurred by the public consultation about Wikinews opened on Meta in June, has led to further developments, and there is now (on Meta) an open RfC to close the Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee Sister Project Task Force itself. The SPTF, described on its own page as "a group of community members and Foundation trustees working together to build a strategy to support the life cycle of non-Wikipedia projects across the movement", is challenged by the proposal's opener, A09, who says that "just about everything went wrong" with the proposal to close Wikinews, and concludes their post by saying:

In other Wikinews news, a proposal on Meta has been opened by Pharos for "Wikinews Pulse", envisioned as a "more universal, data-driven version of Portal:Current events, with generated headlines displaying a variety of daily events from the rich data on Wikidata, and that would then link out to relevant updated Wikipedia articles and pages on the various language editions of Wikinews". — J

The Wikimedia Foundation's Board of Trustees has posted June 2025 meeting outcomes.

The shortlisting process for the upcoming election concluded, with 6 candidates being selected by affiliates to proceed for final voting. The campaigning period continues till August 26, after which voting will be open for 2 weeks.

The shortlisted candidates are:

• Bobby Shabangu – Bobbyshabangu (talk · contribs)
• James Alexander – Jamesofur (talk · contribs)
• Lane Rasberry – Bluerasberry (talk · contribs)
• Michał Buczyński – Aegis Maelstrom (talk · contribs)
• Ravan J Al-Taie – Ravan (talk · contribs)
• Wojciech Pędzich – Wojciech Pędzich (talk · contribs)

– S

These are the latest Wikimedia Foundation bulletins.

• Bulletin 9 (May 16)
• Bulletin 10 (May 30)
• Bulletin 11 (June 13)
• Bulletin 12 (June 27)
• Bulletin 13 (July 11)
• Bulletin 14 (July 25) "The bulletin will be back after Wikimania with a special issue on the 19th August."

Notable news includes 2FA being made mandatory for Checkusers and Oversighters, and Temporary accounts being rolled out in 18 large and medium Wikipedias. – S

• The U4C passed a motion about mass blocks on Hebrew Wikipedia. This sets up a final layer of escalation for appealing hewiki blocks via U4C.
• During July, four functionaries resigned their Checkuser and Oversight rights – Alison, Bradv, Joe Roe and RickinBaltimore.
• After 21 days, the recall petition for Night_Gyr was certified. Discussion was notably heated, with nearly 48 thousand words from editors on the page.