The Wikimedia Foundation's legal challenge to the UK's new Online Safety Act rules has been dismissed. The Foundation had asked for a judicial review of regulations which could mean Wikipedia has to verify the identities of its users. This, the Foundation argued, would be burdensome and "could expose users to data breaches, stalking, vexatious lawsuits or even imprisonment by authoritarian regimes".

The news isn't all bad, however. As Techdirt pointed out, there are two ways one can look at the result. They are reflected in different headlines – while the BBC titled its article "Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act verification rules", The Guardian went with the rather more optimistic "Wikipedia can challenge Online Safety Act if strictest rules apply to it, says judge".

This was also the view of the Wikimedia Foundation, which said that the ruling "does not provide the immediate legal protections for Wikipedia that we hoped for", but welcomed the court's comments emphasising what it said was "the responsibility of Ofcom and the UK government to ensure Wikipedia is protected".

The judge recognized the "significant value" of Wikipedia, its safety for users, as well as the damages that wrongly-assigned OSA categorisations and duties could have on the human rights of Wikipedia's volunteer contributors. The Court stressed that this ruling "does not give Ofcom [the regulator tasked with enforcing the OSA] and the Secretary of State [Labour politician Peter Kyle] a green light to implement a regime that would significantly impede Wikipedia's operations", and indicated they could face legal repercussions if they fail to protect Wikipedia and the rights of its users. In order to achieve that outcome, he suggested that Ofcom may need to find a particularly flexible interpretation of the rules in question, or that the rules themselves may need amendment in Parliament.

If the ruling stands, the first categorization decisions from Ofcom are expected this summer. The Foundation will continue to seek solutions to protect Wikipedia and the rights of its users as the OSA continues to be implemented.

The Foundation's post also notes that it was joined as claimant in the lawsuit by UK-based longtime English Wikipedia editor User:Zzuuzz (whose personal identity "remain[s] confidential and protected by the law and the Foundation"). As summarized in the court's judgment,

[Zzuuzz gave] detailed and compelling reasons for wishing to remain anonymous as a Wikipedia user. They provide[d] extensive evidence of threats that are made to Wikipedia administrators, including to [Zzuuzz] personally, on websites that target Wikipedia administrators. [...] None of the evidence of Mr Bradley-Schmieg or [Zzuuzz] was challenged.

Phil Bradley-Schmieg, the Foundation's lead counsel, also provided various updates about the lawsuit on Meta-wiki, as well as further explanations why the OSA's rules "are written so broadly that Wikipedia could be lumped in as a 'Category 1 service'":

We have said [in the lawsuit] that there is a risk that (for instance, but without limitation) the inherent ability to embed images (or other content; maybe even user-generated templates) into Wiki pages may be deemed "forwarding or sharing functionality".

The Foundation's lawsuit, thought to be the first judicial review brought against the OSA regulations, had been described as difficult to win from the beginning (e.g. by a legal expert quoted by the BBC, see previous Signpost coverage).

Many other outlets reported on the matter, among them Reuters, Ars Technica, Courthouse News Service and Forbes. Several mentioned other recent controversies around the Online Safety Act. E.g. Reuters noted that "Free-speech campaigners and content creators have complained its rules had been implemented too broadly, resulting in the censorship of legal content." A Politico article titled "The UK’s new tech law triggers upheaval reported that "Reddit, X, Discord and BlueSky have all [already] implemented age verification checks and other measures to abide by the safety act", while clarifying that the Wikipedia lawsuit "regards a different provision that would require it to identify many of its contributors."

For background, see also the Foundation's Diff post or the more detailed version of the post on Medium; for the risk of imprisonment by authoritarian regimes around the world, see previous Signpost coverage and List of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia. – AK, H

Mayree Clark is the newest member of the WMF Board of Trustees. She is also on the the Board of the Wikimedia Endowment and since 2024 is Chair of its Finance Committee. Since 2018 she's been a member of the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Bank AG. Her career in finance has included a position as Managing Director of Morgan Stanley, founding her own firm Eachwin Capital, and service as a director of the Stanford University Endowment. She earned an MBA from Stanford in 1981 and has also served on the faculty.

