• These lists exclude the Wikipedia main page, non-article pages (such as redlinks), and anomalous entries (such as DDoS attacks or likely automated views). Since mobile view data became available to the Report in October 2014, we exclude articles that have almost no mobile views (5–6% or less) or almost all mobile views (94–95% or more) because they are very likely to be automated views based on our experience and research of the issue. Please feel free to discuss any removal on the Top 25 Report talk page if you wish.

"Wikipedia's Plan to Resist Election Day Misinformation" by Noam Cohen in Wired features the story of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) appearing on the TV news show Meet the Press with a sticker or campaign button in the background saying simply "86 45". US President Trump's campaign staff tweeted that the sticker meant that she was "encouraging assassination attempts against President Trump," with 86 apparently meaning kill and 45 referring to the 45th president – Trump. To prove that 86 means "kill", they tweeted a screen shot of the Wikipedia article 86 (term), which said that "killing someone" was one of the definitions of 86. Wikipedia's reaction was to first remove that definition as unsourced. Once a source was found, the main definition was expanded and the following words included: "The term is now more generally used to get rid of someone or something. In the 1970s its meaning expanded to refer to murder." Cohen does not mention that an editor was warned for edit warring when they tried multiple times to include the original wording, and then banned indefinitely.

Going further, the Wired article examines Wikipedia's plans to reduce political misinformation, especially on election night, November 3. The 2020 United States presidential election article is now extended confirmed protected. Admins Drmies, GorillaWarfare and Muboshgu were interviewed about their plans to protect other US political articles on election night and alert other admins and editors to watch those articles closely. – S, B

• "Why Did It Take So Long for the Democratic Senate Candidate in Iowa to Get a Wikipedia Page?" by Stephen Harrison in the October 27 Slate tackles the recent controversy over the notability of Theresa Greenfield, an Iowa Senate candidate who lacked a page until a few days ago. Jimbo Wales waded into the controversy, invoking IAR in support. Harrison smartly avoids the tempting but false frame of the issue as one of gender bias, instead delivering a welcomingly nuanced dive into notability policy. He doesn't hold back, however, when it comes to the flaws with AfC and Wikipedia bureaucracy. – Sdkb
• "Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield finally got her Wikipedia page. Here's why it took so long." Also published on October 27, by Sverrir Steinsson in the Washington Post, the article covers the same facts, starting his analysis with Wikipedia's complicated rules. He concludes that there's logic in the slow way Wikipedia works, rather than flaws in its organizational model. Because of the wide range of views among the large number of Wikipedians, strong rules are needed, resulting in a status quo bias. Institutional change therefore must be gradual.

"The Internet should be more like Wikipedia", by Stephen Gossett in Built In is formally a book review of Wikipedia @ 20. It takes three or four topics from the 22 chapter book and runs with them. The first topic is misinformation and disinformation. The main target of the Russian troll factory might have been expected to "be something like Wikipedia, because it's just a hardscrabble, bare-bones crew of people who are kind of keeping the wheels from falling off the thing," according to Brian Keegan, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado–Boulder who contributed a chapter on breaking news to the book. Part of Keegan's answer to why this didn't happen is Wikipedia's social production model. Wikipedia's differences from Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are emphasized such as not having ads, not striving to keep its readers engaged on the the site at all costs, its "strong editorial identity," and a commitment to a neutral point of view (NPOV).

Wikipedia @ 20 co-editor Jackie Koerner is briefly interviewed and points out that NPOV is sometimes in opposition to justice and covering all points of view in matters of race and gender, where reliable sources haven't properly recorded the views of the oppressed. Gossett skips quickly to the topic of artificial intelligence and notes that Wikipedia uses AI to assist its editors rather than replace them.

Wikipedia's future challenges are explained starting with gender equality and "pedantic bureaucracy". Gossett makes a brave attempt to give his readers a taste of the book, but readers will find many more topics than these in the book itself. – S

"What We Know and Can Agree On: Wikipedia at 20" by veteran British journalist Simon Garfield in Esquire surveys Wikipedia as it is about to turn 20 years old in January. It should not be confused with the newly published book Wikipedia @ 20, though both extensively cover the history of Wikipedia. Garfield's article starts with a rollicking tour of Wikimania – though it's an idealized version with colorful details patched together from history. The article ends with a history of encyclopedias, with some emphasis on Britannica.

A too short interview with Jimmy Wales elicits the fact that he is a "passionate chef". Jimbo has now found at least one interviewer who listens to him without imposing their own preconceptions. Jimbo explains Wikipedia's governance system:

We are humans, and people do get into arguments, and people who 'aren't here to build an encyclopaedia' show up to push an agenda, or to troll or harass. And dealing with those cases requires a great deal of calm and sensible judgment. It requires building robust institutions and mechanisms. If we were to deal with some problems in the community by allowing the Wikimedia Foundation to become like other internet institutions (Twitter comes to mind), where policing the site for bad behaviour is taken out of the hands of the community, we'd end up like Twitter — unscalable, out of control, a cesspool.

WMF Executive Director Katherine Maher is more extensively interviewed. Most of Maher's interview won't surprise Wikipedians who have followed her career, except perhaps in the detail and clarity of expression. Nevertheless there is an odd detour into epistemology:

I don't think Wikipedia represents truth. I think it represents what we know or can agree on at any point in time. This doesn't mean that it's inaccurate, it just means that the concept of truth has sort of a different resonance. When I think about what knowledge is ... what Wikipedia offers is context. And that is what differentiates it from similar data or original research, not that that isn't vital to us.

