Thirty percent of the articles are due to the death of Hef. Hefner himself placed at #1, his wife at #2, and his first child six spaces below at #7. As far as entertainment goes, the debut of Star Trek: Discovery placed it at #3, It at #4, and Kingsman at #10. In addition, Megan Markel, a fruit of rumors got pushed up to #8. Disasters (#5) and Deaths (#6) went hand in hand again with one just above the other.

For the week of September 24 to 30, 2017, the 10 most popular articles on Wikipedia, as determined from the WP:5000 report were:

Facebook is enlisting Wikipedia in its ongoing fight against fake news. The new tool, announced October 5, 2017 uses Wikipedia to provide context about news articles. For example, if an article by Associated Press comes up, clicking on a small 'I' will bring up "The Associated Press (AP) is an American multinational nonprofit news agency headquartered in New York City that operates as a cooperative, uninc ..." The feature is now being tested in the United States, France, the Netherlands, and Germany.

The move comes after fact checkers enlisted by Facebook (such as Le Monde) complained about a lack of context. "I would say that the general lack of information — not only data — given by Facebook is a concern for a majority of publishers", wrote Adrien Sénéca to Politico. It was criticized by some, as the first paragraph to a Wikipedia article can be changed by just about anyone, and still show up on Facebook.

This is the most recent development in Facebook's fight against fake news. For many years, and increasingly since the United States presidential election, 2016, Facebook has been seen as complacent in the fake news world. After the election, Facebook enlisted PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, Snopes.com, the AP and ABC News to patrol news on the platform in the US. In addition, since March users can flag fake news, and algorithms are working on detecting it. (Reported by Mashable and reported by Tech Crunch)

Jill Bialosky was quick to defend herself from accusations that she plagiarized content in her new memoir Poetry Will Save Your Life from the websites of the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Foundation and, of all places, Wikipedia. When William Logan reviewed Bialosky's new memoir, he was quick to point out a few things. Logan noticed that many of the author biographies had been apparently plagiarized, saying:

Worse, she has plagiarized numerous passages from Wikipedia and the websites of the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Foundation. Her borrowings are highlighted in bold.

Wikipedia on Robert Lowell:

Although Lowell's manic depression was often a great burden (for himself and his family), the subject of that mental illness led to some of his most important poetry, particularly as it manifested itself in his book Life Studies. When he was fifty, Lowell began taking lithium to treat his mental illness.

Bialosky on Lowell:

Although Lowell's manic depression was a great burden for him and his family, the exploration of mental illness in his verse led to some of his most important poetry, particularly as it manifested itself in Life Studies. When he was fifty, Lowell began taking lithium to treat his mental illness.

Logan even found that Bialosky had plagiarized another author:

Helen Vendler in Last Looks, Last Books on Plath's "Poppies in October":

Plath, under a wintry dawn sky . . . , finds herself on a street where poppies are for sale and where businessmen wearing bowler hats are walking by while an ambulance hurtles past, carrying a hemorrhaging woman.

Bialosky on "Poppies in October":

Under a wintery sky, she finds herself on a street where poppies are for sale and businessmen wearing bowler hats and an ambulance carrying a bleeding woman pass by.

This is just the latest development in a long history of plagiarism from Wikipedia. In 2015, Oxford University Press was discovered to have copied directly from Wikipedia. In 2014, an article on Piero di Cosimo written by The New York Times lifted most of its first paragraph straight from Wikipedia. BuzzFeed also suffered from a serial plagiarist. In 2013, Rand Paul took some sentences from Wikipedia. In 2010, Michel Houellebecq revealed that he had lifted parts of his book from Wikipedia. "If these people really think that [this is plagiarism], they haven't got the first notion of what literature is", he said. [Compare No true Scotsman?] "This is part of my method. This approach, muddling real documents and fiction, has been used by many authors. I have been influenced especially by [Georges] Perec and [Jorge Luis] Borges... I hope that this contributes to the beauty of my books, using this kind of material." Jane Goodall, ESPN, Tim Ryan, The United States Department of Defense, Chris Anderson have all plagiarized Wikipedia. (Reviewed in Tourniquet Review & Reported in The New York Times)

On March 8, 2017, sociologist Nicola Malizia published her article: "A social problem: individual and group rape" in the predatory journal Advances in Applied Sociology.^{[note 1]} Malizia is affiliated with University of Enna "Kore" in Enna, Italy. During a talk page discussion on the article, where the veracity of this source was evaluated, editors discovered that a large amount of material was taken verbatim from WP's Rape article. The journal states that the content of the article is copyrighted by the publisher and the author but has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). (Published in Advances in Applied Sociology)