Kevin Bonebrake and Ike Kier were appointed trustees of the Wikimedia Endowment at the July board meeting.

Bonebreak is the Chief Financial Officer at Quaise Energy, which is developing geothermal drilling technology. Previously he was a Managing Director at Lazard, specializing in energy sector finance. He has earned B.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Economics from Duke University, a Master's in Engineering from Duke and an MBA from Columbia University.

Kier founded KG Funds Management in 2008 after managing four special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). He earned a B.A. in Economics from Cornell University and a J.D. from George Washington University.

Voting for two community seats on the WMF board will be held from October 8 – 23. Six candidates give three-minute video statements here. – AK, S

• No new administrators: There were no requests for adminship in August.

The Hill reports in Republicans investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias that the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating Wikipedia, looking at "alleged organized efforts to inject bias into Wikipedia entries." Quoting the committee's letter to WMF CEO Maryana Iskander they added that the effort is part of an investigation into "foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion."

The committee wants documentation about Wikipedians who have violated Wikipedia policy, and how Wikipedia enforces the policies, citing a report from the Anti-Defamation League alleging anti-Israel bias and another report from the Atlantic Council alleging pro-Russian editing by what they call the Pravda network (see previous Signpost coverage of the pro-Russian editing network).

Specifically, the committee asked for the following information in its letter dated August 27, 2025:

To assist the Committee’s oversight of this matter, we request the following information, covering the period January 1, 2023 to present, as soon as possible but no later than September 10, 2025:

1. Records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination by nation state actors in editing activities on Wikipedia.
2. Records, communications, or analysis pertaining to possible coordination within academic institutions or other organized efforts to edit or influence content identified as possibly violating Wikipedia policies.
3. Records of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) including but not limited to all editor conduct disputes and actions taken against them.
4. Records showing identifying and unique characteristics of accounts (such as names, IP addresses, registration dates, user activity logs) for editors subject to actions by ArbCom.
5. Documentation of Wikipedia’s editorial policies and protocols including those aimed at ensuring neutrality and addressing bias as well as policies regarding discipline for violations.
6. Any analysis conducted or reviewed by the Wikimedia Foundation (or by a third-party acting on its behalf) of patterns of manipulation or bias related to antisemitism and conflicts with the State of Israel.

In a statement quoted by The Hill, a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson said the Foundation had received the request and were reviewing it:

"We welcome the opportunity to respond to the committee's questions and to discuss the importance of safeguarding the integrity of information on our platform"

Common Dreams, a very liberal source, emphasizes that the committee could dox Wikipedia editors in their GOP Investigation Pressures Wikipedia to Reveal Identities of Editors Accused of 'Bias' Against Israel. They highlight a previous attempt to dox Wikipedians by the Heritage Foundation. (See previous Signpost coverage here.)

The conservative New York Post makes a telling mistake in its headline Trump admin launches probe into Wikipedia over alleged ‘bad actors’ manipulating opinions about the US. The Trump administration is currently the executive branch of the Federal government, but the committee is part of Congress, the legislative branch. The Post does not mention the efforts of the former acting US attorney for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin who had sent a similar letter to the WMF in May. The controversial and inexperienced Martin could not be confirmed by the Senate for the post. Despite the rules and traditions of the Department of Justice he only embarrassed himself by later asserting that, if he couldn't find that the WMF had broken any laws then he would use his position to embarrass the WMF (see previous coverage).

JNS interviewed Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, who said, "I am glad that Congress is investigating the use of foreign and U.S. government funds to pay for biased editing on Wikipedia." In March Sanger tweeted Elon Musk the accusation that Federal employees were being paid to edit Wikipedia, and later sent the same message directly to President Trump. The Signpost examined this accusation and asked Sanger to provide some evidence. But without input from Sanger, we were able to find only minor cases of Federal employees making edits on Wikipedia. Sanger provides his statement to JNS on his blog "for the use of Congress and the public."