Garfield did slip up on a few things. He notes that "an early article on the poodle ... stated simply, 'A dog by which all others are measured'", but seems to have missed the joke: the title of the article was "Standard Poodle". (See here and here (#8) for more about the joke.)

More seriously, he asserts that "On 2 October 2018, [Donna] Strickland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics ... But good luck trying to find more information on her on Wikipedia the day after the announcement." Actually, a new article was started on Strickland's article early that morning, and by afternoon ran to 3500 words. It got more than 100,000 pageviews on the day of the announcement.

The odd misstatement aside, Garfield's article is a wonderfully readable, in-depth view of Wikipedia's first 20 years. It captures Jimmy Wales's and Katherine Maher's views without the usual preconceptions. And, as with Wikipedia itself, there will be much more content to read in similar articles as we approach Wikipedia's birthday. – S

In "Wikipedia bans editors from expressing support for traditional marriage" the author comments on the deletion of a user box that read "This user believes that marriage is the union between one man and one woman," plus 18 similar userboxes, following comments by Larry Sanger and the right-wing online newspaper Breitbart. Adam Cuerden started the 4th nomination at MfD with the consensus reached that the boxes were hate speech which members of the LGBT+ community found threatening. Some !voters referred to other "political" userboxes, such as those about Black Lives Matter. Admin Ad Orientem resigned after the close. – S

Since last month's coverage in this column ("Both parties agree, curb Section 230"), a journalism professor, a former WMF lawyer, and a Supreme Court Justice have weighed in on the likely changes to Section 230. There could be dangerous water ahead for Wikipedia. – S

• "Are You Sure Section 230 Is What's Bothering You?" by Andres Martinez.
• "Clarence Thomas Is Begging Someone to Sue Over Conservatives' Most-Hated Internet Law" by Mike Godwin, former WMF general counsel.
• "Supreme Court, Orders in Pending Cases" Clarence Thomas (following page 11).

"The Wikipedia Battle Over the Tragic Death of a Bollywood Star" by Stephen Harrison in Slate covers the conspiracy theories surrounding Bollywood star Sushant Singh Rajput. The Wikipedia article was viewed 11.5 million times in the week after his apparent suicide. But was he 6 feet 0 inches (1.83 m) tall or 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m)? Did he suffer from depression or was his mood caused by poisoning? Most curious of all, did Wikipedia report his death hours before he died? As if to confirm the bizarre controversy described by Harrison, 5 days later Republicworld.com published "'Sushant Singh Rajput Was Murdered; Please Change His Wikipedia Status,' Demands Petition". – S

"Wikipedia and W.H.O. Join to Combat Covid Misinformation:" The New York Times reports that the World Health Organization is now working with Wikipedia editors to update COVID-19 information into almost 200 languages, rather than just the organization's 6 official languages. W.H.O. is allowing free use of some of its published information, graphics and videos under the CC-BY 3.0 license; a portal has been set up on Wikimedia Commons where Wikimedians can suggest specific assets to be made available. Ryan Merkley was quoted saying that the participants hope that the arrangement can be extended in the future to "AIDS, Ebola, influenza, polio and dozens of other diseases." A press release from W.H.O. says they are trying to prevent an "infodemic" which includes "the rapid spread of misleading or fabricated news".

On October 24, a man was arrested in the city of Zhoushan, China for reading Wikipedia using a VPN (virtual private network) tool to circumvent the block of Wikipedia in the country, according to a note published on the website of the government of Zhejiang province (since removed, but preserved at the Wayback Machine). US-based journalist Tony Zy highlighted the case on Twitter, observing that "while using VPN has been deemed illegal in China, this is a rare case for the gov to specifically disclose what the VPN is used for: reading wikipedia for research. ... No matter how comfortable you're with using VPN in China, it is a dangling sword hanging over everyone's head." Radio Free Asia subsequently published an article with more details about the case ("China Now Has The Ability to Track Internet Users Who 'Scale The Wall'"). According to the police report, the man had used the Lantern circumvention tool to "make repeated, illegal queries on the Wikipedia website" on his mobile phone. After being taken to the police station and detained, he "received an administrative penalty, a warning, and an order to cease and desist from connecting to websites outside China". It also mentioned that he had downloaded Lantern following a Baidu search, raising the question whether this China-based search engine is the safest way to find and install such tools.

In a discussion on the Chinese Wikipedia about whether and how to react, some editors proposed to publish a community statement condemning this incident, or a warning to readers, and other argued that such actions might be counterproductive or overtly political. – H

The relationship of Wikipedia to the U.S. electorate gained some attention this month. – B

• Will the mystery editor of Jeanne Ives please stand up: "As Local News Dies, a Pay-for-Play Network Rises in Its Place" (The New York Times). Politicians in the U.S. have their Wikipedia articles burnished? Say it ain't so. Compare to The Times of Israel's description of a "transnational uncivil society" — a network of paid Western enablers who help corrupt political operatives and business people launder their reputations worldwide covered elsewhere in this column.
• NPOV violation: "There's nothing neutral about Wikipedia" (The Spectator)
• Buttoned up and hunkered down: "Wikipedia buttons up key pages ahead of U.S. election" (Reuters)
• Wikis, or it isn't real: "How to spot and fight election disinformation: a voter's guide": "If you see a particularly dramatic political article from a news site you've never heard of before: Does it have an About Us page? Does it have a mailing address at the bottom? Does it have a Wikipedia page? These are some markers of real news sites that you'll want to look out for." (ProPublica via The Cincinnati Inquirer)

