Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	Elizabeth II		6,224,957		Following her death, the coverage has been turned down some-what, with some normal scheduling returning to British TV, but it's also not over yet. But, before we look to the week ahead, let's take a look back. On September 11, the Queen left Balmoral on the way to Edinburgh, where she stayed for two nights, the first at Holyroodhouse, and the second lying in state and St. Giles Cathedral, where 33,000 people filed past to pay their respect, and the Queen's children (#2, 6, 12 and 15) held a Vigil of the Princes. On September 13, the Queen was flown from Edinburgh to London, which became the most tracked flight in history. Since September 14, the Queen has been lying in state at Westminster Hall (leading to the local phenomenon The Queue), and will remain there until 6:30 BST on Monday, the day of her funeral. While there, both her children and grandchildren have performed the Vigil of the Princes. On the day of the funeral itself, the Queen's coffin will leave Westminster Hall at 10:44 with the funeral service being held at 11:00, a two-minute silence will be held at the end of the funeral, with several major airports even suspending flights during this period. The Queen will then be taken to Windsor, arriving at 15:10, with a second service happening at 16:00 at St. George's Chapel, ending at 16:45. It won't be till 19:45, during a private family service, when the Queen will be buried alongside her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (#7).
2	Charles III		4,139,056		He's had a tough few days. On some good news, he has already exceeded the reign of the (albeit disputed) nine-day Queen.
3	George VI		2,670,912		#1's father and the previous King, born in 1895, and King from 1936 to 1952.
4	Diana, Princess of Wales		2,584,814		#2's first wife. Her funeral, in 1997, holds the viewing figure record within the UK, at 32.1 million people (nearly 55% of the population at the time). The Queen's funeral is widely expected to beat this.
5	Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva		2,502,254		This Bollywood film is again the only thing preventing a top-ten monopoly for the British royals, which I imagine Indian readers will find rather amusing. It is also the only article to appear in this report that is unrelated to the British royal family. Ayan Mukerji's attempt to replicate the MCU in India has gotten off to an okay start, although still faces a daunting task to recoup its massive budget.
6	Anne, Princess Royal		2,151,398		The Queen's second child and only daughter.
7	Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh		1,811,670		Described as the love of her life, Prince Philip was Elizabeth II's husband, the father of the new King, and the longest serving royal consort in history. Philip and Elizabeth were married from their marriage 1947 until Philip's death in 2021, a year prior to Elizabeth's death.
8	William, Prince of Wales		1,800,986		The oldest child of the new King, which makes him the heir-apparent. He also received a promotion to Prince of Wales, a title held by his father until his accession.
9	Edward VIII		1,774,375		The Queen's uncle, who was King for 11 months in 1936. He abdicated his position in order to marry Wallis Simpson, nicknamed the abdication crisis. The Duke of Windsor, as he was known after his abdication, served his life in de facto exile in France until his death in 1972.
10	Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon		1,766,856		The Queen's younger sister, who died in 2002.

Rank	Article	Class	Views	Image	Notes/about
1	Jeffrey Dahmer		8,365,786		An infamous serial killer who haunted the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin for years, during which time he killed and desecrated seventeen people. I'd go into more detail, but I don't really need to; for one, it's awful; for two, you could just watch the Netflix series about him (or read his Wikipedia article, as eight million people did this week). Neither are for the faint-hearted.
2	Elizabeth II		4,177,027		After 10 days of mourning, the erstwhile Queen was laid to rest in St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle, marking a definitive end to the second Elizabethan era. I'm not so keen on the services, but the synchronised marching and music was nice to watch (in a respectful way, of course)
3	Charles III		1,992,713		So I guess this is it. Charles is now the King. That's really weird, isn't it?
4	George VI		1,989,940		#2's father and sister.
5	Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon		1,732,233
6	Christopher Scarver		1,684,441		#1 isn't alive anymore, not because he was executed, but because this fellow convicted murderer beat him to death with a metal bar in prison, allegedly motivated by racial grievances.
7	Edward VIII		1,378,696		#2's uncle, daughter and ex-daughter-in-law.
8	Anne, Princess Royal		1,356,536
9	Diana, Princess of Wales		1,306,363
10	House of the Dragon		1,257,174		<checks data> Yeah, it's still here.