Other media reports include:

• Gizmodo: MAGA Puts Wikipedia in Its Crosshairs, 28 August 2025
• USA Today: Republicans in Congress open probe into Wikipedia for alleged bias, 27 August 2025

– S, AK

The San Francisco Standard reports A mysterious Wikipedia editor is scrubbing Daniel Lurie’s page of controversy in a very good analyses of possibly paid editing. Mayor Lurie, an heir through his step-father to part of the Levi Strauss & Co. fortune, is suspected of using his personal PR consultants to eliminate coverage of his mother's $1 million donation to his mayoral campaign, his Jewish religion, his Republican supporters, and in general "purge Lurie's Wikipedia page of criticism and controversy and highlight his accomplishments as mayor."

Joseph Reagle, an academic who co-edited the book Wikipedia @ 20 was quoted saying "this seems purposeful and intentional" and "probably inappropriate." Former WMF board of trustee's member Dariusz Jemielniak was quoted saying the edits were "trying to find an angle that is more positive than it originally was". Even a Wikipedia spokesperson chimed in.

Expect to see updates on this story. My brief review of the evidence shows that the editor in question is attributed 54.5% of the article's authorship, but have made only two edits. There are blocked editors and sockpuppets among the article's authors, as should be expected in most political articles, but only a small handful. – S

404 Media reports on Jimbo's talk page to see how the community viewed Jimbo's AI related idea that Articles for creation could use some AI to better respond to draft articles on borderline notable topics, specifically to a draft of Howard Ellis Cox, Jr. Over five years the draft was rejected four times using exactly the same words, from the same template. The first rejector was the late DGG, followed by Sulfurboy, Hatchens, and JesusisGreat7. A KCBS podcast (via Audacy) sums up the arguments in 4 minutes. – S

Verge published (archive) a 9,000 word article that covers everything that’s happened politically and in the courts to Wikipedia this year.

In an interesting graphic the headline starts as “Wokipedia is resilient because it is biased” then appears to be edited to “Wikipedia is resilient because it is boring”.

The author, Josh Dzieza, gives a lively telling of all this material, but appears to favor the edited headline. He starts with Elon Musk’s (disputed) Nazi salute and after a short detour to the Erfurt latrine disaster runs through a February meeting in San Francisco where Wikipedians calmly discussed attacks on Wikipedia in the media. After another detour to a 1967 New Yorker article by Hannah Arendt about “an inherent conflict between politics and facts”.

Followed by a February report by Media Research Center “claiming that ‘Wikipedia Effectively Blacklists ALL Right-Leaning Media.’” Followed by controversy over the Reliable sources/Perennial sources page. And then Larry Sanger, Asian News International, A.I. and so on.

The best part is the end where Jimmy Wales appears in unusual attire, talks about a working group to strengthen the rule on neutral point of view, and how we now have an opportunity to improve Wikipedia. Like the last eight months, the article is very interesting but exhausting. – S

Ars Technica reviews User:Grnrchst's article, "The article in the most languages", from the last issue of The Signpost. Ars Technica deputy editor Nate Anderson wrote the approximately 1200-word story that highlighted both Grnrchst's investigation, and the ideological leanings of the subject of the apparent self-promotion, which included comparing Timothy McVeigh to Jesus Christ, and a deep interest in a South American colony that "was designed to let German culture flourish away from the influence of European Jews". The Ars piece concludes with a bit of op-ed concerning those who engage in "polluting open or public-facing projects for their own ends". Kudos to Grnrchst! – B

Two websites offer different takes on the advice page Wikipedia:Signs of AI writing.

TechSpot leaves out AI's good and summarizes some of the advice page's points in its short review of the very long page. It doesn't really say much else, so why not skip directly to reading the advice page? It's neither bad nor ugly, unlike AI writing.

Meanwhile, Fast Company's take asks us "Want to disguise your AI writing? Start with Wikipedia’s new list." Perhaps not what the advice page was written to advise about, but hey, death of the author and all that; you're welcome to use it however you want. Just not on-wiki, please.