• More hot stuff in the New York Times: In "To Learn the Truth, Read My Wikipedia Entry on Sichuan Peppers" Mary Mann (User:Mozby), a librarian and writer, explains how she got hooked on Sichuan peppers and editing Wikipedia.
• "Wikipedia probe exposes an Israeli stealth PR firm that worked for scammers": Simona Weinglass in The Times of Israel starts her exposé of the paid editing firm Percepto (formerly Veribo) with a summary of last month's Signpost story, "Paid editing with political connections", written by one of the authors of this column.
• "Wikipedia is a crowdsourcing miracle. But can we trust it?": On NPR station KUOW (Seattle), Richard Cooke – the author of an article in Wired magazine – gives a densely packed interview on misinformation/disinformation, and wiki-lawyers. "All information, especially online, has to be read critically... You've got to walk a tightrope between on the one hand celebrating Wikipedia and on the other still approaching it with skepticism and care ... it just is of a scale that the quality information outweighs the misinformation. In some ways we're not comparing it to Encyclopedia Britannica anymore, but comparing it to the rest of the Internet." (13:00 minute segment)
• Israel and the Intifada "The Second Intifada Still Rages on Wikipedia" (subscription required), Haaretz: "For almost 20 years, Wikipedia has documented the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Attempts to keep the peace in the narrative war between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian editors now shape how the online encyclopedia deals with all conflicts."
• Halloween spoiler alert "Something Wikipedia This Way Comes": "Wikipedia is how I experienced the most grisly moments in movies like Saw ('...with a cigarette dipped in the corpse's tainted blood...'), Final Destination ('...whose house explodes after she is impaled by a falling kitchen knife...'), Hellraiser ('the blood resurrects Frank as a skinless corpse...'), and Event Horizon ('...a video log of the Event Horizon's crew fornicating and mutilating each other'...). No jump scares. No shrieking violin soundtracks. No scary images. No scarring images. My curiosity is satiated. I can walk away with my mind unscathed and my pants unsoiled. That's the power of spoilers." (Northwest Inlander (Spokane, Washington))
• "8 reasons to use Wikipedia in teaching and learning." (University of Cape Town News)
• "Wiki Loves Earth-2020: 3 photos by Biplob among top 10 Bangladeshi entries" (The Daily Star (Bangladesh))
• "It's the world's biggest photography contest" in The Boston Globe about Wiki Loves Monuments.

• "Monday is Indigenous Peoples Day in Decorah, which is Why You Should Know the History of Chief Waukon Decorah". The Decorah, Iowa, newspaper celebrated Indigenous Peoples' Day, more traditionally known as Columbus Day, with a summary of the life of Chief Decorah taken from the Wikipedia article (with attribution). Indigenous Peoples' Day has been officially celebrated in Iowa since last year. It's an interesting story, especially the part where townsfolk thought they were reinterring the Chief's remains, even though others believed he was still alive. Wikipedia is always glad to help in these situations.
• What if Canada invaded Alaska?: Must Read Alaska celebrated Alaska Day on October 18 by speculating about what would have happened if Canada invaded then Russian-owned Alaska in the 1850s or 1860s. A national health care system and more hockey on television, they conclude. The speculation was fueled by the Wikipedia article on the Alaska purchase which contains a quote from Grand Duke Konstantin urging the sale to prevent an American invasion.
• Wacky in Altoona: "Going wacky for Wikipedia" in Altoona, Pennsylvania. The Altoona Mirror gives direct evidence that at least one person there has too much time on his hands. Drive-by factoids include Hedda and DeWolf Hopper, sore throats, farrago, and Clint Eastwood's many romantic relationships.

• The great Wikipedia novel: Journalist Stephen Harrison – see two of his current stories above – is writing a work of fiction about an internet encyclopedia named Infopendium during a pandemic. The novel couldn't possibly work in theory: what could be more boring for most folks than reading about people who write encyclopedia entries for fun? In reality there's a new adventure on almost every page, and it's hard to stop reading as you fall down the rabbit hole.

Tentatively titled Infodemic, it involves hired-gun editors, a crusading journalist, and several characters who Wikipedians might think they recognize. While the characters are clearly fictionalized composites of real Wikipedians, you might think you can identify User:Prospero and Doc Luke, but be prepared for surprises as you read on. Railfan and DejaNu are a bit harder to guess, as there are so many Wikipedians who share some of their characteristics. Are you one of them? What journalists may want to know most is who is the main character Morgan? Five sample chapters are available here – S

• "The Wikipedia Nation: 5 Educational Platforms for Everyone" in qrius, formerly the Indian Economist, covers Coursera, MasterClass, TED, YouTube, and Wikipedia. As it is written for people just starting their journey on educating themselves via the internet, there are few surprises for Wikipedians here, though they may have finally answered the question, "Who are Wikipedia's competitors?"

Disclosure: the author Érico actively participated in the discussions on ptwiki

In early October ptwiki banned editing by unregistered editors, who are often called anonymous or IP editors. The ban is already being implemented.

The issue has been debated many times since the beginning of Portuguese Wikipedia and has always been very controversial. In recent years the ptwiki community came to an unofficial common understanding that vandalism by IP editors was out of control. IPs were responsible for 85% of vandalism. Despite all the anti-vandalism systems being used, from Huggle to dozens of editing filters, vandalism was no longer being effectively controlled.

The project routinely received complaints that vandalism remained in articles not just for days or months, but for years. It was rare to see IP editors making useful edits within the rules. The community discussed the topic and decided to vote on the subject. More than 70% of voters were in favor of preventing edits from IPs in the main domain and 82% were in favor of preventing article creation by IPs.