• 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.

In some months, the weather can just be disagreeable. In other months maybe it's people who seem to be disagreeable. This month it seems like the media all found something to disagree with, either about Wikipedia's coverage or with our policies. Or maybe we disagree with them. It was that kind of month.

In Wikipedia’s Fox News Problem (Slate), author Samuel Breslow – who is listed as a long time Wikipedia editor – explains how a novel-length reliable sources debate decided to allow Fox News to be used for non-controversial facts. "If outlets like Fox News are permitted, Wikipedia’s view of the world will look more like Fox's" was part of Slate's distillation of the importance of reliable source determination on Wikipedia content. Major debates (community Requests for Comment) took place in 2010, 2020 and the most recent debate closed this month. The article's author interviewed Wikipedia administrator and member of the Arbitration Committee Kevin Li, who closed the September Request for Comment, for his interpretation of the process, and the article quotes him extensively. – B

YouTuber and Washington Post columnist J. J. McCullough – a retired Wikipedian who long ago drew the image shown here on the right – has released a 22-minute YouTube video titled "Why I hate Wikipedia (and you should too!)". He criticizes Wikipedia's de facto information monopoly, which he says crowds out other sites and reduces information diversity, and its writing style, complaining about the length and disorganized detail in articles. He really dislikes the anonymity and unaccountability of Wiki-editors – especially of admins and other hard-core editors. He likens Wikipedia to McDonalds: a place to go to get fast, cheap fare when you are hungry but don't really care about quality. There might be some truth in his lengthy and detailed list of complaints, though his description of the editor who has contributed nearly half a percent of all edits to Wikipedia as having written a third of it does seem wildly out.

Indeed, McCullough says that he doesn't read Wikipedia. In the first 30 seconds of the video, he states that in his seven years of creating videos he has never consulted the august online encyclopedia that anyone can edit; that for over a decade he has blocked the site from his browser; and that he uses Google's hide search feature to ensure that he does not see Wikipedia in search results. So how does he know so much about Wikipedia?

In 2008 two articles related to McCullough were deleted: Filibuster Cartoons (his website) and J.J. McCullough. Four further attempts were made to recreate the article about him, either as J.J. McCullough or J. J. McCullough (note the extra space). After the last of these was deleted in 2020, the creation of new articles by those titles was blocked.

The video has attracted detailed comment at the Village Pump, with allegations that McCullough is angry that the biographies of him have been deleted. Others there have speculated that he is a former admin. We reached out to McCullough for further comment, but he has not replied. – S

In Evidence suggests Wikipedia is accurate and reliable. When are we going to start taking it seriously? science writer Liam Mannix in The Sydney Morning Herald uses the case of Queen Elizabeth II's death to demonstrate how fast and accurate Wikipedia is.

this is ... not something we should expect. Wikipedia is free. Its editors are volunteers. There is no expertise or academic qualifications required. We are told again and again that we can’t trust it because anyone could be writing it. It should be the worst place on the internet.

Yet published evidence suggests it is reasonably reliable – at least as reliable as its competitor the Encyclopedia Britannica.

He links to academic studies on six specific subject areas – mostly medical but also one on general political coverage. All of these studies confirm Wikipedia's accuracy. He links to two broader (and older) studies that give Wikipedia better than passing marks. And a linked 2014 meta-analysis of 110 studies concludes '"Wikipedia is generally a reliable source of information" across almost all domains studied.' – S

The term "deaditors"—Wikipedia editors who memorialize the pages of notables who have recently died—was previously mentioned on this page in The Signpost in 2018. As Annie Rauwerda explains in Input, the term started with an article written by a Dutch Wikipedian, which was then reported on in Slate. The term has also been used recently in a few foreign-language reports (Italian, Spanish, Czech).

Other media covering the phenomenon this month include Gizmodo, Metro UK, Yahoo! (which says deaditors are also known as "WikiJackals"), The Sydney Morning Herald, NPR, Kim Komando [1] and The Wall Street Journal.