• Which would be worse, AI writing articles or a paid editor who won't stop creating adverts?: Answer: a paid editor who uses AI to write on-Wiki adverts, and who also uses AI to write advertising for his own services (including SEO and reputation management). Otherwise he uses Upwork (only $10 per hour, 67% of 7 projects completed successfully (sic)), Kwork, and Legiit to attract clients. He doesn't need us to advertise his services, so we won't provide a link (except to a limited number of admins).
• RAGtime blues for some sites, good news for Wikipedia...: Retrieval-augmented generation may be directing AI search (i.e. ChatGPT) traffic to Wikipedia in favor of other online content, due to its higher trustworthiness [1]
• ...or maybe the blues for all websites? Columbia Business School reports "ChatGPT Is Stealing Readers From Wikipedia"; Tom's Guide published an analysis of the Columbia study. (See also our review of this paper in the March 22 Signpost issue: "So again, what has the impact of ChatGPT really been?", and some follow-up discussion on concerns about its statistical methodology.)
• 404 podcast: 404's own podcast about AI slop on wiki.
• Unexpected in Houston: Houstonia discovers that edit-a-thons sponsored by ImagiNoir/BLMHTX, the Menil Collection, and Rice University contribute to Houston's quality of life, in "The Unexpected Ways in Which Houstonians Have Helped Shape Wikipedia."
• Spin spun?: "Wikipedia set to pick Spin as first social media agency" (paywalled) ([2] archive) in Campaign and sister publication Adweek ("Wikipedia Hires Spin for Its Social Marketing Needs") assert that social media agency Spin has been selected to "create social-first video content for the online encyclopedia." Could this be what we need just in time for Wikipedia's 25th anniversary? Nope! Spin seems to have jumped the gun. The Campaign article has been retitled to change "Wikipedia" to "Wikipedia parent", and the Adweek article has apparently been withdrawn.
• "Street cred" for the work of physicists: APS News reports on the American Physical Society program "Wiki Scientist" that encourages professional physicists to become Wikipedians.
• Wikipedia rules (because of AI): HackerNoon published an article titled "Wikipedia Rules Everything Around Me" by Drew Chapin, asserting that because of its prominence in AI training corpuses, "Wikipedia is the only digital strategy [for promoting businesses] that matters in the next few years. Everything else is nice to have or simple noise."

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is now investigating Wikipedia. They want to know how Wikipedia responds to bad actors who try to insert disinformation into Wikipedia articles, in particular to anti-Semitic and anti-Israel edits and "pro-Kremlin and anti-Western" manipulation of articles by "foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion" according to the letter sent to Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) CEO Maryana Iskander. The letter seems to reflect several misunderstandings of Wikipedia, so I offer some basic information on how the Wikipedia community is organized, the limited role of the WMF, and how the English-language Wikipedia deals with disinformation.

This basic information is something the committee should understand before investigating Wikipedia. Any opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Signpost or its staff, the WMF, or any other Wikipedia editor.

Since 2001 Wikipedia has been an international movement with encyclopedias in several languages. Jimmy Wales has expressed our goal as "to create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language". The basic unit of content production and governance is the individual language version of the encyclopedia. The community of editors of each version, which includes anybody in the world who can write in that language and follow our rules, decides questions by consensus. They created those rules by themselves, often using the rules created for the English Wikipedia by its users as a model.

The English language community has delegated some functions such as dispute resolution and article deletion to administrators, the Arbitration Committee, and for some specialized functions such as checkusers and bureaucrats. The community generally starts the dispute resolution process on article talk pages or on noticeboards. Admins enforce the community-written policies and guidelines, for example by blocking disruptive editors or limiting the editing of controversial pages to experienced editors. Along the way, they get feedback from the community. If it goes further, ArbCom is almost always the final step in this process. Anybody can give evidence in an ArbCom proceeding. During the entire dispute resolution process, the admins and arbitrators decide based only on editor behavior, not on article content. Individual editors ultimately decide on content based on their consensus.