• Tajikistan Demands Wikipedia "correct spelling mistakes": The state language committee of Tajikistan has threatened legal action over spelling mistakes in the Tajik language Wikipedia; the committee "warns the errors violate the country's state-language law and therefore make Wikipedia legally liable for the mistakes." (Reported by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)
• The Wikipedia of "being wrong": Everipedia is, in their own telling, a dynamic fork of Wikipedia. This means that they copied Wikipedia's articles, and expanded on them. Unfortunately, it also has a history of being wrong. They have multiple times created articles on people who simply don't exist. Most recently, they have mis-identified the man behind the 2017 Las Vegas Strip shooting as Geary Danley, and the white supremacist in Charlottesville as Joel Vangheluwe. (Reported by The Outline)
• Free Wikipedia: Roshan, a leading Afghan telecommunications provider serving nearly 6.0 million active subscribers, recently announced that they would provide free access to Wikipedia, without charging for mobile data for a year. (Reported by Khaama Press)

The WMF have published the fundraising report for 2016–2017. US$91 million was raised from 6.1 million donations – an increase of $13.8 million over the 2015–2016 total. The designated place for public discussion of the report, clarifications of finance, conspiracy theories, or calls for the Wikimedia Foundation or wiki community to attract or repel donors is at Meta-Wiki. Comments or rants about spending rather than the income are accepted annually on the latest page for the annual plans; 2017-18 is closed but watch Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan to comment in the next round. Other opportunities to inspect finances and speak up include reviewing Wikimedia community grant applications, overseeing the activities and finances of Wikimedia chapters and usergroups, or doing your own investigative journalism and writing for The Signpost.

After many months and cycles of discussions, a strategic direction has emerged from the 2017 Movement strategy:

Our strategic direction: Service and Equity

By 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us.

We, the Wikimedia contributors, communities and organizations, will advance our world by collecting knowledge that fully represents human diversity, and by building the services and structures that enable others to do the same.

We will carry on our mission of developing content as we have done in the past, and we will go further.

Knowledge as a service: To serve our users, we will become a platform that serves open knowledge to the world across interfaces and communities. We will build tools for allies and partners to organize and exchange free knowledge beyond Wikimedia. Our infrastructure will enable us and others to collect and use different forms of free, trusted knowledge.

Knowledge equity: As a social movement, we will focus our efforts on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege. We will welcome people from every background to build strong and diverse communities. We will break down the social, political, and technical barriers preventing people from accessing and contributing to free knowledge.

— Meta:Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017/Direction

Comments and criticisms, on the final and previous versions, proliferate the talk page.

Endorsements will be sought on 26 October, with discussions on implementation to begin in November.

On Friday 20 October 2017 Katherine Maher announced that the Wikimedia Foundation had shifted location. The current Wikimedia Foundation headquarters is at One Montgomery Tower in the Financial District of San Francisco, a 10-minute walk from the previous location. One reason for the new location was to move into a smaller space.

• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrators, Megalibrarygirl and TonyBallioni. Both were supported by more than 200 Wikipedians in their requests for adminship.
• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of the newest Wikimedia movement affiliates, Open Foundation West Africa and Wikimedia Community User Group Malaysia.
• Milestones: The following Wikipedia projects reached milestones: 2,000: Russian Buryat (25 September 2017); 50,000: Luxembourgish (10 September 2017).
• Milhist milestone: WikiProject Military history recently surpassed 1,000 featured articles in the project's scope, which is approximately one fifth of all FAs on the English Wikipedia.

From 14–18 August 2017 a group of 35 offline Wikipedia enthusiasts convened at the OFF.NETWORK Content Hackathon to advance Kiwix and its distribution of offline Wikipedia in the Internet-in-a-Box device. (See previous Signpost coverage) The goal of the meeting was to develop Kiwix and complementary projects enough to make it possible for anyone to be able to:

1. load a Kiwix package onto a Raspberry Pi;
2. deploy that Raspberry Pi to a place without consistent inexpensive Internet access; and
3. expect that anyone nearby with an Android cell phone should be able to connect to the Raspberry Pi's network and begin browsing offline Wikipedia articles within one minute, with no further instructions except "please connect to the Wi-Fi".

The outcomes of this meeting included technical development of Kiwix software, decisions on device hardware, designing content packages, framing of the social and ethical challenges, and planning for deployment of more devices by the end of the first half of 2018.

Kiwix is a software application which provides offline access to Wikipedia and Wikimedia content. To read content in Kiwix, users download the content package of their choice on their device. Being stored locally, they can afterwards check it anytime without having to worry about connectivity (or censorship, in some countries). Various packages of Kiwix exist and vary by the slice of content which they contain. All Wikimedia projects are available for download (in any language), with size ranging from 60 GB for the full English Wikipedia (20 GB without media files) to 0.2 GB for a smaller project like the Haitian Creole Wikipedia. Thematic packages, such as Wikipedia's medical information (51,000 articles in English, 4 GB with media files, 452 MB without) are also increasingly available as more users curate collections of Wikipedia articles sized to match to mobile devices' storage limitations.