Most of the reports reflect a sense of wonder, or even awe, at how well Wikipedians perform this task.

Simon Garfield in The death of the door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman in inews recalls a 2020 email from Katherine Maher asking for a £20 donation for Wikipedia. In 2017 he had donated £2, and then he got the email asking for more. At that point Garfield took at least one amazing action. He compared Maher's position to that of an encyclopedia salesman in a 1967 Monty Python comedy sketch.

Of course the self-identified thief later turns out to be an encyclopedia salesman, who would rather people think him a thief.

Garfield is a professional writer who uses Wikipedia extensively. He's written a history of encyclopedias, All The Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia. He thinks that "Wikipedia is one of the greatest things on the internet".

After talking with Maher, he donated £12.

Maher is now a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab. She was recently appointed a member of the US Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board, an advisory panel established a decade ago by Hillary Clinton.

The Atlantic Council's abovementioned Digital Forensic Research Lab also reported on Runiversalis. Its article, published on Medium, described the new site as "an attempt to spread Russian propaganda and disinformation in the guise of a wiki. Beyond using the underlying software architecture employed by Wikipedia, it’s a wiki in name only." Runiversalis, meanwhile, has apparently repurposed Wikipedia's "Did You Know?" section into an "I Knew It!" section with trivia such as "American politicians, political scientists, and journalists admit that United States turned into empire of lies". The Medium article also states that Runiversalis, unlike Wikipedia, "does not provide editing options for the general public; when the site still allowed user registration, a message would appear after registration, informing the user, 'You do not have permission to create this page.' It openly acknowledges it operates under Russia's restrictive media laws."

The overarching pattern here, bearing in mind China's own huge internet encyclopedias, Baike.com and Baidu Baike, is that governments everywhere – unsurprisingly, perhaps – take a keen interest in having user-generated encyclopedias that propagate their respective views of the world. Thank God the United States government has never done anything to mess around with Wikipedia... – AK

Wait, shit! Speaking of user-generated encyclopedias that propagate their respective views of the world, Judge Andy Oldham of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Texas House Bill 20 in mid-September. The law restricts some content providers' ability to moderate (or censor, depending on your point of view) public speech hosted on their sites based on viewpoint, with some exceptions for public safety and compliance with federal laws. Sites that are covered under the law operate in Texas, have "an Internet website or application that is open to the public, allows a user to create an account, and enables users to communicate with other users for the primary purpose of posting information, comments, messages, or images" and over 50 million active U.S. users a month.

The Techdirt analysis "Did The 5th Circuit Just Make It So That Wikipedia Can No Longer Be Edited In Texas?" questions whether Twitter – one of the three companies the state testified was targeted by the law – qualifies, with its many bot accounts. But then Techdirt speculates that Wikipedia might qualify. If so, according to the analysis, the site's owners – Wikimedia Foundation – may not be able to regulate some of the encyclopedia's content without violation of the Texas law.

Given that WMF so rarely directly interacts with site content it's not clear to this editor what the net effect of the ruling would be – assuming they don't block Texas editors to avoid running afoul of HB 20. It's also completely speculative that any judge would view the creation of a fact-based encyclopedia as protected viewpoint speech. – B