The WMF raises money for the encyclopedia, provides the computer platform, programming, and the terms of use. It employs legal, accounting and research staff as well and makes grants to editors and affiliate organizations. It rarely interferes with an encyclopedia's governance except for violations of the terms of use, or abuse that affects several encyclopedias, or threatens the safety of editors.

The WMF’s Trust and Safety office rarely comments on its activities in order to give victims and others anonymity. Only when they take action (or are about to take action) such as blocking or banning editors will they make limited information available. They do consult the legal department with the final approval coming from the CEO stating that all their internal procedures have been followed.

I hope that the WMF has a strategy and tools to deal with hidden interference in our content by large state actors. But I do understand that revealing those to the editors and the public would greatly limit their usefulness.

One example of the WMF's hesitancy to get involved in the governance of an encyclopedia was The Curious Case of Croatian Wikipedia, which involved a neo-Nazi takeover by the administrators of the Croatian Wikipedia. It took over a decade for the WMF to become publicly involved in the matter and then only as administrators from other Wikipedia versions were coming to a solution.

Diversity, equity and inclusion are core values across the movement. How else would the encyclopedia be able to attract enough writers and editors to cover all the needed content in all the needed languages? Doxxing, or exposing an editor's name or workplace and other personal details is against the rules. It would expose editors to harassment by the bad actors, including some of those in governments around the world who would like to censor the encyclopedias.

Maintaining a neutral point of view (NPOV) is also a key value but it has a special meaning and importance to most Wikipedians. It means that editors try to include all widely held points of view about a particular topic that can be documented in reliable sources, but not including extreme minority fringe viewpoints. Editors spend much of their time trying to ensure that our NPOV policy is upheld. This does not mean that if a POV in an article is questioned, then Wikipedia is biased. Every editor has a POV, but just because your POV is different from mine doesn't mean that either your POV or mine is correct. That's simply not what our NPOV policy is about.

Almost all Wikipedians do recognize that there are non-neutral POVs being pushed on Wikipedia, for example by employees of various governments, politicians, and public relations firms and their commercial employers.

All editors and the public at large can participate in Wikipedia’s discussions on disinformation.

Removing disinformation, like most processes on Wikipedia, happens with individual editors acting alone or as a result of talk page discussions. Wikipedia:Conflict of interest noticeboard (WP:COIN) is also an important starting point. Especially controversial cases may be discussed at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard (WP:AN).

Admins might block editors at this point if the community consensus is clear. Quite often though a sockpuppet investigation (WP:SPI) is needed. Sockpuppets are editors who create multiple accounts in order to deceive other editors. An SPI is often needed when disinformation insertion is suspected. The editor who reports suspected socking needs to show through behavioral evidence that at least two accounts are being run by the same person. Checkusers can then check, for example, whether two accounts are editing from the same computer. While the checkusers’ toolset is generally kept secret, they often are able to find dozens of sockpuppets working together.

Almost all governments have large communications departments that try to provide information to the public. For example, the census bureau provides population data and Wikipedia uses it intensively, posting much of it on articles about almost all U.S. states and territories, counties, cities, towns, townships, boroughs, and many census-designated places. Also, Congress conveniently provides short biographies about almost every congressperson since 1790.

Together, just these two government databases provide information that almost any American would be interested in and can easily access on Wikipedia. Thank you!

But that's not what Congress is investigating. They want to know how governments can secretly influence the content of Wikipedia. Political institutions, parties, and movements, as well as individual politicians can also influence content in much the same way. Businesses and individuals try to exercise similar influence in similar ways, often employing commercial firms or paid editors much as governments employ their own operatives.

Many of these efforts have been unmasked and reported in Wikipedia articles, and in The Signpost, Wikipedia's independent newspaper. A short introduction to these records follows. You can find more Signpost articles on similar topics at our archives.

The Wikipedia article on the Great Firewall gives a good overview of Chinese government interference and states that "In May 2015, China indefinitely blocked access to the Chinese-language Wikipedia. … As of May 2019, all language versions of Wikipedia have been blocked by the Chinese government."