This was one of the largest and most decisive votes in the project's history: 169 votes in favor, 69 votes against. The community then contacted the WMF Board of Trustees to argue in favor of the new rule. The WMF has not responded so far, but neither have they interfered. It is not necessary for the WMF to take action, as IP edits are being prohibited through edit filters and IP range blocks.

One community concern is that there could be other interference from people outside the community, who might not listen to their concerns. Such interference has happened before with the developers community, which simply said that banning IP editors was impossible - "this isn't going to happen." Can someone with no experience on ptwiki say "it is simply not possible to ban IPs"? Since the ban was carried out, there has been a substantial increase in creation of accounts and vandalism rates have decreased significantly, allowing editors to spend their energies creating and referencing articles. – É

The government of the Republic of Tatarstan, part of the Russian Federation, will be paying for articles on the Russian Wikipedia, which will then be translated for inclusion on the Tatar Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia, according to reports on Russian Wikinews. Farhad Fatkullin, 2018 Wikipedian of the Year, helped organize the tender with the Tatarstan Investment Development Agency (TIDA) which was won by Anna Biryukova. According to Fatkullin, "TIDA is interested to have Tatarstan-related materials available also in at least 8 more languages, which are German, French, Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean."^[1]

Vladimir Medeyko, director of Wikimedia RU, said that the chapter assisted in the tender "to help formulate its conditions in the most correct way. In my opinion, this has been achieved, and I am grateful to Farhad." However, they did not place a bid. "We studied the issue of participation in it. I must say that in general we were wary of this in connection with possible reputational risks."

The contract, which has not yet been signed, covers 51 articles, or sections of articles, on ruwiki, plus the translations for tawiki and enwiki, with payment expected to be 990,000 rubles (about $12,500).

Biryukova is a well known commercial paid editor on ruwiki, according to Ymblanter,^[2] and declares her paid status on her enwiki user page. According to that page she's worked as a paid editor on 7 articles.

Ymblanter compared the project to Gibraltarpedia, a troubled project paid for by the Gibraltar government which worked with a former board chairman of Wikimedia UK to increase tourism. Ymblanter says "I am not sure why this project should turn out any differently."

He continued "The government of Tatarstan is not the most democratic institution in the world. I expect that most edits would be uncontroversial, but some probably would not be, and we might very well be in a situation when a user is being paid to add POV to articles. In the English Wikipedia, these articles are poorly monitored, and users prefer not to deal with Eastern European topics which have a well-deserved reputation of … POV pushing and edit-warring."

The Signpost asked Fatkullin about concerns that accepting money from the government to write Wikipedia articles had ominous overtones. He responded, in part:

I love the fact that Wikipedia … is seen by many as the place where people manage to find consensus around phrasing their differences in a civil manner & that diversity of views present benefit its readers, promoting the mission of free knowledge. I would clearly like to see institutions and individuals from around the world contributing to and otherwise supporting as many Wikimedia projects in as many languages as they find attractive. … Our main safeguards against "officially approved" government, private, NGO or individually-pushed POV is in following m:Founding principles and WP:5P, whilst democracy without pluralism is indeed the road to hell paved by good intentions.

Biryukova replied to our questions by saying: "The work doesn't imply any influence on the text on the part of the customer. Wikipedia rules are always more important." She added that the work was not profitable from her point of view. "The authors, whom I have involved in this project, understand and accept this fact. From their side, [the] work is more like volunteering". – S

See today's Op-Ed for the WMF's view on this issue.

Mandatory IP masking is coming to Wikipedia; it's not a question of if, but only of how and when. The Wikimedia Foundation has told all communities that its counsel has determined that displaying IP addresses of logged-out editors can not be permitted,^[a] and a technical solution is being sought that would stop short of disallowing logged-out editing altogether (see prior Signpost coverage). The technical solution would show "a human-readable identifier instead of the IP address", aka IP masking.

There is strong opposition to IP masking from administrators and others involved in combating vandalism. At a discussion on Meta, MER-C states that admins need better tools to combat abusive edits. Removing a simple tool like an IP address will have generaly negative and unpredictable effects for fighting vandalism. Cullen328 says that "Unregistered users can either affirmatively consent to public logging of their IP addresses, or register an account. Let's not pursue complex, expensive and divisive solutions when a very simple solution is readily available." OhKayeSierra notes that non-admins also help in fighting vandalism, and is "concerned at the fact that non-administrators weren’t seemingly taken into account with the report, and I would vehemently urge the team involved to keep us plebs in mind going forward with any decisions made." SQL and 6 other editors insisted that vandal fighting tools should be greatly improved before the IP masking issue is considered.

As of 21 October, WMF has tentatively proposed technical changes and a new user right:

1. The vast majority of people who access our wikis would see the IPs fully masked.
2. All admins could see them partially masked (the first three octets of an IP address being visible).^[b] This could be helpful to see patterns even if they don’t have the new user right. Partially masking them reduces the privacy risk for the unregistered user.
3. The new user right – in addition to checkusers and stewards – would have access to the unmasked IP.

