• 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.

An investigative article in The New Yorker, titled "The Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign", describes how "Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, paid a Swiss private intelligence firm millions of dollars to taint perceived enemies". Most of the lengthy article (whose audio version runs 1 hour and 13 minutes) isn't about Wikipedia, but there are several paragraphs about how the firm ("Alp Services", founded by an investigator named Mario Brero) used it for their purposes alongside many other interesting tools (such as illegitimately obtaining phone call records or tax records of their targets, and planting stories in various news outlets).

The first part is about an American oil trader named Hazim Nada, founder of a company called Lord Energy:

On January 5, 2018, Sylvain Besson, a journalist who had written a book purporting to tie [Hazim Nada's father] Youssef Nada to a supposed Islamist conspiracy, published an article, in the Geneva newspaper Le Temps, claiming that Lord Energy was a cover for a Muslim Brotherhood cell. “The children of the historical leaders of the organization have recycled themselves in oil and gas,” Besson wrote. A new item in Africa Intelligence hinted darkly that Lord Energy employees had “been active in the political-religious sphere.” Headlines sprang up on Web sites, such as Medium, that had little editorial oversight: “Lord Energy: The Mysterious Company Linking Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood”; “Compliance: Muslim Brotherhood Trading Company Lord Energy Linked to Crédit Suisse.” A Wikipedia entry for Lord Energy [probably fr:Lord Energy, created by a single-purpose account (SPA) in June 2018] suddenly included descriptions of alleged ties to terrorism.

This outside view from the victim's perspective is later matched to what the reporter learned from leaked/hacked internal emails of "Alp Services":

In February, 2018, [Brero] asked for more money to expand his operation against Nada, and proposed “to alert compliance databases and watchdogs, which are used by banks and multinationals, for example about Lord Energy’s real activities and links to terrorism.” His “objective,” he explained, was to block the company’s “bank accounts and business.” [...]

Alp quickly put the Emiratis’ money to work. An Alp employee named Raihane Hassaine e-mailed drafts of damning Wikipedia entries. On an invoice dated May 31, 2018, the company paid Nina May, a freelance writer in London, six hundred and twenty-five pounds for five online articles, published under pseudonyms and based on notes supplied by Alp, that attacked Lord Energy for links to terrorism and extremism. (Hassaine did not respond to requests for comment. May told me that she had worked for Alp in the past but had signed a nondisclosure agreement.)

And:

Alp operatives bragged to the Emiratis that they had successfully thwarted Nada’s efforts to correct the disparaging Lord Energy entry on Wikipedia. “We requested the assistance of friendly moderators who countered the repeated attacks,” Brero wrote in an “urgent update” to the Emiratis in June, 2018. “The objective remains to paralyze the company.” To pressure others to shun Lord Energy, Alp added dubious allegations about the company to the Wikipedia entries for Credit Suisse [presumably corresponding to this July 2019 edit by a SPA, subsequently removed in January 2021] and for an Algerian oil monopoly [possibly Sonatrach, referring to these edits - which were removed on English Wikipedia after the publication of the New Yorker article].

And regarding another target:

Brero’s campaign sometimes involved secret retaliation. In a 2018 report, a U.N. panel of human-rights experts concluded that the U.A.E. may have committed war crimes in its military intervention in Yemen. The Emiratis commissioned Brero to investigate the panel’s members, especially its chairman, Kamel Jendoubi, a widely admired French Tunisian human-rights advocate. [...] “Today, in both Google French and Google English, the reputation of Kamel Jendoubi is excellent,” Brero noted in a November, 2018, pitch to the Emiratis. “On both first pages, there is not a single critical article.” Within six months, Brero promised, Jendoubi’s image could be “reshaped” with “negative elements.” The cost: a hundred and fifty thousand euros.

Rumors spread through Arab news outlets and European Web publications that Jendoubi was a tool of Qatar, a failed businessman, and tied to extremists. A French-language article posted on Medium suggested that he might be “an opportunist disguised as a human-rights hero.” An article in English asked, “Is UN-expert Kamel Jendoubi too close to Qatar?” Alp created or altered Wikipedia entries about Jendoubi, in various languages, by citing claims from unreliable, reactionary, or pro-government news outlets in Egypt and Tunisia.
Jendoubi told me that he’d been perplexed by the flurry of slander that followed the war-crimes report. “Wikipedia is a monster!” he told me. He had managed to clean up the French entry, but the English-language page still stymied him. He said, “You speak English—can you help?”

On fr:Kamel Jendoubi, a "Controverses" section was added by a SPA in January 2019, and expanded by another SPA in August 2019. Most of it was deleted in April/May 2021, by an account with only one earlier edit, and then by an experienced editor. Around the same time, the English Wikipedia's article Kamel Jendoubi likewise saw an attempt by an IP editor to remove similar information, which was reverted as "Likely censorship of content"; although a July 2022 edit that provided a more detailed rationale for a more limited removal was successful.