Relevant Signpost articles include:

• Chinese Wikipedia and the battle against extradition from Hong Kong
• Observations from the mainland
• Carl Miller on Wikipedia Wars
• Hardball in Hong Kong

The Russian government has temporarily blocked Wikipedia several times and has fined the WMF multiple times. It's not clear whether the WMF has paid or even been able to pay these fines due to international financial sanctions on Russia.

The Wikipedia page List of Wikipedia pages banned in Russia lists well over 100 Wikipedia articles and over a dozen images from Wikimedia Commons that have been blocked in Russia.

Perhaps the largest Russian effort to restrict Wikipedia has been to fork the real Russian Wikipedia, resulting in an ersatz censored version being published called Ruwiki.

• Putin's fork follies
• Russian Wiki-fork flails, failing readers and editors

But do the Russian government or its proxies edit the English language Wikipedia? There's no official list, but the Wikipedia article International recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is quite likely to have been written mostly by Russian propaganda efforts. It is ridiculously long and one-sided. Written by 811 editors in 3,729 edits, it is much longer than the Foreign relations of the United States article, but could accurately be condensed into one paragraph saying that only Nicaragua and Venezuela currently recognize the Russian-sponsored break-away regions, and that Syria, Nauru, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu once did. (Disclosure – I've edited the article.)

Most of the article is just trivial, misleading detail. But it has been featured on the main page five times: in "In the news" on August 27, 2008 and in "On this day..." on August 26, 2013, 2016, 2018, and 2021.

A later-convicted unregistered Russian agent, Maria Butina, was widely accused of editing the article about herself.

• The disinformation age about Maria Butina
• An unregistered foreign agent of Russia

Some Russian oligarchs appear to have paid for edits in the articles about themselves.

• Oligarchs' socks

Congress may not be too interested in investigating how the CIA edited Wikipedia, if only because it involves material discovered by WikiScanner. More from this source will be discussed in the next section.

• WikiScanner reveals juicy edits
• "minor public relations disasters"
• Dutch royal family

Both the Senate and House of Representatives have a long history of staffers secretly editing Wikipedia. There are two separate encyclopedia articles on this activity.

• United States congressional staff edits to Wikipedia
• CongressEdits

There is also an internal article, Wikipedia:Congressional staffer edits, to help editors identify further activity. The internal article lists 149 articles that were affected by House staff editing. It also lists 176 IP addresses attributed to the Senate which edited Wikipedia.

More generally, the article List of political editing incidents on Wikipedia gives more than a dozen examples of improper editing of political articles.

The Signpost has extensive coverage of this editing.

• U.S. congressional staffers' editing investigated
• Reactions by politicians continue
• Politicians move from editing Wikipedia to citing it which includes edits apparently made by Joe Biden’s staff.

Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign chairman, an Acting Attorney General, state officials, a Congressman, city officials, and even a presidential candidate all made, or appeared to make, some contributions.

• Political staffer's editing meets with mixed reception
• About Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker
• Josh Shapiro, Representative Michael Blake (R-NY) and state politicians
• Amidst city council infighting, Durham, North Carolina, city officials attempt to doxx Wikipedians
• Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and undeclared paid editing

Many businesses secretly create or edit articles about themselves, sometimes using individual employees who just copy from the company's website making for a very bad encyclopedia article. OceanGate who operated the Titan submersible which imploded and killed its five occupants, used this method. They went beyond advertising (which is prohibited on Wikipedia). The information about safety went beyond being misleading, it was disinformation. Wikipedians did a good job removing the advertising and the copyright violations, but it lasted too long in the article. This type of disinformation is one of the smallest challenges we face.

• Imploded submersible outfit foiled

A much more serious type of hidden business editing, is typified by the PR firm Bell Pottinger. In 2011 they were caught on tape by investigative reporters promising to use "dark arts" to edit Wikipedia to people they thought represented a repressive government. Bell Pottinger also had contracts with the U.S. Defense Department – not related to Wikipedia. In 2017 the company got caught working for the Gupta family in South Africa using racial hatred as a PR tool. Bell Pottinger quickly collapsed. One of their contractors on the South African job, an Israeli firm known as Veribo and later as Percepto, showed up in another Signpost investigation involving possible corruption in the Canadian government, as well as editing for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. A list on an internal Wikipedia page shows that a dozen editors connected to them edited at least sixty articles, including some related to governments and businesses, South Africa, Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs, at least one Royal, and an investigative journalist. This type of paid editing is more difficult to catch than the simple menthod used by OceanGate.