• Russia mistreats editors: Doxxed, threatened, and arrested: Russia's war on Wikipedia editors (republished by Nieman Lab)
• Indian engineers: India engineers are helping to keep Wikipedia inclusive
• It's not cricket: India summons Wikipedia officials over cricketer biography tweak and The Indian Express explain how Wikipedia offended a bowler who dropped the ball.
• Explained | Content moderation on Wikipedia, The Hindu [2]
• Sound logo: The Hustle and It's Nice That explore the WMF's search for a sound logo.
• Not a mystery anymore: Wikipedia's page for "2022 Russian businessmen mystery deaths", Boing Boing (about 2022 Russian businessmen mystery deaths)
• Complaints about political bias: Spain's conservative daily ABC, one of the country's three newspapers of record, reports that several Spanish cultural and political figures have denounced the "covert political bias" of the Spanish Wikipedia in a manifesto, claiming its entries "are edited by people who, hiding behind anonymous editor accounts, take advantage of the opportunity to carry out political activism, either by including erroneous or false data, or by selecting news from the media with a clear political and ideological bias." The manifesto is published in Spanish and English.
• Beavers, Cougars, Ducks, and Huskies, oh my: The Northwest Championship meme is legit because it has a Wikipedia page. And because fans of American college football will believe anything. (The Athletic)
• Big Byrd banned? Roger McGuinn recalls how he was banned for editing the article about him. Make that a 24 hour block, Mr. Tambourine Man. See the Grammy's Living Legends interview (a free newsletter subscription is required) and Wiki talk page for details.
• Catnip: An article in grid.news calls a case the Wikimedia Foundation has asked the United States Supreme Court to hear "catnip" for the court, pitting the interests of free information against the interests of the state to limit some communications in the interest of national security.
• Prized students: International Society for Computational Biology Student Council's Wikipedia editing competition prize went to EE/CS students at Ohio University [3]

Wikipedia has lots to explore, especially for editors. When I was only a reader of Wikipedia, I would just look at the information and not really bother to look further. Now as an editor, I've found that there is so much to be discovered, like Wikiprojects and the Teahouse. But I had never wondered what would happen if an article had to be deleted. In fact, I'd thought all articles were perfect — Featured Article status – so they would never have to be deleted. Articles for deletion has so much to discover. Most of the time, it's only a few people participating, but sometimes, it can turn into a long line of comments and opinions...

I was just scrolling one day to find some Articles for Deletion discussion pages when I came across a discussion for the article on the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev. Now, when I first saw the title of the article, I was a bit skeptical. What's an important topic doing at AfD? Then I started to read the nominator's argument, and I looked at the article itself, and so I said to myself: wait a minute, they actually had a good reason for nominating this! There were quite a few opinions there already on what to do, more than I normally saw, so I decided I should have a voice. After making my decision on what to do, I had my say.

Anyway, I like to check up on the discussion after I !vote on an Articles for Deletion discussion. When I clicked the page, here's what I found:

There were so many !votes!

This continued for the next couple of days. More !votes, and more, and more. Eventually the discussion closed, with the result being "no consensus." I didn't think there was going to be any, anyway. I checked recently, and the article is like this now.

Most articles for deletion discussions aren't like this. They have a couple of !votes, and that's it. Like this one:

Then some are longer.. but not super long like the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev article.

Some are really, really long!

This deletion discussion is also super long, and I found this one while I was writing this article. It's from when the talk page at WikiProject User Rehab got nominated for deletion. (Which is kind of ironic, because actually I'm a participant in Wikiproject User Rehab, so if this had been deleted then I could have never joined.) The final result to this discussion was "no consensus."

But you've already seen the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev article, and you too saw that it had also reached no consensus. Why did these two not reach consensus? I think it has to do with the amount of !votes. Coming to an agreement is really hard when you have so many people voicing their opinions. It's a bit like having a speech and debate contest- except for one person against another there are fifty people on each side. Would it be hard then for the judge (in Wikipedia's case, an administrator), to decide what to do? Yes. That might be why we don't reach consensus with these Article for Deletion discussions... but why do so many !votes get there in the first place? I think the reason why some Articles for Deletion discussions have lots and lots of !votes is because the article nominated for deletion gets lots of views— like a newsworthy item. We can kind of come up with a rule of thumb:

The more views an article that is nominated for deletion gets, the more !votes it will get on its deletion discussion page.

Obviously the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev was a newsworthy event, so the Death of Mikhail Gorbachev article got a lot of views, which led to a lot of !votes. But even though these discussions get a lot of !votes, your !vote still counts. So !vote. If you're an administrator, all I can say in these scenarios is— you're going to be scrolling down for quite a while! Thank you.