The New Yorker article was published in April. Its findings were put into a much wider context earlier this month when various European news media collaborating in the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network reported on the results of an investigation dubbed "Abu Dhabi Secrets", revealing that

[...] Alp Services has been contracted by the UAE government to spy on citizens of 18 countries in Europe and beyond. Alp Services has sent to the UAE intelligence services the names of more than 1000 individuals and 400 organizations in 18 European countries, labelling them as part of the Muslim Brotherhood network in Europe.

This investigation was based on a stash of "78,000 confidential documents obtained by the French online newspaper Mediapart", according to Middle East Eye, which summarized the modus operandi of the campaign as follows:

Alp Services - and Brero - were paid tens of thousands of euros per individual targeted, according to Le Soir. The Swiss group then produced reports on the identified individuals.

[...]
Once the information was sent over to Emirati intelligence services, agents were able to target the individuals further through press campaigns, forums published about them, the creation of fake profiles and the modification of Wikipedia pages.

Many or most of the news reports emanating from the collective EIC investigation don't seem to have focused on the Wikipedia angle. Still, the Spanish publication Infolibre reveals some further details, quoting from messages where Alp's paid Wikipedia editors report about their efforts to their Emirati clients, in particular edits (presumably including these) on the English and Spanish Wikipedia to connect Mohammed Zouaydi (known as the "Al Qaeda's financier") to the Muslim Brotherhood. On the Spanish Wikipedia, they claim to have entered "an intense battle with pro-Muslim Brotherhood elements who wanted to censor information about the Brotherhood and its links to Al Qaeda" (translated back from Spanish).

At the French Wikipedia's "Projet Antipub", editors are currently looking into various other articles and accounts that may be connected to the campaign. – H

The Telegraph reports (non-paywalled) on the founding of Ruwiki (see previous Signpost coverage):

Wikipedia's top editor in Russia has quit the online encyclopaedia to launch a rival service sympathetic to Vladimir Putin.

Vladimir Medeyko, the long-serving leader of Wikipedia editors in the country, has copied the website's existing 1.9 million Russian articles into a new Kremlin-approved version.

The creation of the new service, called Ruwiki, was announced by a State Duma deputy from Putin's political party.

It comes as the Russian leader steps up efforts to censor coverage of the war in Ukraine, amid growing signs of discontent at home. [...]

According to The Telegraph, Ruwiki lacks specific content compared to the Wikipedia version:

The Ruwiki entry for Ukraine makes no mention of Russia's invasion or the international support for Kyiv's resistance.

The service has also chosen not to replicate articles on Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempted coup against Putin.

In related news, on July 5 between around 2 am and 4 am Moscow time, access to Wikipedia and other "Western internet services" including Google was temporarily disrupted as Russian authorities tested the country's "Sovereign Internet system", as reported in a Twitter thread by Access Now staff member Natalia Krapiva. – AK, H

• Wiki wars: A BBC radio programme presented by Lara Lewington tries to explain how the Wikipedia sausage is made, touching on hoaxes and Things Gone Wrong like the Croatian and Scots Wikipedias. The programme contains two gross errors – it claims that IP editors lost the ability to edit biographies of living people after the Seigenthaler incident (ahem) and that paid editors are forbidden from editing articles directly (they are only "very strongly discouraged" from doing so).
• TEDx talk: Annie Rauwerda (of Depths of Wikipedia) gave a TEDx talk titled "Why an encyclopedia is my favorite place on the Internet". Watch the recording to find out which encyclopedia it is.
• Jimmy Wales interview: The "co-founder of Wikipedia" was interviewed by Lex Fridman on his popular podcast (video, transcript), for three hours and 15 minutes. One user compiled some excerpts they found especially interesting from a Wikipedian perspective, and journalist Stephen Harrison (known for his Wikipedia column in Slate) summarized several points from the interview in a Twitter thread, e.g. about Wales "push[ing] back on Wikipedia’s alleged left wing bias."

The Wikimedia Foundation has long promised that the Wikimedia Endowment – held by the Tides Foundation and managed as an opaque, organisationally completely separate entity by a board led by Jimmy Wales – would soon be transferred to a financially transparent 501(c)(3) organisation. These promises date back to 2017 (see Signpost coverage this year and last year).

In April 2021, Endowment Director Amy Parker and Director of Development Caitlin Virtue again said on Meta:

"We are in the process of transitioning the Endowment to a new US 501c3 charity, after which it will begin making grants and will publish its own Form 990. ... As we approach the $100 million funding milestone, we are in the process of establishing the Endowment as a separate 501c3. ..."