Existing edit histories would retain the full IP address as currently implemented. – B

The WMF announced a postponement of its branding initiative, on September 30. The initiative was expected to include the word "Wikipedia" in the foundation's name, perhaps as the "Wikipedia Foundation". COVID-19 and a Community open letter on renaming were cited as reasons for the pause. The open letter which requested the pause was signed by 970 individual Wikipedians and over 70 affiliate organizations. An ad hoc subcommittee of the Board of Trustees, consisting of James Heilman, Raju Narisetti, and Shani Evenstein Sigalov, will discuss the initiative with WMF staff until 2021, at which time the initiative will resume, perhaps in a different form. – S

On January 15, 2021 Wikipedia will mark its 20th birthday. The October publication of the book Wikipedia @ 20 starts the celebration by covering almost every aspect of the encyclopedia in its 22 chapters. The book's publication is covered in The Signpost with an interview with the editors, Joseph Reagle and Jackie Koerner. Reagle's chapter on "The many (reported) deaths of Wikipedia" is published here and a book review. Coincidentally, the billionth edit on enwiki will likely occur in December or January.

If your chapter, affiliate, WikiProject, or other Wiki-entity is planning a birthday event, please let us know at Suggestions for publication in our December issue. – S

• Winner of MediaWiki logo vote announced: After a second round of voting, the outcome of the selection process of a new logo for MediaWiki was announced. The winning logo, created by User:Serhio Magpie, continues to evoke the sunflower featured in the old logo, but drops the square brackets (symbolizing wikilinks), while the accompanying wordmark still uses camel case in a reference to a linking syntax used in early wikis. As explained in the original proposal for changing the logo, the main concerns about the old logo included its large "number of colors and shades that make it hardly usable for applications like t-shirts or other swag", and the "too realistic" details of the photo-based sunflower image that don't render well in small sizes. The new logo is still undergoing review by the Foundation's legal team.
• The WMF Transparency Report for January–June 2020 was released this month.
• New user-groups: The Affiliations Committee announced the approval of this week's newest Wikimedia movement affiliates, the Indic MediaWiki Developers User Group which has 16 members and designers; and the Kurdish Wikimedians User Group with 11 members.
• New administrator: We congratulate Wikipedia's newest administrator, John M Wolfson.
• New functionaries announced: Arbitration Committee expanded the functionary team membership as follows. Anarchyte was appointed as an Oversighter; EdJohnston, Oshwah, and Yamla were appointed as CheckUser.
• Forced logout: Another defensive forced logout for every Wiki user (see prior Signpost coverage) was announced on October 1. Some discussion occurred at Village Pump: Technical over whether it should have been more clearly announced on enwiki.

  

• Code repositories to move from Gerrit to GitLab: Following a developer community consultation, the Wikimedia Foundation's Release Engineering team announced that the code repositories for MediaWiki and associated software parts will at some point in the future move to a self-hosted GitLab instance. Many details still need to be worked out, but the team plans "to have a GitLab installation ready with a few self-contained repositories moved to it by this coming June [2021]". Gerrit, an open source code review tool developed and maintained at Google, has been used for MediaWiki since the 2012 switch from Subversion to Git. According to a summary of the consultation, "the overall sentiment was mostly neutral with serious and discerning discussion", with enthusiasm about moving to GitLab's more intuitive user interface (Gerrit has long been criticized for being hard to use), but "concerns about the impact of moving to a PR/MR methodology" and the general disruption that is to be expected from such a platform switch. It is especially hoped that GitLab's interface will make it easier to become involved in MediaWiki development, although several discussion participants cautioned that the most important barriers to code contributions by newcomers are likely to be social instead, in particular the code review process (where commits or pull requests have to be inspected and approved by senior developers, often WMF employees).

Wikipedia’s death has been predicted many times in its twenty years. Reagle groups these dour prognostications into four periods. Though this history shows making predictions is foolhardy, Reagle predicts Wikipedia has many years of life ahead of it.

Reagle is the co-editor of Wikipedia @ 20 with Jackie Koerner. Reagle and Koerner are interviewed by The Signpost in this issue and Wikipedia @ 20 is reviewed. This article is from a web version of the book chapter in Wikipedia @ 20 and is licensed CC-By 4.0.

Many Wikipedians can recall a favorite article that has since been deleted. My forsaken favorite is "Failed Predictions", one of the two thousand articles deleted on a November day over a decade ago. I appreciated how the article evidenced shortsighted thinking about technology given the many dismissals of the radio, telephone, and computer. Some quotes were apocryphal, such as Bill Gates's purported claim that "640K [of memory] ought to be enough for anybody", but I believed the article could have been improved with time. Despite similar lists having survived, "Failed Predictions" was expunged in 2007 from the English-language version of Wikipedia—the focus of this essay.

Although we lost Wikipedia's article on failed predictions, we gained Wikipedia itself as a topic of prognostication. Some have claimed that the young Wikipedia was a joke, that it wasn’t an encyclopedia, that it would fail; mid-life, some claimed that the English Wikipedia was dying or dead; more recently, we have seen claims of its demise and extinction. Claims about Wikipedia's death are not included in its "List of Premature Obituaries", but the topic does have a stub.

I began following Wikipedia in 2004 as a graduate student interested in wikis and blogs. When it came time to choose between the two, I chose Wikipedia. Blogs tended to be insular and snarky. Wikipedia had its conflicts, but people were at least attempting to work together on something worthwhile. Plus, its historical antecedents and popular reception were fascinating. In 2010 I published a book about Wikipedia's history, culture, and controversies: Good Faith Collaboration.^[1] And at that point, I thought the dismal predictions about Wikipedia were over. Yet they continued.

