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Into the A(I)pocalypse
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Spiceworks published an article that concludes "AI is quietly cannibalizing its own supply chain" of human curated information, including Wikipedia, used to train models. Spiceworks' interest? They are concerned that at some point, as AI search engines regurgitate more and more AI-derived information, and users shortcut the venues that would have resulted in corpora of interaction in the past, now users won't be able to do searches for technical help – hence the title "Is AI quietly killing the forums and wikis your IT team relies on?"
Separately, Adweek drives a similar point, in an interview of a Wikimedia Foundation executive. The Adweek article, "Inside Wikipedia's Plan to Survive the Answer Engine Apocalypse", says "ubiquity without attribution is an existential threat" to Wikipedia posed by AI driven search engine previews (like AI Overviews).
Trillion dollar freeloaders?
[edit]Ina Fried, writing in Axios, says Anthropic and OpenAI – with a combined valuation north of two trillion dollars – are not among firms with publicly acknowledged paid access to Wikimedia Foundation feed for AI model training data. Strongly hinting that they are either freeloading, or simply not discussing it if they are in fact paying. Non-human traffic, including the scrapers used by some to acquire AI training data, accounted for 65% of cache misses in 2025.[a] A new analysis of 2026 data appearing in this month's Special report suggests that humans are consuming just 33–35 percent of pageviews; bots have taken over the rest. – B
Rogue AI attempting to access (?) our infrastructure
[edit]Breaking story, to be expanded The Verge reported on unauthorized automated access to Wikimedia Foundation assets including
edits to Wikimedia wikis, "unsuccessful attempts" to "exploit" the Etherpad note-taking tool that the Wikimedia Foundation hosts, and heavy traffic that the foundation says "may" have contributed to a partial outage that happened in May…
— Jay Peters, The Verge, "Wikipedia operator says OpenAI's 'rogue' bots may be linked to a May outage", October 5, 2026
See this issue's News from Diff for the Foundation's announcement of the incident. – B
But on the brighter side
[edit]In the process of researching this article, The Signpost found a Grouse House speculative fiction animated comedy short video created by Mike Greaney, concerning Wikipedia's relationship to a future apocalypse. Released three years ago, before all the AI angst started in earnest, somehow it escaped the attention of In the media until now. Enjoy! – B
In brief
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- Wiki rabbitholes discovered in Pendleton and Umatilla: According to the East Oregonian, you can find rabbit holes almost everywhere. Author Billie Corsetti estimates that it only takes a minute for her to get distracted and click another blue link, leading to hours spent on Wikipedia.
- ...and Philly-something: https://www.broadstreetreview.com/reviews/philly-fringe-2026-noam-osband-presents-wikipedilove (Broad Street Review)
- Edit-a-thon for high school students: Troy High School students in Fullerton, California moved next door to the Cal State U, Fullerton library according to the university's student paper, Daily Titan [https://dailytitan.com/lifestyle/fullerton-high-school-students-edit-wikipedia-s-systematically-biased-stubs/article_70ca5f1a-982d-4122-87d0-56ffb5c8c43c.html
- Graphic history: "The mascots, design and visual history of Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that puts functionality above aesthetics" is an article on the mostly graphic design–focussed website It's Nice That.
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- More staying power than CB radio: History Today looks back on "25 Years of Wikipedia", transitioning from an institution that academics once disparaged by comparing it to a public lavatory, to a "grande dame" of the Internet according to no less a grande dame than The New York Times.
- FBI agent hangs probe of US President on Wikipedia article: At least in part, The Federalist says: an agent "tried to force" himself into the Crossfire Hurricane investigation that began during the presidency of Barack Obama, and emailed his boss about the Wikipedia article Chain Bridge Bank to bolster his creds.
- 9/11 429, call 911: A HTTP 429 error for some users accessing wikipedia.org on 11 September triggered a story in Hindustan Times.
- https://time.com/collection/executives-of-the-year-tech-data/2026/selena-deckelmann/
- Scam targeting Wikipedia page links: Youtuber Eric Parker uploaded a video on a scam impersonating StyleHaul, a former advertising company, known for influencer marketing campaigns. The scammers added a malicious link to the infobox, with the link originally added in May. Parker kindly removed the malicious link, and the revisions containing the link have been deleted. – M
- https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7643840/2026/09/30/notre-dame-football-rivalries-rankings/ Notre Dame Fighting Irish football rivalries, ranked
- https://gizmodo.com/wikipedia-fans-worry-the-site-is-getting-a-bad-deal-from-its-streetwear-brand-collab-2000819947 (Gizmodo)
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- World breathes a sigh of relief: Karmen Petrovic a "star" wrestler was reported dead on Google and briefly in the Wikipedia article about her (AOL). The first false report was added by a temporary acount to the article on September 30 at 00:30 (UTC) and was removed less than an hour later. Four more additions by the same editor lasted a total of about 30 minutes over the next 18 hours.
- Love monument$$$: https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/prolific-photographers-can-get-cash-from-wikipedia-for-taking-pictures-of-these-sites/ (KTLA)
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Footnotes
[edit]- ^ "65% of our most expensive traffic comes from bots" was the headline of the key section in a 2025 Wikimedia Foundation report on the subject, while "overall pageviews from bots are about 35% of the total".
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
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To put an image in your article, use the following template (link):  I understand the primacy of pure feeling in creative art. This will create the file on the right. Keep the 300px in most cases. If writing a 'full width' article, change
Placing (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.
To create a gallery, use the following Each line inside the tags should be formatted like
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To insert a framed quote like the one on the right, use this template (link): If writing a 'full width' article, change
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Side frames help put content in sidebar vignettes. For instance, this one (link): gives the frame on the right. This is useful when you want to insert non-standard images, quotes, graphs, and the like. If writing a 'full width' article, change |
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If you keep the 'normal' preloaded draft and work from there, you will be using the two-column style. This is perfectly fine in most cases and you don't need to do anything. However, every time you have a However, you can also fine-tune which style is used at which point in an article. To switch from two-column → full width style midway in an article, insert where you want the switch to happen. To switch from full width → two-column style midway in an article, insert where you want the switch to happen. |
Links and such
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