• Bell Pottinger
• Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Noticeboard/Bell Pottinger COI Investigations
• Paid editing with political connections

The work of other commercial editing organizations is shown in these investigations.

• Wiki-PR's extensive network
• Orangemoody
• Sony emails reveal corporate practices and undisclosed advocacy editing
• Pardon me, Mr. President, have you seen my socks?
• The "largest con in corporate history"? Adani Group
• How billionaires rewrite Wikipedia Greg Lindberg
• The North Face vandalizes Wikipedia

A special group of purveyors of disinformation is convicted sex offenders. The two that The Signpost has reported on are Jeffrey Epstein and Peter Nygard. While their motives are very different than those of people described above, their methods were fairly similar to the simplest model. A very few people, perhaps only two or three in Epstein's case, seem to have done the editing.

• "I have been asked by Jeffrey Epstein"
• A "billionaire battle" on Wikipedia: Sex, lies, and video

It does look like Wikipedia has a problem with disinformation. And there are likely hundreds, perhaps thousands, more articles every year that are affected by disinformation. So it’s not surprising that Congress wants to investigate the problem. But please remember that there are over 7 million articles on Wikipedia so that the articles with disinformation are still a very small fraction of the total. Editors here are very experienced at making articles NPOV.

If Congress' investigation of Wikipedia results in a way to decrease disinformation, it will be a victory for everybody. We could definitely use some help countering Chinese and Russian disinformation. Much of the rest the Wikipedia community handles pretty well. But, many different types of people try to insert disinformation, using many different methods. We should try to understand and counter all of them. For example, congresspeople and other politicians can be encouraged by their peers and their constituents to follow our rules. They must not secretly edit articles about themselves. If they hire an editor to help them change an article, those paid editors must declare that they are paid and name their employers and clients. No exceptions!

I doubt that Wikipedia editors are going to change our rule on maintaining a neutral point of view. The government can openly provide documentation for its point of view to the whole community, but editors don’t have to accept that POV as being the whole truth. We want to show all widely held well documented viewpoints.

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

Reviewed by Katarzyna Makowska (WMPL)

The author of this 2021 study^[1] looks at Wikipedia projects in several European minority, regional and endangered (MRE) languages. His main focus is on Low German (Plattdeutsch, a minority language spoken in northern Germany), but he also considers other European languages: Occitan, Piedmontese, Sardinian, Kashubian and Ladin.

The introduction provides an overview of the history of Low German, once lingua franca in Northern Europe, its erosion and loss of popularity until being added to the EU list of Endangered Languages. The author mentions the recent generational divide, the role of new media including the internet and, of course, Wikipedia. He reviews studies looking at the online presence of MRE languages, including a notable 2013 study dividing digital presence of languages into four groups: thriving, vital, heritage and still.^{[supp 1]}

The paper then compared the minority languages on Wikipedia: their rank by number of articles, number of administrators and active users. It was noted that the presence of a Wikipedia project is a positive achievement in itself, considering that the rules for creating a new language project are described as fairly complex, and that many of the world’s languages are not represented on Wikipedia. The author also notes that at least as of 2021, dedicated, small groups of speakers/users are mostly responsible for maintaining the languages' presence on Wikipedia.

The author moved on to search for fifty common terms in each language, doing a word count for each entry if applicable (a search for 400 Wikipedia entries in total). This study was carried out between November 2016 and January 2017 with data reexamined in March 2021. The author does not explain in much detail how he chose the 50 common words. This part is somewhat comparable to a recent study by Lewoniewski et al.,^[2] although in that case the authors explained their choice of words to analyse more transparently, and were looking at quality of articles.