The Wikimedia Foundation believes that the role of WMF-supported organizers recruiting volunteers to work on the projects is of critical importance to growing content and retaining contributors. To date, it says:

the path to organizing has been very organic, loosely supported by grant-making and the work of our affiliate network. But the Movement Strategy asks us to focus on Investing in Skills and Leadership Development and Identifying Topics for Impact. We need to get more deliberate about asking questions like:

• How are we inviting the next generation of editors and volunteers to our movement to help us address a universe of knowledge gaps?
• Are we creating clear pathways for organizers to gain all the skills or knowledge they need to champion the Wikimedia Movement well?

By mentoring and working with organizers over the last three years to understand campaigns around the world, the Campaigns Team at the Wikimedia Foundation has learned how to help organizers design campaigns that bring in the next generation of contributors. We are going to share those lessons and experiences in an Organizer Lab (beta) focused on campaigns and organizing around “Topics for Impact”. Though we hope to expand to support other topics and themes in the coming years, the first cohort will be themed around a topic of rising interest across the movement: Climate Change and Sustainability.

The Organizer lab will be a 9-week online course running from late October to mid-December. For further details, see the Wikimedia blog post. – AK

The Wikimedia Foundation has launched a sound logo contest.

Take a note – from 13 September to 10 October 2022, everyone, everywhere is invited to help create a sound logo for the Wikimedia projects.

A sound logo is a brief collection of sounds, often between 2 and 4 seconds long. Sound logos have gained popularity with the rise of audio technology globally; the number of active voice assistant users has grown from 544.1 million in 2015 to 2.6 billion in 2021. Wikimedia projects increasingly power other websites, search engines, and general knowledge queries on voice-assisted devices, but many listeners are not aware because the source of the information is not consistently identified. A sound logo is needed to help listeners identify when they are accessing trusted, verifiable knowledge from Wikimedia projects. In harmony with our values and as always curious to experiment and learn, we will have an open contest for the sound of all human knowledge and invite the world to participate.

– AK

Two seats were open in the Wikimedia Foundation's board, and there were six candidates. With a total of 5,922 votes in the election, the two candidates selected were Mike Peel (Mike Peel) and Shani Evenstein Sigalov (Esh77). During the end in round 5, Mike Peel had been elected with 1,995 votes. The second seat was decided in the final round, when Shani Evenstein Sigalov had gotten approximately 1,835 votes. – H

Check 'em – congratulations to NicoV, whose bot has achieved Wikipedia's 1,111,111,111 GET. An anonymous server kitty is claimed to have said "that's an awful lot of 1s in the same place, hopefully nothing similar will happen for about fifteen years when we expect to need the same number of 2s". The Mayor of Vayres, Gironde is probably unaware of the special status his commune has just acquired in the English speaking world. – W

In June and July of 2022, the Wikimedia movement released a community safety survey. This was to find out whether or not a user felt safe and comfortable contributing to Wikipedia. The question asked was:

In the last 30 days, have you felt unsafe or uncomfortable contributing to Wikipedia?

The survey was sent to users on five different languages of Wikipedia: the English Wikipedia, the Farsi Wikipedia, the French Wikipedia, the Spanish Wikipedia and the Portuguese Wikipedia. The answers to choose from were "Yes," "No," and "I'm not sure." The results turned out to be that the unweighted results (there were two versions of responses: weighted and unweighted) on the English Wikipedia showed that 75.3% of Wikipedians felt safe and comfortable on Wikipedia, 15.9% of Wikipedians felt unsafe or uncomfortable, and 8.8% of them were not sure. The proportions of users feeling unsafe were somewhat higher on the Spanish (24.4%) and Portuguese (26.0%) Wikipedias. – H

In February a Call for Feedback was published by the Community Development (CD) team about a Leadership Development Working Group. The Call for Feedback was shared in 42 languages. The Call for Feedback was used to get feedback from the community on the meaning of "leader," the working group's composition, and the need for continued feedback. The Leadership Development Working Group recently published its leadership definition and invited feedback. – H

• New administrators: After a lengthy discussion at RfA whose close numbers prompted a bureaucrat chat to determine consensus, The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, ScottishFinnishRadish. There's also an interview with ScottishFinnishRadish in this month's issue.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement is Convent. Please be bold in helping improve this article!
• UCOC consultation: Conversation hour for Universal Code of Conduct enforcement guidelines, North America and Western Europe, will be Monday, October 3, 21:00 UTC (your local time)
• Wikimedia Summit: WMF staff are currently still completing their report on the Wikimedia Summit, which took place in Berlin from September 9 to September 11. More in next month's issue.