As Wikipedia's twentieth-anniversary approaches, I look back on those who spoke about the project's future to understand why they doubted the "encyclopedia anyone can edit" could make it this long. (See chapter 2 for a broader take on Wikipedia press coverage.) I discern four periods of prognostication within which people expressed skepticism or concern about Wikipedia's early growth, nascent identity, production model, and contributor attrition. Given how often such bleak sentiments are expressed as premature obituaries, we’ll see that I am not alone in thinking of Mark Twain's quip about exaggerated reports of his death.

Not all predictions about Wikipedia falling short have been from its critics. The earliest predictions, from its founders no less, were not ambitious enough.

As I've written before, Wikipedia can be thought of as a happy accident—a provocation to those who confuse Wikipedia's eventual success with its uncertain origins.^[2] The encyclopedia that anyone can edit was initially part of a project of an elect few. Jimmy Wales, the entrepreneur behind Bomis, a men's oriented web portal, had hired Larry Sanger, a new philosophy PhD, to launch Nupedia, an encyclopedia for the new millennium. Although Nupedia was online and inspired by open source, Nupedia's experts worked within a rigorous multitiered process. And it was slow going: by the end of 2000, only two articles had been completed. Wales likened Nupedia's process to being back in graduate school: an intimidating grind.

To shake things up, Wales and Sanger set up a wiki in January 2001. They hoped it would lead to some drafts for Nupedia, but their expectations were modest. Wales feared that the wiki would be overrun with "complete rubbish" and that Nupedians "might find the idea objectionable".^[3] My reconstruction of the first ten thousand edits to Wikipedia does show a lot of dreck, but it was fertile stuff, being produced and improved at a remarkable rate.^[4] Wikipedians hoped to one day have 100,000 articles—a scale a bit larger than most print encyclopedias. In July, Sanger predicted that if Wikipedia continued to produce a thousand articles a month, it would be close to that in about seven years. Amazingly, in less than seven years, in September 2007 the English Wikipedia reached two million articles, some twenty times Sanger's estimate.

Wales's initial pessimism and Sanger's modest estimate are humbling in hindsight. Yet such mistakes can now be taken as a source of pride. This is not true of the modest expectations of Wikipedia's first critic.

Peter Jacso, a computer science professor, regularly published "Peter's Picks & Pans" in a journal for information professionals. In the spring 2002 issue, he panned Wikipedia, likening it to a prank, a joke, or an "outlet for those who pine to be a member in some community". Jacso dismissed Wikipedia's goal of producing one hundred thousand articles; he wrote, "That's ambition", as this "tall order" was twice the number of articles in the sixth edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia.

When I asked Jacso about this pan from seventeen years ago, he had not given it much thought. To be fair, he published over eighty "Picks & Pans" between 1995 and 2009. And he now concedes that Wikipedia has "worked exceptionally well" thanks to the thousands of contributors working under "constantly updated guidelines". Jacso's early skepticism arose because so many other projects had failed: "I did not anticipate that the free Wikipedia service could realize what even the richest companies such as Microsoft failed to do, as demonstrated by the trials and tribulation of the subscription-based Encarta".^[5]

Jacso and Wikipedia's founders exemplify three ways of thinking about the future. Like Jacso, people look to similar projects to get a sense of what is feasible: even established and well-funded projects had failed to create sustainable online encyclopedias. Or, like Sanger, people extrapolate linearly; in this case, taking the first six months of Wikipedia as the norm for the next seven years. The only model people didn’t make use of was exponential growth, which characterized Wikipedia article creation until about 2007. In "Why Technology Predictions Go Awry", Herb Brody identified this cause as underestimating a revolution.^[6] Now, hopeful entrepreneurs default to this model in their predictions, but this is only because of early examples such as Wikipedia.

Just as Wikipedia's emergence and initial growth confounded early expectations, the identity that we now take for granted, the nonprofit "encyclopedia anyone can edit", was not a given at the start.

First, Wikipedia was conceived by Wales as a possible commercial undertaking. Wikipedia was originally hosted at wikipedia.com, and by 2002 Sanger and Wales were hinting that Bomis might start selling ads on Wikipedia, in part to pay Sanger's salary. Wikipedians objected—Spanish Wikipedians even left to create their own. Given these objections and the deflation of the dot-com bubble, Sanger was laid off. Wales changed the site over to a .org domain and began work to establish the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which happened in 2003.

Second, there was the question of whether Wikipedia was a wiki, an encyclopedia, both, or neither. In Wikipedia's first year, Wales visited the wiki of Ward Cunningham to put this question to the inventor of the wiki.^[7]

My question, to this esteemed Wiki community, is this: Do you think that a Wiki could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia? –JimboWales

Yes, but in the end it wouldn’t be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki. – Ward Cunningham

— Ward Cunningham, Jimmy Wales, and Larry Sanger, "Wiki Pedia"

This interaction is a storied part of Wikipedia's history, and in subsequent years Cunningham was often asked about Wikipedia and his prediction. When he was asked if Wikipedia was still a wiki in 2004, he responded, "Absolutely. A certain amount of credit drifts my way from Wikipedia. I’m always quick to remind people that my wiki is not Wikipedia, and that there's a lot of innovation there. I’m proud of what the Wikipedia community has done, I think it's totally awesome". He thought Wikipedia's talk pages, where contributors discuss their work on an article, were especially useful. Cunningham also conceded that Wikipedia was an encyclopedia: "If someone were to ask me to point to a modern encyclopedia, I would choose Wikipedia. Wikipedia defines encyclopedia now."^[8] However, Cunningham's concession did not settle the matter. Elsewhere, the debate over Wikipedia's identity continued.

