Optional: write a lede — not necessarily a WP:LEAD. Interesting > encyclopedic.

We covered controversy related to the Palestine-Israel topic area in the past several editions of this column. Media have again noted a series of unusual on-wiki events related to the article Gaza genocide and its talkpage. For related information on the current on-wiki discussion, see this month's In focus.

The first of the media to report was UK's The National, with the headline "Wikipedia row erupts as Jimmy Wales intervenes on 'Gaza genocide' page". They reported that co-founder Jimmy Wales asked the community to look at POV in the article after "a 'high profile' media interview about the article", and reported that Wales said:

"[T]his article ... inappropriately, and contrary to our policy and traditions, takes sides in an ongoing controversy when it ought to accurately and fairly summarize all relevant views."

Other media soon followed with the following headlines.

• "Wikipedia co-founder slams 'Gaza genocide' page over 'egregious' anti-Israel claims" (New York Post, retitled)
• "Wikipedia's 'Gaza Genocide' article an example of how neutrality needs to be improved, founder says" The Jerusalem Post
• "Wikipedia co-founder joins editing conflict over the Gaza genocide page", The Verge
• "Wikipedia Article on Gaza Genocide Locked Over Alleged Bias", Gizmodo
• "Why did Wikipedia editor block edits to the 'Gaza genocide' page?" (Al Jazeera, retitled)

Note that some media have erroneously reported that Wales had locked the genocide article. It was full protected from editing by anyone other than by administrators for a period of time, but not by Wales. Wales has also not held administrator privileges for some time (see 2010 Signpost coverage). – B

The media coverage of the newly-launched Grokipedia was overwhelming in the period since the Signpost had published its latest issue. Here's just a sampling.

• Grokipedia launches on 27 October, but doesn't keep running...: "Elon Musk launches a Wikipedia rival that extols his own 'vision'" (The Washington Post) launches but went down after about an hour
• ...Grokipedia launches a second time on 28 October...: "Elon Musk launches Grokipedia to compete with online encyclopedia Wikipedia" (Associated Press); "Elon Musk launches his version of Wikipedia, Grokipedia" (CNN)
• ...and "nobody cares"?: "The reason nobody cares about Grokipedia" (Fast Company)

• "Truth wars: Grokipedia vs. Wikipedia" (Deutsche Welle, video)
• "What Wikipedia and Grokipedia are saying about each other", (KUOW-FM, Seattle-based radio)
• "The internet compares Grokipedia and Wikipedia" (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
• "Grokipedia vs Wikipedia: How Elon Musk's Al-generated encyclopaedia holds up against the left-leaning crowd-sourced one" (The Times of India)
• "Grokipedia vs. Wikipedia: See how Elon Musk's encyclopedia describes 5 hot-button topics" (Business Insider)

Speculative fiction author John Scalzi wrote about his test of the new contender, and had some issues with it repeating rumors about film adaptations by Steven Spielberg and other things. His summary was:

[I]f you have to choose a "pedia" to trust, you might choose the one assembled by a bunch of pedantic nerds saying "well, ACTUALLY" to each other until the heat death of the universe, over the one assembled by an LLM controlled by an insecure Nazi salute-throwing billionaire who sprints to reprogram that LLM every time it shares a fact that makes that billionaire angry or sad, or doesn't fit into his Playskool Machiavellian ambitions and plans. In this particular case, a thousand pedantic nerds is much better than a single rich one.
— John Scalzi's "Whatever" blog, "A Review of Grokipedia, Using Myself as Test Subject"

An opinion by Robert H. Knight in The Washington Times says Wikipedia promotes sexual anarchy and it will be corrected by Grokipedia. Knight should know a thing or two about correct sexual expression, being credited as the "draftsman" of the Defense of Marriage Act in his Wikipedia biography.

