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

The Times (UK) reports "How Epstein scrubbed 2008 sex crime conviction from the internet" by "hiring a team of hackers to remove negative information about him on Wikipedia and Google". Based on the latest set of files released by the US Department of Justice, it quotes Epstein's PR team telling him:

Wikipedia was an important victory, as it will always be at the top of the search engine results. [...] We have stopped the hacking on your wiki site, and that was a major effort. Your wiki entry now is pretty tame, and bad stuff has been muted, bowlerized [sic], and pused [sic] to the bottom.

The edits described by The Times (examples: [1], [2], [3], [4]; removal of the sex offender category was reverted by JodyB) were performed by an IP, 71.165.127.242. According to The Times, the work was done by Al Seckel, the husband of Ghislaine Maxwell's sister Isabel.

The Times describes Seckel as "a writer and self-styled expert in optical illusions who co-founded a group called the Southern California Skeptics that investigated science's relationship to the paranormal" and who was found dead "in mysterious circumstances" in 2015.

The work on Epstein's Wikipedia article appears to have been well paid:

Seckel chased up payment for his work and Epstein complained about the cost. "I was never told never, that there was a 10k fee per month„ you inittaly [sic] said the project would take 20.. then another 10. then another 10" he wrote in one message.

Quite apart from anything else, it is astonishing, after 25 years of Wikipedia, to see a mainstream newspaper like The Times describe people making changes to a publicly editable encyclopaedia as "hackers". – AK

Boing Boing found list of lists of lists – containing lists of metalloids, lists of Atlantic hurricanes, lists of Category 5 hurricanes, lists of tornadoes and tornado outbreaks, lists of physics equations, lists of celebrities, lists of centenarians, lists of deaths, lists of ethnic groups, lists of heroes, and lists of LGBTQ people – is "technically practical but also function[s] as conceptual joke" showing how Wikipedia is "obsessively organized, slightly absurd, and self-aware enough to know it."

In Russell's paradox fashion, the list of lists of lists contains itself, a fact noted by Boing Boing. – B

In Communication Arts, the ad agency kin explains how the "Knowledge is Human" campaign, which they call a docuseries, was developed for Wikimedia Foundation.

See prior Signpost coverage of the 25th anniversary, including some bits about the Foundation's own promotion. – B

Xikipedia is a web based Simple English Wikipedia reader that presents an environment that many media noticed and called "doomscrolling" or other related terms. Coverage included AV Club, Boing Boing, Engadget, Gizmodo, Ground News, Hacker News, Let's Data Science, and Stuff (South Africa).

We weren't sure what to make of it at The Signpost until the author, Wikipedian Rebane2001, actually contacted the Signpost team pre-publication. They said the project is "art/commentary on modern social media algorithms", that it's different from the infinite scrolling, but random WikiTok by virtue of having a "feed [that] adjusts based on which 'posts' you like", and pointed us to this GitHub readme for more details. – B

Campus Reform claims "A University of California, Berkeley professor tasks students with editing and creating Wikipedia articles about 'queer and trans people of color' instead of taking final exams" and has screenshots of WikiEd dashboards included in their piece. See prior Signpost coverage of the coursework (without dashboards) under the heading "300,000 edits, 3,000 refs, 96 million views". If you're wondering what the problem is, let's just say Campus Reform took issue with some of the topics the students chose, and maybe the fact that the prof "frames the project as a form of opposition to the Trump administration". – B

• Subtitle: "Wikipedia, Qatar, and the Future of Knowledge" Algemeiner Journal (New York)
• Another film "like a Wikipedia entry", and...: says The Telegraph of a boy band docu ... feels like we've been here before. Oh! because we were.
• ...so soon again? Lazy films like Wikipedia entries: Here's a shot at biopics like Wikipedia pages, this time with a stinging "lazy" thrown in by The Times of India.
• Subtitle: "Epstein jail cell pics and Trump Wikipedia page included in newly released files" (The Independent)
• Subtitle: "At Age 25, Wikipedia Refuses to Evolve – The digital commons champion faces a crisis of its own making" by Wikipedian and academic Dariusz Jemielniak (IEEE Spectrum via Google News)
• Subtitle: https://www.jns.org/extreme-anti-zionists-taking-over-wikipedia-former-us-official-says/
• Subtitle: Wikimedia España partnered with Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias for a February 13 edit-a-thon for women in science – astronomy and astrophysics specifically [5].
• Time zones are a thing, and so are fake images: Confusion over time zones used in India and UTC used in Wikipedia edit history fueled a conspiracy theory around the death of Indian politician Ajit Pawar, who died in a 28 January aviation accident. Or maybe it was a faked screenshot including "20666" as the year of the incident. We need to get Snopes on this ... [6] (WIO News)
• Subtitle: "Ugandan Wikimedians urge government action against misinformation, cultural erasure" (New Vision, Uganda) – requesting open access to public data and other reforms in the control of the government
• In the future, will people still be reading this featured list?: Timeline of the far future is interesting to Boing Boing, as it was to other media in past years (see prior Signpost coverage (2016) and more prior Signpost coverage (2025)). People are just interested in the year 10¹⁰⁶, apparently.

• Subtitle: "where creativity may be heading next" needs to be shaped by an upside for trust-based platforms like Wikipedia and revenue-sharing models like YouTube's – but faces problems with "an [AI] extraction layer that absorbs creative work without preserving its lineage or sharing in the value it creates". (Muse by Clios, "What AI Can Learn from YouTube and Wikipedia").
• Slopping Stopping the slop-generator: Wikipedians building works in languages other than English are "both populating and fighting the world's regional language AI engines" (Rest of World, "The volunteer Wikipedia army protecting against AI slop").
• Subtitle: In a Stanford University Human-Centered AI (HAI)/data science conference ... Wikimedia Enterprise executive unfinished (The Stanford Daily [7])
• Love it or hate it?: A debate over the continued suitability of archive.today was reviewed by Ars Technica. The focus of the story is Wikipedians' reactions to a claim that archive.today's operator used the site to launch a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack from its users' browsers.
• Don't say Hah-vuhd: https://hbr.org/2026/02/lifes-work-an-interview-with-jimmy-wales unfinished (Harvard Business Review)
• Ambassador can't run under the radar: "Peter Mandelson's Wikipedia page was edited repeatedly by an anonymous user who was later banned for making paid edits" (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism [8]) Mandelson is a former British ambassador to the United States whose Wikipedia biography contains a section titled "Jeffrey Epstein scandal and dismissal".
• Soft open: "China's Baidu unveils AI-driven Wikipedia challenger in bid for international users" (South China Morning Post) BaiduWiki went live around 9 February, with English and other editions AI translated from Baidu Baike.
• Why do you assume you're the smartest in the room, Grok?: Whereas Columbia Journalism Review says Wikipedia's text comes from "an army of humans [who] provide clarification and updates, in dialogue with one another", a media researcher at University of Massachusetts Amherst calls challenger Grokipedia "a vertically integrated, centrally controlled knowledge production system" and its "decision-making dialogue [is] with itself".

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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 |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.
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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.