Shortly after being laid off, Sanger resigned from all participation in Nupedia and Wikipedia. He was unemployed, looking for work, and didn’t see his contribution as a part-time hobby. However, he remained in Wikipedia's orbit, defending his status as a cofounder and, eventually, becoming one of Wikipedia's most prominent critics and competitors. This began in December 2004 with an essay on "Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism". Sanger objected to Wikipedia's culture of "disrespect toward expertise": while Wikipedia was open to contributions from all, Wikipedians still ought to defer to experts.^[9] This deference to expertise was something he would attempt to restore at Citizendium, his 2006 fork of Wikipedia.

Sanger's essay led to another discussion about Wikipedia's identity, with two media scholars, danah boyd and Clay Shirky, taking opposing positions. (Boyd lowercases her name and pronouns.) Boyd recognized that though Wikipedia was useful, its content was uneven and often embarrassingly poor, leading her to conclude: "It will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes". She prefaced this with the sentiment that "this does not mean that i dislike Wikipedia, just that i do not consider it to be equivalent to an encyclopedia. I believe that it lacks the necessary research and precision". Anticipating Citizendium, she suggested this lack of quality could be remedied by "a vetted version of Wikipedia, one that would provide a knowledge resource that is more accountable and authoritative".^[10]

Alternatively, Clay Shirky recognized that although Wikipedia's content was sometimes inferior to traditional encyclopedias, it was sometimes superior, especially on contemporary topics on which Britannica was silent. He also believed that it was myopic not to recognize Wikipedia as an encyclopedia.

The idea that the Wikipedia will never be an encyclopedia is in part an ahistorical assertion that the definition and nature of encyclopediahood is fixed for all time, and that works like Britannica are avatars of the pattern. Contra boyd, I think Wikipedia will be an encyclopedia when the definition of the word expands to include peer production of shared knowledge, not just Britannica's institutional production.^[11]

I was partial to Shirky's argument then and remain so. Yet boyd maintains her position though her concern has shifted. Boyd believes Britannica had its shortcomings and biases, and Wikipedia has improved; yet the latter is special given "how Wikipedia ends up serving as a form of data infrastructure". Wikipedia is relied on as "an information backbone that shapes the core network structure of search engines". This means it has an outsized effect on the world and is then "made vulnerable by those who seek to control algorithmic systems".^[12] For boyd, to label and understand Wikipedia merely as an encyclopedia ignores its importance.

Clearly, questions of identity are not as easy to resolve as those about growth. As David Nye wrote about the "Promethean problem" of technology prediction, a technology's symbolic meaning is as important as any technical utility in shaping its often unforeseen uses.^[13]

Wikipedia's supplanting of Nupedia demonstrated the benefits of open and easy peer production. In 2005, law professor Eric Goldman predicted that this same model meant that "Wikipedia will fail within 5 years".^[14]

Communities, especially online ones, struggle with scale. As a community grows, personal interactions are no longer sufficient for making decisions. This is the endogenous challenge of scale. The exogenous challenge is that a larger community is also a larger target. For example, at the beginning of 2005, white nationalists were marshaling off-site to save their pet article "Jewish Ethnocentrism" from deletion. Wikipedians weren’t sure how to quickly and effectively respond to this threat.

In response, Jimmy Wales said he could, reluctantly, play the part of benign dictator. Wales responded, "If 300 NeoNazis show up and start doing serious damage to a bunch of articles, we don’t need to have 300 separate ArbCom cases and a nightmare that drags on for weeks. I’ll just do something to lock those articles down somehow, ban a bunch of people, and protect our reputation and integrity." And as the crisis is dealt with, "we can also work in parallel to think about the best way to really take care of such problems in the long run".^[15]

Throughout 2005, Wikipedians struggled with such problems, prominently reported as "growing pains". This was the year that John Seigenthaler Sr. condemned the project for falsely implicating him in John F. Kennedy's assassination. This was also the year that Goldman not only predicted Wikipedia's death but made a bet of it with fellow law blogger, Mike Godwin, over dinner.

I remarked to Mike that Wikipedia inevitably will be overtaken by the gamers and the marketers to the point where it will lose all credibility. There are so many examples of community-driven communication tools that ultimately were taken over—USENET and the Open Directory Project are two that come top-of mind—that I didn’t imagine that my statement would be controversial or debatable. Instead, I was surprised when Mike disagreed with my assertion. Mike's view is that Wikipedia has shown remarkable resilience to attacks to date, and this is evidence that the system is more stable than I think it is.^[16]

Mike Godwin is best known for his eponymous "law" that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1". If this maxim reflected some cynicism, his bet against Goldman—and his joining Wikimedia as general counsel in 2007—reflected some optimism. Godwin believed Wikipedia could manage its growing pains. For example, in 2005, Wikipedia experimented with semi-protection, which limited edits to regularly vandalized pages to accounts older than four days. This was one of the "long run" solutions Wales alluded to at the start of the year. As Godwin wrote, "I think part of the design of Wikipedia was to allow for the evolution of contributor standards, even though as a 'foundational' principle anonymous contributors will always be allowed to edit it. Such evolution ought to be enough to keep Wikipedia alive and vital in the face of a changing digital environment."^[17]

In 2006, Goldman affirmed his belief in Wikipedia's predicted demise. Its success made it a target, and defending the project would lead to Wikipedian burnout. Those who remained would be overloaded, and "thus, Wikipedia will enter a death spiral where the rate of junkiness will increase rapidly until the site becomes a wasteland".^[18] Media critic Nicholas Carr had less patience, announcing the death of Wikipedia that very year. Unlike Goldman, Carr did not have a plausible theory; he simply wanted to bury the myth of openness as Wikipedia ceded to the "corrosive process of compromise". Others rightly called Carr on his histrionics, with Shirky responding that "news of Wikipedia's death is greatly exaggerated".^[19]