Some reviewers, like the aforementioned Knight, apparently loved Grokipedia, whereas some others like 404 Media, didn't. In fact, the latter's co-founder, Jason Koebler, called it "the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human". An opinion published in the Financial Times said it was "an AI-powered, low-quality, barely readable Wikipedia rip-off, with a peculiar penchant for Musk and his worldview", and the editor creating the headline said it was a "major own goal".

Writing for The Forward, Mira Fox expressed concerns over Elon Musk's apparent attempt to adjust Grok "to answer in lockstep with his personal beliefs", including the reported incorporation of "anti-semitic and racist dog-whistles" in several pages. In an article for Italian newspaper Domani, Daniele Erler noted how "the absence of human control [over Grokipedia's content] turns the encyclopedia in a continuous re-writing of pre-existing material", and even went so far as to trace similarities between the supposed ideological drive behind the AI-driven portal and fascist ideology, noting how the Italian regime had used the Treccani encyclopedia to "legitimize itself towards the elites".

A few media found humor in the situation, including McSweeney's Internet Tendency, who wrote "Hi, it's me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology", summarized by the quote in fictional Wiki-voice, "peer review deez nutz". The Babylon Bee got into the humor of the binary either/or "winner" mentality by inviting readers to spot the differences between some Grokipedia and Wikipedia articles. The Onion had a characteristically straight-faced take that "users report many articles are seemingly adapted straight from Wikipedia" (also noted by Plagiarism Today, but in a not-so-funny way). − B, O

For eighteen years, the Italian Wikipedia has hosted an article about an infamous political incident that, actually, might not have happened at all, at least according to a report by fact-checking group Nicoletta Bourbaki.

After World War II, the city of Pula – now a part of the Republic of Croatia – was transfered to Yugoslavia, under the Treaty of Paris between Italy and the Allies of World War II, which had been signed on February 10 and would come into general effect on September 15 of the same year. An exodus of Istrian and Dalmatian Italians, as well as ethnic Slovenes and Croats, from localities including Pula ensued.

The so-called Treno della vergogna [it] ("Train of shame") incident supposedly took place at the railway station in Bologna on February 18, 1947, during the exodus.

Lino Vivoda (1931 – 2022) was the only known direct witness of the event until new testimonies emerged in the 2000s. According to Vivoda, the train that was carrying the Istrian Italian refugees to La Spezia from the port of Ancona, where they had disembarked from the Toscana steamboat, was allegedly forced to skip a planned stop in Bologna, due to the protests of a group of communist militants who had threatened to start a strike should the refugees have been allowed to stop.

Further reconstructions of the "train of shame" incident and articles on the matter from the 1990s onwards have added contradicting details about the time and the context of the event, including accusations of violent attacks and other outrageous actions by communist militants towards the refugees on the train. This last version, despite being dismissed by Vivoda himself, has been perpetuated by several politicians, including the incumbent Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, as well as the Minister of Labour, Marina Calderone. It should be noted that the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus is still a highly polarizing topic in Italian politics to this day, as are the foibe massacres – both events are commemorated on February 10 of every year, but have been the subject of negationism and misinformation campaigns from time to time, while right-wing and far-right parties have frequently tried to weaponize their historical impact.

Nicoletta Bourbaki are a collective group of individuals writing in Italian, known for their fact-checking activity and specialized in online historical negationism and far-right extremism. They conducted several inquiries involving it.wiki in recent years. Inspired by the French mathematicians who went under the Nicolas Bourbaki pseudonym, the group is directly affiliated to Wu Ming, an elusive, Bologna-based cultural collective influenced by Marxist philosophy and originally founded in 2000, stemming from the wider Luther Blissett community. The key members of this collective are notorious for their literary production, both as Wu Ming and as single authors, as well as their staunch stance against authors' rights – each one of their books are routinely made available for free download a few years after their publication.