Interestingly, the author notes:

"The brevity of many of the articles and the paucity of information may cause more problems than benefits, such as perceptions that these languages are unrefined, unsophisticated, and second-rate. The voluntary work of the respective Wikipedia crews can, of course, not be faulted for this dilemma. Rather, these numbers underscore the fact that languages with fewer speakers do not have a good or even fair chance of succeeding on Wikipedia, which in turn negatively affects a meaningful online presence. These results, however, must be considered preliminary, and a study larger in scope will be needed to genuinely validate it."

The paper also provides an intriguing case study for changes in Low German Wikipedia:

“Something unexpected happened with the Low German Wikipedia edition in the course of this study. At the beginning of this study, in January 2018, Low German had 27,342 articles, 4 administrators, and fifty-two active users. In terms of total number of entries, it ranked at number one hundred. In March 2021, the Low German Wikipedia had 85,467 entries and had climbed to number seventy-five. It still had four administrators in March 2021 and seventy active users. This means that the number of articles in the Low German Wikipedia edition more than tripled in three years, while the volunteer staff only slightly increased. What are the reasons for this remarkable increase in articles? The answer is baffling, as many of the newly added articles may not have been authored by humans.”

As shown in table 6 of the study, it turned out that over half of the articles in the languages examined, with the exception of Ladin, are bot-generated. This is in contrast to large Wikipedias such as English or German, which use many bots, but less frequently for content creation. While bots can be useful for generating stub articles with basic information, these entries tend to be repetitive and have very few or no references.

The author provides an interesting critique of the digital world achieving or failing to achieve more equality and presence for marginalised groups and minority languages. Beyond digital limitations, the paper reminds its readers that the barriers to the representation of MRE languages can go beyond the domain of linguistics, into the cultural sphere, as many of these languages are “embedded in a profound oral tradition, which often includes the lack of a common orthography. This means that not only Wikipedia but also the Internet in general is not really an adequate medium for communication in these languages.”

After writing this review, I was informed that Book Publisher International (the company which published the volume in which this study is a chapter) is considered a predatory publisher (thank you to the editor who pointed it out!). Considering that the author published in other reputable places on this subject,^[3] I think there is still merit in this small yet interesting study. The author himself was careful to underline that the results must be understood as samples and snapshots rather than definite conclusions. Still, the findings raise important questions about the future of minority languages online. It would be interesting to see a follow up study on this, although understandably, as the author points out, that would require more resources and finances. It would be equally intriguing to see a comparison of how the languages have been doing since the study was conducted and published.

The Wikisource reader app is now available for reading Wikisource books through mobile devices. Android users may get the app through the Google Play app store. For a book to be accessible through the app, it must comply with the data model at Wikidata:WikiProject Books, and have a Wikidata item which uses the Wikidata property Wikisource index page URL (P1957) to link a Wikisource book which the editorial community has certified as passing the proofreading and validation process. Currently the app supports 22 languages, Assamese, Bangla, Catalan, Czech, Danish, English, French, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Javanese, Marathi, Malay, Polish, Punjabi, Spanish, Sundanese, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Wikisource editing has been especially popular in Bangla language and throughout India.

The lead developer of the app is Sai Phanindra, user:Saiphani02. Sai edits Wikimedia projects in English and Telugu, and their interests include sharing photos of village life and public transportation in India and developing scripts and bots for Wikimedia editors. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is presenting the app, but the Wikimedia community and other open-source volunteers are now maintaining and managing it. As The Signpost previously reported, in April 2025 the government of India removed governmental permission for that organization to receive funding from foreign organizations such as the Wikimedia Foundation. While Wikimedia programs everywhere routinely have high participation from volunteer community members, it was helpful to have CIS develop the app. From this point, anyone interested in contributing to the app's development may do so through the GitHub repo. Documentation for the app is available at the meta page and the website for the app is cis-india.github.io/wikisource-reader-app/.

As with all things Wikimedia, there are a few technical developers for the platforms, but an endless invitation for everyone else to edit the content which appears in those platforms. Anyone who would like to present books with open copyright in any language version of Wikisource is invited to join Wikisource. Further information is in the announcement at the Wikisource-l mailing list message.