By 2009, Goldman had agreed with Shirky and conceded his bet with Godwin. Though Wikipedia had introduced some barriers to vandalism and bad-faith edits, "in total Wikipedia's current technological restrictions are fairly modest".^[20] In 2010, Goldman wrote, "My 2005 prediction of Wikipedia's failure by 2010 was wrong." Competitor projects might arise, but they too would have to follow Wikipedia's model of balancing openness with limited protections. (And competitors tend to presage Wikipedia's death in the headlines: "Google Knol—Yup, it's a Wikipedia Killer", "Wolfram Alpha: Wikipedia Killer?", and "Is Owl AOL's Wikipedia-Killer?"^[21]) Goldman remained an active user and was pleased to wish the site a happy tenth anniversary. Wikipedia's model of peer production remained its lifeblood, rather than a source of sickness or external threat.

As Wikipedia approaches its twentieth anniversary, Goldman has confirmed his assessment of Wikipedia's success, though he remains concerned about the quality of lesser-visited articles and the lack of new contributor growth (discussed in the next section). Additionally, he noted that two things he did not anticipate were the effectiveness of nofollow web links—such links are ignored by search engines, making them less attractive to spammers—and the growth of Wikimedia's staff: "I don’t know what Wikipedia would look like without the active support of 100+ full-time staff".^[22]

In any case, Goldman's prediction shows what not to do as a successful tech prognosticator. Like those of a neighborhood fortune teller, predictions ought to be nonspecific in content and time. Goldman predicted Wikipedia's death (rather than subtle changes in openness) in a five-year horizon (rather than "soon") and specified the process of its demise (a death spiral). Although this weakens the likelihood of a prediction, it clarifies rather than obfuscates the concerns discussed. Kudos.

I underestimated Wikipedia in its first few years, as did everyone. However, in subsequent years, I was confident Wikipedia would continue as a wiki and as an encyclopedia, despite the dismal prognostications by some.

However, in 2009, it became clear that the English Wikipedia was facing possible senescence. That year, researchers found evidence that Wikipedia's new article growth had slowed or plateaued. Additionally, new contributions were being increasingly deleted and reverted, and the balance of activity was favoring experienced editors over newcomers. Over the next five years, researchers, Wikipedians, and the Wikimedia Foundation documented similar changes and attempted remedies. Headlines reported on an "aging" Wikipedia that was on the "decline" and "slowly dying".^[23]

Though one prominent Wikipedian invoked Twain's "exaggerated death" quip again in Wikipedia's defense, the trend was undeniable and the concern was widespread. Attempts to retain contributors, to make the site easier to use, and to recruit newcomers were belied by a 2014 story. The Economist reported that the past seven years had seen the number of active editors with five or more edits in a given month fall by a third.^[24] Wikipedia's statistics page shows that the active editors fell from a peak of fifty-three thousand in 2007 to around thirty thousand in 2014. Without the efforts to shore up Wikipedia, these numbers could have been even worse, but things weren’t getting better.

Through 2017, the prognostications remained dismal as people spoke of Wikipedia's "extinction event" and wrote that "Wikipedia Editors Are a Dying Breed". A 2015 New York Times opinion piece asked, "Can Wikipedia Survive?"^[25] The fear in many of these pieces was that Wikipedia's problems were being compounded by peoples’ move to smartphones, where editing Wikipedia is not easy.

Nonetheless, it appears that the number of active editors has been stable since 2014, never dropping below twenty-nine thousand, and that this pattern of fast growth and plateau is not unusual for wikis.^[26] Therefore, the English Wikipedia's growth to maturity might be likened to that of the quaking aspen (populus tremuloides). The tree grows aggressively toward maturity, sending out roots from which new trees grow. Even if the English Wikipedia has slowed, the larger Wikimedia grove continues to grow.

At this point, it's foolish for anyone to predict Wikipedia's death. While such a prognostication makes for catchy headlines—which will probably continue—Wikipedia persists. It has survived modest expectations, an identity crisis, spammers, and contributor attrition. Wikipedia is undoubtedly an encyclopedia; it's the go-to reference of the twenty-first century. Although getting a handle on Wikipedia's hundreds of templates and policies is daunting, some continue to make the effort.

It isn't wrong, of course, to be concerned about Wikipedia. It's an important website that has become even more so in its last decade. Wikipedia is among only a handful of significant noncommercial websites. It's doing a decent job at resisting large-scale misinformation and manipulation. And its data is increasingly relied on by other web services.

It isn't wrong to think about the future, but there's a difference between the future and hype. I appreciate Goldman's five-year prediction. Unlike clickbait, his prediction was based on a plausible theory with specific implications. This kind of prediction can sharpen our discussions rather than muddle them.

The only prediction that I'd hazard for the next ten years is that Wikipedia will still exist. The platform and community have momentum which no alternative will supplant. And by then, the Wikimedia Endowment, started in 2016, should have raised its goal of a $100 million toward maintaining its projects "in perpetuity". The English Wikipedia community will no doubt face challenges and crises as it always has, but I don’t foresee anything so profound that only a husk of unchanging articles remains.

I predict Wikipedia will live.

Acknowledgements: I was able to improve this essay with the help of LiAnna L. Davis, Jackie Koerner, Jake Orlowitz, Ian Ramjohn, and Denny Vrandečić. Thank you.