On October 14, 2025, Nicoletta Bourbaki published a long article (in Italian) on Giap – Wu Ming's own website, named after the Vietnamese general Võ Nguyên Giáp – reviewing the history of the alleged "Train of shame" incident. Their research found no information about demonstrations against the refugees at the time in the archives of the local questura and prefecture. Moreover, throughout the entirety of February 1947, no local journal reported on incidents at the station of Bologna, neither did L’Arena di Pola, a newspaper that reflected the views of the pro-AMG National Liberation Commitee (CLN) in Pula in the aftermath of World War II, and later went on to represent the associations of Istrian refugees in Italy. On the other hand, L’Avvenire d’Italia – now simply known as Avvenire – wrote on February 20 that about 2200 refugees from Pula did stop at the station, receiving help and food from a special pontifical commission for assistance.

The Italian Wikipedia has not been immune to these culture wars, either, and the article about the "train of shame" itself might be a good example of it. Until the publication of Nicoletta Bourbaki’s analysis, the page – which had first been created back in 2007 – included various examples of decontextualized quotes that could be categorized as original research, as well as three pictures that were falsely attributed to the incident, and rather represented, respectively, a traveling exhibition about the history of the exodus, a Holocaust train and a group of Istrian refugees at the Porta Nuova station in Turin. Following the report's release, several users started editing the page extensively to remove the images and correct the article: among them was Salvatore Talia, a frequent contributor of it.wiki since 2007 and a member of the Nicoletta Bourbaki group, who decided to open an AfD request for the page, stating that "the mere existence of this article [was] a damage [sic] for the credibility of the encyclopedia". The following discussion, which also hosted some heated exchanges between Talia and a few other users – including Presbite and Demiurgo, who both faced criticism for their contributions by Nicoletta Bourbaki in the past – eventually reached an almost SNOW-like consensus towards keeping the article, but while some people accused Talia and the Wu Ming collective as a whole of POV-pushing, others did raise concerns about the overall tone and accuracy of the article.

As a result, Talia himself – who did not write the report on the "train of shame", but still declared his COI editing as a member of Nicoletta Bourbaki – and many other Wikipedians have been involved in the re-writing process of the article, which is still ongoing at the time of this issue's publication. Multiple talk page discussions have been opened to discuss a few sources proposed for addition: these included a graduate thesis on "The reception of the Istrian-Dalmatian refugees between history and memory" by University of Padua student Alberto Rosada, which has been cited as a key source by Nicoletta Bourbaki in their analysis, and a recent article by author and high-school teacher Christian Raimo for progressive newspaper Domani (in Italian, behind pay-wall), where he and historian Eric Gobetti commented on the aforementioned report. – O

• For a few barnstars more: Steven Pruitt's prolificity on Wikipedia has been noted again, this time by BBC Science Focus (see prior Signpost coverage [links are just to this column; there are more, trust us]).
• Seth Meyers on Trump handshakes: On October 31, Late Night comedian Seth Meyers highlighted the Wikipedia article about Donald Trump and handshakes while talking about the meeting between the US President and Chinese leader Xi Jinping at APEC South Korea 2025; while mocking Trump, Meyers suggested a new article about Donald Trump and catapults.
• https://www.pcmag.com/news/wikipedias-most-outspoken-critic-says-grokipedia-is-full-of-ai-bullshittery
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This page is a draft for the next issue of the Signpost. Below is some helpful code that will help you write and format a Signpost draft. If it's blank, you can fill out a template by copy-pasting this in and pressing 'publish changes': {{subst:Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Story-preload}}

Images and Galleries

Sidebar images To put an image in your article, use the following template (link): I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler image-v2 |size = 300px |fullwidth = no |alt = TKTK |caption = |image = }} This will create the file on the right. Keep the 300px in most cases. If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes. Inline images Placing {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Inline image |size = 300px |align = center |alt = TKTK |caption = |image = }} (link) will instead create an inline image like below The significant thing is feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth. Galleries To create a gallery, use the following <gallery style="float:right;" mode=packed | heights=200px> |TKTK |TKTK </gallery> Each line inside the tags should be formatted like File:Whatever.jpg|Caption). This creates: Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners. It wants to have nothing further to do with the object as such, and believes that it can exist in and for itself. If you want it centered, remove tstyle="float:right;" from the first line.