But how about sharing content through even more portable means? Current experiments are testing a device called Internet-in-a-Box, which is a Raspberry Pi and a microSD card combo device running Kiwix. Persons with a typical smartphone or laptop within range can access the Internet-in-a-Box network at Wi-Fi speed without having to download anything on their own machine.

Event organizers Martin Walker (User:Walkerma) of WikiProject Chemicals and Adam Holt of Internet-in-a-Box invited all attendees to convene after Wikimania Montreal at nearby SUNY Potsdam. In addition to editing wiki, Martin also is a professor in the Chemistry Department at that university. The event was significant for accomplishing technological fixes and facilitating discussions among offline education advocates, developers, and content experts including health care providers.

Although anyone may package any Wikipedia content in Kiwix, at this event, there was particular enthusiasm to share medical content following a successful pilot deployment of Kiwix in the Dominican Republic earlier in 2017. All attendees at the event took on multiple roles and had conversations with the other attendees regardless of their fields of expertise. This meant that the hardware designers talked with physicians and software developers talked with experts on technology deployment in the developing world.

What follows is more detailed documentation of hackathon proceedings. Each of the four days included an hour of prepared presentations. Video recordings of those presentations are here below with descriptions. Slides are evident in the videos but some original slidesets are also in Commons:Category:Offline Hackathon 2017. All in-person attendees had the option to give statements on video to tell any story about why they cared about the project, what they hoped to achieve, or simply what they were currently doing. Their statements are below, with presenters divided into groups by technical development, content, and deployment for offline access.

• Day 1
• Day 2
• Day 3
• Day 4

The technical developers wanted the Kiwix package to be accessible to the broadest range of users. Their challenges included developing essential features like support for various operating systems, considering requested features like search improvements, and being sufficiently diplomatic in an open source community where tens of volunteer contributors want their requests respectfully addressed.

Accomplishments at this event from this team included configuration of the Pibox installer, enabling search across ZIM files through Kolibri, packaging the readable files with WikiFundi for offline editing, publishing thoughts on "Hacking solutions for offline access", and producing documentation for setting up a Kiwix server.

• Stephane Coillet-Matillon (User:Stephane (Kiwix)) on Kiwix (from Wikimania)
• Julian Harty on deployment of technology to new users
• George Hunt on the falling prices of hardware
• Guillaume on the Kiwix installer
• Ivan Savov on the fast pace of writing code
• Tim Moody on the interoperability of file cataloging and sharing systems
• Subramanya Sastry User:SSastry (WMF) on parsing
• Isaac Hutt (user:Mhutti1) on adapting Kiwix for Android

The participants who had content wanted it made available to the largest, most relevant audience. Their challenges included limiting the size of the information packages to the capacity of the device's storage, devising ways to explain the device's utility to potential supportive organizations, and choosing non-wiki complementary content which the devices might include – such as Khan Academy materials, research journal abstracts, technical databases, and government medical treatment guideline sets.

Discussion in the content team began with reviewing friendly space policy with emphasis on the rule about "providing a welcoming experience for everyone, regardless of... preferred free license". Accomplishments at this event from this team included organizing debates about what content to include, reviews of what content similar projects like One Laptop per Child included, the circumstances under which we might distribute gratis but not libre content like Khan Academy materials or government-provided resources like medical or agriculture guidelines.

• Lane Rasberry (user:bluerasberry) on editor recruitment
• Martin Walker (user:Walkerma) on article ratings
• James Heilman (User:Doc James) on offline medical content
• Samuel Zidovetzki (User:Zidovetz) on physician access to info
• Indira Gowda on the hackathon itself
• Don Watkins on Wikidata in disaster response

The deployment team wanted the device to reach end users in a way that is both useful and which avoids potential harm. Their challenges included planning to get sufficient user feedback without disturbance or privacy violation, continually describing that users needed easier access, and making plans to send their devices through their social networks when the project matures to the point of general use.

Accomplishments included establishing a group understanding on the challenges of sharing technology in the developing world, reviewing lessons learned from the One Laptop per Child project, publishing "How WikiFundi is helping people in Africa contribute to Wikipedia", and identifying unresolved ethical questions about funding, privacy, fair distribution, and long-term support.

• Florence Devouard (User:Anthere) on WikiFundi for offline editing
• Gabriel Thullen (user:GastelEtzwane) on deployment in Africa
• Josh Dennis on deployment in Myanmar
• César López on deployment in Mexico
• Michael Graaf on deployment in South Africa
• SJ Klein (user:Sj) on the legacy of One Laptop per Child
• Anne Gomez (User:AGomez (WMF)) on new readers
• Daniel Mietchen (user:Daniel Mietchen) on Wikipedia in crisis response