I like to add photographs to Wikipedia articles. The addition of a visual aspect improves the quality of an article, and gives a better view on a subject. If the photo isn't reflecting reality, it can also influence the opinion of readers. That’s why many Wikipedians try to improve the quality of photos. I have seen astonishing improvements of photographs, but also weird effects. Some photographs are beautified so much, that the new photograph is an improved version of reality.

I have to admit: I crop photographs. I also remove watermarks, or ask skilled colleagues to make that happen (thank you, Wikipedians at the Graphics Lab). I don’t particularly like scratches and blurs, but where’s the limit? Clearing a background, removal of persons or buildings, image restoration: it all happens at Commons. There’s one line I won’t cross: changing the characteristics of a photograph. Yes, I have seen cigarettes removed from the lips of one of my cultural heroes (“just a small retouch”), and the retouched photograph was used in 10 language versions of Wiki, over a period of six years. I pushed the original photograph back in.

• 
  Carly Rae Jepsen (2012) – with watermark
• 
  Carly Rae Jepsen – watermark removed
• 
  Clear copyright claim (right in the middle)
• 
  Frogs web (original)
• 
  Same image, brightened

When money is involved, attitudes change. The management of The Weeknd wanted his image to change in 2020, and thus wanted to abolish the then current photo in Wikipedia. They hired a company to take legal action via a request for removal of this 2017 photograph in Wiki (DMCA Removal Request, 2020). The result was devastating for Commons: not only was the photograph removed, but two great administrators resigned during the resulting row.

I love removing watermarks and copyright signs from photos in Commons– if permitted by the license. Most photographs in Wikimedia Commons have either a PD or a CC-BY-license, and both permit removing watermarks. At the same time, I like to respect photographers. The rules in Wikipedia regarding removal of watermarks are quite clear. I'm inclined to adhere to the most likely interpretation (in short: removal of (copyright) watermarks is in line with CC-BY-SA and not a legal violation), because CC-BY permits changing of files and removal of watermarks. Some Wikipedians say this issue is not an issue of copyright, but is about ethics. They say it would be disrecpectful or insulting to remove the copyright claims. My simple answer: if you don’t want your photo to be touched by others, don’t bring them under a CC-BY-license.

My suggestion: the proposed Commons guideline should also promote removal of visible copyright signs of images under a CC-BY license.

MB and Novem Linguae took on the task of joint lead coordinators of New Page Patrol this year following the long void left by other coordinators who had moved on. Kudpung was de facto coordinator for many years before retiring from it in March 2017. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not reflect any official opinions of this publication.

Four years ago, in October 2018, the Signpost article "NPP: This could be heaven or this could be hell for new users – and for the reviewers" reported on the New pages patrol process and the challenges it faces. Today, those issues produce new hurdles to keeping the encyclopedia clean – and the need for upgrades to its software is even more acute.

New Page Reviewers use the page curation system to review new articles and pass them for indexing for search engines, or to propose them for further improvement or deletion. Unfortunately, the community has too few capable and competent people at NPP and despite occasional drives to address it, today's backlog still stands at an untenable level. Software improvements, both bug reports and feature requests, that would help and encourage reviewers do this job have been languishing unaddressed at Phabricator for months and even years. Commenting on the WMF's rejection of ACTRIAL in their 2011 article in The Signpost, users Skomorokh, Jorgenev, and Daniel Mietchen suggest that:

Knowing that an appeal was in preparation, a WMF director of product engineering made a pre-emptive post on the task force talk page in which they placed the blame for the lack of software support squarely at the feet of the New Page Patrol team for not having submitted requests to the Community Wishlist. The Wishlist is an annual programme since 2015 where contributors from all Wikimedia projects can ask for those small changes that they would most like to see. Indeed, the NPP group did avail of the process in 2018 and completely swamped it, but that was four years ago. Paradoxically, the response continued by listing other WMF engineering commitments as an explanation of why they don’t have the funds or capacity for NPP. There was also an opaque reference to a need to rewrite the tool: "current projects that we've prioritized above rewriting PageTriage." If they believe it is beyond normal maintenance, that may be another reason why they are providing little support. The WMF's post was made before the letter was published and the NPP team does not consider their comments to be wholly felicitous.