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler quote-v2
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{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Quote
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{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/block quote
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Side frames

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. A caption Side frames help put content in sidebar vignettes. For instance, this one (link): {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler frame-v2 |1 = Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. |caption = A caption |fullwidth = no }} gives the frame on the right. This is useful when you want to insert non-standard images, quotes, graphs, and the like. Example − Graph/Charts Further information: Category:Graph, chart and plot templates This graph was using the legacy Graph extension, which is no longer supported. It needs to be converted to the new Chart extension. A caption For example, to insert the {{Graph:Chart}} generated by {{Graph:Chart |width=250|height=100|type=line |x=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8|y=10,12,6,14,2,10,7,9 }} in a frame, simple put the graph code in |1= {{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Filler frame-v2 |1= {{Graph:Chart |width=250|height=100|type=line |x=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8|y=10,12,6,14,2,10,7,9 }} |caption=A caption |fullwidth=no }} to get the framed Graph:Chart on the right. If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes.

{{Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Templates/Signpost-block-end-v2}}
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Article series

To add a series of 'related articles' your article, use the following code Related articles Visual Editor Five, ten, and fifteen years ago 1 January 2023 VisualEditor, endowment, science, and news in brief 5 August 2015 HTTPS-only rollout completed, proposal to enable VisualEditor for new accounts 17 June 2015 VisualEditor and MediaWiki updates 29 April 2015 Security issue fixed; VisualEditor changes 4 February 2015 More articles Draft namespace, VisualEditor meetings 25 December 2013 Sockpuppet investigations, VisualEditor, Wikidata's birthday, and more 6 November 2013 Last call for Wiki Loves Monuments; Community–WMF tension over VisualEditor 25 September 2013 Making Wikipedia more accessible 4 September 2013 Gallery improvements launch on Wikipedia 28 August 2013 The VisualEditor Beta and the path to change 31 July 2013 Defining consensus; VisualEditor default state; expert and layperson terms in article titles 31 July 2013 VisualEditor in midst of game-changing deployment series 3 July 2013 VisualEditor will "change world history" 12 June 2013 VisualEditor, elections, bots, and more 12 June 2013 The Visual Editor: Where are we now, and where are we headed? 25 March 2013 Visual Editor "on schedule" for July rollout 18 March 2013 Looking ahead to 2013 7 January 2013 The new Visual Editor gets a bit more visual 10 December 2012 Second Visual Editor prototype launches 25 June 2012 Visual editor demo launched, hailed as "most important change to our user experience ... ever"; but elsewhere over-hasty deployments criticised 19 December 2011 Full steam ahead on Visual Editor, the avoidance of lock-breaking and 1.18b1 release 7 November 2011 {{Signpost series |type = sidebar-v2 |tag = VisualEditor |seriestitle = Visual Editor |fullwidth = no }} or {{Signpost series |type = sidebar-v2 |tag = VisualEditor |seriestitle = Visual Editor |fullwidth = yes }} will create the sidebar on the right. If writing a 'full width' article, change |fullwidth=no to |fullwidth=yes. A partial list of valid |tag= parameters can be found at here and will decide the list of articles presented. |seriestitle= is the title that will appear below 'Related articles' in the box. Alternatively, you can use {{Signpost series |type = inline |tag = VisualEditor |tag_name = visual editor |tag_pretext = the }} at the end of an article to create For more Signpost coverage on the visual editor see our visual editor series. If you think a topic would make a good series, but you don't see a tag for it, or that all the articles in a series seem 'old', ask for help at the WT:NEWSROOM. Many more tags exist, but they haven't been documented yet.