"We are in the process of establishing a new home for the endowment in a stand-alone 501(c)(3) public charity. We will move the endowment in its entirety to this new entity once the new charity receives its IRS 501(c)(3) determination letter."

A full year has now passed since that 501(c)(3) determination letter (pictured) was received in June 2022. Yet the money has still not been transferred. This means that another year will have passed without public reporting on the Endowment's revenue and expenses, as it is organisationally separate from the Wikimedia Foundation (its revenue and assets are not included in WMF revenue and assets) and the Tides Foundation does not provide any such reporting either.

In response to an inquiry on the Wikimedia mailing list, WMF Chief Financial Officer Jaime Villagomez recently posted the following update on Meta:

Work is underway to move the Endowment assets out of Tides to its own charity. The transition is complex, due to the nature of banking activities and donor commitments so we cannot instantaneously move from one entity to the other. We anticipate that it will take a few more weeks to transfer most of our transactional and banking activity away from Tides. We will maintain the old endowment accounts to process residual income (such as dividend payments) for some months before we close those accounts. More importantly though, we will also be sharing an update on the Endowment's activities in FY 22-23 in the annual fundraising report to be published in the next quarter.
— User:JVillagomez (WMF)

In addition, WMF CEO Maryana Iskander and WMF board member Nataliia Tymkiv said on the Wikimedia mailing list:

The Board of Trustees will meet next on August 15 in Singapore. Following this meeting, there will also be an open session with the Wikimedia Foundation and Endowment Boards during Wikimania to answer questions on these topics or others you may have.

The Wikimedia Endowment holds a significant proportion of all the funds the public has ever donated to the Wikimedia cause. Yet it does not follow the same standards of transparency that apply to other parts of the movement. For example, it would be unimaginable for any WMF affiliate to ingest over $100 million over the best part of a decade without ever publishing audited accounts detailing revenue and expenses.

Why should the Wikimedia Endowment be different? – AK

The Wikimania Scholarship outcomes were recently published on the Wikimania site. According to the summary provided there,

We had a total of 3800 applications started, after removing spam and incomplete applications we had 1209 actual applications for review. These application were then grouped according to regions.

This means that less than one in six scholarship applications was approved. To one editor, at least, this seemed a "paltry" amount of funding:

I find it rather disgraceful that the Wikimedia Foundation accepted only 197 of the 1209 completed scholarship applications for this year's Wikimania conference, or 16%. While I recognize that travel scholarships aren't cheap, I presume that a sizable portion of the applicants are heavily involved in Wikimedia projects, devoting many hours a week to volunteer work. Wikimania scholarships are one of the few ways the WMF can use its ample financial resources to show tangible appreciation to volunteers and aid participation in the movement. You could have afforded to assist more than 16% of applicants, and it's disappointing that you deemed the expense not worthwhile when you put together your budget.
— User:Sdkb

A WMF spokesperson responded by saying:

The Foundation sponsors the whole event—not just the scholarships—and in this year's Annual Plan, despite reducing expenses across the Foundation, funding for Wikimania increased. Not to undermine any disappointment that any applicant may feel for not having been selected, of course that’s completely valid and understandable, but it does feel relevant to mention that this year there are ~200 scholarships, around 66% more than the ~120 from the last in-person Wikimania in 2019. Together with each year’s Core Organizing Team, the Foundation always thinks about how to spend the funds to reach the most Wikimedians possible, because we completely agree with you that recognizing people for their contributions is critical. This year, that meant increasing the number of scholarships that could be awarded by the volunteer subcommittee, working to keep virtual registration free despite the costs of the virtual event, and working to keep the in-person ticket subsidized. I know it's of course still disappointing for anyone who wanted to attend in person and didn’t get selected. I really do hope those people will consider applying again for future Wikimanias.
— User:ELappen (WMF)

User:Sdkb seemed unimpressed. – AK

In a rare reversal, User:Gitz6666 had his global lock overturned after lodging an appeal with the stewards. Gitz6666 had been indefinitely blocked on the Italian Wikipedia in May, along with another user, and then had his account globally locked by an Italian steward.

The underlying dispute concerned a sociologist's Italian Wikipedia biography that had attracted press attention for its alleged unfairness (see previous Signpost coverage). – AK

• New administrators: The Signpost welcomes the English Wikipedia's newest administrator, Firefangledfeathers.
• Articles for Improvement: This week's Article for Improvement (beginning 17 July) is Religious philosophy. It will be followed the week after by Act (drama). Please be bold in helping improve these articles!

On Wednesday, the English Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee took some sorely needed action on the long-standing subject of fringe theories and WP:PSEUDOSCIENCE, issues where tense disagreements and POV-pushing have been causing trouble for decades.