Despite the bold claim in their Annual Plan 2022-2023 Goal #1:

the WMF makes no mention of supporting the trusted knowledge in their flagship project, the English Wikipedia.

During a July live streamed 'Conversation with the Trustees' (see transcript below), in answer to a pre-submitted question from Atsme, a New Page Reviewer: "What is the Foundation doing to protect New Pages Patrol and Articles for Creation from system overload?" the response from the board's vice-chair, Shani Evenstein, stated that PageTriage was 'community developed' (which it was not: Engagement strategy - New Page Triage) and that NPP volunteers should wait for at least six months and request the work through the Wishlist.

While researching for a reply, in contrast to their claim of "...to have honest and meaningful conversations [...] We prepare for these meetings and send an agenda of main topics, and post it on Meta, a week in advance, and make sure to go through these agenda items".[6] they were apparently either misinformed or they misinterpreted the information provided by their source. Insisting that important technical matters are not at all within the board's 'remit', it is interesting to note how unaware the board appears to be of the importance of the flagship encyclopedia to the Foundation's very existence. In a follow up thread on the reviewers' talk page Ms Evenstein offered some words of encouragement, giving hope for future collaboration:

I cannot promise an immediate solution, but I can promise it will be properly discussed. To make sure expectations are realistic, I will add that this topic / issue / problem statement requires further discussions internally, both with our CEO and our new CPTO. As you may know, we have just hired a new CPTO, who will be starting in August. Whatever operational solutions WMF will come up with for this stated problem, it will have to include her. Till she settles in, and till we are able to strategize around this topic (and other related technologically-related topics) further in collaboration with staff, our Product department continues to be aware and continue to work on it to the extent they can; but I hope it is clear that talking about longer-term solutions, a bit more time will be needed to make sure this is properly discussed.

Ms Evenstein has recently been re-elected to the board, while newly elected Mike Peel comes directly from the English Wikipedia community. A user since 2005 and an administrator since 2007, he was one of two candidates campaigning on a platform of more board involvement on the shop floor:

Although there have been hiccups in the past, some serious, the board generally acts within the movement's best interests, but anyone watching the video of the Board of Trustees responding to Atsme's question cannot fail to recognise the board's reply as inadequate and mildly patronising.

Writing in The Signpost Op-ed Wikipedia has cancer about the Foundation's flow of funds, Guy Macon, a financial consultant, states:

…their poor handling of software development has been well known for many years. The answer to the WMF's problems with software development has been well known for decades and is extensively documented in books such as The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams […] This failure is almost certainly a systemic problem directly caused by top management, not by the developers doing the actual work.

Macon's more recent essay, an updated version of Wikipedia has Cancer, is a testament to the runaway spending on pet projects and non-core functions while neglecting the volunteers, and still leaving the Foundation with current disposable assets in excess of US$200 million The volunteers are the project's major stakeholder and the NPP team on whose work the reputation of the articles depends, is hoping for a substantive response and one that comes from the Foundation's senior executive staff, especially CPTO Selena Deckelmann, and Maryana Iskander, the CEO. In view of the rapidly growing surplus of donations, the stock justifications for inaction are wearing thin; the community is trusting in offers of serious engagement on quality control, rather than further rejections and intangible reasons why it can't or won't be done.

As of press time, the New Page Review team has received an acknowledgement by email from the Trustees, but no official public response to the letter from them or the WMF. We reached out to the board and the WMF regarding this article in the Signpost. The board pointed out a minor error in the staff which has been corrected, but the WMF has not offered any comment.