Drafting arbitrator Hubert Glockenspiel, in an interview with the Signpost, said that the Committee was introducing a set of brand-new fringe opinions, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscientific claims, which will be available for free to anyone interested in arguing on Wikipedia.

The new topics span a broad range of subjects, academic disciplines and national concerns. "We tried to get a little bit of everything", said Glockenspiel. "Because, after all, Wikipedia was meant to be the sum of all human arguments about politics. And we're committed to belonging, inclusion, and equity; we need to amplify diverse voices."

A full list (along with suggested arguments for and against each theory) is available at WP:NEWFRINGE, but here is a summary of each one:

• English is actually a dialect of Basque

While it's true that virtually no grammar, syntax or etymology are shared between the two languages, it is obvious that they share a recent common origin; what else could account for the fact that the two languages use the same words for "Code of Conduct", "cookie", and "Wikipedia"?

• Oroville, California was founded by Alexander the Great in 317 BC

"Oro" is a Greek prefix. How did a city in California (inhabited by Native Americans, then Spanish-speakers, then English-speakers) get a Greek name? The answer is obvious. The Macedonian Menace and his troops didn't stop at India, like we have been told: instead he and his armies kept going east through China, crossed the Pacific Ocean, and founded a city in the Golden State, getting the drop on other Europeans by several thousand years. Note that San Francisco, Los Angeles, Sacramento, et cetera, were indeed founded by the Spanish or the Americans: Oroville was the only Hellenic city in the state.

Evidence of this historic achievement has been suppressed by the powers that be, since they are afraid people will realize how based Alexander really was, and return to his projects: uniting Macedon, Greece and Persia (thereby angering all three countries) and worshipping Zeus and Apis as the true progenitors of humanity (thereby angering the Church of the SubGenius).

• Lake Superior goes down to the center of the Earth

Evidence can be found by trying to swim in it — even on the hottest day in the hottest month of the year, it will always be cold as hell. If you "wait for it to warm up in the afternoon", it will be even colder. How is that possible? It doesn't add up.

• The center of the Earth is cold instead of hot

Why else would Lake Superior always be cold as hell?

• Hell is cold instead of hot

Why else would we compare Lake Superior to it?

• Barack Obama never existed

In reality, the United States simply didn't have a president from 2009 to 2017. The works attributed to "Barack Obama" were written by a variety of authors, orators and politicians; alleged videos of his public "appearances" were simply CGI. This one is fairly easy to figure out: he was allegedly from "Hawaii", an obviously fictional location (the United States somehow contains a tropical island with volcanoes on it?), and started his political career in "Chicago", another prima facie farcical city (a wacky noir setting filled with gangsters and tommy guns?)

• Joseph Stalin was a CIA plant

Come on. They expect us to believe that a good old boy named Joey Ashville — from the sweet, sweet state of Georgia, no less — just happened to wander into the Russian Revolution halfway across the globe, somehow ended up in charge of the whole thing, and then coincidentally spent his entire career making Communism look terrible?

• Various artifacts on the Moon were planted by beings from outer space

The native inhabitants of the Moon could never have developed such advanced technology — it had to have been put there by aliens. In fact, careful analysis of the so-called "Moon missions" reveals several entities bearing a distinctive resemblance to the animals of Earth.

• The media and banking system is controlled by the Church of the SubGenius

This is the only explanation for the sheer scale of the suppression campaign regarding the reality of Hellenic Oroville.

• 2001 Bomis pee tape

I don't care what anybody says: it's real to me.

While many of the new fringe theories have already been associated with one of the two American political parties, others remain undecided. The Hellenic Oroville theory, in particular, is currently the subject of ardent debate as to what political affiliation its supporters have: some have said that it's an obvious left-wing dogwhistle and critique of American imperialism, whereas some argue that it's an obvious right-wing dogwhistle and fantasy of Macedonian imperialism. There is also a secondary, less-important argument about whether it is correct or not.

One thing's for certain, though: we will have a bunch of AN/I threads about it.

Long-time tendentious editor (and WMF-banned troll) Snowpisser said, through a spokesman sockpuppet, that he welcomed the challenge of the new theories. "I can't wait to start a big clusterfuck over these. Nobody even knows what side they're supposed to be on yet! I will probably be able to catch a few dozen people off guard, and get them to freak out and get themselves banned."

Meanwhile, controversial administrator DarkAngelBlademaster666 said in a talk page comment that she was looking forward to figuring out what the right opinion was to have on them, and then immediately INVOLVED-blocking everyone who she disagreed with. "It's perfect, because none of my existing topic bans apply to this stuff yet. By the time they're expanded to cover these, I will have already gotten to fire off like thirty indefs".

Note: My friends Hazzard and Skutz came up with two of these (the moon one and the Stalin one, respectively).